BBW24 – Day 3 – Blockchain and Data Storage: Unleashing the Power of Decentralization

uh hi everyone thank you Ian now I don't have to say everybody's names and butcher them uh thank you and welcome to the blockchain data storage panel this is a very exciting and timely topic today with the use cases becoming more and more prevalent as we go on um things take a long time when we're talking about data management and I'm really excited to talk about this topic today with the news last month with blockchain uh working with the California DMV to really bring forward a really large project reaching millions and millions of Americans to you know really benefit people's lives and use data in really powerful ways that we haven't seen before and I think that's going to create some big changes around the norms and people understanding the technology um we're going to have shorter lines in the DMV for Californians and less for AUD and that's just the beginning of what this technology can do for data and so we have three great panelists on stage today with uh different backgrounds in healthcare and um Oracle work and actually a nonprofit tool that our um organization so I'm going to let them give a short introduction as they are their own subject matter experts uh cat do you want to start cool yeah so I'm cat I'm the founder of Tamarind health and we have built a privacy wrapper for data collaboration so what that means is that the entire data collaboration is private everything from data the underlying data the query and the query response and also for our p p specific protocol the data stays where it is so it's a Federated protocol um we combined web3 Technologies and privacy enhancing Technologies so we're really on The Cutting Edge um but there are a lot of folks in healthcare that are very very interested in being able to protect their data they want their data to stay where it is they want to be able to own that data and those conversations that we're having are with the pharmaceutical companies it's with phys practices and with biotechnology companies so the conversation is being had they are aware of this technology and it's it's really exciting we've been in the space since 2016 so almost OG I'd call it first tranch or second tranch OG and the conversations were not the same back then I think now the industry is ready to have these conversations uh it's been really exciting so for you you guys are really you're not storing data in the blockchain itself we're talking about data storage still in centralized silos but you're really using blockchain to kind of fill those gaps and share that data with people who really need it right yeah that's right so for us um we want to be able to facilitate the connection between the analyst and the data provider so we don't touch data at all we don't store data on chain you wouldn't want to do that anyway with Healthcare data it's super protected and private um and so the web 3 Tech that we use is around data use and access policies so how can we make sure that being able to access the data is more than just a pinky prompt PR because that's all that happens in healthcare right now is just like I promise I'm not going to use your data like you tell me I'm not supposed to but we don't know we don't know if they actually delete the data and so we provide um more security around that with that's fantastic U Michelle you want to yeah share your story um so I have a legal Background by training I used to be a councel at the office of Inspector General at the US Department of State in DC where I focused a lot on efficiency of State Department operations and embassies overseas including their security um and I was attracted to work with the digite blockchain because of its uh developer uh steadfast focus on security from day one in fact in our Genesis block the digibyte blockchain references the target hack in 2014 so I became fascinated with this blockchain that wanted to provide security in our new newly emerging digital economy and using my legal training I formed a 501c3 to support its use and adoption because there really isn't a lot of awareness around digite because it's been supported by worldwide volunteers for 10 years and never really had an Ico so it doesn't have a treasury War chest to get its name out there uh for what it can do which just a brief rundown we are a Bitcoin derivative that has 15c block times and multi-algorithm mining uh we use five mining algorithms instead of just one we have a real-time difficulty adjustment which keeps the blockchain stable and very low fees and an asset layer which can be used to tokenize anything in the world um so digite has been used uh for dock storage purposes over the years the one thing about a decentralized community there's no company to kind of uh control its growth but we have been used in um International shipping tracking our founder was involved with the company early on in China um where it was basically a platform like docy sign but it was on the blockchain and I don't believe that company is operational anymore we've also been used to um authenticate and certify a Rembrandt painting in 2019 at our digibyte uh Summit and uh that was pretty cool the Rembrandt painting was cut up into different pieces and then put onto our blockchain um and then also a Holland company called VI has used our blockchain to um authenticate inspection reports from companies they service including amsc International which produces like 50,000 inspection reports a month to make sure that they're you know fraud resistant and secure when they want to re access them um they have since moved to a dow eth model so they no longer use our blockchain for that purpose unfortunately but it was being used by them for a number of years um we also have an assets platform uh which is very active in our community for art and um we have a larger block size than other blockchains so you can fit things like uh video links and actual pictures in our nfts um also we have a Digi um it's an app where you can use it's not decentralized storage directly but it's a decentralized blockchain password list authentication app which you can use to log into access um storage of documents and a decentralized way and the keys are not stored centrally they're um guarded by our protocol through digibyte keys and it's not controlled by a central company so you you never have any identifying information online when you're logging in through our digid so that digid can be used in conjunction with the assets layer to serve as a credential authentication authentication method where you to encrypt a Visa or a passport on our nft layer on our asset layer you could then authenticate that using our digid app and then I think that about covers what yeah those are some great use cases and it really kind of highlights the wide variety of things that this technology can do what are we really solving for I guess when we're talking about using blockchain to store data a lot of people when they think of nfts think of art but you've mentioned not only the rembrand painting but things like passports and uh important documents yeah I mean I think any document can literally be hashed on either directly on our blockchain which was what bid did or through assets um and then you know to prevent forgery and protect against fraud I I read some crazy article this week that the number attached to cyber crime this year will be $9.5 trillion dollar and so if cyber crime was a country it would be the third largest economy in the World Behind the United States and China so I feel like we really need to start researching and developing this technology at a higher level with more funding to be able to leverage the potential that I think it has through encrypting documents that are just out there floating in basically a non-private digital world that we live in um yeah that's one thing that I see in the the data space looking at this for the last few years working at uh blockchain startup operating in data as well where there are such great benefits that can be achieved that we've seen in finance and we can achieve benefits very similarly in data as well and it's just one of those things that there isn't this understanding and and uh public perception is been kind of Tainted where things like your uh organization doesn't have the uh awareness or people who do hear about it might not understand why it's important so I'm excited to talk more about that in a minute uh John do you want to share what you're doing yeah uh my name is John gregas um I am the co-founder at mosaic Labs um we focus on oracles so if anybody doesn't know what oracles are they're really the ability to bring offchain data onto the blockchain to build applications um in web 3 uh we strictly focus on uh the ZK part of that so we are the first ZK Oracle John what is a ZK uh zero knowledge proofs so we we utilize zero knowledge proof technology um to scale Oracle so uh a little bit about my background um my co-founder and I both worked in the uh chain link ecosystem for over three years um we saw some of the pitfalls that were happening in the current Oracle Market um and so what we wanted to do is scale that um how how chain link and other oracles work they do mostly aggregation or optimistic oracles um to prove that something has happened um to bring that answer on chain and so what we're trying to do is build something that scales from that um where instead of an aggregation of different uh of node operators you can have as little as one operator to uh verifiably prove that something has happened so if it be uh the price of Bitcoin or if it' be actual Insurance data you can have an operator run that and bring it on chain and verifiably prove the computation has happened to make sure that answer is correct that's great so what are some use cases being utilized on your platform um so oracles is in general everybody thinks of dexes so you use Unis swap back in defi summer it was powered by chain link because it allowed price data to come on chain so people could trade um and so from there the you the use cases are endless I mean you could actually do anything and bring anything on chain that you wanted to do and so it's really up to the developer who has that really cool idea in web 3 that says Hey I want to use x data we find those data providers that that provide that data and allow them to sell that data to that developer um in the blockchain thank you so just want to open the discussion we've been in this space all of us for a number of years now and have seen it grown like cat mentioned what do you see as kind of these big buckets of constraints and problems facing the adoption of uh blockchain for data management I have a lot myself but I'll leave it to you guys as the panel for what for debt management data data management so I'd say education so for us we're on the the healthcare side so Enterprise it's can be a sty industry you know if you're outside the industry we love it in the industry but it's it's a bit of a difficult conversation you start talking about oracles like Oracle the company like no totally different like this is this is actually being able to bring data on chain because data it functionally can't do that on the blockchain and there's just it feels very complicated to them and so there's a level of Education that's necessary and needed what's interesting though is all of the Enterprise companies that we're speaking with have a blockchain innovator in house so Johnson and Johnson has one UCB has one um astroica all these companies are are looking at the technology they're educ themselves but there is still a little bit of a of a gap around the knowledge uh and what it means and that can be very scary to an Enterprise that wants to play it safe but also knows that they need to push the envelope a little bit in terms of innovation so one thing that I've looked at with uh blockchain and Healthcare specifically is the uh incentives kind of around for these larger companies you know they're operating at such scale and have such uh influence in resources when we're talking about the regulatory environment um what do you see in that with like adoption and why you know they have these innovators in in house but why aren't they is it something with like the fact that you know they want to maintain their Little Empire of data what do you how do you look at that yeah so it's that's an interesting question because there was just recently a Consortium of pharmaceutical companies that formed um each have their own data it's a Federated model so Federated AI model um but they have not been able to share access to their data really until now and a lot of the reason is is because web 3 has been developing it's been all about dexes all about defi uh which just doesn't fit Healthcare that's not the use case the other side of it is when you're talking about privacy enhancing Technologies H fhe or homomorphic encryption um multiparty computation trusted execution environments those also have just crusted in terms of availability for the for the business side it used to be too expensive to implement and now it's becoming feasible so when you bring these together and then of course you sprinkle in a little AI because everyone loves buzzwords then you can start to create the consortiums that you're talking about which is how do they actually leverage their data for the Partnerships now they can do it in a safe way they can monetize it and what's really cool is that because it's the way that you can build a blockchain is immutability you can assign IP to that so let's say a drug comes up from this Consortium you can share the IP among the participants in our system you can actually know exactly where particular data piece came from at the patient level and you can also share down to the patient so they are testing these a lot of it is uh inhouse and they don't talk about it they don't want to broadcast it also because it's incredibly competitive specifically in the pharmaceutical sector it's all about who can get IP first so they're not going to broadcast it this particular Consortium they did broadcast because they are way ahead of everybody else um but it's just now that the technology is available it's inexpensive enough and they feel because they had the in-house expertise now they feel comfortable implementing it that's very interesting and it's exciting that we're at that kind of almost inflection point I'm hoping anyway right soon it's going to happen but um it's it's just very exciting to to be at this kind of Forefront here where we're seeing this happening and we all know it's happening but it's kind of happening in this really quiet way in the background and I've seen that in uh private conversations in in finance there's people are moving rails of blockchain Mill billions of dollars is being moved but it's not something that everyone's shouting from the rooftops right so hopefully we see more of that going forward yeah mon uh monetization is a a big topic now just because data is oil I mean it's it's extremely profitable and I think it's education with web 2 to say there are a lot of people that want to build applications in the blockchain but they need that data to do that and they're willing to pay a lot of money for that and so if we can educate um these these big ger larger web 2 companies data providers to say hey you might want to think about using someone to provide that data onto the blockchain so users can use it I mean it's it's extremely profitable for them so John to follow up with that do you have any tips or advice for people listening to do that to go to these companies and say hey here's what you can look at um I think it's it with any with any company a lot of on the technical side is always going to be bottom up um you need to educate some of the engineers that are on these teams some of the these companies do have blockchain engineering teams or or some kind of smaller conjunction of people that that do research in this but it's really I guess for our side Mosaic is is educating these companies to say hey this is possible because a lot of people don't know this yet um they don't even know that that blockchains exist or need this data because when they think of blockchain they think of okay yeah you can use an API and and this block can get this information but it's not that's that's not true and so you need to have this this this middle this middleware to be a B to provide that data and now just educate the web 2 companies to say hey there are a lot of people that want to use this let's think about providing this data um in this way so John you did mention too that you were at chain link and have a good understanding of with you and your founder of that space um would you want to touch on we're talking about constraints here yeah what was going on with them and why you guys are different yeah so I the biggest difference from us is when we when we were working um in that ecosystem you really see the ability that it does not scale um a lot of people don't know this but they have many many node operators they pick and choose and Whit list their node operators and that kind of right there is the initial bottleneck where not everybody can then become a node operator to prove this data and get paid to do that um the other the other downfall is they have to subsidize all these feeds and so when you when you have this new data feed or you're a new project and you have your token um if you want to get a data feed for that uh you're going to have to pay a lot of money or you'll never get it or wait in line for years and so we see that as a scaling problem not just for web 2 but also web 3 that people aren't going to make applications if they're not going to have the data available so we want to have anybody become a node operator um we want it to be an actual trustless system where if you if you have any knowledge in infrastructure and you say hey I want to run one of these operators to get paid to do this you can you should be able to do that you know we're in a decentralized world we want to be completely decentralized and so you know what we're trying to solve at mosaic is uh the Oracle problem still exists but we want to make it a little bit easier that anybody can now almost like a Marketplace of of operators and users where users say hey I really want this data if it's Insurance dat I really need this data then you get somebody on the other side who's the data provider that says hey I have this data I want to provide this now and as an operator the operator is that middleware that says okay I'm going to run this data bring it to the user and get paid to do that I'm going to serve you another user example from Healthcare yeah so in healthcare on the hospital side there was a law that went into play about two years ago where hospitals are required to be transparent about how much they're going to charge you they do a really good job of burying that information on their website this would be a great example use case of an oracle especially when you're talking about how we're leveraging this data and eventually people could use this for reimbursement for healthcare or insurance insurance coverage but there aren't there is one one single data point there is one hospital and it is the price of the of that procedure at that hospital it's it is not the case that that same procedure at the hospital down the road is the exact same price so the multiple oracles trying to average a price would not work in healthcare so if there's a way to be able to say this is the price at Yale New Haven Health System guaranteed hip replacement proven data from Medicare from the website this is the Oracle proven bring into the blockchain that is an excellent use case we looked at chain link and it didn't fit the use case for healthcare there just aren't multiple data points to be able to use to aggregate to put an answer on chain absolutely that was a good point yeah there's a lot of nuance in this this space when it comes to the technology and we can say blockchain but it it's a big umbrella right um with that said one thing John mentioned was the word decentralized uh Michelle do you want to touch on the difference between uh privatized blockchain and a a truly public decentralized chain sure yeah I think public blockchains definitely need to be at the Forefront of the Next Generation in the digital economy to the extent that they can given the privacy of certain data because of the fact that they do provide the worldwide node you know security and I don't really think that private blockchains provide the same amount of security because they can't because they're you know essentially centrally controlled by certain people so you have a trust problem and and you know you don't when the nodes go down within that centralized server you don't have access to the data and you know public blockchains are censorship resistant because of the lack of control in the private blockchains the private blockchains are not I just there's a lot of public mistrust of public blockchains and I'm not sure why there's just not a comfort level in using them yet in the market and I think that might have to do with the fact that some of the top chains frequently go down I don't I don't why that is but they do Zana being one um I I don't know I I'm hoping that it you know goes that way um interestingly the Senate armed services Committee just sent a letter to DOD saying that we have to figure out how to use blockchain for National Security and um for me a public blockchain is a public utility for the public benefit and it should be supported by Government funding and you know that's how the internet started the government really got behind it and promoted it and supported it at the beginning because there's frankly nobody to profit off public blockchains at the beginning because they don't have that in infrastructure support so that's one of our challenges and that's why we started the 501c3 to get awareness out there about our blockchain and it's one of the rare blockchains where security decentralization and speed coexist and you know there's all these Layer Two efforts going on out there with Bitcoin and you know more prominent blockchains to achieve the the functionality that we have it's just nobody knows about us yeah so it's a tough spot to be in and it it could be tough to to be sitting and waiting and hoping for more government Buy in right because with this this data space that we're in um so many comp countries see it as a challenge right yeah I want my data in my country Saudi Arabia for example has laws on the books that you can't have a permissionless public chain because they want that data to be stored in Saudi Arabia and so we have those issues and the National Security issues that come with with financial uh problems when you're looking at the future Michelle how are you kind of conceptualizing where this is all going and if you're comfortable all of you guys please feel free to put some time and dates out here because we like to say in the blockchain space Oh you know maybe next year but I'm I'm curious what you guys if you're willing to commit to some sort of 5year 10 year mark I mean I think Mitch Ford I think his name is from MIT media Labs I think that's where he's from said that private blockchains are the intranet and public blockchains are the internet and we're kind of at that stage of development in the space where we're still in the intrnet land and in dialup stage so I'm hoping within five years we're starting to see more migration in public space to public blockchains and that's why we built our infrastructure to support that um I definitely think that public blockchains obviously provide more accessibility for people who are in financially disadvantaged populations to contribute to the new digital economy um there's no barriers to entry anybody with access to GitHub and a computer can get on and code and contribute and that's what I love about digite one of our main contributors right now is a 22-year-old from Peru who just found digibyte and has been contributing all these apps and just coding left and right and the community loves them and that's what I want to see I want to see a more you know open and accessible economy for people and uh open source decentralized public blockchains are definitely the way I think future economic Innovation will happen in our country I think history has shown that you know reducing barriers to entry is a positive thing for democracy and Innovation and maintaining freedom and you know open censorship resistance platforms are the best way to get there thank you uh just want to pause quick do you two want to answer that question or would you rather open this up to a Q&A with our five minute warning here there's questions yeah we can we can take questions that would be great yeah okay not all at once so I'm curious with with the data um storage uh is there any consideration or possible like where do you think the future of data will lay in regards to either pinning or Perma web Perma web or pinning data pinning data pin versus like Perma web is there any the future of holding the actual data like R weave real permanent uh so I think again I'm coming from the healthcare perspective very different um very non you know traditional Shad Health whatever um I think depends on the data source it because it's there it depends on um so for healthcare for example it it's not that helpful to have data kind of in in a history kind of in an R weave archetyp archetype if you will it's more helpful to have a a living and breathing document that is updated regularly almost like your health record contributing in from different places different locations a really fluid document um so for us we've we've looked from the healthcare perspective looked into companies like rwe with permanent data storage and we just haven't seen anything there yet um but I I that's just from the health per Health Care perspective I think for us it's more around living data the data needs to stay where it is being able to access it prove that the data is what it is prove that that it is that it's unchanged in a certain way that that it wasn't tampered with by someone that wasn't supposed to have access to the health record so that's from our perspective but I would turn it over to them to yeah I think it ends coming down to what type of data are you talking about is it sensitive data is it public data um you know at chain link they're they're building ccip which allows for traditional banking to have their own internal blockchains to pass messes back and forth between the public ledgers or banking to banking to public so I think it ends up coming down to what type of data are you talking about is it security is it is it sensitive data um I love ipfs you know R weave is great but do I see that happening any anytime soon no until some type of encryption comes that's that's good enough to that point as well it's very hard to work with these tools at this time so ceramic is a great tool on top of ipfs but even then there are still leaps that these technologies have to make that we're used to in data storage um in in cloud storage if you will that they just haven't thought of or haven't figured out um data deletion is a big one data deletion is a requirement under Hippa it's a requirement under gdpr and with those tools you actually can't be compliant with that so that's something to think about too is that regulatory aspect of it I just want to add not only are you not in compliance you are permanently in incompliance right literally yeah yeah where you're required to legally take it down right and and we've explored the code we talked to the team and and they say it's coming but they haven't addressed those gaps yet that I think kind of like you were saying kind of move us to the Future there