so thank you all for coming i introduce
myself briefly earlier but my name is
matthew spoke i actually I remember
speaking last year at Def Con in London
and I left that week in London feeling
this really strange hi from spending
time with this community I was really
like in awe of everything that was
happening in this space and I was pretty
you know shook when I left to say the
least at the time I was leading a black
chain technology team at a big
consulting firm in Toronto now I'm not
so I'm going to give my general caveat
right now for those of you in the room
that work for a quote unquote corporate
i will take absolutely no responsibility
if you leave this week quit your job
jump into the blockchain ecosystem
there's many people who have done it you
wouldn't be the first so briefly i'm
going to tell you a little bit about the
work that we're doing at new co and then
i'm going to move on I don't want I
don't want to kind of get too repetitive
with some of the things that we spoke
about on the panel or some of the topics
that Victor covered because I mean a lot
of the problems that are being solved by
various party companies in this space
are pretty similar I mean we're all
looking at the same restrictions and
limitations of what needs to happen to
athyrium based technologies to be really
applicable in the enterprise space we
heard from you know that's this panel
specifically how the path towards some
of these solutions in the path towards
some meaningful enterprise adoption and
there's really some some tremendous
companies up here that we're speaking
earlier that i really admire and i think
the the industry is in good hands if we
can just look at the group of companies
or solving this so newco a little bit
about us we're a fully modular
customizable black chain infrastructure
framework that is designed to enable the
creation of domain-specific block chain
networks that can be optimized to solve
specific problems specific applications
in specific industries so we've we've
essentially piggyback off of the the
vision of etherium to create this this
this framework to design a technology
that can solve some of the pain and
unattractive problems that we see in the
enterprise world by bringing to it kind
of a new
ends of how do distributed systems
change kind of the framework and
operations of a large enterprise now one
of the things that I like to kind of
reiterate over and over again when I
started in the blockchain space kind of
two years ago enterprises and large
companies we're kind of you know being
framed as like the evil that needed to
be removed from the world and therefore
we created Bitcoin and then etherium but
I think it's kind of important for us to
recognize that these are the companies
that we rely on on a day-to-day basis
these are the companies that provide us
services like bank accounts and
insurance and although it's sometimes
frustrating to deal with them there's an
enormous opportunity to help these
companies and these industries solve
their kind of outdated systems so that's
kind of where we're putting our focus is
to really bring these critically
important services that we all rely on
day-to-day into the modern world with
new technology to do this we're looking
we're taking a slightly different
approach I mean we looked at etherium as
a technology that really is a public
utility that that everybody can use for
pretty much anything and we applied a
lens of enterprise technology and
enterprise infrastructure to it so we we
kind of dissected the etherium stack and
said if i were to redesign this asking
the simple question of how would this
have been built if it was built from day
one as an enterprise technology and so
what does that mean that the consensus
layer what does that mean all the way up
the stack of etherium so that it can
really start to be meaningfully applied
in an enterprise context and that led us
to some really challenging but important
priorities that have essentially become
the roadmap of what we're building so
for context I didn't give you the full
background I mean newco is a relatively
new venture as I mentioned we used to we
kind of our initial core team started as
a blockchain technology team at Deloitte
we we left and we started this company
four months ago were based in Toronto
Canada so some of the priorities that we
decided to tackle you know very
similarly to the topics we were speaking
about earlier are things like
scalability so on scalability we're
focused on optimizing the availability
of different consensus mechanisms into
the etherium stack so how do you AAPIs
kate the consensus mechanism from the
actual operation of the block chain so
that you can bring in an appropriate
consensus depending on the scenario that
you're trying to solve for so you know
proof-of-work operating on a public
chain or
of stake in the eventual roadmap of
etherium has its its validity and a lot
of value in terms of what it's trying to
accomplish for a public network but we
think that in different contexts with
different numbers of participants
operating different types of
applications there may be other
consensus mechanisms that are better
suited so that's one thing on
scalability we're also building to
ensure that the technology that we
develop is completely agnostic to server
infrastructure whether it be cloud or
on-premise infrastructure I mean quite
similar to what Victor mentioned so that
as we scale this and as we go into
networks of companies at all today
operate on different traditional
infrastructure some of which are moving
into the cloud and they'll have
different cloud providers how do we make
sure that the the connectivity between
these different infrastructures is
solved using a blockchain that we can
solve things like p2p latency when we
want transactions to move seamlessly
around the world so that kind of leads
us to performance which is obviously an
enormous reason why large companies have
run into restrictions when they want to
use athyrium to do anything within
certain context if you think of like a
very simple example high frequency
trading in a financial market it's
pretty obvious that running that on the
public athyrium network would would
cause problems just because of the sheer
nature and size of transaction
throughput that you would need so on
performance we've got kind of two
parallel focuses that we're working on
right now starting with a suite of high
performance throughput api's to kind of
compliment or be alternatives to the
available web three api that you can
find or that you can use for the public
athyrium network so that we can get
closer to that enterprise level
transaction throughput that's necessary
for a lot of these use cases we've also
designed and we're soon starting the
process of implementing enterprise
modifications at the vm level so that we
can start looking at parallel
transaction processing for smart
contracts when it makes sense when
transaction dependencies are at a state
where there are not too many of them
depending on the application depending
on the industry so that we can really
crank through the performance that's
necessary on these networks now overall
when we're when we identify kind of
priorities for our for our development
team for our engineers we kind of go
back to some very simple design
principles and you know when you when
you consider the enterprise market the
biggest thing that I kind of look at is
their need and expectation of Technology
maturity
and as much as it's incredible to watch
what's happening in this space we all
can recognize that this is an extremely
nascent space and nascent technology
scares large enterprises because there's
unanswered questions and unsolved
problems so we're trying to bring a lens
of enterprise maturity so that means
that when possible and when relevant
bringing in existing enterprise
frameworks existing enterprise languages
and existing enterprise tools and making
them a meaningful part of a blockchain
infrastructure so that it's a more
familiar and seamless transition when we
go to make that infrastructure change so
our goal as I said is to make
blockchains a very evident and obvious
next step in how do we make
infrastructures of the past get replaced
with infrastructures of the future you
know digital infrastructure and the
replacing the replacement of legacy
systems and large companies is not a new
topic that was introduced just because
blockchain showed up on the scene but
black chains as we all know our kind of
an evident tool that needs to be
included in how we do that redesign so
you know the more we can make that
seamless and obvious the better off
it'll be in terms of the transition for
these large organizations now as we all
know and we constantly hear this from
innovators in this space there is an
enormous amount of opportunity everybody
who's here in this room although
athyrium is kind of at that state of no
longer being an infant and probably
being more of a toddler right now and
there's this enormously growing group of
developers that are kind of being
aggregated around this technology we're
still the pioneers you know everybody in
this room that's working on a project as
a pioneer there's a ton of opportunity
for everybody to carve out interesting
markets and interesting use cases that
maybe nobody else has thought of but I
suspect I'm not the only one who really
thinks about this and gets excited by
this but also gets equally terrified by
this because the the nature of those
ambitions is not you know what a typical
kind of app developer might be looking
at when they want to accelerate your
food delivery we're talking about
changing how people interact with each
other how organizations transact with
each other on a global basis and it's
important but it's also critically
important that we get it right so that
we need to slow down and kind of bring
that enterprise maturity to this market
now I can tell you how easy it is to
easily become Desai be is going after
when we look at like you know in our
case just looking at the nature of a
small team trying to tackle big global
problems but I'll tell you what it is
that motivates us at new co I mean we're
a small local startup in Toronto you
know 10 people operating out of a
start-up office going after these
globally impactful ambitions and I think
the simple reason that we can do that is
because there's a vision in this
community that kind of drives us a
vision of global changing vision of of
deep impact that really will will touch
unreachable previously unreachable
populations on earth that now the new
technology can kind of unlock so in some
cases I mean having the financial reach
of these large companies to be able to
just dump 50 engineers on to a new
project is helpful but in most cases i
actually think that the meaningful
change is going to happen from small
teams like the ones represented here
from small companies of developers kind
of operating in garages or kind of back
office is saying we have an idea we're
going to change something and i think
the reason is pretty clear i mean i came
from the enterprise world where you know
instability and uncertainty scares
people tremendously and anybody who's
been in the block chain space long
enough knows that if you're scared of
instability you won't last i mean all
you have to do is look at bitcoin over
the last seven years or even you know
more relevant to this audience look at
athyrium over the last four months or a
theorem over the last three days I mean
there's always reasons to get nervous
and scared and that's why I'm confident
and absolutely certain that it's going
to be small you know startups and
community driven campaigns that really
make change rather than large scale
enterprises I mean that said I have no
no hard feelings for the large scale
enterprises I came from Deloitte I spent
five years there and I think there's an
enormously important role for those
companies as as Victor mentioned you
know integration and adoption by large
enterprises in education is going to be
a problem that everybody needs to kind
of tackle together but the future of
this technology really is be going to be
determined by groups like this groups
like us so we see the inefficiencies of
these large companies as an opportunity
for a new business model and we envision
a future where unlike some of the
rhetoric of the early blockchain days we
want to allow people to get the services
they need from the companies they trust
rather than just cutting these companies
out of the equation
really helping them redesign their
processes to make it better now to do
this we're aiming to become a provider
of infrastructure simply put and we want
that infrastructure to be leveraged not
only by these big organizations but also
by smaller kind of application driven
teams that have an ambition to change
something in the in the industry so are
our expectation is that if you have an
idea that is really enterprise driven
and you need an infrastructure to power
that idea that can be well-suited for
kind of the requirements and
specifications of an enterprise market
we'd love to be working with you so I
mean by all means please reach out to us
get to know us if you ever decide to do
the etherium pilgrimage and come back to
Toronto where it all began you know not
so many years ago let us know and we'll
host you while you're there 2016 has
been a really interesting year and I'll
spend maybe a minute just kind of
looking back at what happened since I
spoke at Def Con last year I've been
referring to this year as kind of the
year of the blockchain proof of concept
and not just because of the number of
prototypes being built but also because
the mainstream world is now looking at
Bitcoin and athyrium with a lot more
interest and saying does this stuff
actually work but I don't think we're
the only ones to be frustrated by the
fact that pocs can seem to be an endless
cycle of not getting anywhere an endless
cycle of not understanding how you can
actually make meaningful change so as
exciting as this trend is we need to
figure out how to get beyond this type
of RND work and into real production
work and I'm confident that that's on
the verge of changing and we're making
sure that if they're that new co is kind
of ready to get there now I'll give you
kind of one closing thought because I
know it's the end of the day and it's
been the end of the long week but I want
to kind of encourage this community if I
if I can do that from my perspective I
mean last year I talked about the
floodgates kind of opening and the
mainstream attention kind of dumping
into this space because it was 400
people sitting in a room in London and
not many people outside of that room had
heard about athyrium before I mean I
exaggerate but the mainstream world
hadn't really heard about athyrium and
for those of you who have been involved
in this space long enough you know that
that's completely changed we've seen
companies get funded and founded and
projects being launched over the last
year that have really thrown etherium
into the spotlight I think we've
probably seen the etherium community
grow by 10 x over the last year it's
easily become the most readily available
and most used technology in R&D labs
around the world it hit its 1 billion
dollar miles
this year which is tremendously valuable
for this community and and not to
understate vitalik turn 22 this year I
mean that's a big milestone here so
quite the year for theriyum but we also
learned some lessons this year I mean I
think we also realize that there are
challenges that we hadn't necessarily
anticipated challenges to decentralized
governance and the difficult task of
dealing with diverse groups that have
diverse interests and how do we properly
solve that we realize that there are
challenges that are legal and regulatory
that apply to token systems and
challenges with the development of like
secure enterprise software or a thirion
based software but I think all of this
points to kind of a productive year for
etherium and kind of a very positive
looking year ahead and I'm really
looking forward to being here next year
so I'll just leave you with that and I
mean before I wrap up because I am the
last presentation of the day I thought
it'd be worthwhile to maybe do a quick
thank you and round of applause to Ming
Vitalik George the etherium foundation I
didn't want to steal your thunder Ming
but you probably wouldn to thank
yourself so thanks Matt I really
appreciate it
you