Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Flavien Charlon: Openchain – Centralized Digital Assets Without Blockchains or Consensus

Episode Date: October 26, 2015

Among the dividing themes in the Bitcoin space is the idea of public versus private blockchains. While some argue that private and permissioned blockchains can offer better scalability and lower latency for enterprises, others insist the Bitcoin blockchain will offer the best level of security and robustness longterm. Recently, projects have emerged that propose the best of both worlds by leveraging both off-chain and on-chain transactions. This is the idea behind Openchain, an “open source distributed ledger technology, suited for organizations wishing to issue and manage digital assets in a robust, secure and scalable way.” Openchain uses a client-server model where there is only one authoritative validating node. Read-only observer nodes keep the central node honest by auditing transactions in real time. About every 10 minutes, a copy of the Ledger, and its transactions, is hashed and inserted into a Bitcoin transaction so that it can be fossilised in the blockchain. We’re joined by Flavien Charlon, the one-man operation behind Predictious, Coinprism, the Open Transactions Protocol and now Openchain. We talk about this fascinating new software, which aims to offer enterprises a digital ledger protocol that is highly scalable while enjoying the benefits of the Bitcoin blockchain for immutability. Topics covered in this episode: Flavien gives an update on Coinprism and his other projects The Openchain protocol and what it’s trying to achieve The technical architecture of Openchain and the client-server model it implements How Openchain uses the Bitcoin blockchain to “anchor” transactions into every block Openchain’s consensus model The ability for Openchain to interoperate with other ledgers and blockchains Flavien’s thoughts on what the ecosystem might look like in 10 years Episode links: Openchain Openchain Docs This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/102

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 102, with guest Flavien Charon. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought you by ShapeShift. With no account or sign up required, it's the easiest way to buy and sell gems, counterparty, dogecoin, dash, and other leading cryptocurrencies. Go to Shepshift.io to instantly convert your altcoins and to discover the future of cryptocurrency exchanges. And by Ledger, makers of the Ledger-unpluged NFC hardware wallet. Half peace of mind in knowing your private keys are protected by industry standard physical security. Go to ledgerwallat.com to learn more and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your first order.

And by hide.com, protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN. Go to hide.combe and me slash epicenter and sign up for a free account today. Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastian Kutu. And my name is Brian Fabien, Brian. We're here today with Flavia. Flavia is one of our recurring guests. He's here for the second time. We already had him on last August to talk about a coin prism.

And Flavia has this great town of just putting out projects after projects after project. And he's put out the new project, which is very interesting. It's called Open Chain. And we wanted to get him on to talk about that and look forward to catching up. So thanks for coming on, Flavia. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, we were joking before that you're basically like a. a machine, you know, like producing projects.

Because the first time you had you actually own, you already had two projects. And I think we only really talked about one of them. So you already had the prediction market, predictus. And then you had color coins, right? So you came up with the, you invented the sort of, the, I guess, most popular color coin protocol, open assets.

And then you're also doing this exchange, or a wallet, color coins wallet. right and a block explorer so already you had a lot going on back then um i think in french politics they call this export exporting of french talents outside of the national boundaries yeah yeah i live in ireland so i don't live in france anymore but uh still french um so tell us a bit what's this what's the status with those projects how is open assets doing what about the wallet and and what about your prediction market Yeah, so well basically I discovered Bitcoin I think now more than two years ago

I kind of you know I've always been passionate about prediction markets and at the time I wanted to build one as a side project as for a fund project but like the issue you know was like accepting payments also need you know pay out to users who win the predictions so this was kind of always like the problem with building a prediction market So when I heard about Bitcoin, I started to look into it. And then the more I looked into it, the more I thought I was the perfect thing to use for a prediction market. So basically, I built the prediction market, it's called Predictious. It still exists today.

So you can place money on different predictions. You know, there's politics, economics, you know, Oscars, a lot of different things. And, yeah, so it works completely with Bitcoin. So that was, you know, my first project. That's what got me to Bitcoin. So that was in 2013. After that, I kind of, you know, when you start learning about Bitcoin, you know, some people, they get really sucked into it. So that happened to me.

And I started to read a lot about it, started to read about all the different projects that were happening around Bitcoin. And I discovered corner coins. So at the time, that was kind of the first application, like the first blockchain 2.0 or like, you know, like the first thing that wasn't currency, that had been described. And so that was pretty exciting. There were, you know, some people talking about it at conferences at the time. But it was kind of early stage,

so there was no, like, product at the time that existed. That was just a small group of people talking about it on forums. And I kind of, you know, had like a vision of, you know, like having digital assets on the blockchain using the blockchain for transacting. So at the time, because there was nothing that existed, and I felt like this was something that had a good future.

I started to work on, you know, on cornered coins. And basically I kind of designed a protocol, like a new protocol that didn't exist at the time. There was, you know, just a few troughs of different protocols. There were the white paper as well. I think Vitalik wrote the white paper. But nothing was really, you know, satisfactory for the use cases that I wanted to, that I had in mind, basically. So I developed this, open assets. So that's the name of the protocol.

And you know because it's just a protocol nobody was really you know nobody could use it without programming stuff so basically in order to bootstrap the adoption I built this wallet which which is called CoinPrisum and so this this is also like the name of the company now so CoinPresum is basically a wallet which is web-based where people can you know send receive Bitcoins as well as cardot coins and they can even create their own cornered coins so it's everything is guided through user interface so it takes a few minutes and it's pretty easy and yeah after that we built an API which allows people to programmatically interact with Kodotcoins mobile wallet I suppose we talked about that last time we talked to

with I was on your show but yeah like a mobile wallet for Android a bunch of other things like support for cold storage and so on and yeah so and then now Last week, actually, so we just launched a new product, which is called Open Chain. Before we get into that, I'm curious. So what's the kind of detraction you're seeing with CoinPays and Open Assets? Because it seemed like to be getting quite a bit of attention and projects being built on. Yeah, so, I mean, so Open Assets was sort of, I think, the first protocol that was sort of usable and had tools around it that was launched at the time. and this head start kind of was very useful for adoption of open assets.

And so initially it was like just, you know, startups or just a small like groups of people who were trying to do things and experimenting. So we had like the first week after launch, we had a crowd sale, which was a hair salon in Australia, which wanted to fundraise some money to open a new store. So they used CoinPrisen for that. It was just a week after launch. So that kind of small projects. and over time you know as interest picked up on blockchain technology which kind of happened in the past uh yeah in the past six to 12 months i would say people started to also pick up interest in open assets and just the fact that it was like a simple protocol which was easy to re-implement

there's no there's no vendor locking pretty much because you know you don't have to use coin prism to use open assets it's like there's plenty of open source tools that exist in different languages it's like that's like that's like that's like that's very wide. So people started to get interested into that. Also at the time when Reddit wanted to make crypto note, they actually chose open asset to do that. Well, then after there was some changes in management and they decided they don't want to work with cryptocurrency anymore so that kind of fell apart. But that was kind of the big project that started to look into it. And more recently there was well there's basically chain.com which is it's an API provider but they're pivoting heavy towards digital assets so they also adopted open assets and they work with

NASDAQ and they basically NASDAQ is experimenting now with open assets for their private market platform so this is this is really as big as it can get there's also overstock which is building their T0 platform so they probably use a mix of technology and they say they want to be like blockchain adagnostic in quotes but they're using for the first thing they did they created a crypto bond for like a corporate bond for overstock the company a $5 million bond and they created it on open assets so you can actually find a transaction on the blockchain which has like you know open asset marker and so on which shows the

the five million dollar bond being transacted so you know now it's it's getting picked up by a lot of bigger companies so it's not really something for small companies to play with anymore it's like something with a lot of traction now and so all this all this interest and traction around the open assets protocol? Is it generating any business for CoinPRISM at all? Or are they just implementing the OpenStandard, which is Open Assets? Yeah, so it's most like those big companies, mostly they usually, you know, they want, they want to deal with like bigger companies.

So CoinPRISM at the moment is quite small. So they usually, they're rather higher their own people, their own engineers to work on the technology and re-implement their own stack, which works on open assets, which is what overstock did. I think they have like a team of engineers working on that. So they, you know, because it's such a simple protocol, it's easy to build your own tools around it. So that's what they're doing.

We're still doing some consulting with some companies which are interested, you know, in open assets. So there's still some business here. But yeah, definitely it's a market that's expanding. So it's going to grow very fast at some point. So with the NASDAG example, you mentioned day one. to use colored coins for their private chains, but then how does that work because color coins is a protocol that runs on top of Bitcoin?

Do you know what exactly they have in mind or how that's supposed to play out? Nasdaq. So I think Nasdaq, they want to use it for settlement. So in their private market platform, they don't have so many companies. I think they have about 60 companies. It's just private companies. It's like separated from their big, you know, public exchange. where you know obviously you have like thousands of companies and there's like millions of transactions per day

but their private market platform is like a test bed for them so they have a smaller amount of transactions and I think they can use it for settlement so they can probably every day or even every 10 minutes they can adjust the account but obviously I think they might they probably will retain the keys for that so you won't be able to join the exchange and you know participate as an anonymous user because obviously there's a lot of regulations that would be violated if you were doing that. But basically, yeah, I think they use it for settlement. It's not clear exactly what they're planned to do because obviously a lot of it is still hasn't been really discussed yet.

But yeah, so at least in the initial press release they said they were experimenting with open assets. Is this where the idea for open chain originated? Is there some correlation there? Because it seems kind of similar from the open chain protocol. Yeah, so open chain, so basically, so I've been talking to a number of companies for some time. And usually there's some questions that keep coming back. And so one of those questions is scalability. So as we all know, Bitcoin has limited scalability because of, you know, the fact that it uses proof of work and this distributed architecture.

So it's limited to more or less seven transactions per second. So this is always a question that comes back. and there's ways to address it with open assets by using lightning networks and this type of things. But basically you end up building a lot of things, a lot of complicated layers on top of it. And so yeah, open chain solves that problem by just not doing all of these complicated things

and just stepping aside proof of work, stepping inside the Bitcoin blockchain event, and doing transactions off chain directly. So that's one question that always comes back. another one is the control of the transactions. So, you know, NASDAQ, they cannot afford having transactions been completely open onto the network and letting anybody do any kind of transactions.

There's a lot of regulations that requires them to know if all the parties involved. So it kind of has to work in a closed loop. And then there's some other restrictions. You know, maybe the trading can only happen during daytime, for example. I don't know if that's the case for private market, but might be. So in that case, you know, that's another type of thing that they need to be able to restrict.

There's plenty of rules that they cannot really enforce easily on the Bitcoin blockchain. So that's why open chain kind of provides the way to do that. So the way that I sort of see this, I mean, we've been researching this for the last little while, Brian and discussing it. The way that I would explain it in one sentence, and I'd like to know if you think this is correct, is it's a distributed database that gets block stamped every 10 minutes to the blockchain. Is that sort of accurate or other parts missing there? You mean open chain? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's basically, yeah, it's a database, basically. It's actually built on a database, you know, because databases have been around for decades. They kind of work now. Work pretty well. So it's a database except we add on top of that we add basically hash all the transactions. And every 10 minutes, we take the, cumulative hash of all of that and we put it in the Bitcoin blockchain. So the Bitcoin

blockchain is irreversible, you know, as we know because of proof of work and it's very expensive to reverse the transaction. So this kind of ensures the immutability of everything that happened, you know, as part of this cumulative hash. So it kind of protects against the you know, reversibility of the of the leisure while still providing the same scalability as you get from, you know, a simpler system. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to talk about there and we want to come back. So we have a lot of questions sort of regarding you know the security, the consensus because you start getting interesting discussions. I mean,

Sarasya said this sentence me before as well. But you know, when I read through it, I was like, well, it's not actually a distributed database, right? It's actually a centralized database, which makes sense when the, what you are aiming for is scalability, right? Because as soon as you start having this distributed consensus process, well, scalability becomes almost, I mean, much, much more difficult at least. But maybe before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about sort of what's the structure of open chain. How is, what's the architecture of the protocol? Yeah, so the idea behind it is for every organization that's issuing an asset, they would run their own instance of open chain. So if I take the example of, let's say, Starbucks coupons,

like, you know, which you can spend for, you know, dollars at Starbucks, they're issued by Starbucks. So Starbucks would run their own instance, and that instance would control all the transactions where you have Starbucks coupons. And on the other side, maybe you have, well, maybe you have Macy's coupons, and those Macy's coupons are controlled by an instance that's controlled by Macy's. and you know you that way you know Macy's has complete control over what happens to their points so they can set rules you know you can put expiration dates you can you know you can freeze an account if it turns out gift card has been you know stolen from the store and you know you want to be able to block the points that were on the card you know it's a lot of fraud with gift cards so you can you can set the rules that

that match your your business needs basically and so we have many different different instances so you know every organization has their own instance and then you can connect instances to each other when you want to have let's say you want to swap Macy's coupon for a Starbucks coupon then you you would have they would have to be connected in some degree in some way so either they're directly connected to each other or they're connected to a third chain where you can do the swaps but basically you can form a like sort of a mesh network of different chain open chain instances

and transact assets depending on which connections exist. Our show today is brought to you by our friends that ShapeShift, Shapeshift, shape, shape, is the fast and easy way to trade all coins. They now support over 50 different cryptocurrencies, which includes all the non-scam coins that you have ever heard of. So if you want to trade all coins, then there's the old way, which means going to some shady side, like creating an account, giving them your data, depositing coins, and they're hoping for the best,

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and check out the Shifty button. You'll see all the instructions there on how to install it on your website as well. So we'd like to thank Shapeshift for the support of Epicenter Bitcoin. And what about the structure of the protocol? Like what does it contain? Yeah. So basically the, so it's a simple architecture.

So Bitcoin needs a peer-to-peer system because there's no central authority, obviously. So essentially the Bitcoins are issued by the protocol itself through consensus. So you don't have a central authority. So the network needs to be peer-to-peer. That's something you have to have. But peer-to-peer, you know, it's a nice tool, but there's also some issues with peer-to-peer because it's a It's very consuming in terms of resources, so it consumes a lot of bandwidth because you have such redundancy that there's a lot of bandwidth. Latency usually would be higher in peer-to-peer systems because it's harder to optimize.

So we basically also like another big reason, one other big issue is phones, for example, or like mobile devices, it's hard for them to connect to a peer-to-peer network. usually your mobile network will only you know will block some ports and they won't let you connect to you know for example the Bitcoin network or you know the torrent like a bit torrent or any kind of peer-to-peer network so it's harder for mobile devices to connect to a peer-to-peer network so we've basically taken a simpler approach and we've just using a client server architecture because we only have one node that validates a given asset so that node can be a server and it's actually in the interest of the organization, you know, of having a node that runs well, that's highly available and so on. So Starbucks has like a big interest in, you know, keeping that node running

and having a lot of bandwidth and so on. So they're the ones who are going to pay for it, but the end users are not going to have to pay for it. They're just connect to a server. Because, you know, the end user shouldn't have to pay for being able to use gift cards, like Starbucks gift cards. And Starbucks doesn't even want to have the end users pay for it. So it's a better alignment of the cost, essentially. And it's easier for devices like lightweight devices, like mobile phone, to connect to it. Because, well, basically, it's just exposing HTTP interfaces. And pretty much every device in the world that's connected to the Internet can connect through HTTP.

So it's a much easier interface to connect for a lightweight device. So in this example of Starbucks points, Starbucks would be the validator node. so they have an open chain instance, which is just like an NPM, like it's a node implementation. And the participants, so the customers would be observer nodes. Yeah, so there's this concept of observing nodes. So an observing node connects to a validating node, and it receives a copy of all the transactions as they get validated.

So basically it's using web so you can actually have an observing node which is implemented in your browser if you want to But you basically connect to this web socket and you receive all the transactions that they get confirmed And that allows you to reconstruct a complete copy of the ledger So you have your own copy of the ledger you can verify everything you can calculate the cumulative hash and Compare it to what's in the Bitcoin blockchain to ensure that the integrity is, you know, that everything is, you know, there's still integrity. You still have the correct copy and nothing has been reverted. And the observing nodes, they have the ability also to examine every transaction.

They can verify digital signatures. They can also verify who's doing what. So there's this concept in open chain where the validator can define, when you own the validator you can define administrators so you define a public keys which which are the public keys of the administrators of the instance and those administrators can do things that normal users cannot do so they can for example issue tokens the you know by default normal users can't issue token although you can also configure it so that normal users can issue tokens but you know and they can

also make transactions from two accounts that they don't necessarily own because you know in case of fraud for example they might want to revert transaction. They can also affect permissions so they can remove the permission on an account so that this account is not allowed to trade anymore if they want to freeze an account let's say. So when you do that it's visible that this transaction, let's say a transaction freezing an account, has been signed by the administrator. So all the observer can see that you know the administrator froze an account or the administrator reverted the transaction and you know

you know, basically it kind of keeps them honest, right? If the validator does something that, you know, they start freezing a lot of accounts, the observers will notice. And two things can happen. The first one is they might lose trust. So if there are customers, they might lose trust, stop using the service. And the second thing is the customers, if they believe that something illegal happened, they can actually use the ledger, the copy of the ledger in court as an evidence that the administrator did that.

because everything is digitally signed. There is the signature of the administrator, and this can be used as an evidence in court. So it kind of keeps the validator's honest. So coming back to the Starbucks model, would the customers or the customers of Starbucks be these validator nodes, or these observer nodes, or should it be some auditing party like Deloitte or something like that,

which is auditing the validator's copy of the blockchain? or not at the blockchain, but of their ledger. Yeah, so the customers can be observers, but they don't have to. They can also just be just like with clients. If you talk about the case of Starbucks, I mean, if you talk about scalability, right, then you start having huge volumes of transactions. So the idea that customers would run up server nodes doesn't make sense, no, because they would have the same number of data, the same volume that would be coming in.

Yeah, I mean, if you're. Yeah, usually, I suppose long term it would be firms that would be like auditing firms, maybe that would be doing that for the users. You know, it could be like consumer protection like organizations that exist in some countries. They could, you know, check that the ledgers are working properly. But yeah, like, yeah, depending on the scale, the number of transactions, yeah, the end users might or might not be able to do that. But at least it's possible for someone to do it at least. So maybe it's going to take some more money. maybe it's going to take some resources to do, but at least it's possible to do it.

Yeah. I think this is interesting, though, because we've had this discussion for a while, right? So there's, there's been Bitcoin and there's a whole philosophy around Bitcoin. And then there's been a lot of work on permission blockchains. And then a lot of people sort of say, oh, permission blockchain, or at least if you read Reddit, then people say, oh, permission blockchain is just a database. And this is sort of like nonsensical statement, right? because you still have a consensus process,

that administers has rules, you know. So, but, but it obviously isn't the same thing as a peer-to-peer network where sort of anybody can join in the consensus process, right? So that's a, that's a clear difference. But then of course you can say, well, I mean, in some cases, is that even necessary? Like, do you even need to have, you know, 10 entities like administrating the process together and, you know, voting on blocks or whatnot? Or can you just not like get rid of that and instead, you know, again, some, you know, enormous scalability and speed and cost savings as well, right?

And then I think open chain is that, right? It goes sort of to the very extreme to say, well, we don't need a consensus process. Like there's no p-to-peer network here. This is just a database with digital signatures. So, you know, you see who does what, I mean, at least someone sees it. And then, okay, you can put an observer node in there. So let's say somebody has a record of what that sees there. And then, of course, you do get some security aspects again. I mean, how much, of course, that depends a lot on who runs the observer, what exactly is being done.

But it's interesting because then, you know, in a way is, is this, to what extent this is, is this coming from Bitcoin and blockchain and this? To an extent, is this something that you could do completely independently and is not actually that related. Yeah, it's kind of departure from Bitcoin and blockchain. I guess it uses some of the ideas that were pioneered by Bitcoin. sort of as you know Bitcoin the core feature of Bitcoin is

censorship resistance and it's been designed in a way that it enables censorship resistance and the transparency is part of that you need transparency to enable that but you know it's still useful to have

a transparent ledger even though you don't need censorship resistance obviously it's not as necessary because you know people have been doing that today for a while without transparency and it works to some degree. It's not necessary, but it's still a nice thing to have. And also digital signatures, they're used today.

I mean, they've been used for a while now, but not completely across the board. You know, like there's always a bunch of systems that don't rely completely on trust and no digital signatures. So if you use something where they are enforced across the board and it kind of increases security, Also, there's this idea of using the blockchain for immutability or publishing the hash, which is, it's kind of a small thing, but it's still very nice to have. But, you know, it uses some of the ideas of Bitcoin, but yeah, it's still very different from a cryptocurrency. So the important ideas that you see being used here are digital signatures. So the idea that I guess every transaction is associated with a public key and signed. So I guess you see where it comes from.

And is that the most important aspect here that you're sort of taking from Bitcoin? So there's the, yeah, like the transparency is very important. The fact that anybody can become an observer and replicate the ledger is, I think, is very important. There's also the fact that, you know, it's a simple API. It's, you know, it's easy to program against, which, you know, systems tend to be very complicated. They have a lot of bells and whistles, but here, like, the core API is very simple. Yeah, and also the immutability is also a nice feature. But, yeah, obviously there's no censorship resistance because it's like the assets.

The assets we're talking about, you know, you can always go to the company that holds those assets, like Starbucks, if you're the government, and force them to do something or they go to prison. So in that case, they're going to find a way to do it. Even if the technology prevents them from doing it, they're going to find a way, one way or not. So either technology is going to help them do it or it's going to, you know, slow them do it. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's going to happen because, you know, they're still abiding the law. Right, right. So and of course, one of the interesting aspects too and consequences of that.

And I think that's the sort of a logical decision you made there, right, is that you get rid of blocks, right? So it's not a blockchain because, well, why do you need blocks, right? So you need blocks, of course. If like, let's say there's different parties administering this process, right? And, you know, they may have received stuff in different orders. And somehow they've come to agreement, right? So you bundle them all together and you're sending around. And then somehow they all say, okay, this is the status.

But of course, if there's a central server, well, what's the point of a block, right? You don't need a block. Yeah, absolutely. And the blocks essentially introduce a delay because when you submit a transaction to a system that's based on blocks like Bitcoin, you have to wait for the next block for confirmation. So first of all, it's not synchronous. You have to wait for confirmation,

which is a different event. So it takes time. And even some systems, like some systems based on proof of stake, they reduce the block time to like a few seconds sometimes. But even a few seconds is still a long time for some applications like trading, for example, is something where every millisecond count. So if you have confirmation,

time of two seconds, you cannot use it for like, you know, markets and trading because it's too slow. So, you know, if you do synchronous confirmation, so basically you eliminate the blocks and confirm instantly, then it becomes usable for this type of applications. Let's take a short break so I can take it to Paris. I walked into La Maison du Bitcoin, the house of Bitcoin, in the heart of Silicon Sentier, home to many startups, including Ledger. And I spoke with Eric Larchevec, Ledger's CEO, about... the old new unplugged NFC hardware wallet. The ledger unplugged is an NFC-based hardware wallet

that you can use with compatible Android phones. The private keys are stored in a secure element and you can use them with wallets such as mycelium and grid bits. Each time you want to make a transaction, the signature will be done by the unplugged and this way your private keys is critical data will never be exposed to the Android form. This is a secure way to use your Bitcoins on the go in mobility, and you will also

be able to pay directly with the unplugged with compatible point-of-sale terminals. The Ledger Unplugged is the simple solution for secure, contactless Bitcoin payments. You can get the unplugged at ledgerwallet.com, and when you use the code Epicenter at checkout, you'll get 10% off your order. By the way, that code works on their entire range of products. So we'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. Let's stay on this topic of consensus. One thing that we mentioned earlier is before the show is this idea that the valid, the observer nodes could do real-time auditing.

So in the case of Starbucks or perhaps like if you want to do a stock exchange, rather than having auditing at the end of the month or the end of the year, you could have auditing happening in real time. And the value of having the hash of all the transactions added to the blockchain every 10 minutes is that you can point to that transaction and that hash, and all of the observer nodes can say, okay, this comes to a consensus, I guess, without knowing each other that all these transactions happen because there's the proof of it in the blockchain. Does this imply that you could have multiple observers that don't necessarily know each other?

can still validate that these transactions took place and then what is to stop the validating node from sending different copies of the ledger to the different observer nodes? Yeah, this is a good question, yeah, but you can definitely have multiple observers that don't know about each other and actually it's even possible to have observers

expose the transaction stream so that you have like a second level of observers that connect to the first level of observers. And it kind of builds sort of a graph or a tree, I would say, where you can actually scale out nicely like this. You know, you would have just four, let's say four observers at the first level, and then you have 16 at the second level, and then 64 at the third level. So it's much easier to scale this way. And you're right that the observers could send different versions to different observers.

But if they do that, the cumulative hash for those different observers would be. different and one of those observers would realize that the cumulative hash doesn't match what's in the blockchain. So the blockchain is like that part that everybody has to agree on. You know, that's the one thing that ensures that there's only one version of history. Right. And so in your doc in the documentation, you mentioned that you can do you can do like a large volumes of transactions and those transactions get that hash into the blockchain and which comes up to you know if you do once, if you do one, if you you hash, if you send the hash once every block that comes up of $10 a month or something like that, what would be some of the criteria that would push an organization to say, well, rather than

push these to every block, we'll push them to every 10 blocks or every 100 blocks. Because you can also adjust that, right? Oh yeah, you can adjust the frequency depending on your needs. You know, if you don't have a lot of transactions, maybe, you know, every 10 blocks is enough. if you do it every 10 blocks you actually save 90% of the cost so it's like $10 for every block according to the current fees I mean the fees vary over time if you you know you divide it by 10 if you do it only every 10 blocks you know if you do it once every day then you're going to pay less than a dollar per month and this is you know there's no point in any case there's no

point having more anchors than more than one anchor per block because it doesn't add anything you know, the block is like a snapshot in time. So, you know, if you have two anchors at the same time, it doesn't bring more. So you don't need to have more than one per block. But, you know, the maximum resolution you can have is one per block. And it gives you the same level of irreversibility as you get with Bitcoin. Because with Bitcoin, you have to wait 10 minutes before.

You know that the transaction is irreversible. So it's the same level of irreversibility. So, you know, you mentioned that, yeah, you can have instant confirmations, right? So essentially that means, right, like let's say, I make a transaction, I send it to the validator. And now, of course, because the validator isn't charged, you can immediately say, okay, you know, like transaction approved, right? But that also means there is no security there, right?

Because he could throw it out again and there's nothing, I mean, the chain would be perfectly valid, right? I mean, it's true that if you have like the chain hashed in between, you know, then the hash, you know, you can't throw out things that let's say before the hash. I mean, you could throw them out, but at least it would be noticed. People would say, okay, well, what happened here? But otherwise, evaluators can sort of do whatever they want with it, right? They can go back and change the sequence of transactions. Or they can just block incoming transactions.

I think that's what you mean, Brian. Incoming transactions get just thrown out. you could put a transaction in say like added to the to the chain of transactions but then later take it out again yeah so blocking a transaction is kind of their right if they want to block it as long as it tell you that it's been blocked it's fine but yeah they could like you said they could accept the transaction tell you that it got accepted and 10 minutes later when they publish the hash then that transaction is not in the chain anymore so yeah if you don't trust the validator you might need to wait for 10 minutes to be sure that the transaction has been confirmed.

But usually in this kind of setup, the end user would trust the validator, would trust the company because the validator, you know, you would trust Starbucks to, you know, tell you when the transactions are confirmed for their points, that there's no points really for them to cheat on that. Right. I mean, another small question. So how would you, so they put the hash in the blockchain, how would you know, like, is it possible, to see which hashes are like tied together with previous hashes or like does that you have to see that from someone else someone else is going to say okay these are the has just that belong to that open chain um so basically you when you configure your open chain instance you give it the private key of a bitcoin address

which which should have some funds and then the the hashes are published from that address so like the fees are taken from that address and so So actually we have one address like this for the test instance that we have. So so far there has been like five or six anchors since when we rebooted it like a couple of days ago. So, you know, every time, you know, like every so often publishes a hash there. And basically every instance would have a different address that they would use. So that's how you identify. That's a nice way of handling that. But yeah.

No, I was just saying you need to keep funding that address with Bitcoin to pay those transaction piece. Yeah, yeah. So you need to fund it for like 10, depending on the fees, you know, $10, $20 per month to make sure that you can still publish the hash there. So it's using up return. The transaction is pretty simple. It's just up return and then change. And then some goes to the fees as well. But it's a very small transaction. But yeah, you still need to pay like a small amount of fees. And what's nice about this is that you can always look at that address and you can just see the list of transactions basically in one big one address.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can see the list and then every anchor has also the number of transactions that are encapsulated into that hash. So you can track, you know, like what stage every anchor is at. Let's take a short break and talk about hi.m. Me. Hi.D. Me is a VPN provider. And if you don't know yet why you should need a VPN provider, let us help you. I'm sure you are like me and when all the crazy revelations came out during the Snowden time of all the spying that is being done by the NSA and government agencies, you were shocked and you said, not with me, not with my own rights. Now, the way government agencies can spy on you, there's many of them, but the most easiest way

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and just be completely protected all the time. And of course, High.Me accepts Bitcoin. So we'd like to thank HyD.Me for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. Sebastian made an... I'm stealing your great question, Sebastian. He made an interesting... even an interesting observation before. And so, well, let me take a step back.

So one of the things that at Ares, right, we do is that you say, okay, you sort of take the consensus really, you put it in the smart contract, right? So you could have, like, let's say one party in control, or you could have multiple parties. So it seems like here as well, okay, you maybe you say it's fine if just Starbucks is in charge because, you know, they can always refuse to give me the coffee anyway. But maybe also you say, well, I don't want just Starbucks in control. I want maybe these three entities in control or like you might want to have all kinds of rules regarding that.

So say what I'll see about the point. Yeah, well, could you run an open chain as a distributed application? Would that be possible? That might be possible. Yeah, I haven't really thought in that direction, but it might be possible. Yeah, but going back to like having multiple parties controlling, let's say, Starbucks transactions or Let's say for the purpose of this example. Let's say it's like PayPal. There's like a PayPal chain and You have other companies validating the PayPal chain. Let's say you have also like Visa and Mastercard

And then on the PayPal chain. So PayPal chain kind of controls the funds you have on PayPal and Alice makes a payment to Bob like a hundred dollars So Bob has a hundred dollars and then PayPal decides that the transaction was fraud or something and a derivative transaction. But Visa and MasterCard don't agree. So they, Visa and MasterCard refused to take that transaction. So they essentially fork, assuming that you would have like this consensus,

you know, with PayPal and MasterCard, Vizand MasterCard would fork into a version of history where the reversal didn't happen. So Bob still has $100. But as far as PayPal is concerned, Bob doesn't have $100 anymore. So when Bob comes to PayPal and tries to withdraw his $100.

He says, okay, on the main chain, I'm supposed to have $100. So give me those $100. You know, I want to withdraw into my bank account. PayPal is going to say no, because you know, as far as we know, you don't have $100, the transaction was reverted. So, and there's nothing that the user can do. You can say, okay, look, but like the other guys on the main chain think that I have $100.

Right. But at the end of the day, you need to resolve this in court maybe or, you know, that's the only way. So it doesn't really change the bottom. Well, I don't think I agree with you. I mean, I think in the example you gave, that would be an indication that the chain and the contracts, you know, if you talk about this being in a smart contract land or the chain wasn't set up properly, right? Because if it's a thing where like the ultimate judge of do you have $100 with PayPal or not, it's just PayPal, well, yeah, then PayPal should be able to make that decisions. But other things, you may have different rules, right?

Or you may have multiple parties being in charge. So then you might still have a process of like, let's say a fortune payment is reversed. But maybe you encode who gets to choose on that process. Like where does it go? I mean, I think there's all kinds of things you can do. I mean, you certainly write that it's crucial for these kind of things, that the state of the chain is, in accordance with the state of, you know, the legal stage. So, you know, if someone controls the

sort of the reality, they have to be able to make those changes in the chain. Otherwise, it becomes irrelevant what you have on there. Yeah, it's tricky though, because at the end of the day, those $100 are going to live on someone's bank account, you know, maybe, okay, in my case, it's PayPal's bank account, so PayPal has all the controls. But even if it's a bank account that's controlled by the three companies, it means that in that case, you have some kind of legal structure which encompasses Visa Mastercard and PayPal. And in that case, that legal structure becomes the legal structure that can be, that can maintain the ledger.

So you kind of always have to have an owner. You cannot really have an asset that's being, I mean, as far as I know, as far as law is concerned, you cannot actually have an asset that belongs to many people at the same time. There has to be one legal owner. So that legal owner is the one that would be in control of the ledger. But, you know, maybe laws will change in the future and maybe it's possible to have this kind of setup. but it's still very tricky.

Yeah, it's definitely true that it's tricky to get these things right. I was just going to talk about the, I wanted to talk about the technical implementation. So can you describe how a company would implement an open chain server? Yeah, so, I mean, like, if we go into technical details, so we have a documentation website. It's docks.openchain.org, and there's, like, a lot of documentations, and there's one document that explains how to deploy an instance. And so it runs on, right now the supported mode of deployment is through Docker, which is like a container system.

So it's an easy way to deploy applications. It's kind of popular at the moment. So it's the type of thing you just install Docker on your Linux machine. Or it also works on OS6 and Windows, by the way. You just install it there and then you just execute the few common lines that are described on the documentation website and then you're going to have your instance. And there's a configuration file which you can modify. And so that configuration file today, it has a few settings that you can change.

So the first one is the public keys or addresses of the administrators. So if you want to be an administrator, you would generate HD wallet. You would generate a public key from that HD wallet and put that public key into the configuration file. And so from that point on, you can use that HD wallet to sign admin transactions. You mean a Bitcoin HD wallet? Yeah. So we actually, Open Chain uses the same elliptic curve as Bitcoin. So all the libraries that you can use for signing transactions with Bitcoin, like Bitcoin,

Bitcoin J and so on, you can use the same with Open Chain. So, yeah, you generate HD Wallet and then you sign administrative transactions with that key. so like you can you know change permissions on accounts yeah the structure of accounts is hierarchical so you can you can set a permission at a you know at top level and that applies to all these sub accounts below that you can well you can do a lot of things as the admin another setting that you can configure is whether you want to allow the end user to to issue their own assets So if you want to have a ledger where anybody can issue their own assets, then you can just set it to true and that becomes possible.

There's a few other settings. And then once this is all configured, you just set up the permissions on the ledger. And so permissions, there's a number of permissions, so there's the right to spend money. So you can associate an account with a public key and give it the right to spend money, which means then that this public key is allowed to sign transactions spending money from that account. There's also the right to receive money. So you can, by default, you can either set it to allowing everybody to receive money. So in that case, any accounts can receive money. Or you can use more a pattern where you have to be whitelisted to be able to receive money.

So if you want to only allow your users to be able to receive money, then you set it to false by default and then you enable only some accounts, some public keys, to receive funds. And there's a few other things. things you can also so you can store what's interesting is because with Bitcoin obviously it's a common blockchain everybody shares the same blockchain so there's a lot of limitations in what data can be put in the in the blockchain but with open chain because you're the one who sort of it's your server it's running on your server so you're paying for the hosting costs so you can put as much data as you want basically there's no limit because

you know you're the one and it's not even really you know it's not replicated on 6,000 nodes so it's not as expensive even. So you can store kilobytes or megabytes of data if you want. And you can also give the right to the users to store their own metadata. So we use that metadata for a few different things. You can, for example, define the terms of service of your instance.

So there's a special piece of data that you would put with a special name. And the users, when they connect with their wallets, they will see that terms of services and they have to accept it, for example. You can also, we also use use this ability to store data to store an asset definition on the ledger. So when you create an asset, you can say, okay, this asset is called epicenter coins,

and it has this icon, and this is the short name and so on. Much like you do with colored coins. Yeah, exactly. Except in the case of open chain, it's actually stored in the ledger itself. So it's all completely signed all the way in its part, you know, it's actually a transaction that creates that data and put it in the blockchain. so it's all completely unified. With Carlythoids, it was a bit more complicated

because we cannot put so much data in the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain. So instead, we store the data outside of the blockchain and we refer to it with the URL. So it's not as elegant. With open chain, you can put their data completely indirectly. Yeah, so there's a few other things. You can have also pointer records.

So you can have an account pointing to another account with a pointer record. So whenever someone sends money to that, source account they automatically get forwarded to the other account. Yeah, so there's plenty of things, plenty of features like this that can be done by using data records. Okay, and so you also have client-side libraries then, so then you can easily deploy wallets and applications that use open-ass, or sorry, that use open chain? Yes, so I mean, we have, so the wallet has been open-sourced and it's completely web-based

because we're talking about HTTP APIs. So it's pretty easy to program a web-based interface to deal with that. And it's completely open source. And actually we use, you know, there's no complicated things really happening in there. It's just, I would say, the most complicated thing that happens is signing the transaction. And for that, we use Bitcore, which is the library that, the open source library from BitPay. And it's just a few lines of code with BitCore. You just sign the transaction and then send it to the server.

So it's actually pretty simple. And, you know, it's in any language you could deal with it pretty easily. Okay. And so regarding capacities, so you know, your Starbucks, for instance, and you deploy an instance, and then all of a sudden you start getting into the maybe thousands of transactions per second, how does the server architecture have to scale? Is it pretty low balance? Or, you know, if you start getting into those high transaction volumes, do you have to have, like, perhaps, you know, a pretty hefty server or, you know, distributed servers around the world that are managing these ledgers that are value? trading transactions. Yeah, it's a very good question. So actually, OpenChain has kind of this modular architecture, and we have this concept of storage engine. And by default, it uses just a simple SQL database locally.

But we plan to add more support for more storage engines. And potentially, you would be able to store data in the like scale-out databases like Ascenaa or MongoDB. And those are made for scale, you know, like Facebook and Twitter and those guys, they store thousands of terabytes of data in those databases and and when you will be able to use those databases as a storage engine then yeah it's then it's easy to implement scale-out you would have you know you can have like 16 nodes shard you know sharding the data and storing each some part of the data with

replication and so on so you can ensure high availability as well as you know scalability scale out so it that would be a way to scale basically we rely on will that be possible because I mean it seems like that or would you have to compromise on for example the instant confirmation then so naturally I mean you would you would still commit the database into Cassandra so you have different so you know I don't know if people are familiar with Cassandra but there's many write modes and there's some write modes where you have you know delayed consistency some of them where you have instant consistency if you use so there's a

system like a system called quorum where you write to a majority of nodes and by doing that you ensure that there's actually you know it works actually with consensus you know Cassandra implemented its own consensus mechanism so when you write to a majority of nodes you know that the data is committed and even if you lose a node you you don't lose the data. So you can still have instant confirmations. It might be a little bit slower, of course, because now you're talking to different nodes. But this is the type of thing you can scale, you know, like I said, Facebook, Twitter are using those databases and they obviously have

a very large scale. Today's magic word is open, O-P-E-N. Head over to letstockbidcom to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim your part of the listener award. So regarding the security model and the sort of link to the privacy model, could you have an open chain ledger that is behind a firewall? Say you want to have sort of a private ledger. how would you prevent, I guess, your observer nodes from leaking the data outside of that, you know, behind that firewall if indeed you could. Yeah, so there's plenty of models that can work.

But the fact that it's a server, it means that if you shield it, if you put it behind a firewall, you can prevent anybody from accessing it. So if you want to use it internally for your organization, but you don't want to let other people accessing it, you just use it on an intranet, for example, or into your local network. And then it can only be used from within your organization. And you can still have observer notes,

but they will be inside the organization, obviously. So, yeah, like the kind of architecture, you know, network architecture that people have been doing in the past 20 years, this type of thing completely applies. One thing that's also interesting is because it's exposing HTTP interfaces, you can put it behind Cloudflare. So Cloudflare, for, you know, I don't know if you're familiar, it's a service that provides DDoS protection. So they sort of intercept the calls and then forward them to your own server. So they have a free tier, which is very good and then they have like pro editions and so on.

But they basically protect again DDoS attacks and a lot of different attacks. They provide caching and so on. And so you can, you know, if you want, you can put your server behind Cloudflare to protect it against DDoS. Like everything that works with web servers today, there's a lot of tools that works with web servers, you know, for 15 years. A lot of things have been running on web servers. Everything, all of this can work with OpenChain because it's using HTTP interfaces. Okay, that's interesting. But so regarding privacy, though, if you're using Open Chain behind a firewall, you'd still have to trust the lowest common denominator not to, not to,

to leak the data of your ledger outside the system. Yeah, if you want to use it just internally, then you would not expose it at all to the outside, and the observers would also have to be inside. You would need to make sure that you... I mean, you wouldn't really be able to have observers outside of the network because they couldn't connect to the validator node.

But yeah, and then if you... You know, it depends what the scope of that instance is supposed to be. If you want to expose it to the outside, then yeah, you can open the firewall. But if you wanted to remain internal, then you need to make sure that the validator node and all the observer nodes are within the firewall. So one of the use cases that it seems like this is tiered for, and you mentioned it before, is the idea of trading, right? Because you're certainly right that blockchains aren't very good at that.

You know, I mean, Bitcoin certainly wouldn't be useful for that. And then even if you take like permission chains, you still have problems, right? As you mentioned, right, if there's like a few second confirmation time, well, that's probably too slow. So one of the interesting things here, and I'm curious how that's going to work, is the idea that would you, in a trading use case, let's say we wanted to do a stock market with open chain, would you have a different open chain for each stock? and would those be issued then by the company or would like let's say NASDAQ would have like one open chain that includes all the stock of the entire stock market? Yeah, it's an interesting question. So right now there is this concept of stock depositories, which is like the DTCC in the US and there's a few also in Europe. and this is where the stocks are held ultimately.

So those companies could be the ones running an open chain ledger and have people, instead of having this very tiered approach where you have a repository, then you have brokers, then you have the exchange, you could have the depository holding the stocks, exposing open chain ledger, and then everybody could connect to that directly. So you kind of eliminate a few intermediaries. That's one way to do it.

you could as far as the exchanges are concerned you know if you're a NASDAQ and you're you're you want to run an exchange you would have maybe a second instance where you have tokens that represents which is kind of a proxy for a token on the at the DTCC for example so and then you still don't have to do reconciliation because everything kind of happens automatically you can have like a smart contract in a way that make sure that everything is always in sync. But then you can, the NASDAQ has the ability to have their own sort of small instance where all the trading happens. And for, you know, to go back to your first question,

if you would have different instances per different stocks, I mean, everything is possible. You can have multiple, you can have just one instance with many different stocks on it. But I think for, again, for scalability, just very practical reason, it would probably be better to have one server per security. But, you know, differently there's many architectures possible, depending on, you know, on the creativity. So that kind of leads into the next question, though, because if you start having 100 chains with one chain per security, how can those interoperate? Yeah, basically, there's a concept of gateway.

So you can establish a gateway from one chain to another. And what it does is it creates, let's say you have Starbucks points on the Starbucks chain, and then you want to have like, you want to have like an exchange for Starbucks points. So that's exchange for Starbucks points. On there you would have a special token that is a proxy for the actual Starbucks points on the Starbucks chain. And so you would, as far as Starbucks is concerned, it would be an account. and when someone would want to transfer a Starbucks point from the main Starbucks chain onto the exchange chain, they would send it to that special account that you own.

And now you, as the exchange, you kind of own that point and you create the equivalent on the exchange chain. And then you give it to that user because you can map that user in different ways. Like the easiest way to do it is by giving it to the same public key, so as, you know, as long as the person has the public key. as the public key, you know that it has it because it sent the Starbucks point from that public key, so you can give it to the same public key but on the other chain. And then on the exchange chain you can run your exchange, you know, you can have rules specifically for that exchange. And people can cash out from the exchange by sending it to, again, to a special account on the exchange chain, which unlocks the coins on the main Starbucks chain. So what I just explained, it's actually very similar to the concept of side chains. This is actually, you know, the exchange chain would be a side chain of the main Starbucks chain.

And you can actually have a chain like an open chain instance, which would be a side chain of the Bitcoin blockchain as well. This is also possible. But so, yeah, let's talk about that example, right? Because let's say you have, you allowed to put Bitcoin on some open chain. So that means you would put them in a certain account that would be controlled, I presume, by the validator of the open chain on the Bitcoin. network and then that validated would issue you a Bitcoin token on the open chain. Is that how it will work? Yeah, that's how it would work.

Although it's possible to decentralize this a bit because we're talking about Bitcoin. So a setup that would be interesting is to it actually doesn't really have to be the validator. Although it's probably no, it actually doesn't even have to be the validator. It could be a third party company or a group of companies which come together. They create a multi-seek address amongst all of those. and that multi-seek address is the gateway. So when you want to send Bitcoins from the main chain to the side chain, which is like that special open chain instance,

they send it to the multi-sig address. So it gets locked by all those, let's say, five companies. And then a token is issued on the side chain. Then people can trade. That token represents exactly one Bitcoin. People can trade on the chain. And when they want to cash out, they send it to an address, which is again controlled by those five companies, but on the side chain.

And then the five companies unlock the coins on the main chain and give it back to you on the main chain. Right. But I mean, I can see that making some sense, especially like, let's say, if you think that one of those multi-stick addresses or something would be controlled by people running like Observer nodes on the open chain, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It would be, yeah. But still, though, because if you say there is an account that's like controlled by the same three entities, let's say, on the open chain, I mean, in the end, every account on the open chain, you know, if the validator can reverse transactions and... Yeah, but this is where... This is a very good observation. And what would happen is that the five or three entities that control that multi-seek address, they would be observing, observer nodes. and if they realize that the administrator reverses transactions

and they don't agree with the reversal of those transactions and let's say you have money that you shouldn't really have and they know like the five observer notes agree that you shouldn't really have that money then they just wouldn't sign the transaction when you try to cash out so when you try to cash out you still need to get the signature of those five companies and because they're observing and they realize that something was not right they can just refuse to give you your money because you have money that you shouldn't have. So even if the administrator reverses transaction, then the observer nodes still have the power

of controlling the coins in that multi-segadrace. Yeah, that's right, right. Yeah, so you could have that security that the bitcoins would be, yeah, presumably reasonably secure, at least if the observer nodes would be able to see and know what's going on, right? because it might not, I'm not sure if it will always be obvious when... I mean, yeah, I mean, the service, those five companies, they would run probably special software to identify any type of transaction that's not right because, you know, they would be running this type of service. But this setup is actually exactly what a federated side chain is. So this is, you know, this is basically you can set up a federated side chain. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So before we wrap up, I'd like to get maybe your... Sort of your views on where the Bitcoin ecosystem is going. And we've seen a proliferation of these protocols and standards that are built on top of Bitcoin. And it seems like it was just yesterday that Bitcoin was going to be the currency that was going to, everybody was going to use it. But now we're seeing that, in fact, companies and enterprises and larger players are building all this infrastructure on top of Bitcoin. and using Bitcoin not necessarily as a payment mechanism, but as rails on which other protocols are implemented. Where do you see this going in the next five to ten years?

Yeah, I think I see Bitcoin becoming more of an infrastructure service. You know, like this, the fact that you can publish a hash and it becomes immutable, you know, like open chain is doing, it's very valuable. And I think people are going to realize that it's, you know, Bitcoin is going to stay as a store of value, just because of that value that it provides as an infrastructure. As a currency, I don't know if I see it as a currency because there's still a lot of problems to overcome for people to use it as, you know, for payments and this type of things.

I mean, it works okay, but the user experience, you know, when you try to pay in a store, I mean, it's not great right now. There's a lot of progress to be done, and I'm sure it is going to evolve over the next five years and ten years. It's like, you know, it's such a long time for this type of things. you know, five years ago, Bitcoin was barely, barely existed. So who knows, you know, how the user experience will have improved in five to ten years. But yeah, like those companies, you know, there's always this debate, like with the blockchain without Bitcoin versus Bitcoin.

I think it's like two different use cases, two very different things. Those companies trying to build a blockchain. What they want is like a secure system with like nice properties like, you know, auditability and, you know, transparency, you know, signatures they're not necessarily interested in for it as a payment like as a commodity like Bitcoin is but Bitcoin itself as a commodity is very useful for some things as well which is not what the banks are interested in but it's different use cases but it's still very interesting like the fact that you know you can store the fact that it's like gold but digital you know so if you want to buy

gold it's not very easy if you want to buy physical gold you have to store it somewhere so definitely using Bitcoin is a much easier way to do that But Bitcoin also has this property of censorship resistance. So I mean, okay, it's definitely useful for some of the illegal use cases. I mean, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but at least it's useful there. And just because of that, it's not going to disappear. So it definitely has its use cases. It's just not what the banks are looking at or like the financial institutions are looking at.

It's two different, I think blockchain is kind of in the middle. kind of in the middle but it's like very like two different angles really but they both have their merits yeah absolutely so when it comes to you like coin prism as a company is your plan now to build a business around open chain and also is it because for a long time it was coin prison was basically mainly you is that still the case or is there a larger team now so it's still me the main person on the team. I mean I'm working with like a few people part-time, but yeah, like we're still looking to grow the team, you know, in the next few months, hopefully. But as far as product goes, yeah, obviously CoinPrisome and Collot Coins are

still around and we want to, you know, also keep our focus on that. And as a matter of fact, we'll also allow pegging open assets, token. from the main chain to us to open chain instance. So you know like I was talking about using open chain as a side chain, well it's not only going to be for Bitcoin, it's also going to be for current coins. So and we're going to you know enable that kind of scenario so that people who want kind of the best of both worlds they can use the open chain for scaling and then they can then go back to the main chain for settlement or whatnot. So it's kind of two sides of the spectrum and we still

want to, you know, to be able to have offerings on both sides, on the permissionless side, which is cornet coin and Bitcoin, because there are some use cases where it just works better. And then on the permission side as well, because, you know, there's also use cases where permission makes more sense. So we want to keep the offering on both sides and be able to offer to people what they, what's the best solution for them. Cool. Great.

That sounds fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on, Flavien. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and to a listener, thanks so much for listening. It's always a pleasure. And so we put out new episodes every Monday and you can subscribe to episodes on iOS, iTunes, SoundCloud,

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