Binance Meet-up: Interview with CEO Gilles Fedak
On Tuesday 24th of January, Binance organized a meet-up at the iExec HQ in Lyon. Binance also broadcast a livestreamed interview with iExec CEO Gilles Fedak. This interview was an opportunity for Gilles to present the iExec project’s past, present, and future. The livestream racked up 24000 views on Binance’s native streaming platform! The original stream was in French, but you find the full transcript in English under the video.
H: Hi everyone, welcome to this webinar Binance Live. I’m Hamid, Head of Marketing at Binance France, we have the great pleasure to have Gilles Fedak, CEO of iExec. Can I let you introduce yourself?
G: Thank you Hamid, believe me the pleasure is shared. All the team was thrilled to share these events today and tomorrow with Binance in Lyon. So I’m Gilles Fedak, CEO and co-founder of iExec with Haiwu He. I used to be a researcher at the INRIA in computer science, specifically at the ENS in Lyon, France, where iExec is now based.
H: Thank you, indeed we are co-organizing a meet-up in Lyon tomorrow ending with a dinner with members of the community. The goal of our webinar is to know a little more about iExec, feel free to ask questions in the comments.
(Hamid reads the legal disclaimer regarding trading)
H: The first question is probably our most important, what is iExec?
G: iExec is two things. One the one hand, it’s a marketplace for computing resources where you can monetize the usage of your apps, datasets and computing power. On the other, we have the platform where developers can build web3 apps, preserving the ownership and confidentiality of the resources (apps and data). When requesters use your data, they will never have access to it thanks to end-to-end encryption technology. This is one of the specificities of iExec.
H: Could you give us an example of web3 projects using iExec?
G: I can give the example of a project from Germany named KnowledgeX, a marketplace for machine learning, based on the notion of data confidentiality and ownership. Imagine your company wants its data to be analyzed by others through algorithms. Of course, you don’t want them to access your data, and they don’t want you to copy their algorithm. It is the marketplace’s role to ensure that the data analysis does not infringe on data privacy on one side, or algorithm ownership on the other.
H: Alright, that was very clear. Second question, how was iExec born, and how did this project start?
G: Well I started as a researcher in distributed systems so I have 15 years of experience in this. I got really interested in how we use multiple computers on the internet to compute applications on a large scale, in particular through parallel computing.
I discovered the Ethereum Blockchain in 2015 when the whitepaper got released, and found it very interesting because it solved many technical issues around trust. Blockchain was this great tool to register proof that someone saying he solved a task actually did.
As for the iExec project, the idea was to have this big distributed cloud where people would connect their machine and make money by lending their computing power. This was in 2015.
Since then the project has significantly evolved. In April 2017 we launched an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) — which was quite early as far as ICOs go, being the world’s 5th biggest at the time. Then from 2017 up to 2021, we delivered on the whitepaper. For those unfamiliar with these terms, an ICO is when we release a token, in our case the RLC, we sell it to investors, and write a whitepaper specifying what the project will deliver if the tokens sell.
I would say that the first 3 years were dedicated to delivering the tech infrastructure outlined in the roadmap. We went quicker than we said, by doing it in 3 years rather than 4, and further too, we included technologies that didn’t exist in 2017 such as confidential computing.
H: Alright. Third question: what are the different use cases for iExec?
G: You can monetize resources, such as datasets, applications, computing power. And preserve ownership and confidentiality of these assets.
For example, a current use case: in Web3 one problem is that when you have a protocol, the only information you have on your users is their public wallet address. That’s an issue when you want to do marketing, such as sending an email. As a user, you certainly don’t want to give your personal information to the protocol, because if your personal info associated with your public wallet leaks, that becomes a huge problem — everybody wants to avoid that. What we do is to allow the protocol to be able to send emails without ever accessing the email address. We have many use cases like this in Web3 marketing, in compliance, for DeFi.
H: Do you confirm that there are Web3 start-ups but also larger companies interested in this type of tech?
G: Absolutely. We can class companies we work with into 3 types. We have Web3 startups that have challenges with off-chain data; then we have intermediate traditional companies interested in what web3 solutions can bring for them. And then we have larger companies, for instance, we are currently helping a larger company with the treatment of their biometric data. This type of data is highly sensitive. The CNIL (French data compliance authority) demands from companies to have full consent from users on their biometric data.
H: This reminds me of what Lastpass is doing, the password storage plugin. I believe they need to communicate the passwords to the websites which in your case can be avoided by only giving access to the use.
G: That’s exactly what we do. Our big difference is that iExec never transfers any data — we only enable its use. So my email address is mine and will never be given to anyone, I only give permission for its use. That traditional popup asking for permission for cookies or emails will belong to the past. Now I give permission for the use: for instance I can say “OK I live in France, I’m interested in DeFi, you can send me emails and maybe I’ll even ask for compensation for accepting these terms”.
H: Very interesting. By the way, we currently have 12 300 people and counting listening live! We have BinanceB6gD saying “the product is so useful for real!”, and another listener asking “so where is the data stored”?
G: Great question. Data can be stored wherever because it is encrypted. This magic is made possible thanks to a technology called “confidential computing”, built by microprocessor manufacturers, in particular Intel, with Intel SGX. It’s the equivalent of a Ledger, for those who have a wallet, what we call a “secured element”. Data is encrypted at all times even during processing.
Now the issue with confidential computing is that it is still very much confidential (laughs), people don’t know about the technology much yet. At iExec, one of our strengths was to identify it quite quickly and leverage it for our blockchain infrastructure in an easy way for developers.
H: Many questions regarding the token, what is the use of the RLC token?
G: The RLC token is the only way to pay on the iExec marketplace. So if you want to rent your machine you can only get paid in RLC.
H: So could you define it as an exchange currency?
G: That’s exactly what it is, an exchange currency on the marketplace.
H: How can we use iExec today? How does it work for a start-up?
G: If you are a Web3 startup in NFT for example, here is a use case: you have an NFT that does belong to one owner but the NFT translates to a file that is available to everyone. So sure, you’re the owner but everyone can copy the file — which is problematic. We’re here to give you the tools to make sure that only the owner can access the file and if he sells the NFT, he loses access to that file and is transferred to the new owner. Very useful for artists or content creators, if you’re a startup that wants to guild art galleries.
One last thing, you can use iExec even when you are not a developer. We’re launching a beta called the public iExec “Worker Pool”. So you join the Worker Pool with your computer via a Utility NFT for access, and if your computing power is used, you will be compensated.
H: New questions incoming: Aladdin69 asks “is your solution available on Ethereum only?”
G: For the moment we address all the EVM-like blockchains. So first we have our own Ethereum blockchain, to onboard our users and developers, and then we support Polygon and Ethereum Mainnet. We are looking into other chains.
H: What is your business model?
G: We have 2 business models: One aiming enterprises, where we get euros in a very traditional way. Right now we have clients in the traditional industry, one is looking to have a secured notebook, and another one is CETIM, a laboratory with whom we work on data governance.
The second business model that we are setting up is around our marketplace, if you are a developer and use resources you will be billed, not unlike the cloud business.
H: What is the latest news regarding iExec? What are the next milestones in the roadmap?
G: In recent news, so there is the worker pool I mentioned. Also we have a partnership with an incubator in Lyon to launch the first Web3 incubator in the city, we actually have a Demo Day tomorrow to present the projects currently being developed.
As for what’s next, we have a fairly comprehensive roadmap in 2023: we are working on web3 marketing, a project regarding web3 content creators, projects around DeFi, around compliance. We have around 5 application ranges that we are addressing, coming in April, then in July and the rest in December.
H: You were mentioning incubators, a user asked “are you financing crypto projects?”
G: We do. We have what we call the “Developer Rewards Program” with 2 types of aid: we have bounties that are for mini projects, and usually represent a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, rarely more, you build something with iExec and receive the money quickly after. Then we have the Grants, which can go up to $100 000, obviously for bigger projects with bigger traction.
So of course, if you have crypto projects, please come and talk to us. We will be thrilled to help you start one way or another.
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Thanks for reading!
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