Erick Pinos on Ontology’s blockchain interoperability

0:00I'm Ashley Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have eric Pinos the american ecosystem lead of ontology eric thank you so much for coming welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here thanks thanks for having us you you're very welcome if you could start off the interview by

0:19giving a little bit of background on how you got involved in blockchain industry originally and then how that led into becoming the American lead for ontology sure so I got involved in the industry in 2014 I was an MIT undergrad and MIT had just done the MIT Bitcoin air drop which was every undergraduate at MIT got air dropped a hundred dollars worth of

0:42Bitcoin and this was organized by the MIT Bitcoin Club which had just started at the time and $100 back then it was half a Bitcoin Bitcoin was $200 Wow every student yeah every student getting $100 it was like well what are we gonna do with it some people started speculating on it trading it others were like what is this let me cash out for money and then but some students joined

1:07the MIT Bitcoin Club which was the kind of the point it was to like get people to start using it on campus there were some merchants that accepted it the school store accepted it there was some restaurants they started accepting Bitcoin and it really just kind of grew out of there so I was part of the MIT Bitcoin Club I became president of the MIT Bitcoin Club my last year did some

1:25some conferences some events organized some meetups and through there I met a lot of connect I made a lot of connections by bringing in speakers to come and speak at the club so highly recommend any students till I get involved with the local blockchain club or get involved in local blockchain city meetup group because that's been the best way that I've met the connections

1:45that I have now and from there kind of springboarded I did a couple of investment things with game theory group which was a crypto VC firm I got involved with the blockchain Education Network which is a those blockchain education furs for university groups and university students and for professors and now I'm at ontology doing the Americas ecosystem very cool and let's

2:09dive a little bit deeper into ontology you know the main solutions that ontology provides as a public blockchain and a distributed collaboration platform can you dive into what is the competitive advantage and what is so unique about ontology sure so one of the things that I noticed was that public chains are a little difficult to to get on-boarded for enterprises they're really good for

2:33gaps and for community run projects and for hackathon based projects but a lot of these enterprises when they want to do stuff like supply chain or watching for energy my research at MIT was actually on blockchain and energy can you have renewable or tokenized renewable energy credits and we tried deploying a system in Puerto Rico right after the hurricane and what

2:57Enterprise it onto a public chain you know many of them prefer hyper ledger they prefer private Nets they prefer you know they want to move towards that spectrum but decentralization but they don't want to just put all of their data on there they still want to be able to to have a say and and be part of the consensus mechanism so that's why I like stellar and ripple have gotten like a

3:17lot of traction and what we've seen is like ok well is there a medium can you have a multi chain structure where you have a public main net that has all the benefits of a public chain while also having private blockchains being able to spin up what are essentially side chains and these side chains can be governed by their own consensus mechanisms or their

3:36own rules like okay you want the enterprise's to be able to choose what to what to to say and what to have on this blockchain that's kind of private but still make mechanisms and ways for that private blockchain to be able to talk to the main chain mm-hmm so you still have the interconnectivity between different enterprises and between different consortiums enterprises that's

3:58kind of what we really focus on it's like just tailoring the solution towards the specific use case and towards the specific enterprise while also not just full-on making private like these little private pockets of networks because we wanted to be able to talk to each other that's kind of the point of this whole thing definitely and that was leading me

4:16to my next question about public blockchains people that are new to the cryptocurrency industry are pretty familiar with the Bitcoin blockchain the etherium blockchain and it sounds like ontology has a bit of that public blockchain infrastructure but correct me if I'm wrong the one of the competitive advantages is this side chain and private infrastructure because I guess

4:39on enterprises have a hard time just go moving onto the Bitcoin blockchain without all of these other services is that one of the main competitive advantages and what are some of the other differences between ontology and Bitcoin in aetherium yeah I think that's one of the main competitive advantages another one I would say is just pretty the pretty standard like high

4:58transaction speeds and capabilities they need high transaction speeds now and if they were trying to deploy something on other block chains if it's too slow then it doesn't work for anything beyond just a proof-of-concept so mm-hmm us being able to take an idea we work with a company we're able to take an idea take make a proof-of-concept out of it and deploy it and run it and scale it

5:21up I think that kind of also represents a big advantage that ecology is mm-hmm and how has ontology managed the blockchain dilemma of balancing the scalability of the network keeping high security on the network while also remaining decentralized as possible yes so the consensus mechanism that we use it's called V RF v RF v BFT which just a really long acronym it's verifiable

5:48random function visit team fault tolerance getting every adjective on there what what essentially that means is the visit heed fault tolerance is kind of like proof of stake or delegated proof of stake where you have a list of Delegates that are weighed by the stake that they have and each consensus round one of them is picked to mine the next block but with where the V er F comes in

6:12the verifiable random function is just like you can just like you have these random number generators in your wallets that you trust to generate random seed phrases that are provably random so that you know that no one can like come across the same seed Frasor that are not like actually saving the seed Fraser that it's not easily guessable the verifiable random function picks one of

6:32the consensus nodes at random so that you know that there can't really be a collusion happen so that kind of helps keep the the system running it helps it be really fast without needing to have every single node in the entire network constantly participating in the consensus algorithm which is what slows down a lot of proof-of-work chains is that there's there's very long

6:53propagation times because you kind of have the gossip network your way around through the entire network whereas here's you can just pick or this node is picked each round to mine the next block so kind of yeah it helps with the speed there and we've stress tested in environments I mean right now transaction speeds are really high in ontology is and it's in the top 30 so

7:14it's pretty well like traded chained pretty high transaction volumes but even the simulated environments we kind of pushed it to its full potential kind of see like what's the maximum amount of transactions that it can hit per second mm-hmm that's great and it looked like ontology had quite a large community already can you talk about the size of the community and and how you're helping

7:33foster development in the platform yeah so we have a pretty big community I would say like region wise is very focused on in Asia because that's kind of where the project had its origins but now you know me in in the US we have a region head in Europe we have a region head in Russia we've kind of taken charge in taking over the the kind of natural communities have been built

7:54because there has been like a telegram group there has been a you know in the discord a lot of people are from the US a lot of people are from Latin America a lot of people kind of found us you know through those just just by reading about us online so ontology kind of decided that it was necessary to put someone in charge of making sure that that community is taken care of in those

8:13specific regions so we've been able to draw more attention we've been able to get more feedback we've been able to translate our documentation into multiple different languages create more developer resources you know think about what partnerships can we make in those specific regions to help better educate help better deploy out these use cases and what exchanges especially can we can

8:34we get listed on to to give more access to the people of those different regions in those different countries the ability to buy ont that's great and to have successful applications and a lot of applications on the platform it generally starts with the development you know how easy is it to develop on ontology and are there active developers working on business cases

9:00right now yeah so another reason why I personally really like ontology I was a CS student SES and business major and when I first started to learn how to build on blockchain the this was like 2016 so really the only choice was furia I mean you have to learn solidity which you know doesn't take that long to learn you could pretty much pick it up but one

9:23of the things that makes ontology great and I think there's other blocks chance to do this as well as you can you can do the smart contracts in Python in JavaScript and in c-sharp so these are languages that developers are already familiar with you know you don't have to learn a new language so that enables us to be able to reach out to the to the general developer community not just the

9:43blockchain developer community which you know is dwarfed by the size of the number of JavaScript developers in the world yeah so knowing being able to go to JavaScript development communities and or you know has some people that are looking for for new jobs or new opportunities and their skill sets are JavaScript development or Python development it's a lot easier to on

10:03board them and say like hey maybe your next app should be a blockchain based app or you should consider how blotching can be used for this because it does you know it's not that hard to learn a new language but it definitely it can't be overstated how much of an advantage it is to be able to code something in a language that you already know because

10:20you can hit the ground running get right off of that definitely I know that ontology has already built a great foundation but I'm curious to know what did the development roadmap look like for the rest of 2020 and what's in store for the users of ontology to look forward to yes we at the beginning of the year we actually published a roadmap to look forward to four things in 2020

10:41it's nicknamed roadmap Aristotle so each year with each new release of ontology there's a different Greek philosophers name I think last year it was like playdough and there's a good quote attributed to it but I don't remember the quote but I remember the text so the tech that in the roadmap that we're coming out with so more on the Virtual Mia VM side so right now ontology had

11:04supported up to this point native smart contracts which is like very low level interacting with ontology just very basics and then we added neo VM support so the neo virtual machine which adds more smart contract capabilities and is what lets you program in c-sharp in Java or JavaScript and now with the new wasum vm that we've just added compatibility

11:28for that increases the speed even more than already capable it's just an even more efficient way of doing your smart contracts and then on top of that what we consider it what we considered is called the multi VM so the multi VM combines these three smart contracts together it actually makes it compatible because if you think about it you as a developer can build something in

11:49JavaScript and deploy it on the ontology blockchain someone else can build something in c-sharp and deploy on the ontology blockchain and those two apps can communicate with each other mm-hmm that's like a big deal and also the fact that you know you can code it to interact with the Neo VM own ontology where someone else because they need different different processes they need

12:09things to be run in parallel or they need to be able to run things a certain way they can deploy it on the lawsuit VM so that interoperability is a big deal for us to give developers the ability to build on what whatever it is that they want and also interchain interoperability so another thing that we've been working on right these bridges between ontology and aetherium

12:29ontology and Bitcoin ontology at neo we've partnered with chain link and we're looking at you know using the Oracles to keep like the price data like all accurate as we do these trustless swaps between the different chains but we definitely think that's an important piece being able to have that cross chain functionality and that's a lot of what our roadmap focuses not on the tech

12:50side it's all about the interoperability and not just within the blood the ontology blockade but also outside mm-hmm I completely agree Eric and interoperability and being able to band these different blockchain communities together to work towards a common vision I think will greatly help with the adoption of the technology out into the mainstream world

13:11so that's great that the team is focusing on that now moving into the mainstream world do you foresee any specific business use cases for the ontology blockchain or is the platform really just being put out there for developers to build whatever they want to build in whatever specific industries so we're actively looking for more enterprises and we've

13:33been partnering with enterprises we've done some we've done some use cases and in in supply chains so like chemical manufacturing and keeping track of like the chemicals and also with like some hospitals and keeping track like medical records and the transactions of medical records I think we're the most adoption is going to happen first is not in is

13:58not in blockchain for supply chain your blockchain for real estate or blocked essentially blockchain for the real world assets I think we're going to start first is watching for entirely digital assets so things like non fungible tokens or crypto art but also more more old-world things like like contracts and like legal contracts and patents copyright certifications these

14:25things are digital already and the well the difference between the six a like like a digital house deed and a digital certificate or is it the certificate proof something about you that's entirely digital the house deed even if you take a list of property records and put that on a blockchain at the end somehow you still have to be able to enforce that into the real world and so

14:46that kind of relies on things of solutions that are beyond just blotching but for something that's entirely digital that can be entirely tokenized that couldn't be entirely codified and I think that's where we're gonna start seeing a lot of this stuff be be deployed first and that's kind of where we're putting our attentions like beyond just the token as a payment solution I

15:04think stable coins are really interesting and giving people just the opportunity to be able to pay things in buy things and sell things and stable coins but the next thing beyond that I think is that this exchange of data in being able to own your data and being able to have it stored you know it's yours you own it up because you because it signs on a blockchain because the

15:24hash assigned on a blotch and you can prove that you're not tampering with your own data you're not changing it like it is the same data that was issued to you but the difference is that you know to prove they prove that you didn't mess with it it's not that they have to hold it for you like the hospital has to hold it for you or your your university has to hold it for you

15:43and be your like trust incre like say like oh yeah this person did go here this person does in fact have this certification you can hold it yourself and the people that interact with you can still trust that you're not you're not just writing your own documents you're not just forging your own documents because because of that blockchain because of the fact that it

16:01was issued to you and it was signed cryptographically when it was issued to you so that people would know that if you tampered with it that's great and such a paradigm shift happening here it sounds like ontology is moving in the right direction and you have a lot of promising things on the go now are you guys looking for anything specific as you continue to grow and how can people

16:20reach out and learn more about ontology yeah so we always looking for more partners both like in community and an enterprise I think that yeah the more people involved in the solution are in this in the ecosystem better we are looking for obviously like more interest in in people that want to be involved in this taking so like buying this hook in and then choosing to stake so ontology

16:45because we have a staking ecosystem the Ont the ontology token earns earns rewards or earns gas right just by holding it just by holding it in your wallet you earn Ong which is the ontology gas token and then you can also on top of that then stake it so it's not even staked yet when you just have it you can stake it and earn double the rewards and now your year you're helping

17:09upkeep the network and helping keep it decentralized by putting your stake to and know so just having more people involved in an ecosystem is always great and then on top of that right if people are if people have a community or if people have a company you know if someone has a company if they have you know yeah like a community any way that they want to be involved is ways that

17:29we're looking for whether they want to teach whether they want to on board their community members whether they want to deploy blockchain solution for whatever their enterprise or whatever their industry is yeah all those areas are kind of what we're focusing on and really like all over the world because like I mentioned we have in Europe we have people here we have

17:48people Latin America in Russia in Asia so yeah we're kind of you know we're not of the no we have to do something here or we have to do something there it's more of like wherever the opportunity arises that's where the demand is that's where the interest is and that's where we'll choose to focus our resources on great thank you so much Eric I will leave the links to ontology site and the

18:10details in the description box below for the viewers that's all the time that we have for the interview but I really appreciate you taking the time it's been a pleasure hearing about ontology and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you so much ash and look forward to seeing how everything plays out over the next couple of years