 Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Live on, welcome back. CUBE Live covers day two of the Blockchain Futurist Conference here in Toronto, Ontario and Canada. CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is Remy Carpanino, who's the co-founder and CEO of Espresso. Hot startup. Turns out that he's originally from Reading, Massachusetts, my former town. Great to see you. Great to see you as well. Thanks for having me. So take a minute to explain what the company does. Yeah, yeah, so Espresso's a Blockchain middleware platform. We want to make Blockchain development more accessible to all developers. So we build out a library of SDKs, middleware solution API, so they can code in languages they already know and we can compile it down to the Blockchain that they want to write on. So what's the problem that you're solving? Developer productivity, abstraction layer, cross-chain integration. Yes. What's the main problem? There's a couple of different key pieces that we see. One is just education. Having developers understand kind of what needs to live on-chain versus off-chain or in a data store itself. And on top of that, I think the other thing is identifying, giving them choice. One thing we see is a lot of these Blockchain is kind of siloing them and not allowing them to kind of be a bit more agnostic with their application. So we allowed a middleware solution that allows them to pick the optimal solution. So is it an interoperability capability that you're offering? Yeah, in a sense. So we have a DevNet that you can kind of test against and then that can be compatible with any Ethereum based network, which is a majority of the public Blockchain. Give an example of how it worked. So if you're coming in, you want to build a Blockchain application today, say a lightweight social network with a Q&A platform. You'd come in, you'd pick your template maybe for a smart contract. On top of that, you'd pick out your SDK. So you can say you want to build out in JavaScript. And then you can pick your Blockchain. And that Blockchain could be a DevNet. And then maybe after some testing and iteration, you want to flip that over to V-Chain or Ethereum. You could actually point it to the new Blockchain and it would plug right into it. So this solves a problem of people not having to choose a Blockchain before they start coding. Right. So, okay, get my feet wet. Get my token economics down. Okay, great. Throw it on this Blockchain. Well, that doesn't good enough. Maybe I'll move it over here. Exactly, and we see that over time as more and more Blockchains come about. There'll be specific use cases for a specific application. So they want to write a supply chain management use case. Maybe there's a different path than someone that wants a purity centralized application. So what's the URL? It's espresso.io. And yeah. And you're on East Coast? Yeah, East Coast based out of Boston and San Francisco. Where companies are actually based out of the Caimans. But yeah, some of our employees are both. And you guys tokenized or how's that working? Yeah, we're in the process of our, yeah. We're in the process of ICO. So right now our token's a metering and kind of an abuse mechanism against the API. So we measure all the API calls. So the thought process is as the application scales over time, you'd use more and more tokens. All right, and so where are you on the fundraising? Utility token? Yep, utility token. We concluded our friends and family. We're in the middle of our private sale right now. And we're starting to ramp up for the public sale in the fall. And that's kind of fun. And you ran through the Caimans? The Caimans. Awesome. How big is the team? There's just under a ton of us now. We're based out of, yeah, Boston and San Francisco. Somewhat decentralized team naturally in this space. And we're starting to expand our footprint a little bit to kind of identify new cities we're targeting as well. So what do you say to people out there? Say, oh, blockchain's dead. No, I don't need blockchain to do that, right? So what's interesting, decentralized and distributed computing. Yeah, no. A lot of purists go, hey, you know, get off my lawn. I'm good with distributed computing. Now that's a great question. And to, you know, not everything needs a token or needs to be decentralized per se, but I think putting certain pertinent components that do need a heightened level of security or decentralization makes sense. And I think the hype and the fad that came out in last year's wave or everything was tokenized when it probably shouldn't have been, will continue to kind of matriculate and kind of dissipate over time and kind of core use cases will continue to come out. There's no doubt tokens are going to have too many tokens out there. Bradley Roder talked about that in the queue. The question I want to ask you is, is that, as a developer, you know, one of the things that they want to do is build good code. But then they got to sell it kind of to the use case, either to their team, or to the new venture they got to get funding. Sure. What are some of the trends that you see? Are they using blockchain more for immutability, decentralization, use case, or is it the smart contracts that you're seeing? What are the, what's the trends? We've been doing some primary market research to identify some of these things. And the primary use cases for smart contracts still seem fairly limited today. But the use case of the blockchain definitely has to come down to a decentralization. And that's where it's interesting. And the enterprise space you start seeing here, hearing a lot about hyperledger is more of a centralized solution. But I think it's going to be this blend between decentralization and a little bit more centralized to get some of the medium-sized businesses off the ground in terms of leveraging the blockchain to be a put together. Yeah, we've been talking on the queue here early and Dave Vellante was here about, you know, cloud computing. Public cloud was first dominated. Then you had people on the enterprise side building private clouds and now it's multi-cloud. Is blockchain going the same way? You know, public chain, private chains, hybrid chains. What's your view? Yeah, no, I think it's still early, right? So I think time will tell. But I think there is going to be a combination and in a hybrid of a sense where the blockchain will become a core layer in the stack. But that's not going to be used again for everything. So you will have off-chain data storage that's something that we're offering through Espresso. But also I think there'll be kind of these new, if you think about like Hashgraph or IOTA, these new Tangle networks that will also be in the future. I don't think it's today or anything, but it's coming. That's great. Well congratulations. I mean, appreciate the time. How does someone get involved in the sales? You said it's private, so it's accredited, is it open to everybody? Yeah, accredited investors only right now. And yeah, that's the kind of focus with a telegram channel you can follow, Twitter. Espresso.io. Espresso.io. Hot start up here at the Futurist Conference, the CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more of the day two coverage live after this short break.