 Hello, Roy, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm here with special guest, Sean Douglas, who's the founder and CEO of Amber Data. AmberData.io, it's a hot, blockchain-based analytics startup, kind of taking a different approach. Obviously, we'd like to highlight some of the stars that are doing pretty amazing things. Sean, welcome to this CUBE conversation. Great, thank you very much for having me here. So, you have an enterprise background. You're an entrepreneur, technical, been a CTO at EMC. You've helped EMC run their venture capital firms over the years, helped them build it up from scratch, done a variety of startups, kind of cloud, kind of like large scale. Now, doing a blockchain startup, that's, I find super interesting. I think you might have more there than you think, but that's my opinion, seeing the demo of the folks watching AmberData.io as the site. Let's talk about that. I mean, obviously, blockchain, we've been covering pretty heavily recently with theCUBE. We've been covering Bitcoins since 2010 on our blog, SiliconANGLE.com. But you're seeing a renaissance in software development with cloud computing. But now you're starting to see a new wave coming. We've been documenting, we've been calling it the future of money, the future of work, the future of infrastructure, because what blockchain and decentralized applications are doing is changing the stack a bit. And you've been in many, involved in those waves. So, you're at the heart of it. So, I got to ask you, as an entrepreneur, before we get into what your company does, I want to just get your take on, I mean, you kind of look at this market stand. It's a wide open space. As an entrepreneur is doing a startup, what's it like, what's your view, and how do you see the marketplace evolving? Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot there. Let me try to unpack that the best that I can. So, having gone between startup to big company to investor, help buy, build, sell in companies and operating for as long as I have in Silicon Valley, I think, as you said, technology and innovation happen in waves. And I think that waves are many revolutions, if you will. And I think that revolutions are about addressing fundamental human need. If we look at, look to history to see where the future's going. If you look at the industrial revolution, it was about automation and supply. I mean, production chains and to be able to produce things at scale. If you look at the information age, it was about the ability to communicate and the servers and the networks and the web 2.0 companies that arose out of that was around communication. That was another major wave. If you look at what's happening with AI right now and self-driving cars, that's about the ability for the need to think, right? And you're starting to see algorithms and machine learning applied to Google self-driving cars and just about every facet of our life AI is touching. You're using Siri at home, whatever you're using. I think what we're seeing with blockchain is that next wave. It's that next revolution. And that revolution, I believe, is about trust and about decentralization. So coming out of web 2.0, we saw participatory and non-participatory consolidations in creation of juggernauts of technology, the Facebooks of the world, the Amazons of the world, on the other side, the Equifaxes of the world where you didn't opt in in exchange for being the product to use their platform, they just got your data. We've seen violation of that trust in data breaches at every major player, Equifax being the bad guy in this case where they've lost every single citizen in the United States data. And we never benefited from that, but we carry the liability forward. And what we're seeing with blockchain is the ability for people to leverage decentralized platforms and smart contract platforms, specifically as mechanisms to easily deploy with zero barrier to entry, these smart contract vending machines, if you will, into a world where people are taking back trust. That's what we see, and we see that opportunity across both the enterprise space, because we're hardcore enterprise people that we're building the Ember data, but we're also seeing new enterprises being created on chain, and that list is really long. So it's pretty, it's definitely a big wave. Well, one, obviously, blockchain is an infrastructure thing, people get it all crazy over that, which I think is legit. And there's some people out there saying, oh, blockchain's not legit. They don't really know what they're talking about, in my opinion, and that's just, and a lot of people confuse. So there's a lot of people who are, obviously don't see it, some people do. But I think the phenomenon that's interesting is, taking a tech stack approach is, if you look at the decentralized application market, where Ethereum, for instance, has got a lot of, the most developers, and they're working fast on some technical challenges they have, but they're making progress. The de-applications, distributed, I mean the decentralized applications, that's like an application server on the blockchain. Yeah, exactly. So what that happens is the things are happening, so you can almost think of it, and you and I were talking about this, is that the vending machine of the future, or the transaction service layer, is that decentralized smart contract. Absolutely. Because that's where the value is going to be captured. Absolutely. And created and captured. Let me unpack that, because that's spot on. I 100% agree with what you're saying there, is that what is a blockchain? Blockchain is effectively a decentralized database and network put together. What I think is interesting is smart contract platforms that put a virtual machine on top of that, like Ethereum has the EVM, where it's your application server, and what are smart contracts? Smart contracts, like you said, are vending machines. They're a vending machine that has the appropriate level of security, the appropriate level of service, and allows you to have an autonomous transaction with that. When you walk up to a Pepsi machine, you put in a dollar, you expect to get back a Pepsi, it works, you go away, you don't think anything about what blockchain is allowing anybody to do is to publish a smart contract on chain, and monetize that at the most elemental level. It's analogous to if Amazon allowed you to deploy a Lambda function and monetize that. It's analogous to if e-business suite allowed you to monetize your plug-ins from an Oracle world. It's analogous to if SAP, when Shai Agassi was still there, doing composable applications, allowed you to, as a vendor, anybody publish into that SAP ecosystem and monetize that. This is a massive, massive transformation, and it reduces barriers to entries for people to come in and compete with juggernauts like an Amazon or an Oracle, because at the barrier to entry is, they're publishing into a globally available, decentralized platform. And the thing too that's interesting and just to tie that together with what's happening in the cloud world is, you look at like Kubernetes containers and microservices, the ability to be efficient with microservices allows for that IT infrastructure to completely be replatformized. Exactly. So what you're getting at is with smart contracts and atomic nature of the transaction, you're going to be laser focused and scale transactions and be efficient. So the efficiency is a big part of this. There's efficiency and there's the ability to decompose things. And that's been a trend for as long as I've been in technology, right? It's, first it was cloud services, then it was SOA, then it was cloud, now it's serverless, it's blockchain is just on that spectrum. There's not a lot new here actually, right? It's a continuum of technology. And I think all of these waves are enabled by different revolutionary forces. Operational change and software drives it, obviously. And you've got the characteristics of blockchain immutability, et cetera. And Dapps is just a new way to kind of write software for that, they create those vending machines or transactional services. So I got to ask you, so with what you guys are doing, I want to tie that together because one of the things we've been reporting on theCUBE is the piece of action that's most hyped up is ICOs. These blockchain apps that are changing in the old garden, disrupting incumbents, but there's not a lot of tooling around it. So if you think about like trading platforms, 24-7 traders have access to stuff, now the world's a 24-7, 365 global. There's not a lot of tooling, not a lot of stuff. So this instant industry's created, this new wave is coming, you're building some tooling. So I want to get your thoughts on the support needed to do this. Say I put my business on the blockchain and with these developers to do decentralized applications. Yeah, so. I need tools. Absolutely, that's exactly. So, you know, I've got a little gray hair here and I grew up building internet software at scale, right? And whenever you run anything in production, you always have your network operation center. You have your app D, you have your Splunk's, you have your new relics, you have all of this, you've instrumented your infrastructure, you've instrumented your application transactions. You've instrumented search for operational log data. You need to be able to triage a security instance. You need to be able to respond to performance or production issues. You need to be able to communicate with your customers. None of this existed when I looked at the blockchain space and I'm like, I don't get it. This is a massive opportunity because if you look at the enterprise space, because public right now, sure, it's very interesting. ICOs are the killer use case. There is $300 million per hour traversing in the public Ethereum network. 50% of those are going to smart contracts. A lot of that is actual transactional trading volume, but step back from the hype for a second and you look at IBM, you look at VMware, you look at Cisco, you look at Microsoft, you look at, you know, all these guys, JPMorgan with Quorum, they all have major bets that are starting to evolve around taking things and removing intermediaries just like public chain, but they're doing things like swaps, credit default swaps, interest swaps, currency swaps. They're talking about removing escrow services. They're talking about- So pre-existing companies are going to take the efficiency side of this and then drive it. It's going to, it is a massive transformation, right? And especially when they're working with their trading partners, there's almost a, what, a 2006 VMware data center consolidation play. Remember when the data centers were full of servers and then all of a sudden, you know, they started pulling back the number of servers and turning off the AC because they were able to take entire data center floors and consolidate them inside of VMs where they had three and four virtual machines in a server. And I think that you're going to get those same types of efficiencies over time once they get to pass some scaling issues around blockchain where you don't have to have seven copies of your data and across your front office, your back office, across your trading partner, you can have one single source of truth and operate in an open, transparent world where you're, where you can reduce some of those inefficiencies. And then there's the whole business transformation play that, you know, there's, there's just, I think it's- It's a perfect storm. You got the consolidation piece, which is more efficient operationally. And then you got the top line revenue opportunity with disrupting kind of industries with new transactional models, the business models and token economics. So we've talked a lot about in theCUBE. I want to talk to you about your company and your data. So you guys are trying to make sense of what's happening because if you're going to put a business on the, on the blockchain and use decentralized applications as a transactional application server, if you will, like a better description, you got to know what's going on and this gas involved, you got to pay the mining fees. So where this costs, you need visibility. So the old school, the old model was you'd have KPIs, system alerts, dashboarding. You're doing that, right? So take a minute to explain what Amber data is doing. Did you do a round of funding? What's going on with the company? You got the product up there, amberdata.io. Right. Yeah, so let me unpack that there's a lot there. So we started the company end of August. We raised a round of funding with traditional enterprise venture capital firm, Hummerwind Blad, Lars Lecky, amazing investor, really understands enterprise software and how to enable companies to grow. Amazing partner to work with. We've been heads down building a product about 45 days ago. We launched our platform live and what we have today, if we have instrumentation for blockchain infrastructure, decentralized applications, transactions, and a nontology based search that gives a clean user experience where you can be search driven to drill into a smart contract, a transaction into a block. And if you're building on top of chain, I mean, we're a classic picks and shovels play. It's pure, it's enterprise software. We built this for enterprises. We, today our platform supports public Ethereum, but it was really to demonstrate if we can do this for the entire Ethereum network and we can do this for its scale, of course we can do this for any enterprise. And today we support public Ethereum and Quorum, which is private Ethereum. It's a JPMorgan project that I think is the, one of the leaders in private blockchain and that's a project that's being supported by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. We will also in our working with IBM, I was just on the Hyperledger technical steering committee this morning, I participate in that. So we will support Hyperledger in the future. We will support multiple other public and private chains. So the private ecosystem today is, you know, Enterprise Ethereum, all a Quorum, it is Hyperledger, it is Quorta on the public side. It is Ethereum, it is Stellar. It is, you know, things like quantum that are emerging, Neo or emerging. So is your, is your business model SAS? It's SAS, yes, it's a SAS model. And today, we support public chain as a demonstration of it, but we're also working on allowing people to, just like a data dog or what have you where you, we have a connector, we can pull your data in, it's private, it's only visible for you, for your private blockchain, or we could deploy into their private cloud or into their private data center. So it's amperdata.io, a demo site, or is that more of what do you do with it? It's a demonstration of the ability to instrument blockchain infrastructure, applications, transactions with search, the ability to set alerts on every single panel, which are your KPIs. If you're going to run a business, you either have explicit or implicit service level agreements, and you need to be able to instrument those service level agreements with KPIs. And those KPIs, you need to be able to set alerts and events, receive emails, you know, all of the things that you expect. Well, I love the demo, we got for the demo. I think the demo would be a great freemium model because it showed just my notes here, smart contracts on the, yeah, decentralized applications, top 50 sort of transaction volume, token velocity, change in price, because, you know, gas and gas, these are paying the gas to get the transaction written. I mean, this is kind of like spot pricing for Amazon almost, you need to understand, what am I paying for if there's an SLA involved in a smart contract? You got to know the policy involved, right? So again, this is like old school, like enterprise thinking, but the world is now a global enterprise, if you think about it. Yeah, you absolutely need transparency into your operating costs. Those are your transactions costs of either for your customers to consume your service or for you to provide your service. And prior to this, there was very little transparency. It's ironic is that the most, the trustless, transparent platform had no real view into it. And that's what we've built. We've built transparency and are enabling you to trust the trustless platform to get transparency into your DAP KPIs. And so for example, if you're building, like you look at like EtherDeltas, EtherDeltas is one of the non custodial smart contract based exchanges. They're doing $70 million a month in transaction value. I don't know what they did before. We've talked to people that are consumers of that. We've talked to people on pretty much all of the decentralized exchange platforms, but the ability to understand what are the number of transactions per hour per second per minute that are hitting my smart contract? What are the token transfers if I've tokenized my unit economics? Who are the top 10 callers to my contract? Is my smart contract calling other contracts? What are my pending transactions? What is my book of trades? What is market depth on my gas prices? What I need to be able to search if I've got failures, show me transactions between this date that date two from where that is all mission critical stuff that you need if you're going to operate any business. So a lot of operational data and that's phenomenal. But are you worried that people aren't going to adopt blockchain? I mean, is that? Oh, I'm not worried about that at all. That is. I actually think that there's an entire, when we started this, we were focused on enterprises exclusively and we saw what we were doing on public Ethereum as a marketing ploy. We're like, hey, we'll go instrument the whole public Ethereum network. I'm a big data guy. We've built high throughput four terabytes a day of social graph ingestion platforms. We're like, public Ethereum, not that transactionally intensive. We're going to do this for the world. Now, after building the platform and seeing $300 million an hour with 50% of those transactions going to smart contracts, we're seeing a new enterprise emerge. You can look at companies like, you know, SIA, Storage, Coin, IPFS. So you can actually see the activity. I'm sort of, everything's encrypted, but you can look at the metadata and get the patterns. I mean, you're actually looking at the transaction, you look almost like a stock exchange. We have full transparency into every transaction that's happening on chain. And we can see, like the other day I did a tweet on, there was a token this traded. I don't know, you know, we're not interested in the trading side, but it's the use case that has the most buzz. So, and we have transparency, so we see it. We're like, hey, this smart contract went from 2,000 transactions, you know, to 40,000 transaction. What is going on, right? And we actually saw that. You can see the pump and dumps games, too. Well, you can fully see that. Providing transparency is now, it's becoming easy for anybody to search for anything. Well, it's a great free service, and I appreciate you, and I've been playing with that over the weekend. Thank you. I love it. I'm like, hmm, check it out. There's some trades on this thing. We'd love feedback from anybody that's seeing this, ambradata.io, and I could be reached at Sean at ambradata.io. So, I mean, obviously funding, you must have a ton of VCs throwing money at you. Is that the case? Are you thinking about an ICO? What's the thoughts on capital expansion? Yes, you got a great hot startup here. So, what's the funding strategy? We've been heads down on building things that we're obviously getting inbound, but, you know, we're well-funded, we're in a, I think we're in a position of strength. What we're focused on is taking the mountain and defining and being the category leader. I think right now, we have defined it. There's no one else doing it. So, you know, it's solo, you know, only one doing it. So, we are going to define the space for operational monitoring analytics for public and private blockchain and be that single pane of glass that allows enterprises to build on or around, you know, decentralized smart contract platforms or, you know, private smart contract platforms. And we're going to take that hill and we're going to stay out in front. So, right now, we're heads down. We'll eventually- Can I get an API to the data center? Can you just give me an API? You have a fire hose opportunity there? Yeah, so, we are enabling this as a platform to drive network effects. And we're working with several exchanges. We're working, you know, some of the non-custodial exchanges. We've got a lot of inbound interest from people more on the trading side. We're evaluating whether we do that. And we want people to be able to build on top of our platform, other analytics tools, you know, connect to exchanges, connect, what have you, right? And create that marketplace, create those APIs, inroads, and then allow people to drive that. And on the ICO front, we're really not focused on that. We're enterprise software, we're enterprise-backed. Well, the CUBE team would love to have an API and program for the CUBE insights. We'd love to look at that option. That would be great, right? That's when we can work together and collaborate on that. I got to ask you about the data, because this is fascinating coming from the search background that I come from. It's almost like the Google crawler. You went out, is it true that you guys crawled all the Genesis nodes in a theory, so you got into the Genesis nodes? That's correct. From the Genesis nodes to today, you've essentially gotten all those instrumented, and have real-time data coming in. That is correct. So as far as I know, we're the only people that have done this. It's computationally intensive, and from the data structure perspective, pretty difficult to do. But what we've done is, and it has to do with the data structures in the way Ethereum works, whether that be public or private, is that there's an account-based blockchain that has transactions, but then the smart contracts and transfers of tokens happen in messages. So what we've done is, we have the ability to, or we have done and we have the ability to do in perpetuity moving forward, we instrument every transaction, every internal transaction, every token transfer with time series data, index, searchable. We also have graph, as well as relational views into the data to be able to give to transparency, enable trust, enable you to triage an issue. Like I think about having worked at other enterprises in the past where you have a security incident that you need to respond to. We're currently under attack. We need to find out who, what are they doing? What have they done? What is our exposure? How do we contain that? How do we deal with that? Without what we have, you can't do that. You got to write Python scripts and do, you know, you're chasing the host, basically, by the time you get it, it's over. And then for enterprises, they've got hardcore regulatory compliance considerations that you need to deal with ad hoc queries from an auditor. You need to be able to show, hey, I've got confidentiality. I have availability. I have integrity. Well, even these smart contracts are still software. They can, you know, we interview Harteh Swani, who's got a company that's doing just that auditing, auditing the smart contracts because someone's got to write the code and the code's got vulnerabilities. Absolutely. There's a compliance aspect coming, quickly. Yes, yes, absolutely. And yeah, I mean, so there's, it's an amazing space. There's a tremendous amount going on. It's moving super fast. Ticks and shovels for the new. Ticks and shovels. The new mine, not mine, I say, literally mine is, but Sean, great to have you on. Congratulations on your new startup. I think you got a great product. I've been playing with the data a lot, but I think it's fascinating. If you could summarize the data that you've learned from the tool that you've built on the platform, what's the summary? If you had to kind of tease it out, what's actually happening right now in the market on Ethereum network with the apps and blockchain? Right, so there is, so at the end of the day, Ethereum is a smart contract platform and it pans out that 50% of the transactions are actually going to smart contracts, which is a great validation, right? Two, the actual value being transferred and interacting with smart contracts is $300 million an hour. That is, it's on an enterprise software perspective, it's not huge, but it's definitely a validation. It's legit. It's legit. The number of smart contracts that have been created in the last three months is 400% is just going through the roof. Some of this, there's a lot of junk, but there's a lot of stuff that people are building new enterprises. And on the enterprise side, we're seeing real business cases going into production, we're working with a few large customers now on instrumenting real, instrumenting real over-the-counter type use cases. It's very, very interesting. Well, you know my rant, I've been ranting about some of these bankers that have come from old school bank, and they're young kids too, so they're younger than me, but they're trying to do valuation, keep the mechanisms around companies and tokens. And they're using discounted cash flow. Now, I mean, I get how they can go there, right? Because they learned that in school. But the reality is, there's a new school going on. The school's in session. If you don't have the data, you have very interesting valuation variables that could be constructed on these new models that need to be looked at. I mean, how do you value a company? Certainly velocity, who's actually doing the transactions? Are they no smart contracts? So there's a lot of gamification and I won't say scams, but I would say the investors want the transparency too. I think it's amazing is that we have that transparency, we provide that transparency as a free service to the community right now. And the ability to have transparency into transaction volume for smart contracts, token velocity, number of unique callers, the market capitalization, the change in price, this gives you the ability to value that. That's something that we've thought about extensively is maybe we should just provide valuation as a service on just these assets that are publicly available. Yeah, I don't know. A lot of opportunities. So great job, congratulations, good work. You guys really done the work on this project, love it. And again, it validates the reality of the smart contracts, the application side of the business changing. Sean Douglas here inside theCUBE for CUBE Conversation here, Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.