Hi, I'm John Wolpert, I'm the Seeker of Awesomeness for ConsenSys labs here in
Washington DC. ConsenSys is a company that operates in many countries where the
largest blockchain company right now in the world by many accounts, and one of the
fastest growing software companies in the world, and by many accounts, the largest
blockchain company in the world. We help businesses start up on the new Internet of
transactions on the blockchain. In particular, on Ethereum. So, I'm here in DC with
team looking for new ventures to get behind, to help bootstrap, and to get going
faster. We are a new venture development lab. My experience of the evolution of
blockchain, which I think is pretty common, was a number of years ago hearing about
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and thinking that was novel and interesting. But, I was
at IBM at the time working on the Watson team. That was artificial intelligence and
pretty interesting onto itself, so I didn't pay a lot of attention. Then, a few
years later, my boss met one of my favorite people at IBM who's now the head of IBM
Blockchain, Jerry Cuomo, called me up and he said, "Hey Louis, it's Clark," and I
said, "What do you want Jerry?" He said, "Well, there's this thing called
blockchain. We don't know a lot about it, but there's gold in those hills, go out
and find it." I said, "Well, give me a ship and crew, and I'll go investigate." He
said, "Well, I got a canoe, two dogs, and a musket." I said, "Well, okay." We got
lucky. It turned out that blockchain was, we got halfway across the Mississippi,
looked over our shoulders, and found that there was a wagon train behind us, and
now we're running a boomtown. There was definitely, they're there. So, we got
lucky, and that's how I stumbled into blockchain. Every use case I've seen in
industry to date since 2015 that tried to do something with blockchain, that said,
"Hey, let's do this on blockchain," has almost every single one of them has proven
why it doesn't need blockchain. Everyone that says, "Hey, let me look at this
problem differently," through the lens of immutability, of decentralization, of a
number of nuanced ideas that are actually packed up into primarily public
blockchain technology, especially around token economics, and what you can do with
this emergent notion of being able to not just gamify human interaction.
Gamification is just keeping track of scores, but then turning that into an
economic set of decisions, right. I'm going to vote, I'm going to bet that this
thing, that this piece, that this fact is true. Well, if the consensus is that
that's false, I just lost. Not just a point but real economic value in some way
either in money, real money, or some kind of other value, many voting points, or
something else. So, it's applying this notion of powerful social-. Public
blockchain is effectively a high precision instrument for seeing problems
differently, and then instrumenting them in ways that would have been way too
expensive and difficult to do if we had the old rails only, right? We needed a new
railway to run these kinds of transactions, one that's more nimble, one that's more
precocious, more always available. Once you have that kind of new rails, you have
an infrastructure that can allow you to just do things completely differently.