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>> Live from Mountain View, California.
It's the Cube
covering DevNet Create 2019.
Brought to you by Cisco.
>> Okay welcome back everyone,
we're here at day two coverage live of coverage
at Mountain View, Cube coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create.
I'm John Furrier, your host,
where all the action is in the creation side
of two communities, DevNet, Cisco developers and then the
open cloud native world entrepreneurship
coming together to create products.
Our next guest is Nik Kalyani,
co-founder of WhenHub and TryCrypto.
He's a builder, he's a creator, he's an entrepreneur.
Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on
>> John, thanks for having me.
>> You just gave a long talk
so I'll let you breathe a little bit.
You're an entrepreneur, you're an inventor,
you see things early.
You got a lot of your hands on lots of good stuff here.
This is the perfect place for you
to be giving talks and hanging out.
>> Absolutely I love the fact
that people are here to learn.
They're here to find out about the new innovative
things that they can experience hands-on.
I just gave a workshop on smart contracts,
on the blockchain and I loved the questions I got
and the energy that's there.
>> What sort of questions were you getting?
What was the interest? Where are people going at it?
Because networking's a supply chain problem
you can almost imagine applying blockchain
to networking constructs.
>> Yeah absolutely, you know blockchain
is one of those technologies
that is misunderstood quite a bit and some of the questions
I got really helped me,
help reinforce that.
Ultimately, what I was trying to do is make sure
that people understand that blockchain
is not a solution for everything.
There are certain things where there are scenarios
where there are multiple un-trusted parties
where blockchain is great, but otherwise
it's just a slow database. (John laughs)
So you want to make sure that you use it
in the right scenarios and supply chain is a very
common example where it's used,
especially private blockchains.
>> If latency's not a concern blockchain might be a solution
if other things line up.
Great point, I'm glad you brought that up.
I want to just ask you because
your profile as a person
you're a visionary, you see things early.
The part of the show here that's interesting
is it's not like there's this research
kind of thinking, although researchers tends to think
about the waves coming.
It's about what's here and now and what's coming
but it's also making things real and creating.
So a lot of the conversations are fun, exploratory,
discovery orientated but also there's a lot of reality
kind of grounded in it.
You know entrepreneurs make some mistakes
if you're too early, you're misunderstood for a long time.
It's got to be a little bit early at the right time,
timing's everything.
Talk about the dynamic of timing and building
and creating with big waves that are coming.
You got cloud, you got blockchain, you got AI,
you got machine learning.
Talk about this dynamic.
>> Absolutely, yeah so timing is so important,
especially when you have start-ups right?
You could have the greatest technology
and maybe the market's not ready for it
and so yeah it fails. My first start up was like that.
I created something that the market was not ready for
but fortunately the stuff I'm working on
the market is ready for.
So I think one of the things that developers,
engineers can do is really look at how
not necessarily how a technology is being marketed
but what the adoption rate is.
If there are more people jumping on it,
and a good way to look at that is to look at GitHub
and see how many people are creating samples,
boilerplates,
how many people are writing blog posts et cetera.
That I think is a better indicator of whether
a technology is ready for prime time
or if it's just all vaporware.
>> Tell about what you're working on now
you're working on some very interesting projects.
Where are they? What's the status, size of the team,
collaborative open source. What's going on?
>> So I have two start-ups I'm working on.
the first one is called WhenHub.
So we have a product called Interface that allows anyone
to be an expert on any topic, and promote themselves through
the platform. And allows anyone who's looking for expertise
on any topic to find them and then pay for them
and do a video call,
get their questions answered and the whole transaction
is handled via blockchain with either our cryptocurrency
or you can use Apple Pay or Google Pay.
So we launched a few months ago,
we have about 75,000 users, it's growing very fast.
We are just at the point right now
where we are trying to scale-up.
Our crypto token is called WHEN token.
It's listed on five different exchanges.
So that's one thing.
While building that product one thing
became very clear to me.
Mainstream users have a very challenging time
with using anything blockchain or cryptocurrency related.
And it's through no fault of theirs,
the ecosystem has been created for developers
by developers and the tools lack empathy for the users.
And that lead me to create an
open source project called TryCrypto.
The mission is to create free open source content
and tools to make blockchain and cryptocurrency
more accessible to users.
>> To mainstream not the killer dorks
and the guys coding.
>> Yeah we want it to be like non-technical folks
>> Is it the wallet that's the problem
or is it just overall too techy?
>> You know what John,
the very word wallet is the problem.
(John laughs)
Because it gives this idea that there's something within it.
As we were talking earlier, you know about blockchain,
there's nothing in a wallet.
It's just a placeholder for all of your addresses, right?
So in fact, I'm trying to solve that problem with a new tool
I've created called Photoblock, where I use a photo
and emoji's to replace that.
Yes, wallets are problems.
The fact that it requires you to have all these parts
in place before you can do anything useful,
that's a big problem also.
People really need to step back and look
at the user experience and say
what are the friction points and how can we eliminate them
and that needs to happen before
blockchain and cryptocurrency can have mass adoption.
>> Talk about the choice of smart contract language used.
Ethereum which was the hottest development
oriented the most traction.
A lot of ICOs kind of watered that down,
it's still under 300.
Other ones are emerging, NEO, EO, a bunch of other ones.
It seems to be kind of like a NASCAR race,
one's in the lead, someone's coming up.
How do you look at that marketplace as other developers
start to kick the tires?
As people start building these real-world apps
is that important to have a selector? Does it matter?
What's your thoughts on selection?
>> That's a great question.
I think going back to what I said
about how to evaluate a technology.
You can see that Ethereum is still continues
to be the leader, by far.
So while EO and other blockchains have
what appears to be a lot of momentum,
if you dig down below the surface you don't find as much.
So I continue to remain a big fan of Ethereum.
Which doesn't mean I don't care for the other blockchains
but I find that right now Serenity and Ethereum
are a good way to move forward.
I think EO is also a good platform to build on
but I think their developing tools need
to reach some level of maturity.
On Ethereum, the folks that have created the truffle stack,
the truffle and ganache package,
have done a great service for developers because
they make them so simple and easy.
Something like that needs to evolve.
>> Yeah and your point earlier I think it's
important to know for the developers out there
don't confuse the protocol and the token selection
on smart contracts with blockchain.
Again, you don't have to anything on blockchain
'cause it's a slow database.
You're doing smart contracts
which doesn't really require a lot of overhead.
I mean it's a contract, it does.
You want to have it reliable,
but you're not doing
zillions of contracts per second.
The IOPs are not that high.
>> Yeah, actually smart contracts is
also a very misunderstood term.
In fact, someone asked me
is it legal contracts or medical contracts, what is it?
A smart contract is really just an application.
A programming code that runs
on the virtual machines on blockchain.
They call it a contract because
once it's out there it's immutable.
Which means the rules are defined, known and fixed
and can't be changed.
So when you create a smart contract,
really what you're doing is handling
a very small amount of data that you want to persist forever
that runs with some rules.
>> And in a decentralized world,
as we call it in our community, it's a digital handshake.
You agreed that we would do this,
there it is, it's un-hackable.
What are the cool things you're working on?
What else you got? Opensource project's awesome.
You got a lot going on. Life's good.
>> Life is good.
As I mentioned, Photoblock is the thing
that I'm really excited about.
Another app that we are building is called Public Record.
The problem we are solving there
is that in areas where there is strife,
or maybe there's dictators et cetera,
sometimes when you have people who have photos of some crime
occurring or some event occurring,
they are reluctant to share it
because it could be traced back
and have adverse consequences.
With Public Record we are building
a smart contract driven blockchain app.
Where you can just take a photo
and it will push that photo on to IPFS.
Which stands for the InterPlanetary File System,
which is a decentralized file system.
It will anonymize the photo.
It will strip all the stuff that your camera
puts on there like GPS, the camera model et cetera.
It'll manipulate that photo and it will
then put a hash of that on the blockchain
and make it available by location.
So you can go to any location look at all the photos
that people have taken there that are completely anonymous
and impossible to track back to the
>> And what about tampering proof?
You have origination data,
you strip out the real origination data,
that's really important for some of these countries
where people get killed for sharing or trying to get
the backdoor out of the country for political revolution
or just simply I don't want anybody to know.
How about tamper proof?
>> It is, it's on IPFS, which is immutable file system.
What we also do is we manipulate the colors and tones
of the photo a little bit so it's impossible to even use AI
to go back and reverse engineer
and figure out who created the photo.
The location, the time and the actual content
of the photo is not tampered.
So Public Record will do that.
>> Just a little quick Q and A on your company.
Did you do an ICO, did you finance it yourself?
>> With WhenHub we did do an ICO,
but it was at a time
when the market was at its bare things
so our ICO was moderately successful.
In addition to the ICO funds, we are primarily funded
by one of my co-founders, Scott Adams,
the creator of the Dilbert comic strip.
We are doing quite well.
>> He's a cool guy to hang out with, huh?
>> He is.
>> Never a dull moment?
>> Never a dull moment, I learn quite a bit.
>> Congratulations.
How do people find out how to hang out with you?
You got some good things going on here.
Where do you hang out? What do you do for fun?
What events do you go to? What's going on with you?
>> I'm on Twitter quite a bit.
>> Say your Twitter handle.
>> It's @techbubble.
I'm there.
I like to blog.
on TryCrypto
and also my own personal blog.
I go to meet-up events here in Silicon Valley
and I do make an effort to speak
at least five to six conferences each year.
>> Aim it forward. >> Yep.
>> A lot more action going on in crypto and token economics
not just from an ICO standpoint always been some negative
scams out there and global fraud, but generally,
blockchain and token economics is real
and getting more traction and
soon I think it will be clearer.
Your thoughts on that, if you could share your perspective
in terms of the opportunities around those two areas.
>> Like any other new and exciting technology
goes through the hype cycle, they've gone through that now.
I think there's really two types
of people in this ecosystem.
The ones that are focused
on the cryptocurrency and the pricing around it et cetera.
But I'd really like to separate that
from the blockchain aspect of it.
Blockchain is a very real technology,
it's a really different technology that the world
has never seen before.
Yes, it's very true that not everything
is a good candidate for the blockchain.
But there are many, many scenarios where there are multiple
un-trusted parties that are excellent for blockchain.
I think what needs to happen is persons
in leadership position need to really evaluate:
what are the scenarios where
there are un-trusted entities involved?
And limit their blockchain involvement, test pilots,
all of that they're more likely to see more success.
Versus just throwing blockchain into it,
replace the database, 'cause that's guaranteed to be a fail.
>> Nik, great to have you on. I totally agree with you.
The team here we were in Puerto Rico,
we've been in the Bahamas, we've been Toronto
we've been to all the blockchain events.
Consensus is coming up in New York.
We might be there, May 14th.
Patrick, getting ready to head down to New York.
Maybe go down there. Great to have your perspective.
Great to see the blockchain conversation coming in here
as the emerging tech and the creation
here at DevNet Create continues.
Thanks for coming out.
>> Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here.
>> More Cube coverage here coming live here at Mountain View
after this short break.
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