(lively pop music) >> 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. 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. (pop music plays)