Blockchain Soundbites #3

Blockchain Soundbites is a regular digest picking out some interesting quotes from leaders in the blockchain space and presenting them in an easily consumable format. The newsletter includes some added commentary to the illustrations I share on Twitter.

This edition features soundbites from the following leaders in the blockchain industry:

• John Wolpert — Head of Web3Studio, ConsenSys
• Barry Silbert — Founder & CEO, Digital Currency Group
• Eric Piscini — CEO, Citizen’s Reserve
• Adrian Lee — Senior Research Director, Gartner
• Akhila Raju & Cem Özer — Ethereum Protocol Engineer & Applied Research Engineer, PegaSys

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John Wolpert

• John Wolpert is an interesting character who is well known in the blockchain space. He served as the global product executive for IBM Blockchain and was co-founder of Hyperledger, before joining ConsenSys in 2017 as head of their Web3Studio.
• John is a big advocate of the Ethereum mainnet for businesses and in a recent conversation with Paul Brody, head of blockchain at EY, he spoke about how in 2015 his whole team at IBM were really interested in Ethereum, but because of its inability to provide privacy and confidentiality, IBM decided to build their own solution from scratch, which became HyperLedger Fabric.
• With all of the new tools, patterns, and protocols — from on-demand enterprise sidechains and “Layer 2” protocols to movements like OpenLaw and Chainlink — that make deep interoperability between networks practical, scalable, and secure, John thinks it is only a matter of time before Ethereum will be the go-to choice for enterprises wanting to transact on a public blockchain.

Check out the video here.

Barry Silbert

• Barry Silbert is the Founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group, who build, support and invest in companies in the crypto space.
• In a wide ranging interview with Real Vision’s Raoul Pal, he spoke of the viability and volatility of cryptocurrencies, bitcoin vs gold, as well as his investments including the only digital currencies he holds which are Bitcoin, MANA, Ethereum Classic, ZCash, and Horizon.
• He also spoke of Decentraland, which is a metaverse that he is betting people will be spending a lot of time in in the near future!

Check out Barry’s interview here.

Eric Piscini

• Eric Piscini is a Godfather of the enterprise blockchain space. He was one of 3 partners that founded the blockchain practice within Deloitte in 2012, which when he left 6 years later employed 1,200 worldwide and was generating $50 million in revenue.
• Eric thinks in the long run we are going to see significant disruption in the business world because of blockchain technology, especially in transaction platforms such as supply chain, capital markets and payments.
• There are two ways this can be done from a blockchain perspective: centralised business models with decentralised technology, or decentralised business models with decentralised technology.
• When Eric used to talk to different Deloitte customers about blockchain, there were 3 different profiles he would encounter — all clients of the technology but with very different agendas:

Check out the interview with Anthony Pompliano here.

Adrian Lee

• Gartner has come out with some interesting predictions for the enterprise blockchain space which should make any CEO/CIO nervous if they have already invested heavily in a private or permissioned blockchain solution, as they are predicting that 90% of the platforms today will be replaced within the next 2 years.
• In a recent article Gartner spoke of the rapid evolution of the blockchain platform market and forecast that by 2025, the business value added by blockchain will grow to slightly more than $176 billion, then surge to exceed $3.1 trillion by 2030.

Check out the comments from Adrian Lee here.

Akhila Raju & Cem Özer

• Akhila and Cem are engineers at PegaSys who are building an Ethereum 2.0 implementation.
• In a recent presentation, they went through the issues with Ethereum 1.0, why Ethereum 2.0 is needed, and how Ethereum 2.0 will work. Below are some key Ethereum 2.0 definitions they provided in their presentation:

Check out the short presentation here.