 This is JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals and JSA radio, your voice for tech and telecom on iHeart radio. I'm Dean Perine and on behalf of our team here at JSA, welcome to our monthly virtual CEO roundtable. These monthly broadcasts lead us up to our onsite CEO roundtables at our executive networking event, the telecom exchange or TEX. And new for 2019, we are now quarterly. Next up, we are back in Hoboken for our ninth annual TEX New York May 14th through the 15th and then Toronto in October and then LA in November. More info on that at thetheletelcomexchange.com. All right, so let's get started here. We've got a fun one today. Today's topic, blockchain and AI, the next gen battleground for cybersecurity. It's gonna be interesting. We have a C-level lineup from three very innovative companies and three very, very intelligent guys, but we've had a great conversation leading right up to this roundtable. So you're in for a treat. Joining us today and to help us introduce those panelists and moderate our panel, please welcome Mr. Jerry Christiansen. Jerry is the founder and CEO of our industry's leading market intelligence and technology insights firm Mind Commerce. Jerry, the floor is all yours. Let me know if you need anything. Thank you very much. So first of all, I'd like to have each of the panelists introduce themselves and give it a little bit of background. Dominic Stile, I'll turn it over to you first. All right, great. Thanks, Jerry. So my name is Dominic Stile I'm the CEO and founder of Dabs Inc. We are an enterprise blockchain computing company focused on delivering smart contracts and other enterprise applications to the salesforce.com ecosystem. We focus primarily on building application on the Ethereum, hyperledger and CORTA protocols around accelerating sales cycles for enterprise customers. Thank you, Dominic. Next I'd like to introduce Mayunde Walker. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi, how are you doing? My name is Mayunde Walker. I'm the CEO of Open Crypto Trust. Open Crypto Trust is a blockchain-based company that focuses on the telecommunications industry and we've built some killer apps that solve specific problems within the telcospace such as false or impractical bandwidth market valuation and significant delays in provisioning as well as some very cool security and encryption services. Very nice to be here. Great, thank you. And next I'd like to have Guy Roosevelt introduce himself, Guy. Hi, I'm Guy Roosevelt. I'm the director of threat intelligence and web security for NSFocus. NSFocus is one of the largest security companies you've not heard of. We're very big in terms of developing network and infrastructure security products as well as threat intelligence. Fantastic, let's jump right in. We've got a few interesting questions for you. Mayunde, let's start off with you. So the first question is, what are some of the problems that blockchain solves today that artificial intelligence does not solve and also vice versa? So it's an interesting point and I come to this with the advantage of having as a partner, well-known artificial intelligence company. And my sense is this, I would actually rephrase the question a little bit because what it is that blockchain offers in particular is a framework of trust through which various kinds of transactions can take place. And with artificial intelligence, you have an opportunity to gather different pieces of information and in a very exciting and innovative way leverage artificial intelligence in order to find solutions and answers to problems that one wouldn't readily be able to find. So I don't see them as necessarily being solutions that solve problems better than the other. I actually find and have the working experience to show that they really compliment each other and do it in very different ways. I don't think one solves solutions much better than the other. In fact, I think they're both necessary but different solutions entirely. I can give you more details if you're curious but that's my sense. Guy, what are your thoughts on that? And also a related question is how do you see blockchain and AI working together in the future to solve cybersecurity challenges? Well, there's no blockchain is, it's geared for a certain type of activity which is good because it's transaction based. I can improve the ability to identify and authenticate things in supply chain type stuff. I can use it as better inventory control. There's tens of thousands of devices that many organizations have that they have to keep track of in terms of IoT, in terms of industrial control systems. And by being able to use blockchain technology they can better identify fingerprint technologies which is great. At the same time, we have to be aware that there's a lot of operational things that still have to be worked out to ensure that people don't take advantage of flaws that are in that ecosystem. I have one more point out there on the combination of the two. I think there's two applications. I've seen one of them on the security side is we're entering a world where AI can do things like deep fakes or even tech generation. We saw like GPT2 and you have like these, we're moving towards that where you're gonna have all these kind of, you have fake generated content that's like completely, looks completely real. Having a kind of provenance or lineage or a chain where a company can say whether it's an executive or it's a company saying this is our provenance, this is our actual content that was produced from us, whether it's an article, whether it's a video of someone saying something. I think that application will continue to come up more and more as just that lineage. On the secondary side, the actual models themselves that are being used in AI, having lineage where what was the training data used for this particular model? Can we have provenance of where that data came from off a blockchain based system record? And so I think those are two applications, one on the security side, one more on the provenance side which I think are pretty exciting. Thank you and few listeners, that was Dominic Stiles speaking just then. So actually a related portion of that original question for you Dominic, do you see anything in particular about how blockchain relates to devices as opposed to networks as opposed to data? Are there any particular concerns or application areas that you see that are unique to any of those three different things? On the device side, I've been hearing more and more around, you have to have a trusted identification so you need to know who sent what data, like they call it a DID or a decentralized identifier. And that ultimately comes down to being able to trust the device and having finality. Most of the blockchain systems today will be 10 minute block time or 10 minute block time for confirmation or even 15 seconds. I think that's just too long for a lot of the systems that we're expecting will go live on these types of networks. Moving towards consensus algorithms where you have a media finality, that will be where we start to see real devices using these types of blockchain networks. And there's a ton of new consensus algorithms such as kind of that are actually pioneering that very thing. Okay. See, it's just that you said that because that's where you start seeing the ecosystem starting to have issues and vulnerabilities, especially with consensus-based algorithms and devices. For example, there's what's called the 51% problem. The thing about blockchain, it's a consensus-based algorithm which means that everybody has to be able to buy into this, prove who they are and agree on the transactions which makes it very difficult to falsify or modify a transaction. But the minute you get someone that can control over 51% of the environment, they then have the primary voting capability to be able to vote into fraudulent transactions or to be able to roll back stuff and that becomes an issue. So we talk about devices. There's malware will be coming out, they'll be able to start taking advantage of this. Are they gonna be able to start using artificial intelligence and malware to be able to say, if I can control a blockchain network, how can I then go ahead and manipulate the transactions? And that's the stuff we have to start worrying about. Thank you, Guy. So Guy, a follow-up question to that. Is there anything in particular about blockchain or AI for that matter that you see as particularly important for supporting the internet of things? And that could be either an IoT network or an IoT device or the data. Well, one of the nice things about blockchain is I can use it, as I said, in the supply chain and where it's really important is I can use it to identify where things like software updates have come from. One of the biggest problems we have right now with a lot of malware and a lot of phishing type stuff is a lot of devices get spoofed in terms of where they get their software updates from, which then allows them to get affected by malware. In the blockchain supply process, it allows us to uniquely identify where the software is coming from. And then when the transaction happens, I can verify that the proper software has been uploaded to the proper device. So there's a lot of things at that point in terms of how blockchain can improve the IoT infrastructure again, but then the other side of the coin is, if I had the ability to get that malware in there, how can I circumvent or basically infest that place with something bad? From artificial intelligence, sorry, from our artificial intelligence point of view, the smarter the malware is, and they're gonna start using more artificial intelligence type algorithms to be able to emulate and be able to adapt in real time to a lot of these types of conditions to be able to try to hit the blockchain systems. Sorry. Thank you, Guy. Am I under, do you have some comments on that? Well, no, just when we talk about the usage of blockchain and internet of things, one of our development teams in Spain, in fact, developed a framework specifically to prevent something that's plagued the internet for some time, which is a BGP spoofing. I'm sure, Guy, you're aware of some of the recent embeds, in fact, that took down some very well-known companies because of BGP spoofing either accidentally or not, but by using blockchain in such a way that the nodes on the network can be verified before they begin advertising BGP routes is a phenomenal approach, and one that I'm very certain we're gonna see a lot greater adoption of. Fantastic. So Mayende, while we've got your attention, I've got another question for you. Regarding lessons learned from the use of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, how do you see business practices and procedures evolving over time in other industries? So as a blockchain-based company that's focused on telecommunications, Open Crypto Trust has had a lot of opportunity to think very carefully about how to approach this. And I think part of the answer to that question lies in whether or not one chooses to approach a public or a private blockchain. And the reason I say that is because, first of all, I think it should be well understood by most people that there will be multiple blockchains. There isn't going to be a winner takes all. And certainly in the area as Guy was mentioning of logistics, private blockchains make a lot of sense in terms of a way to simply track data or track transactions between different entities that are continuously in partnership. But public blockchains really necessitate the use of a new way of doing business. It's something that for people that are very comfortable with Bitcoin, it's well-established. But the idea of tokenization and the idea of having tokens that are representative of some piece of the ecosystem that gets developed within a public blockchain really is a new way of doing business. In some ways, it's not entirely new. Certainly we are all very used to going to, I don't know, fairs where you get tickets to represent the different rides that you take or if you're a little older and have a certain outlook on life, perhaps you go to casinos where you get chips in order to play some of the games. So it's not entirely new, but I think what may be lost in certain industry analysts is understanding really the power behind tokenomics and how they play a really incredible role in the ecosystem that involves a public blockchain. And there's a lot that can be talked about that has been learned from even Bitcoin. And we were talking earlier about the sort of unfairness of certain consensus algorithms like proof of work. And certainly there's a lot more impetus for leveraging technologies that provides a much more democratic approach. And we ourselves came up with our own consensus algorithm called proof of duration that really speaks to some of the lessons learned from Bitcoin and the unfair advantages towards those that have huge compute ability as well as access to very cheap energy, which is not necessarily the value that we get from a decentralized platform like a blockchain platform as opposed to support a public blockchain. Thank you, Mayende. So Dominic, I see you shaking your head and quite a bit in the affirmative. Would you have anything to add to that? Yeah, I think the part from digitally native assets and tokens I think is one massive component was the first wave of and it's gonna continue to secure whether private or public networks, I think there'll be tokens deployed on both. I think that will be fractalized ownership and a number of other applications whether in B2B or B2C scenarios. I think one of the focus that we've made is also on digitally native contracts. And that's something in the ecosystem that we're in and we've talked to different enterprise customers is they just spend so much time reconciling contracts between each other, whether paper processes. And this is in every industry, oil and gas industry, financial services industry, transport logistics. There's just so many contracts that are going back and forth and all of these companies are in different either cloud or on-premise contract-based systems. And so our focus over the last two years is we've identified that being able to create auto-executing digitally native contracts is going to provide not only top-line growth but ultimately remove the costs associated with this reconciliation between these different companies and in a value chain. And I think that's that horizontal application that we discovered over talking to these different customers is where we've really, really focused our time and being able to automate things like payments, things like escrow within these agreements between the different counterparties. That's what I'm really, really excited about when it comes to some of the industry. Dominic, you're so right and you're giving me for jumping in here, but one of the most sexy aspects quite honestly a blockchain and what's come about in recent time is smart contracts. And really having the ability to build in code the legal ramifications around what aspects of an agreement necessitate the execution of a brand new contract and having it automated is just fundamentally game-changing in terms of the relationship that it or in terms of the processes that normally take place within a B2B environment. And that's a really an exciting area and something that is going to change every industry in fact, no question about it. The efficiencies that come with that. All right, so I have a follow-up question and thank you, Maende. I'm gonna turn this next question over to Guy just to get him ready for it, but I'd like each of you to weigh in on it. So the follow-up question pertains to business models and we've all seen sort of the hype around blockchain and like any new technology there's gonna be a hype cycle of course. And I don't mean to pick on them but I'll pick on Overstock for example when they announced that they were gonna be a blockchain company all of a sudden their stock price shot up and I don't follow them very closely but I think it came back down to earth. So the question is regarding business models, do you see the more generic blockchain as a service type model being more important or do you see more important to companies integrating blockchain in their operations to improve their bottom line? And it's probably not an either or I realized that but I'd love to have you weigh in on that guy. Like I said it's not an either or kind of thing is you'll see companies doing both from a logistics supply chain things I mentioned before. How can I stop the proliferation of counterfeit goods? So if I can use blockchain to be able to do transaction process to be identify what are the products I'm presenting or the products I'm selling or the products I'm receiving to be able to validate that those are real and authentic and not been either stolen or kind of it that's a huge thing. At the same time because of the infrastructure required to do some of this type of supply chain type stuff it can be very expensive or very resource intensive and a lot of smaller SMB types would like to take advantage of. So seeing blockchain as a service type of thing I see has a lot of potential in the future as long as it's implemented securely. Okay Dominic would you like the way on that as well? Yeah so I think there's a lot of blockchain platform as a service companies that was one of our first products we released that sort of okay you can spend up some blockchain nodes. I think the point where it comes to is you still need to have you need to still need to go up the stack and you still need to identify like what is the actual application once we have these nodes running? I think originally that was kind of our first thing is let's abstract away all the infrastructure create whatever middlewares we need to provide an interface. But I think ultimately you need to get to where it's gonna be blockchain applications as a service and that's where you'll start to unlock all the value. I think running nodes at the platform level is a great step but you ultimately need to have that secondary interface layer as well. And from a business model standpoint I think there's ways to charge for that from a you can charge for the nodes per month or you can meter it on cloud platforms I think aside from that there's a lot of models where you can do the open source model you have a native token without having to go through the platform as a service model and everything's becoming containers most of these networks permission networks are running in containers you could do open source container have that deployed wherever really and if it has a native token you have this contribution in the open source community combined with that incentive to contribute towards the project I think that there's a lot of interesting models that weren't really possible before that combination of a tokenized asset in an open project for these specific type blockchain networks. Thank you Dominic Mayende, what do you think? Yeah, so with every new technology there is definitely a moment of hype and I'm here to say as someone who really was a big critic and skeptic and it took me many years to turn around to really understand the value of a decentralized network and blockchain in itself and even of tokenomics here's what I think is actually going to happen and by the way, my favorite example is not Oberstock as much as it is the Long Island ICT company that changed their name to a blockchain ICT and their stock went crazy. Blockchain is not in and of itself a solution and there's a lot of industry analysts that are quick to say, hey look, if your solution doesn't really need blockchain if it's just simply a database then what's the purpose? Key to the transformative nature of the sort of framework of trust that blockchain provides is really understanding exactly how it will impact a specific industry and how it can be leveraged in a smart way and that's what we sought to do in the telecommunications industry in terms of taking the technology and for us it was really kind of serendipitous we weren't looking to build a blockchain company blockchain actually solved a problem that helped us to solve a problem we were trying to solve and I think that what we'll find in every industry is that very smart folks and I tend to wanna believe like myself innovators will come up with solutions that simply are game-changing or simply transformative enough that the industry in itself will have to stop and take a look and recognize this value. Nobody, especially well-established industries are necessarily looking to change there are definitely lots of C-level folks that are recognizing the importance of blockchain but blockchain in and of itself doesn't solve problems. It really requires as Dominic was saying taking a look higher in the stack of understanding what you're looking to solve and whether or not there's a place for it. I happen to believe that there is a place for it in just about every industry but it's gonna take very smart people to find the way to build that ecosystem that provides value and causes the industry to be willing to change and that's what I think we're gonna see. Blockchain is a service, yes. In fact, there are many companies that are doing that kind of model but I think that there will be innovators within each industry that will really kind of change the game and people will adopt it and it will not be anything that it'll just become ubiquitous in terms of how everyone realizes its value. Thank you, Mayande. So for our last question and we're gonna need to wind down here we've got about five minutes left. I'd like to bring things back to telecom networks something that's very near and dear to my heart for my career and what my in commerce covers the information and communications technology industry. And so with this last question it seems like we spent a lot of time on blockchain. I've just made some mental notes. I'd like if you guys can with your answer to spend a little more time on artificial intelligence in terms of how it may support blockchain and just to sort of tee this up for you one of the things in telecom networks that we focus on a lot is triple A authentication, authorization and accounting. And so I've got sort of this mental model in which I think that blockchain helps with authentication. We can verify who you are through the chain of custody so to speak but then I think of artificial intelligence as being the authorization part. So as Guy was mentioning earlier alluding to that, what are the behaviors? And so one of the companies that we filed for quite a while is Silance who was recently acquired by Blackberry. And I thought that was particularly interesting because Blackberry focuses on internet of things IoT that we talked about earlier. And so I know that Silance focuses on AI based security. So Dominic I'll turn it back over to you and the question for you is how do you see AI complimenting blockchain in support of telecom networks in general? And specifically if you wanna address that towards IoT or edge computing or anything else in a telecom network I'd love to hear that from you. So I think that one of the things we're moving towards is more privacy and when it comes to network and I think there's like a lot of applications around differential privacy that are kind of being implemented on these blockchain networks and they're doing things like we can have a machine learning on this particular dataset but office gating any of the personal identification information from that particular training data that is being done in some blockchain companies or blockchain platforms where they're making that privacy focused leap. And I think that that combination of being able to do privacy preserving data analytics on a network or even I know Uber was pioneering something like this for their network of drivers as soon as you get out of the Uber we wanna office gating where's the next place they're going before they were capturing that data. So I think that application of being able to do machine learning and AI on a particular dataset but using blockchain based or advanced cryptography based systems to preserve the privacy of the data. I think that's something that's pretty interesting for me when it comes to networks. Got it, thank you Dominic. Guy, what's your answer in two minutes or less? I'd like to see blockchain and AI being used together from the basis of being transactional auditing. If I can use AI to look at the transactions that are happening on the blockchain to be able to identify what could be potentially anomalous transactions again to identify potential incursions in the system to make sure that bad things would happen make sure that rollback transactions are happening. I think AI would be great for doing that to be able to improve the security identification of activity. Great, thank you Guy, Monday. So quickly two examples come to mind. So artificial intelligence within the telco space is critical in terms of doing what Guy and what Dominic were suggesting in terms of being able to take predictive measures of analysis of traffic to understand where there may be security holes. That's something that we are leveraging in fact. And then one other interesting tidbit is that one of our solutions, blockchain as a transport is being leveraged by an artificial intelligence company simply because they are taking tons of very sensitive data and in their cloud doing their AI magic and making it available for much smaller companies. This is an interesting company called AIDOR AI but here's an example of how blockchain and artificial intelligence are working together in order to provide a better solution for a smaller business. So that's what comes to mind. Fantastic. So one more question in that same area and we've got a couple of minutes here. Edge computing is something that everybody's talking about these days. It's something that is used for LTE and it's gonna be particularly important for 5G. Part of the notion of edge computing is that there's gonna be virtualization and there's gonna be the ability for application providers to update a edge computing node on the fly. So it seems like that is an area that's ripe for blockchain. Guy, what are your thoughts on that? As I said before, the ability to be able to uniquely identify all the edge computing devices would be a very big thing because again, you wanna make sure that no one tries to insert a malicious edge device in there that's gonna either capture or modify traffic. You wanna make sure it doesn't do anything to change or steal any of the information that we see happening on there. Again, I think blockchain will be really good in being able to secure these types of systems from certain kinds of malicious attacks. Fantastic. Dominic, one final note on that. I think when it comes to being able to have more of a distributed point to presence, whether the node's running in a container or if it's a public network, I think that having this shift towards edge computing will be able to bring the network closer to people's end devices and that ultimately will give them a better experience and be able to actually have real applications of these types of blockchain networks in the future. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you very much. And thanks to all of you. It's been a real pleasure to moderate this session. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks, Dean. You got it, you got it. And thank you, thank you panelists. Thank you, Jerry, for your views on blockchain and AI, the next-gen battleground for cybersecurity. Again, all of our panelists, Dominic Stile, Adapts, Mayande Walker, OpenCT, and Guy Rosefeld at EndFocus. And a huge thank you to you once again, Jerry Christensen, founder of MindCommerce for keeping us all together today. Guys, I feel like we needed an entire afternoon for this, but a lot of great information here in just 30 short minutes. And also thank you viewers for tuning in and if you like today's content, you can come here, our CEO Ron Tables live. Again, telecom exchange now quarterly. Next up is our flagship event, May 14th and 15th at the W Hoboken. We have an amazing lineup of speakers already confirmed for that event with just a few speaking slots and sponsorships remaining for that event as well. So check out more at thetelecomexchange.com to feature your thought leader here next time on our monthly virtual CEO roundtables, just email us at pr at jsa.net. Happy Friday, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to Chase A.T.V. Until next time, happy networking.