from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape so cube conversations simplifying blockchain for developers remi karpadito is here is the CEO of espresso remy thanks for coming in yeah thanks for having yeah so you guys are in the Seaport we want to hear all the action that's going on there but let's start with espresso CEO founder or co-founder um not a co-founder founder okay good just to clarify with respect to your co-founders voice why did you guys start espresso yeah no it starts back on in a little bit little while ago we originally wanted to and a replace our first company was a company called campus towel and we want to replace student identity with NFC chips and smart phones and it was a really cool concept back in 2010 but at the time there's only one phone that had the technology capable of pulling the south and we built a prototype with that smart phone as a Samsung phone at the time and we brought that around to a dozen plus colleges showing hey you could replace the student ID with the phone you can just tap your phone to it for attendance for events etc and they loved it but everyone had the same question you know when is the iPhone can have the technology and we were three years early the iPhone didn't come up with NFC chips until 2013 and we ended up hitting into a mentoring platform and scaled that company October 70 colleges across the country but ironically enough we came back to the same issue a lot of CIOs and CTOs wants to interface with their single sign-on servers which required us to support this legacy technology you know so AJ and I spun back internally AJ's our co-founder and CTO to identify how can we replace identity again but instead of using hardware and smartphones let's use the blockchain and AJ was an early a Bitcoin adopter back in 2010 mining Bitcoin really I'm passionate about the technology and I started learning a little bit more about it and trying to find a way to incorporate blockchain technology into our student identity solution as a secondary offering for Campus Tau but we quickly realized was that our front-end engineering team who is a little bit underwater in terms of the technical skills that needed to help and participate in the development for the boccie an identity solution so we ended up building up to middleware components to help them with the development and that's where we saw kind of that's where the lightbulb went off and the bigger opportunity came about where a lot of the infrastructure and tooling needed in order to build a production level blockchain application isn't quite there yet ice we ended up hitting and building a new company called espresso to make botching development more accessible so let's talk about that that the challenge that your developers face so you were at the time writing in for aetherium and in solidity right which is explain to our audience why that's so challenging what is solidity yeah and and why is it so complex yes illinit e is a JavaScript based framework for writing smart contracts on in the etherion platform it's not a fully baked or fully developed tools that yet in terms of the language there's some nuances but on top of that you also need to understand how to support things like the infrastructure so the cryptography the network protocols so if you want to sustain your own blockchain there's a lower-level skill set needed so the average JavaScript engineering could be a little bit kind of overwhelmed by what's needed to actually participate in a full-blown botching development yes and they're probably close to 10 million JavaScript engineers worldwide so it sounds like your strategy is to open up blockchain development to that massive you know resource yeah and in JavaScript being a definite core focus out of the gates and will be developing a plethora of SDKs including JavaScript and Python and Ruby etc in the thought process is you know activating these engineers that have coming new code academies or Enterprise engineers that really get a C++ or another language and allowing them to code in the languages they already know and allow them to participate the blockchain development itself okay and so how many developers are on your team so we've it's a small ad product teams three people on a parodic team now but we're actually the process is killing that up yeah so those guys actually had to go on the job training so they kind of taught themselves and then that's where you guys got the idea said okay yeah exactly and we realized that you know if we could build out this infrastructure this tooling layer that just allows you compile the language as you know into the software or the blockchain side it can make it a much more accessible and then also the other thing too that's interesting it's not just kind of writing the languages they already accustomed to but it's also the way you architect these blockchain solutions and one thing we've realized is that a lot of people think that you know every piece of data needs to live on the blockchain where that's really not something I've been teachers for you to do so because it's really expensive to put all the data on the blockchain and it's relatively slow right now with ethereum of 30 transactions per second there's companies like V chain that are looking to remedy some of those solutions with faster write data write times but the thought process is you can also create this data store and with our middleware it's not just an SDK but it's a side chain or a really performant in-memory based data store they'll allow you to store off chain data it's still in a secure fashion through consensus etc that can allow you to write data rich or today's level applications on the blockchain which is really kind of the next step I see coming in the Box chain space so I'm gonna follow up on when coaching there I mean historically distributed database which is what blockchain is it's been you know hard to scale it's like I say low transaction volumes they had to pick the right use cases smart contracts is an obvious one yeah do you feel as though blockchain eventually you mentioned V chain it sounds like they're trying to solve that problem will eventually get there to where it can can compete with the more centralized model head on and some of you know the more mainstream apps yeah and that's and that's kind of where we are because our thought process if we were to move campus topic the kind of private LinkedIn for colleges per se on to the blockchain back when we started it wouldn't be possible so how do you store this non pertinent data this transactional or not even transactional this attribute data within a boxing application and that's really where that second layer solution comes into play and you see things like lightning Network for Bitcoin etc and plasma for aetherium but creating this environment where a developer comes on they create an account they name their application they pick their software language and then they pick their blockchain there's pre-built smart contract we offer them but on top of that they already have this data store that they can leverage these are things that people already accustomed to in the web 2.0 world these are the caching layers that everyone uses things like Redis etcetera that we're bringing into the blockchain space that well I that we believe will allow this kind of large-scale consumer type application well when you think about blockchain you think okay well he thinks it's secure right but at the same time if you're writing in solidity and you're not familiar with it the code could be exposed to inherent security flaws is that so do you see that as one of the problems that you're solving sort of by default yeah I think one thing here is that I kind of as you write a smart contract you need to audit you test it so on and so forth and so we're helping kind of get that core scaffolding put up for the developer so they don't need to start from scratch they don't need to pull a vanilla smart contract off of a open source library they can leverage ones that are kind of battle tested through our through our internal infrastructure so the last part of our kind of offering is this marketplace of pre developed components that developers can leverage to rapidly prototype or build their applications whether it be consumer engineer or enterprise that one and you were developer what's your back my background yeah so I studied entrepreneurship and Information Systems so I do have I was a database analyst at fidelity it was my last job in the corporate world so I do have some experience developing nowhere near that of my co-founder AJ or some of our other but but yeah I understand the core concepts pretty well well speaking blockchain who if she was talking about obviously you you see a lot of mainstream companies obviously the banks are all looking at it you're seeing companies we just you know heard VMware making some noise the other day you're at certainly IBM makes a lot of noise about smart contracts so you're seeing some of these mainstream enterprise tech companies you know commit to it what do you see there in terms of adoption in the mainstream yeah no I think the enterprise space is gonna want to fully embrace this technology first I think the consumer level we're still a little bit ways away there just because this infrastructure and this tooling is needed before developers kind of get there but from the enterprise space what we see I mean obvious things like supply chain being a phenomenal use case the blockchain technology Walmart IBM are already implementing really cool solutions one of them my advisors Rob Dulci is the president of Asia and they've successfully implemented several blockchain projects from car parts manufacturers to track and trace through wine seeds and this from grape seeds and so there's a lot of different use cases in the supply chain side identity is really exciting Estonia is already doing some really cool work with digital identities that's gonna have a big impact voting systems etc but also thinking through some newer concepts like video streaming and decentralization of Network Maps and so there's many different use cases and for us we're not trying to necessary solve like a dis apply chain problem or anything we're trying to give a set of tools that anyone can use for their verticals so we're excited to see kind of what a spreads used for and over the next several months to here I remember you mentioned V chain before so explain what V chain is and now your what you're doing with those guys yes if V chain is another kind of next generation blockchain they're they're v chain Thor is the new platform and actually their main net launch is tomorrow and they're really excited they're introducing heightened security faster block times more transactions per second they have a really interesting governance model that I think is a good balance between pure decentralization in the centralized world which i think is that that intermediate step that a lot of these enterprises are going to need to get to end of the block chain space and we're working with them or lon on their platform so our token sale will be run through V chain which is great in addition we'll be working with them with through strategic partnerships and the goal is have espresso be the entry point for developers coming into V chain so we'll help kind of navigate the waters and kind of have them leverage the pre-built smart contracts and get more developers into the ecosystem okay let's talk about your token sale so you're doing the utility token yep and so that means you've actually got utility in the token so how is that utility token being utilized within your community yeah so the data actually the token is used to meter and mitigate abuse in the platform as well so at every single transaction it'll validate the transaction in addition it will be an abstraction layer since we do speak to multiple block chains that ezpz token will have to abstract up to aetherium to Thor which is the V chain token the future dragon chain etc so that's a really interesting use case and one of the interesting things we're trying to solve right now if you're a developer trying to come in and use it it cryptocurrency for development you need to go to something like a coin base you have to exchange fiat to aetherium you have to push that out to a third party exchange you have to do a trade and then you have to send that digital wallet address where you get easy peasy Oh to our account after that's a ton of friction and that's more friction if you're not a crypto person you're gonna be what is it you're gonna be asking to do it yeah so we're talking to some pretty big potential partners that allow kind of they would be the intermediate intermediary or money service to allow a seamless transition for engineer just to come straight onto espresso put down a credit card bank account verified go through the standard kyc AML process and then be able to get easy peasy in real time and that's something that at a macro level I think is one of the biggest barriers to entry in the botching space today so what do you call you your token easy-peasy okay so you're making that simple transparent done so you're doing a utility token you do in a raise where are you at would that raise give us the details there yeah yes so we just close our friends and family around we're not private sale right now are working closely with the VA in the VA chain foundation helping kick that off right now as well and we're yeah this is gonna be much more strategic capital in this round and then after that we'll be moving into since we are partnered with each a in their community gets a little bit of exclusivity in the next piece of the round so their master note holders will get a bigger discount in the next round and then the last round will be the public round for the general community and that's where we anticipate a lot of developers we already have development shops coming on participating in the first round which is great because the thought process is we want to get as many developers in this platform as possible throughout the summer and I think that's one of the most unique things about the token sales it's not just raising capital it's actually getting people that want to use your product to buy him now and that's that's amazing so okay so you're doing the private sale first right and you open that up to those types of folks that you just mentioned and they get some kind of discount on the on the token because they're there in early and they're backing you guys early and then you guys got a telegram channel I know it was on the recently anything is exploding it looks like a pretty hot you know offering and then then what happens next then you open it up to just a wider audience we start getting the core community members from V chain and then after that the public sale will be really targeted for the unused these are the people that you know need to put in a large substantial amount of capital again and at that point you could put in a couple hundred dollars and actually participate in in the token sale and you'd be getting in the kind of ground Florida sand and the SEC just made a ruling you know recently a week ago or so that Bitcoin and in aetherium were not security so that's a good thing nonetheless you as a CEO and entrepreneur you must have been concerned about you know a utility token and making sure everything's clean that there actually is utility you can't just use the utility token to do a raise and then go build the products you have you had it you have a working product right yeah so there's a lot of functionality already set up and we're going to continue to iterate before we even get close to the actual tokens or the public sale right so we anticipate having full functionality of what we want to get out there to the development world by the end of the sale so it's the thing that we I think one of the biggest things in this space right now in terms of the law and compliance side is a lot of self regulation since in the u.s. in particular it's such a great area you need to one stay up-to-date with every single hearing announcement but also really make sure you're you're taking best practices with kyc AML making sure the people you know good people that are investing into the comm or I've kind of participating in the allocation and and that's something we you know we've spent a lot of time with our legal team I've got pretty intimate with our lawyers and really understanding kind of the nuances of this space over time what about domicile what can you advise people you know based on your experience in terms of domicile yeah I'm not a lawyer but based on our experience I mean there's some great places over in in Europe you know Switzerland Malta Gibraltar we're down on the came in and also Singapore there's a you know these different legislature or jurisdictions are writing new law to support the effort and I think that's gonna continue to happen and I hope it happens in the u.s. too so we remove some of this nuance and gray areas that people can feel more comfortable operating and I think that's gonna happen hopefully soon in the next six months or so we'll see but as long as more guidance continues to come out I think we can operate or people can operate in the US I know a lot of people are moving offshore like we did so just something that's gonna it's a tough area right now well it gives you greater flexibility um and it like you said it's less opaque so you can have more confidence that what you're gonna do is on the up-and-up because as an entrepreneur you don't want you know I'm not gonna worry about compliance you just want to do your job and write great code and execute and build a company and so I mean I feel I don't know if you agree that the u.s. is a little bit behind you know this is kind of really slow to support entrepreneurs like yourselves like like us we'd like more transparency and clarity and you just can't seem to get a decision you're sort of in limbo and you got to move your business ahead so you make a decision you go to the Caymans you go to Switzerland you go to Malta and you move on right so and I think it's interesting too and you know a lot of what the SEC did in the beginning there's a ton of bad actors out there just as well and there's a bunch of good actors too so again if you yourself regulate you play you really understand what you need to do to be compliant you should be fine but again I think the flexibility you get right now is the more kind of defined law and some these other jurisdictions makes a lot of it yeah and I don't mean to be unfair to SEC they are doing a job and they need to protect the little guy and protect the innocent no question I would just like to see them be more proactive and provide more clarity sooner than later so okay last question the Seaport scene in Boston you know we always compare Boston and silicon silicon valley you can't compare the two Silicon Valley's a vortex in and of itself but the Boston scenes coming back there's blockchain there's IOT the Seaport is cranking you guys are in the Seaport you live down there what are you seeing would give us a what's the vibe like ya know watching me just passed about a month ago it may be less and as the great turnouts I spoke at a few events a few hundred people kind of it each one which is great and it's interesting you get a good mix of Enterprise people looking to learn and educate themselves in the space you see the venture capital side moving into the space and participating in a lot of these larger scale events and it's definitely growing rapidly in terms of the blockchain scene in Boston and I spent some time in New York and that's another great spot to and an even think places like Atlanta and I was down in Denver I did a big presentation down in Denver which was awesome and and now the coolest thing about blockchain is it really is global I spent a lot of time in Asia and in Europe and speaking over there the the pure at like the tangible energy in the room is amazing and it's one of the most exciting things about the industry many people that in the space know we're on the cutting edge here we're on the this is a new frontier that we're building along the way being part of that and helping define that is pretty exciting stuff that's cool you know I said last question I lied I forgot to ask you a little bit more about your your team maybe you could you talk a team your team your advisors maybe you could just give us a brief yeah okay there my co-founder and CTO we've been working together since I believe my sophomore year at college so it's been a while and he's their original crypto a blockchain guy and and pushed us in the spaces leading to the product development on that from in the top of that we have Craig Gainsborough our CFO I actually spent a lot of time at PwC he was the North America tax and advisory CFO over there Jalen Lou is the director of product marketing Kevin coos the head of product he worked he was nominated for a Webby and then we have our ops team Kyle who's a former campus - a complete business deaf guy over there that's working on us from some of the other side on the advisory team we have a really good team sunny luke from the CEO and founder of e chain just came on eileen quentin the president of Dragon chain foundation that was the blockchain company spun out of Disney and then David for gamma is the co-founder and had a product at autonomy that's an IOT protocol really really cool stuff happening over there new new new program coming about Rob Dulci as the president of Asia in North America which is the supply chain company and they've already successfully deployed a handful of use cases and mihaela dr. mahele Uluru who is really interesting and in this sense that she was working on decentralized systems before they were called blockchain she worked with the professor in Berkeley that defined decentralized in technology and she speaks in the World Economic Forum frequently and is really just a global presenter so we have we feel like we have a really strong team right now and we're actually getting to the point of scaling so it's gonna be exciting to start bringing in some new people and picking up the momentum it's super exciting well listen congratulations on getting to where you are and best of luck going forward best of luck with the raise and and solving the problem that you're solving it's it's an important one and thanks for coming in the cube of course thank you so much you're welcome all right thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time this is david onte