S1E5: Blockchain Technology Maturity with Antonio Senatore, Deloitte Global CTO
A Blockchain technology Master Class with Antonio Senatore, Deloitte's Global CTO for Blockchain. We discuss what he sees as the 'core' Blockchain technologies for enterprise, his key learnings from taking both Public and Private Blockchain platforms into production, and his forecast for when we will see emerging domains like Zero Knowledge Proofs, Interoperability and Blockchain-enabled AI being ready for prime time.
On this episode we discuss:
- What it takes to be considered a 'mature' Blockchain platform
- Relative maturity of Ethereum, Hyperledger, Corda, VeChain and others
- Key challenges for implementing Public and Private Blockchains in enterprise
- The importance and time horizon for Interoperability between Blockchain networks
- Why we should be excited about Blockchain and AI, and what can they bring together
- What are Zero Knowledge Proofs, and what is required for broader adoption
- What questions to ask of emerging Blockchain technology vendors looking for partnerships
- Where Antonio gets his reading list
References mentioned during the show:
Antonio's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-senatore-b759273/
Andreas Antonopoulos: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aantonop/
QEDIT: https://qed-it.com/
Polkadot: https://polkadot.network/
Constellation Network: https://constellationnetwork.io/
Transcript (Courtesy of Sonix - Apologies for any errors from the AI):
Anthony: Welcome back, everybody. Today, it's a technical masterclass. We're going to talk through the state of blockchain technology in 2020, and I'm joined by Antonio Senatore. He's the global CTO for blockchain at Deloitte, a good friend and a former colleague of mine. Antonio, welcome to the show.
Antonio: Thank you, Anthony. Thank you for having me today.
Anthony: That's my pleasure. And I'm really excited for this. This is going to be a technical deep dive. We're going to talk about the state of the technology. We're gonna talk through some of the projects that you and maybe you and I also have worked on, obviously in anonymous format, talk through some of the learnings that we've had in terms of taking blockchain into production and also get your specific take as a CTO on what more we need to do and how we can help more blockchain programs getting into production.
Let me start with a simple one, Antonio. Give us your blockchain origin story. How did you first start working with blockchain?
Antonio: It is very easy. The demand came from Deloitte literally. In 2016, May 2016 when Deloitte opened the EMEA Blockchain Lab in Dublin. David Dalton at the time was looking into the technology and was finding the technology quite interesting for a number of use cases, specifically for the financial services sector. And so Deloitte founded a lab in Dublin, which is called the EMEA blockchain lab, which I'm leading. And then at some point in time they needed a CTO. And they called me and said I would like to join the lab and to meet our technology effort and roadmap. And I said in blockchain, you know, I was just studying it. Like anyone else studying Bitcoin in that area much of the time. More than that. I will love that. So I jumped in. We were very few people at the time. The team has now grown to over 30 people, but globally Deloitte is over a thousand people. So during this journey of 4 years to become the global CTO for the firm in the blockchain space. And yeah, that's that's where it started, with a call.
Anthony: As some of the best stories do. And obviously there are no blockchain natives in 2020. Tell us more about your background and how that fits into the work you do with blockchain.
Antonio: I am by background. I'm a computer engineer, I've been developing software since I was a teenager. Basically, I come from many years of Java Development, middleware, integration, API, ESB, queuing systems, et cetera, et cetera. I have done for a number of years, about 16 years, big data and analytics, a lot of infrastructure for data architectures and large data deployments. Literally before I was doing blockchain. So I kind of have an angle of software development and software development lifecycle and data and analytics, and I think blockchain kind of fits all of those together. I always say it's probably the core tech to glue together all the technologies that are going to be part of the fourth industrial revolution.
Anthony: Let's talk about the state of the empire in 2020. We've seen lots of different platforms getting into production. There are many different flavors of blockchain, as some people say. There are many different types of blockchain platform out there. Public and private. Give us your sense of what's working well. What's been successful or where there's more work to be done.
Anthony: There is work to be done everywhere. That's got to be the bottom line here. There is a lot that has been done. There's still way too much to be done and they will be done. And I'm confident about that. So let's step back. You ask what is what is the current status of the art? We are in a in a situation where we are seeing a number of players that are not mature enough. They have gathered a number of use cases, production, deployments and interest.
Of course, the Ethereum blockchain being one of those, probably the main one, I would rather say both in the public space and permission space. We have solution for permissions, that are deployed and are working fine for three years now. Of course, a lot of work being done by the Hyperledger Foundation, as you probably know better than me. The Fabric platform being there for a few years now with that significant number of of large consortia. You also have, of course, Hyperledger Indie, which is with the sovereign network, which is getting a lot of traction in digital identity and proof of credentials, space.
You've got Corda, the R3, which is becoming almost a standard in the financial services industry for several reasons for the way the protocol is designed to be point-to-point, basically a middleware for organizations for data exchange and for the smart contracts between organizations like almost like a middleware for the market rather than a middleware for a single organization. Actually, their motto is they're trying to become middleware for markets. Rather in the same way middleware was beneficial for the organization. So and of course, within the Corda ecosystem you also have the Corda Networks, which is their public network to enable networks to interoperate.
You've got to VeChain foundation, which which is creating a lot of traction in the supply chain carbon footprint space. It's a permissioned and public blockchain, which is quite interesting as a concept. And yeah, these these are really the main players. Of course you've got the Bitcoin blockchain. You can still do time stamping that as you can do anywhere else. And you're going to get a lot of use cases.
Anthony: I knew we were gonna get a time stamping reference at some point today.
Antonio: Yeah. Yeah. Do we still have a few time stamping? I did myself in the early days and 2016. I think there is a time stamp on the bitcoin blockchain when we open the EMEA Blockchain Lab. I've been doing it from my personal wallet, which I think I sent is what it was a very small transaction fee, but I think at some point in time that transaction fee was about two or three hundred euro.
And that is one. Yeah. I mean there are still others around. Anthony, you've got EOS, which is that actually growing a lot, getting more mainstream traction. You have some minor players that probably still have something to say. These are the core platforms and protocols. We're seeing an exponential growth in, you know, infrastructure. We are seeing the work that you guys in IBM have done, with kubernetes. And Red Hat Openshift. We have seen what Oracle has done with Hyperledger Fabric, creating a platform as a service on Oracle Cloud to create blockchain instances and networks. And not only that, also off the cloud on premisis. You're seeing Kaleido, which is again, platform as a service for blockchain.
It's almost like a blockchain marketplace to create blockchain network and blockchain instances where the Kaleido guys are doing, which is basically hosting public data nodes, offering blockchain as a services basically and others. So, you know, you have a number of core protocols which are now kind of mature enough, although I don't exclude that we would see a few more happening in the next few years. And now you've got a number of players who are trying to put infrastructure down around all of those. And this is quite important to get life, to be honest.
Anthony: And what's the difference between core and non-core? I mean, what do we have that allows Ethereum, Hyperledger, Corda to become core or to become mature versus, you know, what's happened to the likes of Chain, Multichain, Steem? What is it that makes them 'Core' for you?
Antonio: Well, first of all, it's the adoption, it's, you know, the fact that there's a number of of organizations that are using it. And that becomes core because as you know, one of the biggest fear of any CEO or like me or CIO is to pick the wrong technology and, you know, begin the technology that everybody else is picking, the technology that is more mature in the market, that the technology that has got the more traction makes everybody feel safer.
I feel that they're doing the right decisions and sometimes it's just market driven. To me, though, personally, what makes it mature is the fact that I can literally sit on my laptop, download the notes, create a blockchain instance immediately, deploy smart contract and deploy anywhere. Then I want to deploy locally on a server that I have internally, my organization or in the cloud, you know, simple containerisation, of course, or platform as a service. So to me, the maturity stands in the fact that it enables me a true DevOps experience. As I say, the ability to work on my laptop, work on my instance and create networks and deploy that everywhere instantly, quickly. And that's not an easy thing to achieve with a technology like blockchain. It's a network technology. So there is a lot of players within infrastructure or players within the network that needs to be orchestrated and need to communicate together. So it's not trivial, but I can guarantee you a couple of years ago, getting an Ethereum node, a private, a data node, running or not. But let's say more. Three years ago, getting an Ethereum node running on a Docker image anywhere was a lot of pain. Maturity stands not only in the fact that the thing works and does what he's supposed to do also in the facility that enables you to develop, to deploy, to monitor, to maintain those networks. And those protocols that I just mentioned are growing an ecosystem around that and that that is making them very viable for production use cases. I hope that makes sense.
Anthony: Yeah, that's really helpful. And again, it's important for people to think through as you're choosing a particular technology or as you're thinking of establishing your network, you want to try and focus as much on the commercial case, the ecosystem, getting the parties together and not having to fight with your technical team to be able to spin up the technology in the first place. It sounds like we're moving towards making the establishment of the core nodes of the network as simple as spinning up a Squarespace website, which makes a ton of sense. And then you can focus your time on more value added activity.
Antonio: Definitely. I mean, you want to know that the team is efficient. The team has the right tools from development, from, you know, testing automation, which is something that has been missing for years. And now we are seeing a few frameworks from user acceptance testing again in the testing automation space to penetration testing if needed up to the deployment and managing of the network. So that's what we want to achieve.
We want blockchain networks to work, and blockchain projects to work, to be as easy to deploy as anything we've been doing in the past 10 years. You know, we have tools aimed at technologists to speed up the way we develop and deploy things and to reduce the risks of failing, of course, the risks of bugs, the risk of security breaches.
And in the meantime, and at the same time, of course, being commercially viable, that's what the aim is and that's what maturity of a technology should give you.
Anthony: So if we've got through a good degree of improvement in terms of the user experience or the developer experience with some of these core platforms, where does the pain remain? What's still challenging for your teams as they're trying to work on blockchain programs and take them into production?
Antonio: Oh, well, there is a lot in there. There is still a degree of integration with the existing tech stack, which and sometimes there are surprises that are unexpected, literally integration.
You know, there's there is a series of legacy applications that you have. They may be running in DOT net, in Java. There could be an ERP system running somewhere and API provider. You know, you may have a Microsoft architecture that is using certain technologies to deliver those services. And then all of a sudden you're trying to integrate all of those with a blockchain network. But that is going to enable you to do some stuff, whatever that is, reconciliation. Anything really, either private or public integration is one of the first problems that we have and we are still facing those still some of our core issues. To get full integration capabilities, a very well-documented API or whatever that could be protocols, integration protocols with different blockchain networks.
That is one as usual is is of course deployment for me and cloud the deployment and containerization and plus the integration with the Docker and Kubernetes.
We're getting there. We're not fully there. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. And it doesn't work as smoothly as you may think. Always. And there is a lot of configuration that you need to do beforehand to enable that to happen, which is some data doesn't happen with the entity. If I look at creating a kubernetes or do we do mySQL server, I can do that immediately with you in 10 seconds and we deploy anywhere we want on my laptop, on the cloud. It's not that easy. Of course, blockchain is more complicated, but yet there's still work that needs to be done there. The other one is key storage. Where we are, we are not struggling. But there are different aspects in the internet, you know. You know, we you develop enterprise solutions in some extends to the transaction or signed within the network itself. Imagine a fabric cluster or fabric network. Hyperledger fabric network. So the key storage is kind of integrated within the node itself that is going to run or separately, but within the same network. And there are different solutions that are coming out that are trying to make that seamless.
But HSMs are very clumsy beasts. I mean they're very big. They're there, they're difficult to get it right. That difficult to configure and difficult to integrate. We are still finding HSM integrations sometimes over complicated. I mean what I like to see is to see more virtual HSMs coming out, be that in the cloud. Of course that's why it's useful. Sometimes transactions get signed outside in memory, not fully integrated. There's still a lot of work to be done. That's for HSM and not to mention wallets. Mobile wallets. Now, there are phones coming out with inbuilt capabilities with key storage, but they're not they're not for common use for everyone so that the exercise of storing private keys on your phone is not fully integrated. It's kind of the key with the hardware key storage. It's always dangerous. So there's that aspects there that need to improve as well.
And then there is a lot still needs to be done in terms of cloud platform as a service.
Good work from many organizations, Oracle, IBM I mentioned a few minutes ago. But if you compare with the cloud experience you had so far and as you were trying to create, anything, anything like NodeJS, with a mongo database we do in front of it. I don't know, any sort of load balancer back up, et cetera, et cetera, with a pipeline of deployment. It is literally one click away. It's not there yet for blockchain. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done there as well.
So that's most of the challenges for us, a bit of also lack of penetration testing tools, static and dynamic, let's call it runtime analysis. They are getting there. They're out there. But we are nowhere near what we have for any other, you know, server side application or any other network technology, et cetera
So there is a number of things that need to get there to help us develop faster.
Anthony: Thanks for that, Antonio. And there's a few things in there that I wanted to double click on. Obviously, a wealth of knowledge in terms of some of the pain that you've had to go through. And I guess it's a lot easier to do the work that we do today than than it was three years ago. But the likes of wallets of crypto currency and key management. Do you find in the enterprise space these are challenging concepts for clients talk through these barriers to adoption at this point.
Antonio: Well, the thing is these the clients that we have been working so far, in most cases I know clients are different, but they never had to talk about storage for any type of applications that they were doing. I mean, they had their own HSM for some particular type of applications like key storage and of course, cryptocurrencies in the enterprise space. Sorry. In the blockchain space, they're a key concept. OK. They're a must have. I mean, you cannot run a blockchain network without a key storage or at least having having someone that is going to sign the transactions with you. So you're looking into a space where the clients are saying the clients have two problems. I need to host cryptocurrencies, to pay for gas. That is a concern. That is a concept that still nowadays, in 2020, is a still a concern because there are different reasons why that is a concern. Maybe two. One is the security.
Like what if I lose the my keys? What if somebody steals my keys? It's a responsibility internally for security systems. And it's a responsibility very few people are willing to take. And second one is really the concept itself.
So that's definitely one. But there's not only the fact that, OK, I don't want to store cryptocurrencies. It's also the entire blockchain architecture in general. And even when it doesn't include cryptocurrencies, you always need HSM. You always need key storage. And that's always complicates the discussion.
Anthony: Got it. And through all of that, we didn't mentioned zero knowledge proofs, which I know is a topic that you've been spending a lot of your headspace in. Is zero knowledge a technology that's ready for deployment now. Is this something that you're seeing being deployed in production? Where are we on zero knowledge proof at this stage?
Antonio: You know, it's an incredible technology. You know, Deloitte is part of the ZK proof standards group. We have organized the first ZK proof community event in Europe, which was in Amsterdam in November. We strongly believe in the tech. That's one. Where are we? I mean, Anthony. There are things that now we know we can do. It is so big. It's all about definition of a trusted set up environment.
And based on what you want to do, which means which is the type of transaction and the base reference of data that you want to transact, it can get very complicated. We now pretty much have zero knowledge for digital assets. So we can there are solutions out there, different various solutions where you can shadow transactions that are related. ERC20 or you see someone on the blockchain. If I look at the sovereign network, you can literally create proof of your identity or your qualifications without revealing anything. That's within the Hyperledger Foundation so that data reference has be cracked. And there are there are others that are putting out their frameworks that are that aimed to do more and more. And every time is about what we are actually trying to exchange here? And every time that can look extremely different. So what we are going to have to do is to look at what the industry does and what the experts do. And every time what the new protocols for the new assets are going to going to look like. So at the moment, there is stuff we can do. There are things we can do. But this is gonna be the next 10 years journey.
Anthony: So it sounds like we've got to create a separate protocol where we've got to work towards a library of types of proof that we can standardize for this to become a more scalable proposition.
Antonio: Yes, pretty much like that. And of course, that we did the final aim to get at some point where as anything else, you're just going to have libraries where everybody can, say, create a token, an ERC20, and create proofs, distribute those tokens in CGP and create proofs that you are clustering. So you want to reach your level of really almost shielding anything that you have or the entire trusties that OP reference data and basically allow developers and cryptographers to just call libraries to say, OK, generate these transactions, generate a zero knowledge, go for this type of data, et cetera, et cetera. So that that is the aim and that's what we are seeing in the market. If you look at the credit solution or the US tech solution, that's what the guys of. Even the EY solution, which I think at the time was Nightfall. Now I think it's called different. Now there's been a new release: Baseline protocol. I mean, I'm saying we are still digging into that to understand what it does, but it's basically a framework that enables you to generate ZK proofs through API. Now, it's a lot bigger than that, but that's the overall concept.
Anthony: Antonio, before we get into some of the wit and wisdom from some of the experience that you've had into taking blockchain into production, I wanted to pause. I know that you're a voracious reader and you do probably more research around blockchain than anyone else I've ever met. You're constantly looking for learning, which is something that I hold in really high regard. And what makes you the CTO that you are today? Tell me, where do you go for your learning and reading? How do you keep abreast of the technology? How do you keep up with what's important to learn when it comes to technology and blockchain?
Antonio: Anthony, that is the most one of the probably the most difficult question of the day. Usually, to be honest, I look up to people that are better than me. The CEOs of larger organizations. The CTOs of big tech companies, former CEOs, etc. I literally steal their reading list. Believe it or not. Which is which is a good thing to do because these guys, they know what what they reached very high positions. They achieved a lot in life and they can see when something is truly disruptive and worth reading. So I really refer a lot to people that I believe where I have been more successful than me personally. The way I look at that is through my feed reader.
I'm constantly on most of the top technology feeds that are out therewith topics related to blockchain, big data analytics, machine learning, A.I., DevOps, Cloud and more.
And that's where I get probably most of the knowledge of the tech that is worth investigating. After 20 years in business, I kind of know what what what are the problems out there. And so I'm able to spot when something is really worth reading immediately that that was the case. You know, when even when I started zero knowledge proof, the first time I heard about it was three years ago and I said, this is gonna be a big game changer. So that's where really I go about my reading. It's a it's true through advisors from people that are better than me and through my technology feeds.
Anthony: And I know it's not just reading with you. Right. You do like to get your hands dirty. Do better coding every once in a while?
Antonio: Yes. Yes, a lot. Always. As you know, I still like to to keep my hands dirty within the code. Then that gives me a lot of confidence when when I read something to understand whether it's good or not. Because the simple the first thing I always do is try it. See, sit on my laptop and my instances, start coding, start developing, deploying it.
Does it work? Is it easy? That gives me an initial feeling, whether what you're talking about or whether the new tech that is coming out really has legs to stand on or not. One of the things that, you know, as a CTO, especially in Deloitte, because we've got a lot of vendors that want to work with us, I assume that's the same for you, Anthony, and for many who are listening to the podcast. My advice to everyone when assessing a new tech and trying to read more about that is really just a simple one. Just try it. Get it running on your laptop. Start coding it. See how that is. Because somebody in your team is going to have to use it if it's not easy for you is not going to be easy for everyone.
That's my probably number one advice when when assessing something.
Anthony: What was the last technology that you spun up? What was the last thing you explored, that was outside of mainstream?
Antonio: Yeah, it was the Qedit framework for ZKP in January / February this year was the last last thing that I've done.
Anthony: And what were you trying to spin up on Qedit?
Antonio: It just on private Ethereum, trying to create it for an ERC20. And its worked quite well. I mean, I was able not immediately, but after a couple of attempts, I was able to get it running. But it's a continuous thing. Then before I was playing with the Oracle Cloud. You know, it's a way for me to really understand whether the company is in some extent serious and whether the vendor is putting the right amount of time in investment. Which is another talking point. By the way, identifying the way the vendors that are serious about it, that are serious about blockchain or not, and how do you determine.
Anthony: Serious or not, what are the criteria that you look for?
Antonio: It's the quality of what they deliver. Anthony. I mean, if you look at you know, there is there is one and one thing that is that usually impresses me is the quality of documentation and the fact that your documentation matches exactly what what what you plan to deliver. Developing the documentation, it's a difficult job and expensive. BAs, the technical writer and the team and the CTO who address it together. It means it is strategic. One of the first things that I look at is quality of documentation. It's either you're early days or you're really not being serious about.
The second one is my ability to reach you, literally download whatever you have quickly and make it work you in a few clicks away, which means that you have been thinking about the user, that you've been thinking about the developer. You've been thinking about the fact that the person that is going to develop around your tech needs assistance needs a series of tools around that. There's been a lot in this in this market over of announcing the blockchain space. That was just bizarre, but there was very little behind. Look at the documentation and you'll look at the technology and easiness of developing and deploying it. It's always going to give you the answer.
Anthony: So this show is all about the practical realities of working with blockchain and getting into production. We've said it many times. We've proven most of the technical concepts and you said it as well today. What we're able to do technically with blockchain is pretty well understood. What I'd love to be able to share with the community is some of your key learnings or examples or stories from some of the production programs that you've run. What went well? What are some of the must dos? What are some of the painful learnings? What are some of the main things that come to mind for you?
Yeah. I mean, it's a difficult question because there's been a lot has been four years now. You know, the fact that over the years the technology has been improving and we've been able to to release projects with different technologies. We were able to release several production projects, not easily, but but with confidence. T
And, you know, having us put up live blockchain project, you know, has helped the entire community and has helped all of us. What are some key learnings while it's, let's say, one bad first and nothing really went really bad. But in several instances at the beginning of our journey sizing all the different nodes, all the different images, all the different instances of nodes was, you know, it is something that everybody should look at. We did care because, you know, you tend to underestimate the amount of traffic that you think is gonna generate, especially if you're looking at, you know, deploying within your organization public blockchain nodes. Don't underestimate ever in public blockchain deployments the time and effort that goes into the synchronization that we the public network don't underestimate, with public blockchain networks, deployment where you're running. You don't know that a fork that you're not aware or software upgrade or as I did, it doesn't work. It happens to us once, believe it or not. I know most of the times are very well announced, et cetera, but there may be changes that were really your API no longer works or you're not going to sync correctly. And you're like, what? What is going on here?
These are some of the things it's not that went badly, but some of the issues we faced.
For me, what is really in permissioned networks, is making sure of the onboarding of new players. I know it's a business problem rather than a rather than tech. It's a governance problem rather than a technology problem because it's a process. How do you do that? What is the process for you all saying we are 20 organization. We want the 21st organization. And by the way, this organization can play X, Y and Z in this network.
Ok. You have defined that. Don't underestimate the technology effort that goes behind realizing that. And actually my suggestion is that be prepared to do that. So as I said, create war games, just simulate all different situations that can occur. And that's probably a talking point that I should have mentioned earlier. The ability for you to expand permission and networks is not there yet.
What more players within the network is really not there fully. I mean, you can do that, but there is a lot of manual scripting to be done. So my advice to everyone is to get that manual scripting down yourself quickly during the project until the technology and all the different problems are measured enough to enable literally a few configuration steps or clicks a way for adding new players internet.
These are pretty much and needed some of the the learnings.
Of course, this is from our what our own learning. If you look at the market, there is a lot around security. There's a lot around testing and there's a lot around penetration testing.
It is something you got to take into account, especially when playing in public matters. It is something that you need to cost for, it something you need to be very, very conscious about because it's in some cases you won't be able to reverse what you have done. And even in permissioned networks, it's very, very difficult to then recreate everything.
These are some of the tips.
Anthony: Thank you so much for the examples. Obviously a mix of a lot of technical challenges there. But a couple of things you mentioned are actually the people based challenges, onboarding and offboarding, even working with some of the I.T. teams, with the security teams in client organizations, that can be as much of a challenge as actually the technology build in the lab as well, right?
Antonio: Absolutely. There are several clients that I met, and I think you might as well where the solution was technically sound in theory. In practice. I mean, the network was working. The network was generating transactions. The smart contacts were running. The assets were exchanged. The payments was verified onchain. All those things that we do in blockchain at public and private. Then there was an aha moment or whatever you want to call it, when you know a blockchain network. Ultimately, what it what is a blockchain network? It's a network of nodes. So what we deliver to clients is a full stack we deliver to clients. The core ledger, the HSM in some cases or whatever, whatever. We are going to build the API layer, a UI, an integration layer, maybe an off chain storage whatever that is. We give a package and then each one gets this package. That would be the certificate authority as well. And they run it and they have to connect to the network that they want to connect to be that, you know. And then there's the security people, the enterprise architect within the enterprise architecture team of the organization, especially in financial services, which are for obvious reasons, very wary about security and very, very aware and very conscious. They want to tell you we cannot have these in this fashion. You cannot have, you know, the access immediately. It has to be within our own network. We cannot have the API sitting there.
And by the way, the ledger, we cannot open the ports that are going to enable you to do the P2P connection with the other players.
And so we need to open different ports, and that may require three months of requests and a process to get that approved. So, I mean, internal processes are a big deal, especially for big organizations. And never underestimate that. So what is the solution here? You just need to involve all your stakeholders from day one.
Anthony: These are not problems you want to find out or not work packages that you want to have added on at the very end just before you go into production. Right?
Antonio: Yeah. But people have found those problems before going into the production. So this has happened. I'm not taking personally, but it's in the news and talking to clients. It's been happening. And it's important that we point out for sure.
And I guess when you're talking about a founder network or vertical network where you've got one lead organization, these are the challenges that you're going to get to out front as you get into production when you're getting into a horizontal or a network of multiple parties, competitors, peers in an organization. You can build the technology and then there's the bootstrapping process. You're adding one by one, by one by one. And where on paper you've got a network of 15, 20, 30 companies, actually you only end up with one, two, three or four at the beginning. And then you might get a drip feed of some others as their internal onboarding process eventually catches up.
Let forget about blockchain for a minute. The way we have done agile software development in the past few years, 10 years, I say it's been through to the release of MVPs and incremental progress, that's a standard where we know how to do that. Microsevices architecture actually help us doing that better and DevOps technologies and techniques, they help us achieving that, you know, with continuous integration and delivery. Microservices you can just increase and add features that is perfect in the blockchain space. You'd not only talk about minimum viable product, but you've got to identify who are the initial players within your network. What is the and what they do? Are they just consuming and a transaction? Are they part of the governance? Are they validating? Etc. etc. And then you need to figure out how to scale from that minimum viable ecosystem.
Anthony: And with all those learnings in the hopper so far, as you start continuing your journey and speaking to clients in future, what are some of the early stage guidances or insights or stories that you tell to clients as they begin their blockchain journey to help you hopefully mitigate some of the pain later down the road?
Antonio: Well, first of all, blockchain. It's a network technology. It's a technology for transacting with other organizations. It's a technology that is going to build a layer of trust across markets, across a transition, across industries. And so you've got to identify what is your network. Who do you want to talk with and why you're using blockchain?
Because maybe its not the right solution for your problem. So this is the number one advice when I get into into the room with my clients. I mean, why are we talking about blockchain?
What is it you're trying to solve? What is your network and what does your network look like today? Blockchain is going to help you to increase that network, to make that network wider? And why? So that is one of the number one points that we try to get across. And then the results. But I think that is the main one. Identify your network and identify how do you scale it. Now, the second one that I like lately is 'think out of the box'. You have identified your network. That is fine. What about other networks? Is there any other network you would like to talk to?
And then interoperability becomes an issue. But that's that's probably a different a different discussion.
Let's assume you are offering you know, you're tokenising real estate. Anthony, anything, or you're running a trade finance platform and all of us sudden, you know, you need to integrate with banking or maybe you want to integrate with insurance networks that are out there already running on blockchain where you actually want to insure that asset.
How do you scale out there? So I always tell my clients they start thinking about the other networks.
Let's assume you're running some project and these projects are running on the blockchain. You know, there's really a workflow management running there. We do all the different stakeholders with the digital identity. How do you connect to a supply chain that is running on another blockchain to make sure your the materials that you're getting are sustainable and your carbon footprint is within regulation? If there is any like that. So the second piece of advice that I asked you to think, what are the other ecosystem that the client wants to play? And then, of course, interoperability becomes the challenge.
Anthony: I'm glad you brought up interoperability. I feel like we've gone down the road of kind of the painful learnings and this experience of the past. I want just to open the aperture just a tiny bit, because I know that you spent a lot of your time thinking about what's next. That's the core role of the CTO. Where are we at this point in time and interoperability? I know you had the Polkadot guys in the lab not too long ago. Is this near horizon or we still got a way to go?
Antonio: I think we have still got a way to go. Anthony, there are several school of thought here. You get, you know, a number of organizations and people believing that it's going to be one winner that takes it all.
Blockchain can literally deliver on promises only if we all use the same platform like we have done with the Internet. Which is a legitimate opinion. And I see where he's coming from. But yet that's not the way things are going.
I believe we are going to have one global network that needs to be governed by this global network is gonna be comprised by multiple chains and that that's what Andreas Antonopoulos said recently. One network, multiple chains. Now, are we there? No. No way. There are some protocols, Cosmos that allow you to do atomic swaps. The Polkadot guys are doing a tremendous job there. They are going live or they're very close to be live. There is the ability in some of the networks like fabric. There are some workarounds that we do with digital assets around creating a common language to define digital assets that can be then moved across the network. But that solves the development problem, not really the assets sharing problem, but is still a good approach, but is still a long way to go. In my view, the ability to swap assets across networks is going to be a difficult one. Good work has been done also from what we called an anchor. Yes, it is still within the same network, likely still within the same protocol, but they are effectively different networks even across multiple networks that are running on the same product. It's difficult. It's very difficult to do that. The R3 guys have resolved that using Corda networks and it's getting a lot of momentum. But really, you know, swapping I said from private to public chain, it's a difficult one to achieve. So, no, we we're not there yet. And it's not something that should scare anybody because that's the angle is going to be the end game. Once we are going to have all these multiple networks solving insurance, reinsurance, finance, trade, finance, micro-credit, etc., et cetera, et cetera.
The ability for them to interconnect and swap assets is going to be crucial. It's going to be the moment where we say, OK, we have made it because then our network can expand beyond the use cases. We thought they can expand beyond what we were thinking at the beginning. And that's what's going to change the world because we're going to do things that we didn't think we could do before.
Anthony: I hear you. And it's clear to observe you're seeing lots of different blockchain networks spinning up, some in the same industry or competing blockchain platforms. If you look at trade, finance or supply chain, a bunch of similar technologies, but being done on different protocols. And so for the time being, you're going to see maybe you could call it a Balkanization or silos of platforms being established for the next few years. And in my view, as long as they're creating business value or they're helping to improve or to reduce friction, that's worthwhile. For now, it's not perfect. A globally adopted universal standard blockchain platform is going to be a really difficult thing to implement. So in the meantime, what we're doing I think is valid, but clearly interoperability is going to be something that we're going to need to solve. And I think you're going to see multiple companies coming together to look and solve those problems because they see value in those those interconnections.
Antonio: But even the interconnection is not going to look the same across multiple networks. You may have interoperability solution that can, you know, make easy to interoperate networks that are running using the same protocol. That's fine. Other that they're going to get multiple protocols. So you're going to see multiple different solutions. And that's where the next wave of horsepower needs to go. Absolutely. Because that's where then we will know that we have achieved what we wanted to achieve, that blockchain has delivered on promises. But in the meantime, there's still work to be done on the protocols themselves.
So there's gonna be it's going to be two streams of work and it's going to be very interesting to see.
Anthony: This is where it gets a really interesting level where you've got multiple types of blockchain protocol, multiple types of interoperability protocols, trying to connect multiple networks in multiple geographies. I don't even want to go there right now. Let let's step away from this.
Antonio: But it's clear we don't need to we don't need to be scared about that. It's the way technology evolves. And actually, the more we try it's all about the technology. The more we try, the more we get out there, the better for everyone. That's my view where I have an approach that is very pragmatic. You know, we set up together our multi-platform approach at the time and that's where we see things. Different networks are going to be good at doing different things. And as we as things continue, we are going to see interoperability or multiple interoperability solutions. That's that's really the way it's going to go.
Anthony: I want to touch on another one of your favorite topics - artificial intelligence, and I know there's plenty of throwaway lines that have been written in articles, in white papers saying blockchain and I will do this or blockchain and A.I. together will solve the world. And practically speaking, I don't think we're there yet. Where do you see the intersection between blockchain and A.I.?
Antonio: The title of the podcast is Blockchain Won't Save the World. So why should blockchain and AI save the world? It is an interesting combination, which I like very much, because it's one of the cases where, you know, we always sometimes people refer to blockchain. And trust me, they were referring to the Internet in the past and the same with the same ways that technology looking for a solution for the problem to solve. While that's not really true, because we have seen lots of solutions that are very viable using blockchain, but blockchain and AI together is one of those ways where technology is going to be used for a way that was not told before. It's almost like AI found that I can plug blockchain within A.I. and achieve something which is really interesting. So almost like blockchain as a technology tool to enable another technology to work better, almost like a technology supporter. I consider that the glue, blockchain, the glue and the infrastructure that is going to take A.I. to the next level.
The problem with AI that we are going to face and we see is this there are two things that A.I. relies on data. A.I. is a data driven technology. By definition, A.I. learns from data and thereby makes decision based on previous data and makes decision based on data that is coming in and delivers them up.
So you have two problems. One is the data that was fed to the A.I., whether it is trusted it or not, where is it coming from? Is it coming from a trusted source, etc. And then the AI itself, you know, you see in the future, you can already see using, you know, A.I. as a service to do image recognition or very, very, very simple things. But imagine in the future whether you want to do very serious things like A.I. as a service to check whether you have cancer or not or any anything else.
How do you rely on that A.I.? That's what blockchain I think gets everything together because the blockchain can track the data provenance. So where these A.I. learn from improved that they are has learned from that data through a combination of different cryptography techniques and machine learning. And you can also have a digital identity overlaid. And imagine in the future where an AI or AI Networks that is going to learn from each other, they're going to exchange information from each other and actually applications that they're going to use different AIs to deliver on different things.
Imagine the amount of trust that you need to put into those networks, and that's where blockchain comes into play for A.I..
Anthony: I think that is an incredible thing that's really interesting and it talks to a number of the different levels of the blockchain capability. So it's trying to provide access to potentially sensitive data to AIs to help with their learning algorithms. It's also looking at helping to maintain a history of the activity of that A.I. so you can trace back the decisions that it has made based on certain inputs.
Antonio: Exactly. You can also also have situations where you're in a network. The A.I. is going to make a decision for you, which is quite important, can be life and death in some instances or a very, very sensitive business decision, which can mean a lot of money or security breaches. And then you've got A.I. running in a network almost as smart contracts and the group of A.I. achieving consensus about what is the right answer to give you so that the decision can become as a consensus can come out as a consensus. That's another quite interesting way of looking at that.
Anthony: So we took that interoperability is still a few years away in terms of the technology being ready to take into production. How far away do you feel that A.I. and blockchain interacting could be?
Antonio: I think we're still a few years away for technology and also people reasons. I mean, if you look at, as I said before, A.I. is a very much data driven technology. It's all around data. So it's all about the permission of gathering the data.
So it's all about giving consent for the data. It's all about knowing where your data is stored and understanding. Always, always gonna use your data. And for what? So there is I wouldn't say a compliance, but the regulation problem there to make this Bible a reality. That's really the blockchain. Problem is, if you think about that, it's about self sovereign identity, it's about self sovereign data, which means, you know, being able to immediately say, I want to give access to my data, set these guys X, Y and Z to do X, Y and Z. Imagine an open, decentralized marketplace entity. Imagine things like the ocean protocal or the Constellation network. They're basically public data lakes where people give consent of access in their own data or their own company data or their own IoT data or whatever. But those takes are really early stage. There are a number of those.
I haven't seen them in production yet. Maybe they are, but they haven't seen many use cases that are made. That of course means the main net is in production. But they haven't experienced any client requesting that that type of service. So still a few years away. And remember, you know, we're still talking about data. So this is going to be a regulation ongoing to all of this, which probably blockchain is going to have.
Anthony: Thanks, Antonio. As always, I've learned a huge amount today. It's always great talking with you. I'm gonna put it out there, immutably, or at least for as long as this podcast stays up. I miss you, buddy. I miss working with you. I wish you every success. Before we close the show, I want to ask, where can the audience find you? How can we find out more about the work you're doing and what else have you got going on in your life?
Antonio: Oh, god. Where people can find me. I mean, you can find me on LinkedIn and my social media. That's probably the easiest way. That's the that's the easiest thing people use nowadays to reach out. I'm leading the Blockchain Labs. I'm the global CTO for Deloitte in the blockchain space. So you can you're gonna reach out to me with email. Just Google the Deloitte Web site for Blockchain. You'll find me there. With what I got going on in my life, it is to continue working in the blockchain space, which is probably in the past 4 years have been the most exciting and frustrating years of my life.
I have that feeling that we are doing something that is literally reshaping the world as we know it. It is not going to save the world, but it's going to change a lot of the way we interact within each other. What I'm doing right now is just continuing helping clients in delivering solutions that can improve the way they interact with other organizations, with customers, with governments, etc..
Anthony: Well, I wish you all the best. And of course, for the rest of the Deloitte team. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And I hope our paths cross again very soon.
Antonio: They will for sure. Thank you.
