Community Conversations: Behind the Scenes with Wayne Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Spruce Systems

Hello everyone and welcome to the third installment of our new interview series! As the community manager for TQ Tezos, I am on a journey to interview builders, creatives, and community members from around the Tezos ecosystem. Our guest this week is Wayne Chang, Co-Founder and CEO of Spruce Systems.

Spruce builds the most secure and convenient open source tools for developers to share authentic data. Developers choose Spruce to integrate bank statements, medical records, and proprietary datasets.

Spruce recently unveiled the upcoming launch of Tezos Profiles (TZP). TZP is a web application that helps users regain control of their digital identity for use across platforms. It allows users to create portable verified profiles by demonstrating control over their public social media and by self-attesting information. These verified profiles are then linked to Tezos accounts, allowing any platform to resolve and establish trusted information to mitigate identity fraud.

Check out the interview below!

—

What initially got you interested in blockchain technology?

Well, I got some exposure to Bitcoin back around 2013–2014 when I was doing freelance developer work. After reading more about it — it reminded me of the sci-fi authors that I love to read. I was like, ‘wow, they were right,’ and we’re moving to this digital cash system. The idea that it would empower end users and individuals was really appealing to me.

You mentioned sci-fi — is there anything specific that really makes blockchain seem sci-fi to you? What do you find most fascinating about blockchain technology?

In some of Neal Stephenson’s writings, the government is reduced to the size of a small American state or something. The idea that there’s still an underlying system that would enable utilities, services, and commerce is really fascinating. Blockchain is not a bad explanation for how such a system would work.

Let’s dig deeper, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain as opposed to a centralized database?

I think one of my favorite characterizations of this is “resiliency by default” or just fault tolerance as the expected mode of operation. When you’re designing a lot of systems, you’re always thinking about what’s the happy case; blockchain developers are always thinking about what could go wrong. I think it was Bruce Schneier who wrote that engineers already have a tough job, but security could be even harder — not many civil engineers have to think about a bridge dealing with malicious wind that blows at just the right resonance to topple it. That’s what blockchain is facing. I think there are some excellent government use cases as well. Even if one of the control centers is taken out the system can persist.

Touching on interoperability — when it comes to mixing databases, going from platform to platform, etc. — do you see blockchain having an advantage in that realm as well?

I don’t think blockchain is going to replace Postgres or SQL databases in the short-medium term. However, I think that when you start looking at something like DNS, which itself already has a level of resiliency, decentralization, and a lot of governance by community — if you can add more guarantees that the system will stay up and running, even if an attacker were able to take down a part, then I think that would be a good thing. We hear a lot about this narrative that a lot of the web technologies we rely on were invented at places like the IETF and IANA — old school internet. They were invented in a time when we didn’t have the same kind of attack models and where we didn’t have to worry about these sophisticated adversaries trying to break everything. BGP routing is a great example of that breakage happening. It’s hard to fault anyone who was designing when the context was that we only had trusted universities and government entities using it and that they all were going to play nice together. As we opened that system up, there were some clearly broken aspects just because the initial requirements weren’t able to foresee this new landscape.

Do you think that blockchain technology and blockchain ecosystems are going to be able to evolve at a faster pace than the technologies that most people are using right now? Perhaps with regards to quantum computing?

Just because there’s less incumbent technology built on top and less restrictions with blockchain tech, I think that we’ve seen a much faster pace. I think that the fact that you can also evolve protocols is something that we haven’t really seen anywhere else. Then to your point about solving problems — I don’t know if blockchain will be the industry or sector to solve quantum computing specifically. However, I think that it’s kind of evident that, without the investment into blockchains that people have been making, in terms of engineering hours and the amount of talent in the ecosystem, the whole area of zero knowledge proofs would not be where it is today and would not have the level of interest that it does.

What brought you to Tezos?

A few reasons. I’m a little bit of a functional programming geek at heart. I really like the idea that code is data and I have dabbled in a bunch of functional programming languages and shipped some. I have really grown an appreciation for how type systems can help you write code with fewer defects. It just felt like the right approach to finding high assurance use cases for financial sectors, infrastructure, etc. Whenever you have to deal with high stakes, why not spend a lot of effort to check everything that could go wrong beforehand and make that process a lot faster? Using some of the same tech from the automotive industry to figure out formal verifications for specific properties and software — I really like that approach.

Also, the ecosystem had the expertise, with people actually excited and willing to help us come up with some formal proofs for specific properties and software. The Tezos project had a history of being alive and existing and having stakes in attacks since I think 2017. That was a pretty big vote of confidence, seeing that it’s been around for a while and there have been people who tried to break it down and failed; that’s what you always want to see if you’re trying to evaluate the security. The third reason is the idea that we could upgrade the protocol to support things like decentralized identity at the base level.

The ecosystem has grown since we first got involved, but it still feels like everyone’s very approachable and haven’t formed any kind of standoffish cliques — which can be difficult to navigate in other ecosystems.

You mentioned decentralized identity there. Could you tell us more about the technology that you are building on Tezos?

So, we’re working on the idea that people can own their own data and their own identifiers. What if your favorite email provider decided to revoke your email? How much would that cost you? How much access would you lose to platforms, etc.? Is there away that you could have more ownership over your identifier? These are the questions we’re exploring in this ecosystem of decentralized identity. We want to give individuals real control over their data and presence online. We’re seeing many more people take an interest in that these days. It’s really aligned with a lot of the regulations coming out with respect to data privacy. The EU is, I think, very supportive of efforts in self-sovereign identity. I think that we’re also gonna see what happens in the US, in terms of interoperability requirements for large tech companies and in terms of more privacy laws getting rolled out like what we saw in California.

So, what is the timeline looking like for what you’re making? What’s coming up in the near future?

Yeah, so one thing that we’re excited about is Tezos Profiles and it uses a lot of our technology, including DIDKit which is our rust library and that can handle decentralized identity pretty well. The goal is to establish public profiles for people to combat things like creator fraud in NFT markets and other interactions. We start with creators and people who have fraud problems right now. However, what if you’re a business and you need to receive payments? We’re going to be looking to address that as well.

How does this compare to other decentralized identity projects?

We take a pretty open source approach with things that are standards-based. If these tools that we’re building are going to end up helping people with critical parts of their lives, or businesses prove important things about the business, then it’s really important to demonstrate that we’re following international standards and establish trust.

What do you see in the future of decentralized blockchain ecosystem adoption? How big do you think something like Tezos can become in terms of global finance or even just the daily lives of people?

In terms of overall blockchain use, a lot of the excitement is in issues of provenance. I can speak specifically to verifiable credentials — that’s a global data standard. There’s a lot of interest from governments and enterprises in using it to solve real business problems by being able to package data in a way that anyone can verify as authentic. This drives what some are calling the data supply chain, where information is tracked and traced just like how you would in a normal supply chain, but in a way that could possibly give users control over their own pieces of it. We’re already seeing adoption and experimentation with the US federal government, with the Canadian government, and many Asian countries, including South Korea, that are all looking at decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials and their place for it.

Then, oftentimes, a public blockchain will be a dependency if you want to give users an option to manage their decentralized identifiers in a way that is censorship resistant, is globally available, and has some guarantees around consistency. So I see that being an important part of bridging things. I think that, in general, tokenization is an extremely powerful concept. Tokenization creates a digital representation of something non-fungible. It could be anything from a shipping container, to voting rights, or anything else you could imagine. But the rub is really in the token engineering aspect of it. If you have one token that presumably represents a bar of gold, and there’s poor governance behind it, then, you know, that’s gonna fall apart. But if you think through the whole system, not just the engineering of the smart contracts, but also what are the governance structures, what are the legal contracts that you need to make this possible, etc. — I think that’s huge potential.

The idea of being able to import, like a library, real use of currency is just enormously powerful and really feeds that software is eating the world narrative. That is what I’m betting will be the end state. I think that there are a bunch of adjacent technologies, such as decentralized identity, that help us get there. There are a bunch of things we have to solve around privacy, around compliance, around how we have standardized, interoperable digital assets that work in regulated markets. I think the idea of tokenization is powerful.

What do you think of Tezos’ governance mechanism, is it an underappreciated aspect of the network?

Yeah, I really like that Bakers (validators) can vote on what the next protocol is going to be. It gives direct control to the people. I think that if you are considering building on something, then the idea that there’s a straightforward way for you to get involved in the decision making of where that core dependency is going to go is pretty exciting. Usually it’s tough knowing who really controls a decentralized network — is it the developers who are making recommendations and changes that may or may not have political implications or power-dynamic implications? How do you get involved with that governance? Who really holds power in those decision making sessions? That’s an open question. Whereas if you’re a Baker, it’s clear that you hold the power on Tezos.

Can you tell me more about what you like about the Tezos vision and community in comparison to maybe other projects?

Most of the people that I’ve met here are just really qualified engineers; that’s been great, because they will all balk at, you know, committing keys to GitHub or something, or using something the wrong way. I think that’s a really good culture we’d like to see continue.

What is the future for Tezos?

It’s been really exciting seeing the transactions growing month over month. You can go to Baking Bad and check it out yourself in terms of the smart contract calls. There’s also been this significant critique about the power usage with proof of work and regardless of your thoughts on if that’s a valid argument to begin with, Tezos didn’t have to deal with that at all because we already had a proof of stake system from day one. So, I think that, just seeing that adoption trend line, there are a lot of interesting and meaningful projects spawning committed teams and that’s what I like to see in ecosystems. If working in this sector has taught me anything, it’s that capital is not the constraining factor for building really good products; it’s really about having committed teams that are able to listen to the users and have a high bar of quality in terms of what kind of products they’re satisfied with putting out into the world. That’s a really positive indicator for me, and it’s kind of reflected in the recent activity.

Are you seeing more interest from other developers when it comes to wanting to come into the Tezos ecosystem?

Yeah, definitely. I’ve seen a lot of folks just starting to use SmartPy or some of the Ligo versions to deploy their smart contracts — especially because we’ve seen some projects like OpenMinter and now people are just building their own and NFT marketplaces without asking, you know, without being gated by any intermediary, so I think that’s really exciting to see it start taking off. Developer tooling continues to improve and the experience is getting better.

Last but not least — if you had any message to pass on to the general Tezos community, what would that message be?

Write more documentation, please. It’s so difficult to document things — I’d say harder than programming in many instances. But it’s so necessary to get a lot of the great ideas that are in this ecosystem out there and accessible to people. I think if you’re writing smart contracts and deploying them on Tezos, then you’re probably underestimating how much that you’ve learned and overcome along the way. You know, you’re deploying in smart contract language that is geared for formal verification and there are certain techniques to be able to write that way pretty well. You learn a bunch about how the staking system works, etc. So, anytime that you do learn something, or how to use something, please write documentation about it or post about it. I think that would really help the knowledge reach the community a lot faster.

And do you think this applies to community members — even ones that don’t necessarily do a lot of smart contract work or don’t have that much programming experience?

Yeah, I think that just posting about your journey and what could be improved would be good. The developers I’ve met in this ecosystem are really open to feedback. They read things even by non-technical community members. It’s really great.

Thank you so much for the interview Wayne!