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JOSHUA SINDY: My name is Joshua Sindy,
and I'm a Staff Engineer for Swirlds Labs, previously
Principal Architect and DevOps manager for Hedera.
What excites me about a conference like this
is that we get to talk about the future, all
the wonderful possibilities in front of us and the opportunity
to turn them into reality.
It's literally in the title, What's Next?
But innovation doesn't really happen in a vacuum.
So in order to understand what's next,
we need to look into the past, what was,
to contextualize and understand what can be.
And I want to go back to ancient history, so like 11 years ago,
in crypto terms.
That's the beginning of time, roughly.
About 11 years ago, I built my very own Bitcoin exchange.
You could buy Bitcoin through it.
And I was working with this payment provider.
This was so early that there weren't any real regulations
around the industry.
And that provider ended up suspending me,
and that was the end of that service.
Why?
They saw some risk here.
What was the risk exactly?
Well, to give you an example, my solution
itself bought Bitcoin from Mt.
Gox.
Mt.
Gox, if you didn't know, was a bit infamous
eight years ago for losing 850,000 or so bitcoins
through some theft, fraud, mismanagement,
or a mix of all three.
It was never really clear.
So the payment provider saw some risk here in deplatformed
me, and rightfully so.
That payment provider was, well, Google Checkout.
So I may be the only customer success segment
here where I've actually been deplatformed
by Google at one point.
But that's water under the bridge.
So why am I here?
Well, fast forward to present day.
We have built something amazing at Hedera
that I would like to share with you,
how Google Cloud helped us build it,
and why I'm excited to share about what's next.
Again, in the interest of looking to the past
to understand what's next, 12 years ago, Dr. Leemon Baird
invented the Hashgraph algorithm.
This algorithm underpins the Hedera network.
Leemon set out to solve a decades-old math problem,
not just build a better blockchain.
The concept of blockchain has been around for over 20 years.
There are 2,000-plus projects, which all depend on blockchain.
But if blockchain didn't exist, Hedera would still exist.
Hashgraph solves a network of computers coming to consensus
on an event where no individual is necessarily trusted.
But does so with extreme speed, high throughput,
and at the highest security possible.
It also has low costs, which are predictable
and which an enterprise can plan around.
I got into Google Cloud in 2016 for the Kubernetes service.
This solved 90% of the problems I didn't want to focus on.
Interestingly enough, Kubernetes is
antithetical to decentralization.
It is a centralized control plane for managing resources
on large compute clusters.
We were in a position where we needed each node in the Hedera
network to be completely independent of each other
and maintained by a separate organization.
These organizations could be adversaries or competitors.
Kubernetes, the tool of choice, wasn't going to cut it.
We continued to use containers, but we developed
our own node management tool.
This tool uses threshold signatures
from our council to orchestrate updates in a decentralized way.
While this is itself its own interesting problem,
it's a pretty straightforward engineering problem.
And what it unlocks for us is to focus on our business case.
How do you establish a network governed
by large corporate and noncorporate entities
across industry, across business segment, and across continents
and have them govern our network?
What do these enterprises, banks, and universities all
have in common?
Well, try to get them to decide on something
about their own business.
How to make an investment, how to structure themselves
or plan for their future?
Imagine now how the largest aerospace manufacturer
makes a decision, or the largest bank in Africa.
How about the largest search engine?
Now, what about all of them trying
to make a decision together?
When we talk about what's next, we talk about Hedera.
That aerospace company is Boeing,
the bank is Standard Bank, and the search engine is Google.
Google joined the Governing Council in December 2019
accepting council member responsibilities,
such as Google runs a single consensus
node in the Hedera main net.
Google is equal part owner of Hedera.
Google also sits on the technical and regulatory
committees that govern the network.
They're bought into the idea of Web3
and what the Hashgraph algorithm can do
and what the Hedera public network built on top of it
offers.
For Google Cloud, this led to them understanding
and investing, not just in Hedera,
but in the broader Web3 ecosystem in general.
Google Cloud has formed a team dedicated
to Web3 called Digital Assets Web3
and has approximately 50 people on that core team
with an additional 150 individuals
working across Google in YouTube, Search, Engineering,
Ventures, and Payments.
And that describes Google.
And Google is one of the 26 members.
Hedera intends to grow that to 39 governing council
members across different geographies and industries.
So what can I share?
When I think about taking your idea
and making a business about it, I
think about those poor baby turtles.
If you've watched "Planet Earth,"
you know what I'm talking about.
Most of them fail to make it, getting eaten by birds,
crabs, various sea life, whatever.
So do a vast majority of ideas fail.
Maybe the idea was bad, or worse, the idea was good,
but it simply wasn't its time.
For me, my timing just wasn't right.
But for you, that baby turtle, that fragile unproven idea,
could make it.
And maybe that time is exactly right
and it starts something amazing.
So what do these Web3 turtles have in front of them?
What makes the time right for them?
Well, a lot of things I didn't have.
We have partners, like Google, who are eager to have you.
Who will grant you credits, even,
to use their platform like we do.
You have demand, and I'm not just talking
about the demand of something like pictures of rocks
or monkeys or coins with dogs on them,
but demand from established companies.
Look no further than our governing council.
They are bought in on this idea.
You have proof of economic value of the technology underlying
your idea, whether it be large banks establishing
remittance POCs using digital tokens,
industry-managed nonprofits building
a platform for redeeming coupons,
law firms tokenizing real-world assets,
the largest packaging and distribution
company in the world proving the carbon footprint
of your product as a service.
These are the Hedera use cases.
And as a Web3 entrepreneur, what you have in front of you
is a network like Hedera.
We offer a number of things.
Fast finality, meaning your transaction
is final in seconds.
Fairness that keeps the leaders from adjusting the transaction
order, energy efficiency.
Per the University of London economic study,
we are the greenest solution on the planet.
We're even carbon negative.
Fixed transaction fees, meaning your costs of your solution
isn't wildly unpredictable.
Decentralized governance by the big names we mentioned before.
And so what does it mean?
What's next?
Well, with the Hashgraph algorithm and platforms
such as Google Cloud, maybe that idea
you had might not fade into obscurity because
of the ecosystem, the demand, and the underlying technology
is here.
Maybe it has the potential now to grow up
to be a massive sea turtle.
Thank you.
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