This week we welcomed Henrik Hjelte of Chromia into the dbcrypto community Telegram chat to speak with the crypto-community.
Chromia are fast approaching their IEO with KuCoin on May 28th, so we thought this would be a great time to chat with the project’s CEO.
AMA Question Highlights
Henrik, thanks for being here, can you introduce yourself and give us some background on your journey in blockchain? — Daniel from dbcrypto
Hello, very happy to be here. I’m Henrik Hjelte (pronounced something like yell-tea), CEO and a co-founder of ChromaWay and now Chromia.
My journey looks like this….
I studied computer-science at university, but soon thought I knew all about it and switched to economics, business administration, philosophy etc. After exams, I soon got a job as a Financial Software Consultant. I got bored with the bad tech used, and instead started a Web 2.0 startup.
We used a weird programming language called Common-Lisp, and it was hard to hire people, but I found a great dev in Ukraine, Alex.
The web-startup failed, but one day Alex approached me and explained that I should take a look at Bitcoin.
Alex had come up with a way to add tokens to Bitcoin and formed an open-source project around it. — Henrik Hjelte
Daniel
Right, because Alex was working on coloured-coins in 2012, from memory.
Henrik
Yeah, the colored-coins project was started at 2012 and continued to 2014 when it basically split up into different projects/companies.
I started to work as a developer in 2013, but then myself, Alex and Or started ChromaWay in 2014 to commercialize this new “Bitcoin 2.0” thing (now started to be called blockchain).
Eventually myself, Alex Mizrahi, Or Perelman and Iddo Bentov (now left) started at the same time we got a BANK as a customer. At the time, super cool. A BANK. Someone from REAL FINANCE (before IBM, before R3).
So we did what is now called a “Stablecoin”. A Bank in Estonia (LHV) issued Euro-tokens, we had a decentralized phone app for peer-to-peer payments and plans to commercialize as payments.
But: the bank found commercial issues with releasing it. And after that we only got one more serious customer, so we went back to do enterprise development, thinking about the right way to do blockchain for enterprises.
One thing we learned from the payment solution was that we need proper indexing on blockchain data to retrieve info, so we saved a copy of the blockchain in a database.
And the idea slowly grew: Why don’t we completely integrate the database with transaction mechanisms, and make the database into a complete blockchain? That was the start of Postchain, a relational blockchain.
Telegram user bradleytownsend
It’s one of the first things that we see when we’re introduced to Chromia, could you explain the ‘relational blockchain’ concept to us?
Henrik
In short: combining a blockchain (all the security properties) with a relational database (SQL database in normal speak).
Chromia is a PUBLIC blockchain based on this idea, the relational blockchain. It means it is as easy to code as SQL (but we use a new, better language Rell). Facebook was built with a relational database (mySQL).
I’d say 99.95% of all complex applications use a Relational Database. The whole company Oracle is built around it.
Daniel
I’d like to talk about what you are doing now then…
Is your focus essentially purely on gaming / blockchain-enabled dApps? If so, do you think that your scope and target market is too narrow?
We know that the gaming industry is massive, yet it will take significant time and effort to reach meaningful adoption of blockchain-based games.
Henrik
Gaming is good because it needs lots of fast transactions, and we think it is nice to not have to wait for years for enterprises to go live.
For us: we’ve always wanted to work with core blockchain tech, that is where we have our strengths. We became at a time famous for “real-estate”, even a top-10 “real-estate tech” startup globally. But we never felt like a company for a single vertical.
Daniel
You mentioned Rell, this was something I wanted to ask about. What is this ‘Rell’ language? It’s for programming the dApps on Chromia?
Henrik
Rell is a new language for blockchain programming. It is both a “normal” programming language, but also a database programming language like SQL.
SQL does not work well in a public blockchain.
We want security right? So it needs to be deterministic, we can’t use all features of a language not intended for blockchain. We’ve added important security features like Static Typing: bugs can be detected when programs are created rather than when the code is executed.
It is also more compact (up to 7 times fewer code-lines) than SQL. and much more compact than other blockchain languages.
For example: you want to find how many tokens do your top-100 users own, and sort them by number of tokens? In Rell it is a single statement.
A Solidity developer can tell you how many lines it takes for them.
Telegram user LDA_Roc
What apps are you personally most excited to develop on Chromia, Henrik?
Henrik
I really like the idea around Public Applications: applications that users have a say in and control over. Of course new kinds of social media not controlled by large enterprises, for example.
Public sector applications that protect against corruption. Say a land-registry which is transparent and fair. Games are a good kickstarter, but we can do more serious stuff on Chromia.
Daniel
Do you think you are best positioned to lead adoption of blockchain-based gaming apps?
Henrik
What is different with Chromia is that the complete Game Logic can be on-chain. Therefore, you can have provably fair games, and we can make it possible for games to live forever: players can pitch-in and pay for the game hosting. Players can have say in how the game should be changed.
Blockchain gaming is not only about NFT (even though we support that too). But control.
What will you do with your cats when the client is removed from app-stores and the server is closed down? On Chromia the server will not be closed down, ever.
Daniel
How have you designed your protocol to work around network fees?
We can imagine that games will put significant load on-chain with hundreds or thousands of transactions.
Henrik
On network fees: with Chromia, the application itself (at the start the application developer) pays for hosting it. Not the users!
Telegram user cryptoi2020
One concerning thing I saw in the whitepaper is that anyone is able to fork a dApp — do you think that poses some uncomfortable ramifications for some developers who would rather not have their hard worked dApp forked off?
Henrik
You (the developer/entrepreneur) might need to come up with new business models as new technology appears.
A few years ago open-source tech was considered crazy, it will never work to give up the source-code. It is a complex issue, and not everyone will be able to just migrate their wish to control things to blockchain
Daniel
I’ve got a follow-up on your NFT point.
Will you have any scope for interoperability between other blockchains and tokens? This could be important for gaming-based dApps. There are already big international companies looking to build on ETH for example using NFTs.
Henrik
We will look at interoperability solutions, for example we have a bridge to Ethereum for payments designed. But also, there is scope for innovation. Still a large untapped market. Once upon a time Netscape Navigator was number one.
Telegram user Bun2018
I know this is not in relation to Chromia per se... but how is ChromaWay progressing with working with the Australian Government? It’s just really cool to see and hear it in the media a while ago. Quite curious about it, haha.
Henrik
ChromaWay are working with New South Wales Land Registry.
We finished our first project, and will now start a second project.
No guarantee of Chromia, too early to choose technology . But we will have some real enterprise applications on Chromia, definitely.
Telegram user Maclah
Henrik, nice to meet you. Who would you say is the key decision maker when it comes to how funds are distributed?
Also, how would you describe the Chromia team (yourself, Or & Alex) and the primary roles they represent in the company?
Henrik
We make most decisions together, the three co-founders but also involving team and advisors. We have a bit of different roles of course:
Or Perelman, our COO is very active in the crypto community, currently he does a lot of the planning for the IEO.
Alex Mizrahi, our CTO does tech. But he is a general genius, so has lots of good input on all kinds of business.
Myself, well I do a lot of work with team, business development etc.
Telegram user cryptoi2020
Who will be the initial nodes and how will they be chosen?
Henrik
We will be choosing the initial nodes, striving to make good choices, we are aware that this will be analyzed as a factor of the blockchain attractiveness.
Therefore, we need to make wise choices, but the network needs to be bootstrapped this way. Then, it will be migrated to a situation where providers take over control and we have no more say than anyone else.
We need to make good choices on this, otherwise people won’t think it is a good decentralized network. And then we will have no market.
cryptoi2020
Will there be any transparency in the process?
Henrik
To an appropriate level. We need to make initial choices. But we can’t just put up a poll to random people on Telegram for example to choose providers.
Telegram user HHD01
Are you sure that you will be able to deliver the mainnet 1 month after the IEO and will you communicate on that subject?
Henrik
This is software. We can never be sure, and we will not compromise on security.
We have published roadmaps and goals. Sometimes we have changed plans: for example, to focus more on attractive developer tools and documentation.
Sometimes development goes faster than expected, and sometimes slower.
Daniel
My final question, and a bit of a fun one.
As CEO, and in one sentence… what is your mission with Chromia?
Henrik
To provide the best software tools to create a fair world.
Thank you, Henrik for your time and thank you everyone for joining us
— Daniel from dbcryptoThank you all, great!
— Henrik Hjelte
Website
https://www.dbcrypto.io
Twitter
https://www.twitter.com/dalb0013
Telegram
https://www.t.me/dbcryptochat
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/c/dbcrypto
Please note that some questions and or answers may have been edited to account for grammatical errors and appropriate presentation. This summary does not necessarily include all questions asked and answered during the event.
Thank you to the Chromia team for supporting our work and sponsoring this AMA session.
