 Live from Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here, day two coverage live of coverage in Mountain View, CUBE coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create. John, for your hosts. Where all the action is in the creation side of two communities, DevNet, Cisco Developers, and then the open cloud native world entrepreneurship coming together to create products. Our next guest is Nick Caliani, co-founder of WinHub and TriCrypto. He's a builder, he's a creator, he's entrepreneur. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. John, thanks for having me. You just gave a long talk, so I'll let you breathe a little bit. You're an entrepreneur, you're an inventor, you see things early, you've got all out of your hands and lots of good stuff here. So it's a perfect place for you to be giving talks and hanging out. Absolutely, I love the fact that people are here to learn. They are here to find out about the new innovative things that they can experience hands-on. And I just gave a workshop on smart contracts on the blockchain and I love the questions I got and the energy that's there. What were some of the questions you were getting? What was the interest? Where were people going at it? Because networking's a supply chain problem. You can almost imagine applying blockchain to networking constructs. Yeah, absolutely. Blockchain is one of those technologies that is misunderstood quite a bit. And some of the questions I got really helped me reinforce that. Ultimately what I was trying to do is make sure that people understand that blockchain is not a solution for everything. There are certain things where there are scenarios where there are multiple untrusted parties, where blockchain is great, but otherwise it's just a slow database, you know? So you want to make sure that you use it in the right scenarios. And supply chain is a very common example where it's used, especially private blockchain. Latency's not a concern. Blockchain might be a solution if other things line up. Great point, I'm glad you brought that up. I want to just ask you, because as just your profile as a person, you're visionary, you see things early. Part of the show here that's interesting is it's not like this research kind of thinking, although research tends to think about the ways coming. It's about what's here and now and what's coming, but it's also making things real and creating. So a lot of the conversations are fun, exploratory, discovery oriented, but also there's a lot of reality kind of grounded in it. You know, entrepreneurs make some mistakes if you're too early and you're misunderstood for a long time. It's going to be a little bit early at the right time. Timing's everything. Talk about the dynamic of timing and building and creating with big waves that are coming. You get cloud, you got blockchain, you got AI, you got machine learning. Talk about this dynamic. Absolutely, yeah, so timing is so important, especially when you have startups, right? You could have the greatest technology and maybe the market's not ready for it. And so, yeah, it fails and my first startup was like that. I created something that the market was not ready for, but fortunately, the stuff I'm working on is the market is ready for it. So I think one of the things that developers, engineers can do is really look at how, not necessarily how technology is being marketed, but what the adoption rate is. If there are more people jumping on it and a good way to look at that is to look at GitHub and see how many people are creating samples, boilerplates, how many people are writing blog posts, et cetera. That, I think, is a better indicator of whether technology is ready for prime time or if it's just all vaporware. Tell me about what you're working on now. You're working on some very interesting projects. Where are they? What's the status, size of the team, collaborative, open source? What's going on? Yeah, so I have two startups I'm working on. The first one is called WAN Hub. So we have a product called Interface that allows anyone to be an expert on any topic and promote themselves through the platform and allows anyone who is looking for expertise on any topic to find them and then pay for them and do a video call, get their questions answered, and the whole transaction is handled via blockchain with either our cryptocurrency or you can use Apple Pay and Google Pay. So we launched a few months ago. We have about 75,000 users. It's growing very fast and we are just at the point right now where we are trying to scale up. Our crypto token is called WAN token and it's listed on five different exchanges. So that's one thing. While building that product, one thing became very clear to me. Mainstream users have a very challenging time with using anything blockchain or cryptocurrency related and it's through no fault of theirs. The ecosystem has been created for developers by developers and the tools lack empathy for the users. And that led me to create an open source project called CryCrypto. And the mission is to create free open source content and tools to make blockchain and cryptocurrency more accessible to users. So that's at CryCrypto. To me and you, not the killer dorks and the guys who are coding. Yeah, we want it to be like non-technical folks. Is it the wallet that's the problem or is it just overall too techy? John, the very word wallet is the problem because it gives this idea that there's something within it. And as we were talking earlier, you know about blockchain, there's nothing in the wallet. It's just a placeholder for your addresses, right? So in fact, I'm trying to solve that problem with a new tool I've created called PhotoBlock where I use a photo and emojis to replace that. So yes, wallets are problems. The fact that it requires you to have all these parts in place before you can do anything useful. That's a big problem also. People really need to step back and look at the user experience and say, what are the friction points and how can we eliminate them? And that needs to happen before blockchain and cryptocurrency can have mass adoption. Talk about the choice of smart contract language, use Ethereum, which was the hottest development or in most traction. A lot of ICOs kind of watered that down. It's still under 300. Other ones are emerging, NEO, EOS, a bunch of other ones. It seems to be kind of like a NASCAR race. One's in the lead, someone's coming up. How do you look at that marketplace as other developers start to kick the tires as people start building these real-world apps? Is that important to have a selection? Does it matter? What's your thoughts on selection of that? That's a great question. I mean, I think going back to what I said about how to evaluate a technology, you can see that Ethereum is still continues to be the leader. I mean, by far, so while EOS and other blockchains have what appears to be a lot of momentum, if you dig down below the surface, you don't find as much. So I continue to remain a big fan of Ethereum, which doesn't mean I don't care for the other blockchains, but I find that right now, Solidity and Ethereum are a good way to move forward. I think EOS is also a pretty good platform to build on, but I think their development tools need to reach some level of maturity. On Ethereum, the folks that have created a truffle stack, the truffle and ganache package, have done a great service for developers because they've made things so simple and easy, and something like that needs to evolve. Yeah, and your point earlier, I think it's important to know for the developers out there, don't confuse the protocol and the token selection on smart contracts with blockchain. Again, you don't have to do everything on blockchain because it's a slow database. You're doing smart contracts, which doesn't really require a lot of overhead. I mean, it's a contract, it does, but I mean, you want to have it secure. You want to have it reliable, but you're not doing zillions of contracts per second. The IOPS are not that high. Yeah, actually, smart contract is also a very misunderstood term. In fact, someone asked me, well, is it legal contracts or medical contracts? What is it? So a smart contract is really just an application, right? A programming code that runs on the virtual machines on blockchain, and they call it a contract because once it's out there, it's immutable, which means the rules are defined, known, and fixed, and can't be changed. So when you create a smart contract, really what you're doing is handling a very small amount of data that you want to persist forever that runs with some rules. And in a decentralized world, as we call it in our community, it's a digital handshake. It's like, we agreed that we would do this, and here it is. It's unackable. All right, so what are the cool things you work on? What else you got? Open source project, that's awesome. You got a lot going on. Life's good. Life is good. So as I mentioned, photoblock is the thing that I'm really excited about. And another app that we are building is called Public Record. The problem we are solving there is that in areas where there is strife, or maybe there's dictators, et cetera, sometimes when you have people who have photos of some crime occurring or some event occurring, they are reluctant to share it because they could be traced back and have adverse consequences. So with Public Record, we are building a smart contract-driven blockchain app where you can just take a photo and it will push that photo onto IPFS, which stands for the Interplanetary File System, which is a decentralized file system, and it will anonymize the photo. It will strip all the stuff that your camera puts in there, like GPS, the camera model, et cetera. It'll manipulate that photo and it will then put a hash of that on the blockchain and make it available by location. So you can go to any location and look at all the photos that people have taken there that are completely anonymous and impossible to track back to the present. And what about tampering proof? You have origination data. You strip out the real origination data. That's really important for some of these countries where people get killed for sharing or try to get the back door out of the country for the political revolution, or just simply, yeah, I don't want anyone to know. But how about tampering proof? It is, it's on IPFS, which is immutable file system. And what we also do is we manipulate the colors and tones of the photo a little bit, so it's impossible to even use AI to go back and reverse engineer and figure out who created the photo. But yeah, so the location, the time and the actual content of the photo is not tampered. So public record will do that for you. Okay, so a little, just a little quick Q and A on your company. Did you do an ICO? Did you finance it yourself? Yeah, so with Venn Hub, we did do an ICO. But it was at a time when the market was in its bare thing. So our ICO was moderately successful. So in addition to the ICO funds, we are primarily funded by one of my co-founders who's Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. So we are doing quite well. He's a cool guy to hang out with, huh? Yes, he is. Never a dull moment? Never a dull moment, I learned quite a bit. Yes. Congratulations, how do people find out how to hang out with you? You've got some good things going on here. Where do you hang out? What do you do for fun? What events you go to? What's going on with you? I'm on Twitter quite a bit. I'm... Share your Twitter handle. It's techbubble. So I'm there. I also, I like to blog on TriCrypto and also my own personal blog. I go to meet up events here in Silicon Valley and I do make an effort to speak at at least five to six conferences each year. Hanging it forward. Yep. A lot of more action going on in crypto and token economics, not just from an ICO standpoint, although there's been some negative scams out there and global fraud, but generally blockchain and token economics is real. It's absolutely... And getting more traction and soon, I think it'll be clearer. Just your thoughts on that, if you can share your perspective in terms of the opportunities around those two areas. Yeah, so, you know, like any other new and exciting technology, it goes through the hype cycle. We've gone through that now. And I think there's really two types of people in this ecosystem. The ones that are focused on the cryptocurrency and the pricing around it, et cetera. But I really like to separate that from the blockchain aspect of it. Blockchain is a very real technology. It's a really different technology that the world has never seen before. And yes, it's very true that not everything is a good candidate for the blockchain, but there are many, many scenarios where there are multiple untrusted parties that are excellent for blockchain. So I think what needs to happen is, persons in leadership position need to really evaluate what are those scenarios where there are untrusted entities involved and limit their blockchain involvement, test pilot, et cetera, or that. They're likely to see more success versus just throwing blockchain in to replace a database because that's guaranteed to be a fail. Yeah, Nick, great to have you on. I totally agree with you. You know, the team here, we were in Puerto Rico, we've been in the Bahamas, we've been in Toronto, we've been to all the blockchain events. Consensus is coming up in New York. We might be there May 14th. Patrick, get ready, head down to New York, maybe go down there. Great to have your perspective and great to see the blockchain conversation coming in here as the emerging tech and the creation here at DevNet Create continues. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, I appreciate you having me here. More CUBE coverage here coming, live here at Mountain View after this short break.