 On the Ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, Jeff Frick here. We are On the Ground in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center for a special On the Ground presentation. You've heard a lot of stuff about blockchain. Of course, we all know about Bitcoin, but blockchain is really starting to get some traction outside of the context of Bitcoin. And we're seeing a lot of blockchain conferences pop up. This is a little one happening here in San Francisco. We wanted to come up, get a feel for what's going on, share the information with you. So really excited to be joined by our first guest, Bruce Pahn, the founder and CEO of Ascribe. Bruce, welcome. Thank you very much, my pleasure. Absolutely. So you've got a session coming up later where you're talking about blockchain. Make sure I get it right as the ownership layer for the internet. What does that mean? What are you talking about? Yeah, what we saw was, we were actually one of the very first use cases of non-financial use cases of blockchain technology where we're using the Bitcoin as a normalization layer for intellectual property. An idea was that, you know, there's a lot of intellectual property created in the world right now. And most of that, the attribution gets lost, the provenance gets lost, and it just spreads out there on the internet. And this is by design of the internet. And we said, hmm, you know, since most of the creation on the internet is intellectual now, is there a way to notarize who does what, where, when, why? And so that later on, if you find some content, you can find out who the original creator was and maybe reward them. And so we hear all the time about how difficult blockchain is and it's heavy technology and you can only kick out so many Bitcoins per unit time, you know, to be safe. But how do we start to apply blockchain technology to a problem like that where you don't want something heavy, you don't want something onerous because obviously to make it work, you want to be touching a lot of pieces of intellectual property, you want to be exchanging that data. How does it work? How's that heavy lifting work on something like intellectual property? Right, so this is exactly one of the problems we've seen. We saw that if we were going to ascribe a photo marketplaces content, we were working with one in Berlin, they had 100,000 photos a day that were coming online and they said, well, if we put this on the blockchain, is it going to be norderized? You know, is it all going to be reliable? And you know, the throughput of blockchain is about 100,000 transactions a day. So if we were to put even just that one marketplaces photos on the blockchain, we would explode it. It wouldn't be able to handle the throughput. Right. So Scott is actually looking at other solutions to say, hmm, how can we take it off Bitcoin blockchain and put it onto some other scalable type of blockchain? And was that because of the original purpose of the blockchain, at least that you were using for this application, was for Bitcoin? So there really wasn't a concept of high transaction rate, high throughput rate, high volume. Is that why it was architected in such a way? Yeah, so Bitcoin blockchain was architected in a really smart way. I mean, it was actually a huge advancement in the world, but it was also, it's an extremely paranoid network by nature, right? You're trying to secure money and make sure that people aren't messing with the system. And the initial design was kind of a beta release. And the thing with Bitcoin was it took off as a beta release and it baked in its current form, right? It wasn't able to mature and harden to build in these concepts of scalability throughput, all this kind of stuff. Right, right. So now you applied it to an electrical property, but then as you said, I talked a little bit off camera, you discovered that it wasn't the perfect application, the Bitcoin application for blockchain as the platform for doing some of these other non-financial services, non-paranoid applications, as you said. So found an opportunity and as all great entrepreneurs did, you jumped on it. So talk about your announcement today. We talked a little bit before we went on air, what's going on, exciting news for you guys. So today we announced that we're rolling out big chain DB. It's the world's first scalable blockchain database and what it does is it completes this stack of modules and components that allow for people to build applications in a decentralized way. Like today we have different platforms like Chain, Enigma, Tenderman, all these type of things that make blockchain accessible to all developers around the world and enterprise. You have Ethereum, which does smart contracts, and you have File Storage, which is IPFS. What has been missing in a database that can handle the throughput that's necessary for all these transactions to occur? So if you're going enterprise grade, where you're talking global transactions from multiple different sources, and you're talking throughput of thousands of transactions a second, there is no blockchain out there that currently can handle that. We built it, and it's big chain DB that we announced today here. Awesome, and then what is the impact on an optimized database for the blockchain build up? It allows for enterprises to, right now there's a thousand enterprises experimenting with blockchain technology. Starting with financial services, now we're going into the industrial sectors. And the key question that most CIOs and CTOs have is, great, we can do a proof of concept, but when we're done, Bitcoin blockchain does two transactions a second, and all the other ones do 30 to 100. Is this gonna be my enterprise grade solution? Because we can play in a sandbox, but if I can't deploy a production, then it's useless to me. Two per seconds, not cutting up these days. Yeah, yeah. So what applications do you see this enabling to move from a POC around a Bitcoin based, you know, kind of financial services test to wow, we can use this technology for all types of things. What are you seeing from some of your customers out in the field? Right, so first off, like big chain DB is a component of the entire stack. We play well with everybody. So we play well with Ethereum, we play well with Tenderman, any other blockchain company out there because there's just so much to do. And the way it's gonna work is that we work with enterprises, we work with our channel partners like the blockchain companies to roll out this technology to enterprise. And there's a whole bunch of use cases from getting transparency across your supply chain. So currently in a supply chain, you'll have multiple databases at various node points. So at the manufacturer distribution, all this kind of stuff, right? And it's really easy to lose sight of how your supply chain is doing. So that's a great use case. Banking, capital markets, easing the whole process of settlement and reconciliation in the banking sector. Payments, so being able to cross-border payments in a much, much faster way, reducing risk, reducing escrow costs, all this sort of stuff. The blockchain is gonna affect the world in a way that the internet has affected the world where right now, if you go to a hotel that doesn't have free wifi, you wanna walk out the door. Blockchain is gonna insinuate itself in all facets of society as an underlying kind of pipe on how our society runs. It'll make it faster, more efficient, just better for everybody. So what was the secret sauce? What was the breakthrough that you guys were able to develop that makes us database better for this use case? So, blockchain itself was a fundamental breakthrough in technology on a whole bunch of different levels. Most of the people in the industry didn't come from big data though. Neither did we, but what we did was we said, if we need to scale this to the world, is there any other example out there of scaling with high throughput, petabytes of capacity and low latency? And the answer is yes, distributed databases. So we actually started with this concept of using distributed databases and then building on top of that, blockchain characteristics. And that was the breakthrough. That was one of the breakthroughs, was just opening our mind saying, we can't start with the blockchain architecture and then try to scale it up. We actually start with something that already scales and then build in the blockchain characteristics. First one, second thing is what we do is, in the Bitcoin world right now, every single transaction has to be verified before it goes on the blockchain. We switched that around. We said, the limiting factor is to take that away and just put all the transactions on there in different blocks and then check them afterwards. So what you're doing is you're laying down the railroad track and then the train comes afterwards. And the train only passes over that block when all the transactions are verified. But by doing that, you're able to put a million transactions every single second on as a rail and then later on, you're verifying very quickly behind the scenes. If there's a bad transaction in one of the blocks, you kick that out and you put it back forward of all the good transactions. So let's say 1,000 transactions, one is bad. Take out the bad transaction, put 999 later down the road and verify that later. Pretty exciting stuff. We call that pipelining. So how can people, even the last word, we're here at the conference, how can people learn more about what you guys are up to? Go to our website, bigchaindb.com. We have an expansive white paper. We have Devhooks so everybody can start playing with it. Our goal is to make it so that people can have a big chain DB instance running in less than one minute. In less than one minute? Yeah. Very good. All right, Bruce. Well, hey, thanks for stopping by and good luck on your talk later today.