Rob Viglione on Horizon’s enterprise blockchain solutions

0:02i'm ashton addison from event chain for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have rob viglion the ceo of horizon labs and co-founder of horizon rob welcome back to the show it's a pleasure to see you again ashton pleasure to be back thanks for having me you're very welcome i know a lot has happened with horizon

0:22since we last spoke last year uh and in crypto uh years that's that's like a decade and i know that your team has done a lot of initiatives there's a lot of new exciting things to talk about and i would love for you to just kick it off for those who aren't familiar yet with with horizon uh just a overview of the platform and what are the specific initiatives you're working on and then

0:40we'll dive into the details sure so horizon is a programmable blockchain platform really focused on privacy and we we implement this in a sidechain context using zero knowledge cryptography so we're very much crypto geeks and focusing on data privacy and getting blockchains to scale to the mainstream definitely and i think that's something that's really needed right now

1:03especially in the enterprise industry and i know that your team's also focused on enterprises quite a bit to help them get involved as the big money flows in and the conglomerates flow into blockchain can you talk a little bit maybe on the enterprise side about about some of those problems uh that these big companies are having getting into the industry and how

1:23exactly you're helping sure so there's a few big ones and one probably the most important one is that a lot of enterprises don't know how to use blockchain or really why they want to use it everyone want knows that this is an important technology this is the future in some way a lot of them are now graph really grappling with in what way all right so now one of our

1:42biggest focuses in horizon labs the the software development company is working with enterprises and getting them familiar with the technology and then helping them guide them through specific use cases that would actually it makes sense to use blockchain for and not just using blockchain for everything other important ones are congestion on popular public blockchain

2:01networks prices that are scaling with usage in ways that really don't lend themselves well to you know large-scale blockchain adoption and then probably the last one and really bread and butter for us is a lot of businesses and their customers don't want to put sensitive information on a public ledger without strong privacy definitely and i think that last one is

2:23super important and that's partially why not all enterprises are using public blockchains and there are private blockchains and hybrids and so on where they can have more privacy and that confidential information for enterprises which is has a lot of value in it is is protected and i'm curious you know you've really seen blockchain on the enterprise side for

2:45the last few years now can you give a snapshot of what does it look like throat halfway through 2021 here enterprises entering into the space compared to uh this time last year some of the important indicators in in how many enterprises are actually getting involved with blockchain right now right so the two biggest stories in blockchain over the last year were nfts

3:08and on the enterprise side nfts are really where a lot of enterprises are using their their entryway into the blockchain space right they're thinking about nfts in a much broader context than just collectibles although some of them are using the collectibles concept really well although others are looking at nfts for things like digital subscriptions and getting

3:28getting tens of millions of entities out there to their customers so that's a very interesting kind of gateway for a lot of enterprises uh the other is on the defy side and defy uh hasn't really been an enterprise adoption piece but this is the other really big story in cryptocurrency and for some like one of our partners and customers celsius network

3:48it really has been a major part for them so celsius network is you know the largest lender in the the cryptocurrency space where they take in crypto deposits they lend up you know dollars or cryptocurrencies and on the back end they do d5 right so it's the c5 app but on the back end the way that they give yields to their users is really entering the defy space and

4:07being able to participate in a number of ways so that's a really important development and others are starting to really come in in that context stable coins are another big one but really thinking about enterprise blockchain from like the supply chain use case and maybe like iot and other things we're cultivating these use cases that they really haven't just like uh

4:27exploded in the same ways that anna fees and beef i have definitely and on the nft side i've seen some of these marketplaces some of the largest companies in the world seem to have jumped right in you know from disney and marvel uh to to every other major brand already getting involved so quickly and i think that's only going to continue to grow and i think the the intricacies of how

4:50they're going to integrate blockchain just into their companies overall for these enterprises is going to continue to grow as well and and i'm glad that you mentioned celsius network there as your customers we just actually recently spoke with alex and the growth of their platform in the last year has been phenomenal i think it was the top growing coin of all of the coins in 2020 as well

5:11so it really does uh these two trends as you said have really exploded and i think we're still really early on as well because uh there's just a small percentage of of companies that have really fully uh capitalized on these enterprise blockchain solutions and i know that you're helping a lot of enterprises with that and just go back a few minutes we did speak

5:33about you know there's private solutions hybrid solutions not everyone's going to be using the ethereum public blockchain to store all their confidential information could you talk about uh with horizon as you're helping enterprises are you offering all of these different types of architectures for enterprise blockchain solutions or what specifically are you

5:54are you helping on the technology side with these enterprises yeah so we're actually providing solutions across the entire gambit of it so at our core we have a totally decentralized public blockchain and our sizing technology is totally decentralized so basically our product that we offer is an sdk a software development kit and a business a group of developers can take that sdk

6:16and launch their own layer one blockchains their layer layer one block chains are really independent they they operate you know on their own but they are interoperable by choice into the public horizon blockchain ecosystem and then the cryptocurrency actually could be like the gas on these these independent l ones um so that's an important product and they could be private so businesses

6:39can keep these things like private consortium chains like you see you know down the hyperledger the you know the quarter corda part of the industry or they could be completely public blockchains that are actually decentralized like like a like given a furious right and then we could do all different types of services in between there from smart contracting to issuing you

6:58know tokens nfts stable coins and all that kind of stuff now that said i'm speaking a little bit in the future because we just completed development of this platform a couple of months ago it's been going through audit third-party testing and we're getting ready to go live at the end of q3 with it that's great to hear and yeah to be able to provide these different layer one

7:17solutions i think is going to be a great foundation for these enterprises but i also was reading into uh the fact that horizon has built out their own side chain zendoo and the side chain has you know at least with the the public chains that are sort of lagging in scalability um it seems like it's a lot more scalable at least for enterprises that are going to need to have

7:39a lot of throughput maybe you can talk a little bit about zendoo how you've been working on it you know what you were speaking about side chains last year when we were on the show but it seems like now it's it's almost ready to deploy to the main net um how is that functioning within the platform and how enterprise is needing that yeah so and it's actually massively

7:58scalable and i'm glad you brought it up because we are positioning ourselves to be uh blockchain infrastructure for the enterprise marketplace so we've been taking very meticulous steps over the years to make that possible and um some some of these stuff have been a little humble and quiet like we built up the largest node network in the industry so right now we have over 40 000 servers

8:17running around the world that are ready to support this big enterprise blockchain infrastructure zendoo itself is massively scalable so each blockchain is a proof-of-stake blockchain and we can have about a thousand of them running in parallel on our network so this is you know more than 10 times our even like the the most scalable competitor that we come up against

8:37in terms of transaction throughput if you have a thousand blockchains running in parallel they're proof of stake so you have like a 100 000 transactions happening for for you know epico blocks um on average we have something like three million transactions per per block that are supportable on our main chain each block is every two and a half minutes

8:55so it comes down to like 20 000 transactions a second it it is huge now it's not now we have to put this in context it's really not meant for like high frequency trading type of use cases it's not that kind of lightning fast because we have a global distributed blockchain network but it is massively scalable for real blockchain use cases at the enterprise level wow that's great

9:16to hear and 40 000 notes that's that's a lot uh compared to you know some of these major public networks um so that's crazy that you've sort of you know that's not it's bigger news that not a lot of people have heard that um is there a specific advantage like the more nodes the better or maximum decentralization or what is the competitive advantage of having

9:39tens of thousands of nodes right so number one your network never goes down so that's really important and in particular because we have seen some other networks actually go down for some days which is kind of weird in the blockchain context but some networks really don't have a lot of nodes supporting them so that that's kind of um you know i would say probabilistically

10:00close to zero for us but you can achieve that with hundreds of nodes you don't need 40 000 those why we have 40 000 nodes or more than that is because we we have now a side chain system and we want to build a sidechain marketplace so that anyone can launch a sidechain like we said you can have with the v1 of our software like a thousand of them running

10:19in parallel so we need a large set of nodes that could actually be you know um working with developers and businesses so they can run their sidechain so if we have a thousand blockchains running in parallel 40 000 nodes is actually you know probably maybe even too small maybe we need more although they can run multiple side chains in parallel so it it's if we built up

10:40the network specifically for that purpose and it's been very successful thus far and really can't wait to go live on my netflix system definitely and that that is incredible to hear and you know for those viewers that are sort of just trying to understand a lot of people understand bitcoin and ethereum but they don't really understand enterprise solutions

10:57as much uh or enterprises that are just looking to get involved for these side chains is that more specifically when you're attaching it to a public network or for hybrid and private because if you have your own private blockchain uh and you could have the scalability since you don't really need to have is the decentralization in different nodes is that more focused on there or why

11:17would the enterprises specifically need to take advantage of the zendoo sidechain right so a number of different reasons and one because we use the type of cryptography that we do in zero knowledge crypto it had a bit of a splash with zcash going to market back in you know 2017 16 17. now we're we're gonna see in say 2022 and beyond i think zkp's zero knowledge proofs are

11:41going to be that critical missing link linking private blockchain to public blockchain so it's kind of like that link you know in the early days of networking where you went from internets to the internet the technology that we've been working on is that link because you can run your own private blockchains and you can still use our public network through the zendoo protocol

12:00to validate or at least verify that the transactions that happened on your private network actually were valid transactions and conform to the rules of the system you can publish the rules so the entire world can see what the rules are for what you're trying to achieve with your blockchain but you don't have to disclose the data that's actually going on on your private

12:17network so that's the big missing link and really to get to your question we want to bridge the gap between public and private blockchain so that we can actually provide the value that public blockchain brings to the market which is really information integrity or information certainty immutability the big things that blockchain brings but still have that big privacy element

12:37that governments are going to demand enterprises are going to demand so we really do want to straddle that that kind of critical value proposition definitely and that's a great explanation thank you for that rob and now you you've been working on this for a year from what i understand it's not fully deployed in the main net yet or or can you talk about where exactly it's at

13:00when it's going into the market and if the enterprises are going to be utilizing this right away yep so we we took the longer path which has been a little bit painful we actually came up with this idea three years ago when we were thinking about really how do you scale blockchain to the mainstream and it it's an it's a modular architecture it's a blockchain a

13:17blockchain type of world and really we think that this is critical to actually hit scale in the enterprise marketplace because the idea of all the world's economic activity going through a single blockchain just doesn't make sense it's not going to happen and i think those conversations really are are we're going to move beyond them so we we chose very deliberately to go this

13:36blockchain to blockchain architecture and it's taken us three years to develop it because it's actually a very sophisticated technology that uses zero knowledge proofs to link all the side chains back to the main chain so you can issue your tokens your coins on your own layer ones that you can deploy with our sdk but you're still leveraging the main

13:55blockchain network for security which is really important um so that was the path that we took and you know it's been a long road where we stand now is we're done with development we've been done with development for the last couple months but because it's such an important upgrade to the system we're going through two independent third-party audits

14:12and we just received the results from the first audit and actually passed with plain colors we're actually integrating uh some findings for there and we've already tested a deployment from one test that to another testament so that we we have the mechanics down for when we go to the main net but we're looking at that maintenance deployment at the end

14:28of q3 maybe even a little sooner if things keep on going as smoothly as they have definitely well it's great to hear and i will be following along as that gets integrated into the main net rob so you know we are running short on time but i want to look towards the future and for you know the widespread mainstream adoption for enterprises of uh blockchains and of the zen technology

14:51specifically as well what do you see as one of the main key factors to success that's going to have horizons technology implemented into enterprises globally yeah so we're starting humble and starting very specifically and really the product that we're building for celsius it's called zk audit and this is really a showcase of the technology to show the world

15:12that how powerful it is so what we're doing specifically is we're able to audit near real time all of the cryptocurrency reserves celsius has so right now you have to trust the company you have to trust their auditors maybe annually they do an audit but now we do cryptographic audits near real time of the reserves using zero knowledge proofs so actually

15:32we don't do we don't leak information from institutional clients any fund flows across the network but we still cryptographically prove that yeah you know the reserves that they hold that's the first client in first use case we use bitcoin actually you're running on a horizon sidechain we reconstruct the entire you know bitcoin network and all the transactions on a

15:52snark friendly horizon side chain but that that's beyond the point now what we're doing is we're driving a whole bunch of other business into that same product and we can even audit private blockchains with that product so to the extent that we're successful like this is the type of thing where this could disrupt the entire idea of the audience so i think ey and

16:12honesty on pwc devoid everything that they do manually we can now do at least in the cryptocurrency world near real time with cryptographic certainty so this is a really big product and this is just one use case of the sidechain technology but as we deploy other ones and our path to market to make it actually successful is we build the modules that others could

16:32take the modules add it to the sdk launch their platform so the concept of a module would be something like an nft module so you combine an nft module with the sdk and all of a sudden you can launch your own nfc platform right we can do this with a stable coin module like a decentralized exchange exchange module an automated market maker module you name it really everything that's

16:53going on in the crypto world now think enterprise grade version in different modules that you can now like add to your your layer one solution and deploy seamlessly low cost best in class security and best in class data privacy for your clients so that's our path to market and right now it's uh working really well even before we launch we're we're using beta technology a beta

17:15version of the technology with these early clients to you know really battle test it and get things deployed seamlessly when we go to mainnet definitely and that sounds huge rob to revolutionize the entire auditing industry and that's uh something that's very exciting so i will be looking forward to to that as your team continues to work on that but for now uh deploying zendu getting

17:39it into uh the market working with celsius i will be following along for those updates and for the viewers that are looking to follow along as well uh what's the best way for them to uh learn more about horizon get involved with the community follow along as you roll out these updates so horizon dot io is the one stop shop for everything but from there i

17:58recommend check out if you want to join the community join our discord channel that's where all the action happens we have a telegram group and really all of the other standard channels you can follow us on twitter and so forth sounds great rob i will leave all those links in the description box below for the viewers all the best with these rollouts moving

18:15forward and let's follow up in the near future cool thanks ashton look forward to it