Blockchain POCs with a future - Eric Saraniecki's keynote at the 101Blockchain virtual conference

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so names such as Daml and Canton can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   good morning everybody uh well good morning from new york i'm pretty impressed with the uh with the global representation i'm really excited to speak to you today and thank you very much for for your time i look forward to your questions at the end um so if you don't mind going ahead here we go so what i'm here to speak to today is about um setting yourself up for success when you're out to explore in the blockchain space it's a very complicated nuanced environment

2. 0:29

   how to use it and apply it correctly can be maybe not obvious until you start to get into it a little bit deeper it's definitely a steep learning curve with lots to understand into and to consider the worst thing that can happen to anybody that wants to explore and develop blockchain i believe is to only have enough power to try one time and what we want to try to encourage are

3. 0:53

   strategies that people could use to give you leverage in your experimentation to find something that is going to be significantly more valuable to you and your users and that's what i would like to speak through today so next slide please i'm going to start with the problem statement and roughly speaking it's just way too expensive to experiment in blockchain today there's a tremendous amount of interest

4. 1:16

   and hype and people have spent a lot of time looking into it but when it comes time to sit down and do something it can be prohibitively expensive uh microsoft has really nice posts where they talk about uh their research showing about eight to twelve weeks and up to three hundred thousand dollars my experience is that this is consistently on the low side more often than not i see things that are in the range of six months to a year and uh with a much higher price tag

5. 1:42

   next slide please and a big part of the the big part of the problem with the expense is because of just how much you have to do to get one of these blockchains off the ground so uh you know again microsoft pointed out calling this scaffolding so how do you build all the infrastructure that you need to get started uh next time please and all those different types of components require

6. 2:07

   different types of skills this is where the cost really starts to go up you need a set of traditional skills new skills niche skills you've got kind of everything across the board and in the end this is what causes a lot of the bloat in the experimentation and and now no the last two slides all i've spoken about is getting something built and running i haven't spoken at all about the application or the value to the user or the you know any sort of user feedback or

7. 2:31

   research i mean this is really just a tax on your idea all you wanted to do is test your idea with your users or maybe learn a little bit more about how these systems work but you've spent the preponderance of your time on building infrastructure you know things that just people won't even see or care about when you launch your idea so next time please and this is kind of the reaction that i see a lot

8. 2:55

   of people get because where scope gets cut almost always is at the functional layer of the application like you know all you did was move some marbles around all you did was transfer a token from one person to the other like that doesn't really feel all that innovative i don't really know what the value of this is and people will invariably then fall into the weeds of discussing

9. 3:18

   all the public and private key stuff and the data structures and the consensus mechanisms and your user unequivocally will not care about that the user cares about the value of the application how is their business getting better how are their interactions with your business improving so you know this is a pretty common um pattern that i've seen and this is the this is the face that we want to make sure that nobody

10. 3:42

    ever experiences when they get into it now you can get into it and say you know what there just isn't enough value here that's a fine outcome but you never want to see people disappointed with your experiments because it's just leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth next time please and the other thing that i think is a little bit subtle and confusing for most people is it doesn't matter if you are using an open source

11. 4:05

    normal programming language in an open source ledger nobody with the exception of digital asset has invested in building an abstraction layer between the blockchain and your application so that means your application it doesn't matter if you wrote it in go or kotlin and you're running it on an open source ledger it is baked into that ledger so if you get to the end of your experimentation

12. 4:28

    and for whatever reason blockchain a didn't work for you and there's lots of reasons why wouldn't people are making trade-offs and design decisions all the time and you want to try b if you've chosen the ledger first and you built uh application for that ledger using whatever its native languages or whatever its native application framework is you're stuck you have to start from scratch somewhere else and that's something that people don't anticipate because often open source to them

13. 4:52

    or even the basic development experience for them they are accustomed to portability and the ability to test different types of infrastructure with minimum application changes or none at all and this until digital asset does not exist in the blockchain ecosystem i'll explain a little bit more about that in a bit so i know i'm going to glance over that uh next slide please and when that happens you know you've just spent three to six months you've just spent 300

14. 5:17

    000 plus dollars on an experiment imagine going back to your stakeholders and saying um actually i need at least the same budget because i want to tweak this application but on a different ledger and more often than not it just doesn't go anywhere from from that situation or people double down under the sunk cost fallacy and they keep going forward with the decision that they started with and make no mistake a lot

15. 5:41

    of these blockchains actually employ that strategy their goal is to get you to pick them first and to get stuck and it's to their advantage not to yours so um you know again you know as digital asset we try to position ourselves as advocates for approaching the space intelligently and giving leverage to to the to the developer and the user all right next slide so you know i wouldn't present a problem if i didn't have

16. 6:05

    a solution for you of course so next one so the solution is actually really quite straightforward you can approach the blockchain space by picking demo first demo is not at the ledger layer it's at the application layer and demo is a really large umbrella term for lots of things that we produce but first and foremost it's a programming language and a framework that allows businesses to build applications that collaborate and this this to us is really kind of the key value of these blockchains is that

17. 6:37

    you get to build applications that can selectively share a state with each other it's you know an equivalent would be you know moving from mainframes and messaging to moving to something like aws and shared shared infrastructure or moving from word documents and sending them through emails inversion way instead moving to something like google docs what you can do with demo and

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    blockchains is you can start to build applications that natively can interact and collaborate with each other that's where we see the real value in this ecosystem and we always start from that perspective first the value to the user the change in the application and then you can pick the infrastructure that makes sense based on your use case next slide so i want to spend just a quick moment trying to give you a couple analogies these are crude high level

19. 7:24

    analogies but still i think they're important if you look at the creation of the computer industry what was a really key innovation there was microsoft windows not everybody knows this right but i just want to point out why this is you know a pattern that has become true tried and true and in technology space developers built applications for windows and computer manufacturers made sure that it supported windows

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    and in that way the developers learned one ecosystem and they got all of the technologies and at the technology layer it allowed the technology vendors to compete exclusively at their layer right a lot of these companies didn't go into the market and say i want to build a better financial application they just said i want to build a faster better computer and having this common layer in the middle

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    made any application that work with that common layer work in the technology so it's a virtuous circle it helps all sides it helps the developers it helps the users they have a common interface it helps the vendors in the space because it gives them focus and purpose and they compete at the right layer and we saw the same thing happen with databases in java something people don't talk a lot about is jdbc and you know people are aware of sql and

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    its value but maybe not in the same context so when you write a java application you're not building it for the database per se you're building it for jdbc and jdbc is the interface into the underlying database and it did the exact same thing that the microsoft operating system did for computers there are hundreds of database vendors and if they support a jdbc driver your java java application can work against

23. 8:59

    that database with minimal or no changes right so this portability story this abstraction out from this very quickly evolving growing and improving infrastructural layer is a critical component to the success of these technology markets and damil is that same abstraction and language that you have into these growing enterprise blockchain ecosystems so if you want to pick daniel and build an application in daimle you will have full portability across

24. 9:29

    any demo any ledger that supports the daml ledger drivers and in the future you will also have perfect interoperability across anyone else using demo on the demo ledger drivers completely independent of the infrastructure that they've chosen next slide so you know what i want to point out is that there's really nothing positioned like demo in the blockchain space today and i've got a couple more analogies because i think it helps people understand a little bit

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    more of how we're positioned the web needed a really great language for building websites you know javascript you know some people love it hate it but you know unequivocally it had its position and it helped make the web what it is today connected applications applications that collaborate need a language like damol to make that possible lots of benefits there which we can get into another time but primarily demo is the language if you want to build this type of application

26. 10:21

    databases needed this interface like sql and jdbc blockchains need the demo ledger drivers it does the same job it does the same purpose gives you all the value that i discussed in the previous slide and we are bringing to market something that we've been working on for a long time and it's a critical component of what we're building which is a protocol the web needed http to share data across different entities in the system connected applications need the

27. 10:45

    daml canton protocol to share state again across any type of infrastructure that's running demo in the demolition driver next step alright next like this and if that wasn't enough we've also built a sas service that allows you to deploy your demo application in seconds so if you go back to your experimentation lifecycle and you're thinking about it this allows you to pick up demo learn it in a couple days build your first application in a couple days

28. 11:14

    and deploy it in seconds without having to spend one moment building any infrastructure into your solution your application that means you can engage your stakeholders right away you can have something in production right away while you experiment learn test explore what type of permanent long-term blockchain infrastructure you want so we really cover the full life cycle um you know education training learning open source language top to bottom instantaneous deployment production environment project dabble

29. 11:45

    and then a suite of enterprise blockchains that you can choose from for your target infrastructure if that's the direction that you want to go down next time um the benefits will be super quick uh we can go through them really quick touch on a bunch of them next slide um it allows you to do rapid innovation in that same three to six months you may have built ten examples um it really is that fast i

30. 12:11

    mean demo applications are consistently ten percent the code of their alternatives uh plus we have all this tooling that makes you more productive we give you uh uis that come out of the box all sorts of frameworks and like integration components etc etc so we give you tons of tooling to make you highly productive out of the box next slide once you launch them into project dabble they are in production those are real applications they are authenticated top

31. 12:36

    to bottom login flows uh hadr backup resiliency auto scaling everything that you need from an application so once you've deployed that app it may have only taken you a couple days to get it up and running you can instantly start sharing a live url with anyone that wants to interact with it and they can start to interact live with a with a real application give feedback within days of when you started to write some

32. 13:00

    code as opposed to having to wait six months and putting the majority of your effort into something that they that the user will never even see or interact with excellent and you know one of these really nice implicit benefits of this is that as a as a company or as a developer you've taken a focused approach you've spent the entirety of your time thinking about the application of your users you've spent zero time thinking about how to run the infrastructure

33. 13:24

    you get lots of learning from that you really and again where it matters you know at the user level excellent and you know like i started with our primary goal in all of this is to give you the user the customer and your users leverage and optionality so you know the value of something like portability is you may choose blockchain a to start with but for whatever reason blockchain a continues down design path a

34. 13:56

    and it doesn't work for the way that your application is evolving and you want to move to blockchain b if you don't have portability in that scenario you not only have to start from scratch if you have to go to b but you have to somehow migrate all that data and all those users over there it can be extremely difficult and that can be really limiting to what you're capable of doing in your system and you know we see this happen like in a

35. 14:19

    lot of the public blockchains you see really aggressive nasty forking lots of arguing with everybody and this will happen for anybody that gets locked into their blockchain and wants to try to take it in a different direction and keep in mind you're not building us you know this single controller of an entire network type thing some of your stakeholders will have different needs as they move forward but they still want to interact with you so how do you start to build this

36. 14:43

    network of networks where people have sovereignty over the decision making of the infrastructure that they want while still having the connectivity to all the other users in the network that that to us is the sweet spot and that's what we're trying to solve for uh next slide and the next steps are really simple so go forward uh uh tamil is open source under the apache 2 license so everything that you need to build an

37. 15:06

    application top to bottom is free and open source today you can also go to demo.com and learn and we have lots of online tutorials online ids lots of tools to get you started we are consistently told that our documentation is fantastic uh we've made we've made huge investments in that over time next time anything that you build in uh damo you can deploy to dabble again you can start for free there there's some high threshold whereby we start to ask people to pay but up until that point uh it's free and clear for you to

38. 15:37

    experiment and play around next slide and when you get there you'll see that you will have been like massively successful in a very short period of time and you will invariably want to know more and again our job is to position ourselves to help you find and make the right decisions within the space we have every type of service that you might need or want to help you take the next step in your journey think about how to go forward forward

39. 16:02

    we do everything from code review to bootstrapping to connecting you to our demo certified partners who could build really big production applications for you um you know damil is currently uh going to become the uh the language of the entire nation of australia's stock market so if you look at some of the projects that we're working on they are they're huge they're massive and they're going to be around for a long time to

40. 16:28

    come so we have not just experimentation and poc experience but we have years of enterprise build at national regulated infrastructure experience so just to make it really clear that is a demo application will run every stock in australia it'll run on vmware blockchain so there's there's lots that we can talk to everybody about and help them in their journey uh but remember to try to start with something that gives you leverage at the end point okay um

41. 16:59

    that's it thank you very much i think i did okay for time and i would say first of all we are bringing now the poll results that i would like you to uh to comment and also we do have a great number of questions already coming in actually i'm afraid we won't make it we will not make it in the five minutes available so uh the question that was is what is your experience with blockchain so far and 50 have no uh no experience and the next is

42. 17:34

    poc complete but no onward production plans so it looks like that there is a sort of a hold in in the execution of blockchain projects what will be your comment looking at the results um i think that this is about what i anticipated when i set out to do this this deck um you know the two things the none i mean getting securing this type of budget for an experiment where you can't yet articulate the value to the to the company

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    can be very difficult to do um and so again that's why we thought that if we could build this whole damn to dabble experience someone in their weekend might be able to build an example and show it to someone in their internal organization and say you know doesn't this look compelling do you want to do more it might be able to get a smaller budget to move forward yeah so we wanted to make the space significantly more approachable i think the abandoned but failed thing i actually expected that to be a little

44. 18:26

    bit higher of the non proportion just based on what what i what i've seen and i know of in the space um again very much like uh you know stuck in the weeds and not necessarily able to articulate why a blockchain makes something better for the use case that they're going after um and so that i expected that number to be a little bit higher but it's great to see these other two numbers at the end here about um well i guess just the one at the end about moving to production poc

45. 18:58

    but no onward production plans those two in the middle i guess are kind of uh the same in the certain sense but that last one is good to see it's a good number yeah yeah yeah actually perhaps you know it also depends on how the success of these projects is measured because i think that by virtue of at least in running and implementing and testing that's already a big i would say accomplishment you know so people

46. 19:22

    start getting acquainted okay now let's get into the uh the question uh quite just as many here so let's see actually that i think we have space for one or two uh if you can um the first one here is how does demo relate to smart contracts yeah so demo is a language for building smart contracts so you know you can think of it as an alternative to uh chain code for fabric or an alternative to the the stripped down kotlin variant in corda or an alternative to solidity

47. 19:54

    for ethereum or the enterprise ethereum uh uh options the difference is all three of those languages are baked into the ledger so if you if you want to build an application for one of those systems the semantics of the ledger seep deep into your application and you're locked in demo is both the language and the abstraction layer so if you write a demo application you can run it against a sql database

48. 20:19

    like like you would any normal programming language and there are lots of good reasons why one would do that and then that same application line for line exactly the same code you could run against something like vmware blockchain or you could run it against something like like you know we've got all sorts of different enterprise blockchains that we're rolling out so you can go to the website and get the full list but um but i think that that's really important it brings you optionality you've built

49. 20:42

    something you can run it in the right infrastructure for what you need but it is it is a smart contract language plus all sorts of other tools okay um so i would say it's time for one more question here let me pick this one here it says it's coming from uh hi eric may i know the procedure for from demo to get demo apps before we develop the right blockchain system yeah absolutely so you can go to tamil.com and the sdk distribution so the development kit is there and it's available for

50. 21:11

    anybody to download for you to experiment with it it's it's in get it's free and open source under an apache 2 licenses demo.com is something that you can go to and you can just use it right now for free same thing with projectable.com you can log in create an account everything is free we won't even ask for a credit card for you to get started so you can experiment with both things completely free and clear completely self-service and reach out to us at any time as you get a little bit further into the process

51. 21:42

    and need a hand needed help and might be willing to pay for some some enterprise services or enterprise tooling so please feel free to get started anytime thank you very much okay there's people asking how they can get in contact with you so definitely you know we can we are happy to set up the contact for you with eric and the reason why also we are insisting on you to uh you know register on the uh linkedin group is because that is the best place to

52. 22:08

    continue the conversation and also there's plenty of questions that are there uh unfortunately they are not answered but uh i would appreciate eric if you and your team could spend time and first of all those who ask questions and they have not been answered if you can please post those same questions on the linkedin group and we will make sure that eric and his team will answer those questions so that

53. 22:31

    we have another environment of course you know those questions that can be answered uh that would be great to keep the momentum and also allowing you to set a direct connection with eric and demo uh to eventually you know find business opportunities together that is actually what we are happy to happen so thank you eric for your time today thank you thank you everybody for attending okay