Travis Reeder on GoChain’s web3 blockchain protocol

0:00I'm Ashley Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Travis reader the CTO of go chain Travis it's a pleasure to have you on the show today and thank you for being here yeah well thanks for having me here I'm excited you're very welcome let's kick it off by talking about go chain could you please

0:21start by giving us an overview of why you originally created go chain and what was the team's vision sure so basically our goal from the beginning was to fix aetherium scaling problems we kind of saw and late 2017 you know a bunch of activity was happening you know crypto kitties things like that where the network slowed to a halt and transaction fees went sky-high and my backgrounds in

0:49cloud infrastructure so I've been building you know scalable systems for for a long time my previous company was a cloud infrastructure company you know our biggest problem was how to scale things so I sold that and then I also worked on Oracle's cloud after that and then we started go chin yes we set out to do that in our original goal was to try to get to 100x what aetherium zet

1:13and since there only had 13 transactions per second we our target was 1,300 you know we just thought that was a good goal and we accomplished that goal you know what 13 transactions per second you can't really even support a single application let alone thousands or potentially hundreds of thousands in the future so that was that was the original vision goal yeah that's great so you

1:36guys are providing more scalability than aetherium and hopefully at less cost as well what is the main difference between go chain and aetherium when people aren't familiar with either really what's the easiest way to describe the difference is it the consensus mechanism or yeah so so we try to also one of our goals is to be 100% compatible with aetherium so that you could take all

1:58your smart contracts and your your apps that use aetherium and kind of shift over if you needed the performance but yeah to get those speeds a lot of it was the consensus algorithm we had to get rid of proof of work because that's just can't scale period so we switched to consensus called proof of reputation where we have big companies running notes for instance

2:20DISH Network's is running a company sling TV and and a bunch of other companies you know all around the globe so so our rap you or our model is these big companies you can trust them there's a lot on the line the reputations on the line and doing that we also were able to be more decentralized actually if you look at the companies running them and geography and and or it is a magnitude

2:47more green like use less energy so you know at least a thousand probably ten thousand times less energy than the area network Wow and you guys I I understand that you have the ability to run a public blockchain as well as private blockchains or hybrid blockchains why would enterprises be interested in running a private blockchain or a hybrid blockchain sure so a common use case for

3:12this is banks trying to do settlements cross border settlements between banks I think this is one of the ones where private blockchains really shiny you know instead banks going through the Swift system which actually uses human beings – you know verify transactions and things like that you can use private blockchain networks between these banks – and settle these transactions within

3:36seconds kind of thing and everybody you know agrees and comes to consensus on this blockchain so that's that's a really good one and you can imagine there's a bunch of use cases that companies might want to set up between you know different parties so they all agree on the same set of data essentially mm-hmm yep and I understand that a theorem can also create private

3:57blockchains as well but I'm guessing that still uses the proof-of-work consensus algorithm is that the reason that banks per se would be using go chain rather than aetherium oh yeah theorems they're really focused on the public network side of things and just so happens that the way we built our public network is you know with this this network of corporations running

4:22these nodes it works great in a private environment – we've done some benchmarks and tests now it wasn't only the consensus algorithm that we change we also optimize the code a lot I've done a whole bunch of other stuff in the background we've created ways to store the storage off in cloud storage sort of offline off the chain so you don't have to have it all on disk because these

4:44black teams are getting really big now and most people can't store that on a single disk so we've created all these tools and stuff to help these companies manage the blockchain stuff too and it's all open source it's all docker eyes so you can spin up these he's networked pretty easily that's great and what kind of companies are you guys already working with in the market so we're

5:05working some of the recent announcements were DISH Network's they're actually running a node and we're working on a project with them they're pretty big into blockchain and Microsoft we're doing a POC project with them so those are a couple of more recent big ones you guys that event chain so yes it does work very well for large-scale ticketing as well the theory

5:30I'm just can't handle large venues to sell a lot of tickets right so it does only make sense yeah definitely oh yeah and who would you say are your ideal clients Microsoft sounds huge is that your ideal client or are you looking for those other cloud services like the companies that you worked for in the past I mean obviously the ideal client the bigger the customer the

5:53better so we've actually been focused quite a bit on the enterprise lately you know that's how we came up with the dish and the Microsoft stuff so that's kind of our target market is enterprise and I I feel like they they have more need for bakhtin things and their customers actually like for example Microsoft may not need blockchain for themselves but

6:15their customers need it so you know they're good avenues to partner with to to get leads and get new customers yeah that makes sense and sounds like you guys have made a huge progress so far especially with this Microsoft partnership so how far along is the project from the inception when did you first start coding it and how long did it take to get it into the

6:37market I started thinking about it in 2017 probably in the summer or early 2017 we really started going for it probably late 2017 early 2018 we did our token sale early 2018 I sold that out in a couple minutes actually and almost a year ago today may 2nd was a token sale date congratulate and we launched our

7:06meet maintenance so we're almost coming up on our year anniversary of the main net in life that's amazing and is the product right now you know fully functioning for these large-scale enterprise clients and what does the development roadmap look like is it you know heavy in features that are coming out still yeah so this year we focused a lot on performance and scalability

7:30scalability last year we're still folks focusing on that but we also want to you know get adoption kind of main goals for this year so with that we're coming out with more tools we just released a great CLI tool called web 3 for developers to build and deploy smart contracts it's kind of a replacement for truffle we're also releasing an identity framework in

7:55fact that's what we're working with Microsoft on and that's that these decentralized identities which is also a w3c specification that's being built so working on that because you know with these applications you sort of need you need these identities that people can own and you know authenticate with and things like that we're also working on trying to get some payment type

8:18solutions in place so people can you know build on go chain and take payments and make that easy for developers to get on so really focusing on adoption this year and you know performance performance is a constant thing but features out – yeah with your current scalability 1,300 transactions per second you mentioned is that going to be enough for all these clients around the

8:44world simultaneously and what is the next goal beyond that I don't think it's enough for everybody simultaneously that said it's it's more than enough for all the Bitcoin transactions all the etherium transactions reference if crypto kitties launched on go chain it wouldn't have got any gas wars so it could handle today's needs for sure but it probably

9:10can't handle the future yet so our next goal is to not do another 10x we want to get to 13,000 transactions per second that's kind of the next one and then well then we'll be in this sort of the same realm of visa transactions so that's great and how are you guys creating this into a sustainable business are there revenue models behind this and if so what does that look like

9:33right now yeah so again on the enterprise side of things we're trying to help these enterprise build solutions on top of coaching so so we have a service services model where you know they can hire us to help them build things the architect there there are applications things like that also do workshops and whatnot so yeah we so we have a services model goes along with

9:59our network in our open source software that's great and what would you say the biggest challenge is for go chain moving forward I know you mentioned you know acquisition or customer acquisition is that just going to require more marketing or are there other challenges to think about as well yeah marketing is always a big thing and you know we try to do our best there but you know when

10:22you're going up to these enterprise companies a lot of its direct sales right and connections and networking so we're tapping into our network and like I said up oratorical and I'm an advisor at sales for us too so we you know pretty connected in the Silicon Valley system so we're utilizing those channels that's good well sounds you guys are making great

10:46progress so far if enterprise clients or other developers and people looking to get involved with go chain are looking to find out more information what's the best way to get in contact with you guys they can go to our website and go Jane do you know or send us an email info at go Jane dot IO and yeah that's probably best way awesome well congratulations on all the success

11:10so far I'm looking forward to seeing this 13,000 transactions per second that you're speaking of and it will see how the identity system works as well because I know that's going to be very important especially for banks and financial institutions without any kyc you really have no idea who you're working with right so that sounds like I'm the major

11:29milestone for go chain so let's follow up in the coming months when you've done some more development and we can see how go chain is progressing and until then thank you so much for your time Travis yeah Thank You Austin pleasure