Oscar Jofre 00:42

Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Oscar Jofre. I’m one of the co-founders and President and CEO of KoreConX. What an exciting month, it is December 2022. And here we are, we’re going to come right down to the basics because, well, I’m not going to spoil the surprise, we’re going to be talking about the chaos we’re reading about. But I think whenever anything like this is happening, sometimes we need to go back to the very basics, to have a better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. And today, I am so grateful that we have two individuals that I believe are going to open your mind and more importantly, get you to understand what blockchain is. So, first of all, we’ll start with our special guests. Richard, please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Richard Ring 01:33

Good morning. My name is Richard Ring. I am a former intelligence officer from JSOC and a former Air Force Intelligence analyst. And for the last five years, I’ve owned a private intelligence firm, and we’re one of the only, if not the only, private investigation firms able to conduct both the on-chain and off-chain portions of a crypto-centric investigation, whether that’s for white collar crime, fraud, or conducting corporate intelligence.

Oscar Jofre 02:01

Wow. Okay. I stayed up too late last night watching Jack Ryan. So I’m really getting excited about this. All right. Dr. Garimella, please.

Kiran Garimella 02:16

Hi, I’m Kiran Garimella. I’m the Chief Scientist and CTO for KoreConX. And I’ve been in this financial services space for more than 30 years in IP and consulting, and also a trader myself in a way as types of instruments, including futures and all really fun and exotic stuff. And of course, I have a Ph.D. in data analytics and machine learning. And we’ve done lots of really interesting stuff with Blockchain over the past three to four years. So looking forward to having a really interesting discussion.

Oscar Jofre 02:56

I agree, I think it’s going to be really exciting. This discussion, I think, is timely. So I’ll put it out there. What is so timely? Well, we’re all watching the news, the big chaos in the market with FTX. And 99% of the market is still trying to figure out what is all this and we’re going to start at the origin. So, you know, let’s talk about where it all began. I mean, Kiran, obviously, from an academic point of view, and from the sector of research and all that tell us the origins of blockchain, where we are today. And obviously, I want to slip into Richard, because Richard and I had a separate discussion once and he just blurted out to me where it came from, but please.

Kiran Garimella 03:40

You know, most people are actually very surprised when I tell them that Bitcoin is not the origin of blockchain. And surprisingly enough, you know, people say, Hey, what is blockchain and where did it come from? And I tell them, a blockchain is nothing more than a chain of blocks. It’s as simple as that. Okay. I know, but underneath that, there’s a lot of history behind it. But the chain is really a linked list. So people in the computer science, you know, from way back when, and I’m kind of dating myself now, back in the mid-80s. We actually learned how to create chained worth program them, but the linked list itself began way back in the 50s. And the mid-50s, 55, 56. Distributed systems were distributed computers, and that’s what the origin of DLT really is, was in the 50s and 60s, right? And people are fond of quoting the Merkle tree, you know, something really exotic as if it’s invented in 2009, but Merkle trees have been around since 1979, and consensus mechanisms, you know, Byzantine fault tolerance. All of these have been, you know, available since 82. And on and zero knowledge proof, really something really exotic in the blockchain world today. But that was invented way back in 1985. So, the origins have been very uh, you know, it’s been quite a number of years and decades in the making, right? Cryptography, consensus mechanisms, and, you know, chaining distributed systems, all these things have been around for decades.

Oscar Jofre 05:14

I know. And it’s rather, you know, I’m glad you brought up the point. I didn’t want to bring up the issue of Bitcoin, but you did in it. I think it’s great. And you know, there’s so much dialogue out there about blockchain, what it is and what it isn’t. And, Richard, you may recall the first time you and I had a really great chat it was, you know, for ex-person, ex-government, you really have a really great way of communicating. And one of the things that you said to me, Oscar, at the end of the day, they’re all DLT, let’s slip right into that. Tell me, because that got to me, and I agreed with you. It’s just that there’s been so much discussion thinking they’re both different. Please share that with us.

Richard Ring 05:57

Yeah. So distributed ledgers go even farther back in history actually going back to Roman times. The Romans used distributed ledgers, to basically throw gasoline on the economic world, you know, the first globalization economy that we can really track throughout history. And they use these distributed ledgers to allow people to make purchases from one city to the other so that people aren’t having to haul around big bags of gold with them, making them prone to robbery, right? Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Security is an issue, people inject bad information. But that’s one of the first roots of distributed ledger technology, if you will, the stone tablets and the parchment paper. And then going even further, you have the Byzantine general problem set, which is certain DAGs, like Hedera, have claimed to have solved with their asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance. And in that was a hypothetical scenario in which you have multiple generals surrounding a city and they all need to be able to accurately communicate, are we attacking, or are we retreating? Because if they don’t all attack, then they’ll be defeated. So and you have to account for bad actors injecting bad information. So that’s kind of what distributed ledger technology aims to solve. Is allowing people to operate in a trustless society, or I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but we can still move forward with a financial transaction or a piece of property that’s been tokenized, etc. So DLT is the overarching umbrella term. And then within that, you have DLT, such as blockchain, you have different types of DAGs, like hollow chain and Hedera, as well, and new ones are emerging every day people are working on solving the problems. The big problems with DLT have always traditionally been the trilemma. Right, which is security, scalability, and decentralization. Historically, you have to give up one to get the other two. So that triangle, as you start solving for one or two of those problems, the other side, the other side of the triangle will start suffering. And so I think that’s what we’re seeing now with these modern DLTs is they’re trying to basically have their cake and eat it, too. They’re trying to solve all three problems. And some projects are actually succeeding in that.

Oscar Jofre 08:21

Yeah, they are in, obviously, I don’t want to muddy the waters today. I mean, it’s because of the chaos that’s currently happening. We’re seeing something that we didn’t anticipate. We’re seeing too many of our colleagues who have been working hard at their ventures. And unfortunately, because of this, it’s all that research is somewhat going to have deteriorated. But I do see the upside. But you brought up an interesting point and Kiran, I’m gonna go to you on this, because, you know, the premise has been, you know, when we’ve been talking about this for a number of years, is that it’s like one shoe fits everyone, right? This is the only shoe and boom. So give us an overall view of why that cannot happen. In the complex world, we have today, which is you know, we have the financial world capital markets world real world, eCommerce. Everybody thinks they’re one but tell us the differences.

Kiran Garimella 09:21

You know, Richard made a great point about DLT being the overarching umbrella term that we really should be using. And what’s happened is that with the way blockchain evolved, people didn’t know what a blockchain was they bought Bitcoin and Bitcoin is blockchain. Then slowly the now they’re finding out that you know, Blockchain isn’t just Bitcoin it’s an underlying technology. But it isn’t just blockchain. There’s DLT, which is an overarching technology. So I think about the DLTs as it’s like world transportation, right? How many ways can you have transportation? You can walk, you can have a horse, you can bike, motorbike, car, plane, ship, spaceship, and so on. And but everything wants to everything right when you can run a ship on dry land and you can take your car into the water, right? And so it depends on the specific use case and all these different DLTs such as the blockchains, the hash graphs, the bags, the hollow chain, and other stuff like that. There are different ways of propagating those transactions to the distributed community, different ways of forming consensus, and different ways of storing that information in different ways. Right. So you will have to very carefully look at what is it you’re trying to solve. What is the underlying premise and what is the real problem? And if you take blockchain as a classic example, my introduction to blockchain was when I was interning as an auditor for an accounting audit. And in the old days, you know, way back before computers, you know, we had to deal with physical ledger’s physical computing or ledgers, right, accounting, ledgers. And each, each ledger had a, you know, set of pages and inside the page, you have the transactions and at the end of the 10, you have to total everything up, and then some of the debits and credits and get your supervisor to sign off on that one and then carry forward, the balance will next one and continue on down that path. It is very, very difficult to eliminate transactions from that physical ledger, right? You can not tear out a page, the page numbers wouldn’t match the numbers, the totals wouldn’t match, and so on. And that really is the fundamental concept of a blockchain. And when we went into computers, we kind of lost some of that, because now people can willy-nilly change things in the database, you know, underneath. Now, we’re kind of bringing back all of the efficiencies of computer technology into the blockchain. But all of the security mechanisms we had on the physical ledger, except that we are not distributed in that in real-time with multiple copies. So it’s extremely difficult to fool and you know, corrupt that one, right? So, that’s only the blockchain part of the DLT. But there are many other types of DLTs. And as I said, it really depends on the type of use case, we’re looking at.

Oscar Jofre 12:13

I know the use case, I really hone in on this because over the last 10 years, watching this sector evolve in the maturity that we are today, I know I’m using that word at the same time, while we’re facing one of the greatest chaos. But in the reality, we need to look at it this way, the maturity, it’s maturity allowing us to look into this. And if we are going to go to the next wave of utilizing this type of technology infrastructure that could transform various different elements of the way the world operates. I think the clear message from my point of view in all this is that I think people need to approach it from the perspective of understanding the case scenario, if there are elements where there’s an interconnection where with another, let’s say, another DLT, and another blockchain to be interconnected, rather than thinking that one is going to fit it all. And that’s, I think that’s the biggest mistake we’ve gotten to today, I believe, you know, it’s, it’s, I bring it to something even more basic, I know, I’m going to age myself for everyone here. But I go back to 1999, you know, the early 90s, when the big fight was the database, it was DB 2 Oracle, and MySQL. There was a reason we had choices. We had three or four, maybe more, and then more, however, right now we got Mongo. So why are there different flavors, because there are different applications that require a different way of storing data. And I think that’s my personal view, I look at it as here is the thing that we want to solve, here is how it operates. And then we look at all the choices and we go, this is the one that can fit best fit this scenario. And our elements in here that what is the common theme between them? It happens to be Richard. Okay, so Richard is the common theme between so does that mean because Richard is the common theme? That’s why I feel like they all make that quest that oh because Richard is the commonality to all of this. This is the only thing that they need to go through. And so let me ask you both. I mean, you’ve seen it from the, why do you think we’ve gotten to this point? Because this is the reason we’re here. Just so you know, the reason we’re here at this stage of chaos is that I believe people have made that premise in the business models. They’ve gone in and said this will fit everything. Why is it that they feel that it needs to do that in order to be the perfect solution for the market using DLT or blockchain technology? 

Richard Ring 15:08

I think it’s just human nature to try to make everything fit into the same circles, you know, get that peg to fit in the circle. That’s human nature, but people need to step back. And remember, there’s a reason why we have iPhones and we have Androids, right? We have Apple computers, and then we have PCs. And it’s because people have different applications. If you’re an artist, if you’re a digital artist, you’re probably gonna buy an Apple computer, right? Because they have better tool sets for that sort of thing. If you’re somebody that likes to personalize your own stuff, you’re probably gonna build a PC. So I think crypto is no different. DLT is no different. You, you know, you have to ask yourself, Is this a FinTech sector tool? You know, am I trying to solve a FinTech problem? Or am I trying to do fractionalized real estate? What transactions per second are needed? How much security is needed? Does this crypto exist allow somebody to do something like send medical records within the network? So there are different use cases and different projects that hone in and try to solve those problems? So it’s very, very hard. I can’t think of much in history where you know, one thing solved all problems perfectly. So crypto is no different. DLT is no different.

Oscar Jofre 16:32

You know what? That’s a great way to say it historically. We haven’t and you’re right, we’re not. We can’t just take the leap from here to here and say let’s quash away all the because that’s exactly it. We would be saying only Microsoft, no more Apple computers, or no more, you know, only Android not Apple. And you know how people are no, no, no, we need choices. And, and thank you for explaining that.

Richard Ring 16:58

You want those choices. Because those choices are what keeps everybody on their toes and give you the best product. So that competition is key as well. You don’t want a one size fits all solution because you’ll pretty quickly find yourself becoming late and sitting around doing nothing and not keeping up with the times. 

Kiran Garimella 17:17

In this specifically one really baffling aspect of the code that I found. And there are people who think that the public blockchain is the only blockchain that can happen, right? And I’m going, how can that be? That is like saying, you know, my car is the only way to have transportation. But that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, it’s not just a public chain, it’s a permission chains. And there are business enterprises and business ecosystems that need different, you know, ways to communicate, and do business processes. Right. And so, I find that utterly baffling. I mean, it’s like, you know, there are different types of things, guys live with it.

Richard Ring 17:57

Like it all the varieties of vehicles like Kiran just mentioned, you’re thinking, if you’re a handyman or construction worker, you work on a farm, you need a truck, not a Rolls Royce, right? If you want luxury, then you go buy a Lamborghini if you’re in a speed luxury, if you want something that’s just gonna get you from work for the next 20 years to work and back, you buy a Toyota, right? Like, that’s correct. I can’t imagine a world where there are only Fords that’d be crazy.

Oscar Jofre 18:25

And you know, okay, so as we, as you, both of you say that, and I echo your words, 100%. I’m all in with that. I’ve been like that for a long, long time. So tell me why I know, we’re gonna get a little bit of, you know, that’s the thing about me when I hone into something because you said something really interesting. Cars are a perfect example of you having a different vehicle for a different purpose whatsoever, right? You know, a working vehicle, this and that. And we’re okay with that. We understand the logic that comes here. But you, we’ve all seen that the minute you say anything outside of this environment, all of a sudden, you’re not part of the mainstream. You know, I’ve had some partners of ours that, you know, they’ve been fantastic going online and trying to educate the market. Why for this, and they go aww but that’s not a public chain. It’s never going to go this far. And not really understanding that it had nothing to do with the chain. So let me ask you what besides the human element, obviously, this chaos is allowing us to do a reset. That’s why we’re having this webinar today. Let’s talk just about blockchain. What is it that we need to make sure that in the next way we go through, so we don’t have these kinds of scenarios happen again, because we can’t afford it? Let’s just face it. We can only do one every 10 years. But even after that I think people are getting tired are draining their bank accounts. But what would you say is the one fundamental flaw that we are all tapping into when it comes to riding the wave because that’s the way I look at it is, you know, there were a few people like myself, Kiran, John Richard, a few, including probably yourself, Richard and tell him that here here, look at this, this business case and this and that. But it was all about rah-rah, it’s got to be this. What can we do going forward to eliminate that happening again,

Richard Ring 20:20

I think the community is missing people that are educating even those already in the community on the true utility uses of this technology. So just my anecdotal observation of the DLT crypto community is that even people that have been in it for the last three or four years, they’re buying tokens they’re investing. Probably 99% of them still only see it as Fintech is, as currency. They think NFT is jpg art. They don’t understand that NFT is to help tokenize a physical asset. For instance, they couldn’t define what an Oracle is they they think a smart contract is just a contract that is been saved on the ledger, right? So I think the next step is educating people so they can wrap their heads around what this technology is actually going to be used for. And I think that that’s when the light bulb will go on, oh, this is more than just money, right? This is more than just me paying for something and alternative currency, which is I think, sadly, I think most people that are in the space, which is a fraction of the population, see, it’s still as just crypto. Cryptological-driven currency is all they see it as, they don’t understand the real utility.

Oscar Jofre 21:39

I agree with that. But I think this chaos, Richard, is alerting people. If I’m going to lose money, next time, I’m going to do my homework. Do you know what I mean? It’s like when you start taking supplements, you know, the first time you get on the wave, you get on the way and go, Whoa, something bad. Okay, the next one, I’m going to read about it, I’m going to find out what it’s made out of, making sure, I think we’re moving into that phase. And that’s the exciting part. So that’s why, you know, I thought back when we were launching this, you know, the KoreChain webinar series all about blockchain and in particular to the capital markets, because that’s what I mean, it’s a, it’s a vertical list. Yeah, let’s call it that. It’s a vertical segment of the business world that needs its own attention. And if it doesn’t get attention, the right way. Well, we’re going to have problems which we’re already seeing. So but let me ask you both from a personal experience, let’s talk about some real-life examples. Kiran, I’ll start with you. Let’s, let’s start from here’s the business case. In general, let’s obviously, you know, the capital markets and financials. Let’s start with that. In that scenario, what are the important factors where blockchain plays a key role in its implementation? And why it’s so important for people to see how it can change fundamentally to make things increasingly better for everyone by utilizing blockchain DLT technology and you?

Kiran Garimella 23:11

Certainly, but before I get into that, I just want to say one of the common because this is a segue to proper uses within the financial community, right? So back in the days in 2017 and 2018, and you know, you and I, we both read hundreds of white papers from the ICO community, right? And I can get, I must have read more than 100 of those, I can guarantee that if you take, you know, 95% of the content in that white paper was all about blockchain, cryptography, consensus, distribution, decentralization as if the writers had invented all this stuff by themselves all by themselves, right? The other three to 4% was all about you investing your money in this one because you’re going to make 300,000,000,000,000% in the next two days, right? And that sort of call to action, one page, barely two or three paragraphs had anything to do with the actual business model of how they’re going to make money. How this is going to benefit society. That’s it. So your question really is, you know, if you turn this over to Ted, the technology needs to take the backseat. And we basically need to say what are the specific use cases. What’s the business model behind this one? And so if you now segue from the ICO days, the STO days and thinking about cryptocurrency and then coming to financial markets, people have to realize that there’s more to financial markets than just cryptocurrency. There are all various types of digital assets, and instruments in the financial space, right? You’ve got equities in the securities, you’ve got debt instruments, you’ve got collateralized debt, you’ve got many, many, many types of derivatives, for example, right? All of these serve different needs. All of them require certain compliance, they need some governance, and they need a risk assessment. And I think that’s where we need to start. And then determine what really makes it easy to transact and how to make it easier, right? What are some hindrances, what’s causing friction in any of those types of financial transactions? And if you start there, you know, people will start to see the light and say, well, that’s kind of where we can introduce blockchain. We need immutability, right, because that introduces trust. We need consensus. So that reduces the frequency variation between multiple parties when a distribution so people are, you know, they feel secure, that somebody else is not going to run away with the ledger to the Bahamas, right? So it’s all of those it’s underlying mentality and a mindset that really, really needs to change. There are many, many specific use cases within the finance industry, right? I mean, securities, for example, are not bearer instruments. But a lot of people in the crypto community think that securities and shares and equities can be bearer instruments, which by the way, are illegal in many, many countries. So they haven’t gotten their head wrapped around how to get away from a payment instrument or cryptocurrency to a securities instrument, which is an entirely different animal.

Oscar Jofre 26:21

Yeah, that’s, that’s a good point. And thank you for that. Because that’s one business case right there, where there’s one particular type of DLT chain that will work to meet the obligations of that. And then Richard, I know you’re working on a personal project, which I hope to provide any assistance, but you’re using Blockchain for something else, which, when you told me what you were doing, I thought, This is amazing. That’s exactly how we transform. If you could share, that’d be great.

Ricard Ring 26:51

So before I get on that, I just want to piggyback off what Kiran was saying, Please, with people that are entering the space, to avoid the rug pulls avoid the pyramid schemes. Do y’all know who David Patrick is the entrepreneur? Okay, so when he talks about investing in anything, there’s certain key fundamental principles that you should follow that transcend no matter what sector you’re investing in. And one of those first questions you should always ask is, Is there a problem being solved here? Right? Is there a demand for this? And how many other people are trying to solve it? So if you can’t answer that with something in the crypto space, it’s probably not a good idea, if it’s just a Bitcoin clone with a funny meme dog on it, and it’s not doing anything different than anybody else, you should probably stay away from that, right. The other thing that you should always ask yourself, he says is who’s behind the project, because he likes to invest in people, not projects. And for the last, let’s say, five years of the crypto Wild West, you literally have people dumping their life savings in the projects where individuals are hiding behind cartoon faces, using, you know, Greek mythology names, and nobody even knows who these people are, they’re not even doxxed versus maybe somebody that was an Air Force Research Scientist, or somebody like Kiran who has a PhD, you know. I would invest here. And I’m not investing in somebody that calls himself Zeus. And, and I have no clue who he is. So, so I just wanted to point that out that no different than you would with stocks or anything else that you want to get into, you should ask who’s behind this project. What makes them qualified? You know, you look at some of these more legitimate projects, and you have people that used to work for Deutsche Bank, you have people that used to work for the SEC, that’s something that I can trust because I know these people know what they’re doing, right? They know the rules. They know how to navigate the regulations, even if there aren’t regulations. They’re pretending like there are regulations and still acting accordingly. That’s stuff that you should look into. The cartoon memes and all that, I would say stay away. As far as our use case, what we’re looking to do with DLT. So I mentioned we own a private investigation firm. But we also own something called the F3 Foundation which is a nonprofit, everybody in my PI firm is former federal law enforcement or former intelligence community. So these are schlubs in a car for camera. And these are guys that know what they’re doing. And they’ve been doing it for decades, between everybody in the organization you probably have 1000 years of experience. And what we saw was we kind of fell in our lap the epidemic of missing children’s cases that go cold, if they’re not solved in the first couple of weeks, because law enforcement has to move on. Their caseload is too high. And so we accidentally ended up solving a missing kids case it fell in our lap and we went oh wow. You know our counterterrorism methods we used overseas actually worked here domestically to find missing persons. And so we started solving some more as a proof of concept. And by, you know, Kid number 37, were like, okay, this works. Whether it’s a cold case, a dynamic missing kids case, it just happened in the last 48 hours, whether it’s an endangered runaway, whether it’s stranger danger, abduction, it didn’t matter, we were able to solve it using our methodologies. But us operating as a parallel police force is not a long-term solution. So I always like to think if I got in a car accident and died tomorrow, would this all go away? Or would it continue to outlive me? And so to build something that will continue to outlive us, we had to identify what are the limiting factors for law enforcement being able to keep these cases from going cold, right, because once they go cold, statistically, to sit on a shelf, and nobody looks at them, possibly ever. So the thing we identified was that there was their methodologies were out of date. So that’s easy to solve because now we’re working with law enforcement governing bodies in different states to inject our methods, our intelligence committee methods into the police academies for the advanced training for people that are already sworn officers and detectives. So we’ve already solved that problem. We’re working on that with these various police academies across the US. The other limitation factor we identified was that they have a serious intelligence-sharing problem at the local and state level. So overseas, JSOC is doing its black ops, the CIA is doing its black ops, you have the conventional forces, you have NGOs, even have law enforcement organizations like DEA operating in Afghanistan. And so you have all these people that all have their individual mission set, yet they’re all operating in the same area of operation, Al. We have intelligence-sharing tool sets, like Palantir aren’t just the overlay on Google Earth, and they have different GEOINT levels, and were able to share intelligence, even if people still restrict things, I can see that hey, something occurred, DEA dropped a dent beyond this house. So they did some sort of operation three years ago at this house that I am looking at as a JSOC officer. And then the CIA has something at the house next door, so I can now reach out to people and we can talk. And you can determine how restrictive you want to make it I can go full open kimono if I want and just let all the Intel hang out there for everybody to use. But it’s a formalized intelligence-sharing tool that takes out the limitation factors of the human factor, right. So right now with law enforcement, the way they intelligence share is what we call an IC, the bro network, which is maybe you and I Oscar went to the same Police Academy and we liked each other, and we meet up for beers all the time. And so we talk all the time and share. But Kiran and I also went to the police academy and I don’t like him. So you think I’m calling him to ask him for help or vice versa? No. So you kind of see where this lends itself to DLT and a trestle society, the bro network is not an efficient way to share intelligence. And it’s not formalized, there’s no, there’s no methodology to it. So we wanted to make an intelligence-sharing tool, specifically starting focused on missing children. But this could carry over in all other facets of law enforcement. But we want to build it on DLT. And we want to do that because we want to create a database that is trusted by everybody and that’s immutable. Nobody can go in there. Nobody can make a claim of corruption of somebody going in and erasing evidence or getting rid of evidence that evidence has been entered, even if somebody later says, Hey, that evidence was no good. That was an accident. It’s amendable. But you can’t delete it, right? Because eventually, maybe something actually comes about that turns out around, and actually, that was good evidence. But they didn’t know it at the time. The other thing is it would allow you to see who the POC is, who entered this intelligence into the network, and make that immutable as well. And then for law enforcement, they have an issue of they have to protect their case, right? So they can’t just put all this information out there to anybody. Well, DLT is a great way for us to through tokenizing law enforcement credentials, ensure that the only people that get on this network are people that are allowed to be on this network. So it lends itself across multi facets of what we want to solve with this intelligence sharing to take these tool sets that already exist and then build the next version of them on DLT. And, and I think if you do that our estimates are you could probably cut about 80% of cases down from going cold.

Oscar Jofre 34:39

I don’t know that that is you know, that’s my point. I mean, this is real life. how something so powerful can change something that is so horrific and change people’s lives. And yet, I mean doesn’t get the rubber All that it needs, and kudos to you and your team. I know you’re doing it through a nonprofit in bringing it out there. But that, you know, this is a great way to, you know, I wanted to give people kind of an example of how blockchain where it’s been used in real life examples not just in the world. You know, one of the individuals that’s here with us, Hunter, posed a really good question. You know, he is right. I mean, shouldn’t companies be looking at the state of blockchain to evolve to a more enterprise-quality database plus ledger? I mean, that’s the state. I mean, the way I’m interpreting his question is sort of like, okay, so because blockchain is because it crypto, people shouldn’t look at it. Where do you guys sit with that? Should enterprises be coming in and seeing a kind of like a hybrid model? Or should they find the solution? Because there is a chain specific to them? In order to solve the real problems, Kiran?

Kiran Garimella 36:03

One of the things, you know, to answer that question, we should not forget one of the fundamental things that Richard highlighted, everything he said, you know. He began with the core issue and the core problem they’re trying to solve, which is extremely commendable. We all as parents, we really love that. It pulls at our heartstrings. And that’s fantastic. But why would DLT come in and make a difference right there. It’s because of the intelligence sharing, it’s inefficient, it’s unreliable. And maybe there’s not, there’s no trust. So it is to eliminate all of that one. So enterprises, when they look at blockchain as a potential for solving some problem, I think they shouldn’t look at blockchain to start with, and then try to find what they can solve with it. And I think that’s the wrong approach. The right approach is to sit back and say, Look, who are our constituents? Who are our participants? What business process do we have? And what are the participants in the in our ecosystem? We’re all kind of loosely disallowed conglomerates. And do we all trust each other doing? Can we trust each other? Can we have business processes without any unreliable trust mechanisms? Or inefficient trust mechanisms? Can we do it like that? And in many, many cases where I’ve seen I’ve consulted with people and people have approached me, I’ve looked at their business cases, in many of those 99% of those cases where there’s a large ecosystem of participants and a large business model, the answer is a resounding yes. Do you need a database? Of course, you need a database? Do you need email communications? Of course you do? Do you need a way to have business processes without wasting time on reconciliation, even if you don’t trust for the party or don’t know who they are? Of course we do. Yes to blockchain. But I think we need to start from there. Otherwise, you know, this is going to be a non starter.

Richard Ring 37:57

And if I was to sell this to enterprise, to the corporate world, I would point out what DLT does at large one, we’ve been foot stomping the fact that allows you to operate in the trust of society. So I would hope anybody that’s smart enough to find themselves in the CEO position of a fortune 500 company would automatically have a light bulb go off where they can use that. But the other thing is DLT reduces friction across processes. It cuts out middlemen, it speeds things up, and then it increases accuracy. So I love to use supply chain management is a great use case for DLT for corporations. And the analogy I always like to give is, we see on the news when Walmart has a salmonella outbreak. And they basically have to throw out all the spinach across all their stores in the southeast, because all they can do is narrow down our region of where that spinach was shipped to. Using DLT for your supply chain management would allow you to identify the three stores that got the bad spinach, therefore saving Walmart, who knows how many millions of dollars and both manpower to carry that action out of getting rid of the bad spinach but also throwing out product that didn’t need to be thrown out? Right? So it, it reduces friction, it increases accuracy and allows you to operate in a trustful society. I don’t know a very many businesses that cannot find a use case for for something that solves those problems.

Oscar Jofre 39:22

Kiran, you want to add anything to that?

Kiran Garimella 39:25

No, absolutely. I mean, you know, every every kind of interaction that we have today is a supply chain interaction for sure. You know, I remember, you know, years ago  I was having this conversation with a New Zealand Company called Fonterra that contributes about 25% of New Zealand’s GDP, and that in the dairy business, right, so from cow to cup. Their products, you know travel to almost 40 countries, right. And the biggest problem was no visibility. We don’t know where our things are. Right. And, you know, just imagine all of that had actually been mean, on a permissioned blockchain, with everyone having the latest copy, it’s extremely well known, it’s immutable, it’s unsorted. Right? That that would be absolutely fantastic. I mean, it would have addressed a tremendous amount of problems, you know, to solve many of them, you know, for these people, and take dairy products and substitute that with, you know, financial instruments, you know, we go through multiple jurisdiction, there are a lot, a lot of friction going on. You know, I’ve dealt with Swift and international transactions, and they’re very, very inefficient in many ways, right? Sometimes there’s no accountability, I had to physically change one of those wires, international wires myself, from, you know, from United States, to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong, to Taiwan, Taipei. And I had to do this myself, but I had to make all the calls. And this happened in a few years ago. So there are a lot of inefficiencies that I think, you know, we can get rid of with these types of technologies, but people have to understand how to make it actually work.

Oscar Jofre 40:57

But do you think what’s happening right now? I mean, we can’t escape the pink elephant in the room? Like, I mean, we all need to, I think we all need to be candid with this. I mean, four or five years ago, we didn’t have that pink elephant. So So oh, let’s go for it. Let’s go for it. Now we have that, does Hunter have a point that this will have an effect on enterprises or anybody else? Personally, I don’t think it will. My my personal view right now is of the following, I believe enterprise, the financial capital markets, governments, all alike see the value of DLT blockchain. They do see it. I think what we’re seeing right now, is one segment one vertical, that, yes, it’s going to be painful. But the bigger players are going to come in and scoop it up, but very low dollars, and they’re going to operate it compliantly. And we’re going to see it to work, because there is no escaping digitizing currency. There’s no escaping this, we got to face that reality we are, you know, it sort of gets the evolution of where we’re moving. So, but in the meantime, do you think that there is a kind of a, in the back of their mind? What can we do? What more do they need to know understand about blockchain to get there? Or it’s just there’s so much fog around it, that they can’t even see it? Therefore, they’re saying no, because the association is crypto. 

Richard Ring 42:27

I’ve seen indications that, that they’re already sold on this technology. They’re just waiting for regulations, because they have a moral and ethical obligation to their shareholders. Right? So they cannot go investing large amounts of capital, shareholder capital in a technology that has no regulations yet, or very little. So I think that’s what they’re waiting for. One of the indicators that that when I’m reading the tea leaves, is an article came out, I think, less than a week after the FTX crash, JP Morgan Chase says something along the lines of buy the dip, Hey, guys, this is a great opportunity, the market’s down buy, so if they were actually scared of this technology, JP Morgan Chase wouldn’t be saying buy the dip.

Oscar Jofre 43:13

Yeah, I think you know, it’s correct. But I do want to, I’m going to just interject there, because you mentioned something really interesting. You know, for us, 2023 we see it, it’s only going to be about two things, trust and compliance. And because of that chaos, now, when I say us, I’m talking about the capital markets, people need to really understand the difference between capital and financial. And what does that mean? Well, capital is regulated by the SEC and FINRA, financial lists FTC, other regulators that banking and financial services, which is people tend to think they’re the same, they’re not. On the capital markets what people don’t realize the regulations are already there. Yes, the regulations are there. And if you go to the front door to the SEC, and FINRA, you knock on it, you show them and you go through it and you get your DLT or blockchain technology qualified, the way that regulations are intended that you will be operational, just like KoreChain is today. It takes time. It took us almost three years to get it, but we did it. We didn’t ask for an exemption. I do understand in different elements of business, you need some clarity on regulations and what the impact will be, you know, on on how this will play out. But I’m so optimistic about 2023 because I think you just you you said it right there, when the big players are saying that they’re gonna buy the dipthey’re gonna get this thing at what, pennies on the dollar?

Richard Ring 44:58

I mean, so what I’ve seen is that the the fortune 500 companies are really looking into projects that are ISO 222 compliant. So they’re kind of using that is the the standard right now with the regulation that we have. So back to the if I was telling somebody coming into the space, what to look for and what to stay away from, I don’t think you can go wrong with something that’s ISO 222 compliant. Correct?

Kiran Garimella 45:27

No, absolutely, you know, many of these situations that are kind of go back to first principles, you know, so I’ll give you one analogy. I like the transportation analogy, because they’ve been through a lot of these things. And transportation is a very public thing, even though the vehicles are very private, in many instances, right? They all have to operate on public infrastructure. So whenever there is a plane crash, you know, people don’t say, oh, my God, let’s see, you know, the whole Iran aeronautical industry is bad, you know, let’s remove it. That’s not the reaction, the reaction really is going to be what went wrong? What can we do to fix it? Right, it’s the root cause of that they’re examining the root causes. Aviation, for example, has a six and a half sigma capability, right, which is like very, very, very low error, the safest form of transportation, right. But that regulation is because of the reason, it’s because of regulation mandated, the aeronautical industry mandates, the maintenance schedules of all the aircraft, you know, they follow a regulated airspace upside down layer to kick, so to speak, right in the airspace. And, you know, they follow checklists, this governance, right. When I was learning to fly, you know, there’s a whole checklist that I had to go through, I cannot operate from memory, I have to go through a checklist and mark it all off, right? Otherwise, I couldn’t, you know, start the engine. So it’s a it’s a very methodical, it’s very, you know, thought is a very carefully thought through process. And what many people early in the newcomers to the blockchain in the cryptocurrency space don’t understand is that the current financial markets and the capital markets have been operating for more than a couple of several hundred years, you know, back from the mid 80s. And they went through a lot of these problems about trust, about efficiency, about settlements and risks. And all of this mechanisms are in place, but a very, very good reason. Richard, you mentioned that, you know, it’s all much of this blockchain is about eliminating intermediaries. 100% agree with you. But what many people don’t realize I know you do. And we do here, but many people don’t realize is that just because you remove intermediaries doesn’t mean you have removed the risk. That is intermediaries were taking on or mediating, so to speak, right? And that’s never going to get swept away. And that’s, that’s that’s what all these people are now discovering the hard way in the cryptocurrency scams right now. So it all comes down to you know, hey, do we have the right type of regulation? And we admit, I mean, you know, everyone knows that sometimes regulation can be burdensome and difficult to you know, it can be bureaucratic in its nature, but the spirit and essence of the data protection of all the parties concerned so can we do that much more efficiently? Can we be more methodical? And can we have but IT governance, right? I think those are the lessons that we need to have, right? I mean, I agree with you, Richard, I mean, many business people that I spoke to the corporates, and, you know, they all understand the need for this, they understand the value of this one, but I think they’re kind of waiting for a better traction in the regulatory space and you and in the risk mitigation space. And how do we mitigate the risk in any of these transactions?

Richard Ring 48:32

Now, a question I’ll throw to you too is, do people need to fully understand this technology? Is this for retail? Is it even important for people within the businesses? Or is this like the Internet where hey, it’s just magic. It works. I sign on, I do my thing. I send my mom money to my bank. I don’t know how it works. She just gets the money right? You know, a lot of people like Mance Harmon says all the time you’re going to use web 3.0 and not even know. You’re gonna wake up. You’re gonna go to work.

Kiran Garimella 49:07

Yeah, you know what’s funny about that question today? I think it’s a small cadre of retail people, techie nerds, who really know everything about wallets and cryptography and how all the things works. None of the corporates know that level of detail, right? And certainly, you know, none of the mom and pop, you know, type of people will ever have a wallet today, for sure. Right? I think that needs to turn around on its head, just like in the large databases. And in this field, you know, since today, it’s a corporate people and the tech people and the business people in the corporate world that really need to understand how this actually works. in excruciating detail, there’s no going around it. But when it comes to the retail people, they should be like, you know, hey, it just works. It’s magic. We trust it, right.

Oscar Jofre 49:59

We’ve made it But I think I think that is a great question it because I often give the analogy to people, when they go, can I see the blockchain? And so when you go to the bank, and you go deposit your bank before to the teller you go Excuse me? Can you tell me? Are you using IBM, DB 2, or Oracle? Or like, does it really matter? It just shows you the statement, you got $10,000 in the bank, you saw your withdrawals, you see that? I think, I think you nailed that I, your colleague is correct. There, this technology 99% of people will never see, it just works. It does what it’s supposed to do. What is it supposed to do is we’re highlighting the inefficiencies of the way we operate. That’s a good thing. We all I mean, who doesn’t know standing in line waiting for your driver’s license, or to pay and pay a ticket, I mean, seriously, all these things we all know in efficiencies, then we can see how they may not immediately see that, oh, by providing technologies right there. I mean, there was a time that when you went to a restaurant, there was a waiter and taking down writing everything down. And hopefully they wrote down that you didn’t want lettuce, you want it tomato, but now they don’t make that mistake, because they just tap for what you want. And the order is automatically. They don’t have to walk back there. It’s already there. So the technology is doing that. So I think we spent so much time making such a big deal of this for a small community. And this is an important lesson for everybody to learn. Because in the capital markets, people make such a big thing, hey, Oscar, we want to attract that crypto investor. That’s not a crypto investor. That’s a technology individual who is fascinated by the technology who loves what they’re doing, they didn’t go at it because of this. That’s just an afterthought. And unless you understand what you’re getting into, this is not your playground, this is a 99% of the audience today shouldn’t look the way we operate. They use words like wallet and all that, but at the end of the day It’s an app, let’s let’s call it it’s an app, an application. So that was a great question, Richard. Because I, we need to not only do we, as you said, we need to ask ourselves what the problem is. That’s number one. That’s number one. And is it a front facing problem that can make people’s lives easier, like the one you guys are doing to find that child? Right, but you’re fixing in the front, but it’s also it’s how that data is being shared and trusted, in every sector has got a front view to it, or just a purely back end, making it more efficient, like real estate, my goodness, I am getting so tired of real estate tokenization that it’s going to revolutionize the whole industry. And what I find fascinating is that most people do not even understand what they’re talking about. Because, you know, they go, it’s going to remove them. That’s why you should tokenize to raise money. That’s not why it’s going to do it. And there’s an you gotta look at the three different parts that there’s one big one, and that is when the government’s who, you know, they’re the, they’re the ones where the land title’s when they put that on the chain, oh my goodness, that’s going to change the way we buy things, we sell them, you know, no more fraud, okay, Game changer all the way. That way we manage that real estate asset on the chain. So it’s transparent to the holders and, and all that and how we raise capital? Well, that’s a totally different activity altogether. But to think that all three are one never, never, never. And can they play together? Okay, that’s where we’re gonna use words like Oracle’s coming in, we’re not, we’re gonna not do that today. But the industry is so famous for three letter acronyms and I think they use that. And I think it was earlier on that you said that Richard was everybody thinks in NFT is a JPEG. And it’s, it’s so sad to see that, but that’s the value they put on it. And that’s the input now, if they lose it, okay, you know, what you didn’t take into it to really understand what it really was, what is the representation what this was, and the ones that took advantage of it did just that. And I predicted that once again in 2023. A new three letter word is going to come out. I don’t know what they’re going to call it.

Richard Ring 54:30

I joke with people that the jpg NFT’s are the Zoomers version of pogs. You know, everybody got into it, and now nobody could care less. And when I find a pog from 1990, I throw it in the trash because I really don’t care. I think I think it’s also important to point out that DLT what it’s going to do for different industries, it’s going to be a spectrum. It’s not going to revolutionize every single sector. There are some sectors that it will absolutely revolutionized, and there was some words just going to make them work more efficiently and better. So it’s the next evolution in this business. This is where everyone’s going, almost like the little portable credit card readers that small businesses use every day, right? That technology didn’t revolutionize every sector, but it made business as a small business owner easier, right? So I think people shouldn’t think that DLT is going to revolutionize the world, in every aspect, some industries, it will, in some industries, it’s just gonna make them better.

Oscar Jofre 55:31

Some of them, they’re not even gonna realize that it’s actually it’s because of it, that it’s actually making it better. It’s like when people complain, we hear this a lot. Oh, my God, I gotta fill out this form again, but I just give it to my lawyer. Oh, yeah. But I’m the auditor. And then they go to the I gotta give it to you. Yes. You know, we I there’s nothing more beautiful. When you look at information. It’s probably like police stations, right? Each one collect the same data in a different way because of their own business. This is Richard, this is Oscar, the captain. And then but the people that were actually putting through that aggravation. They’re the ones that feel the pain. And I believe in certain sectors, but you are right. It’s not going to be for everyone out in the market. And but I do believe that blockchain DLT is here to stay. It’s not going away. I’m going to ask each of you for last minute words. But someone Richard is asking regarding your organization that you’re doing that work? If you have a moment? Could you share that with everyone as well, when you’re providing your last minute words, please?

Richard Ring 56:37

Yes, I’ll actually put the link in the chat real quick no case. So our website is nocasescold.org You can follow us there. LinkedIn is probably where we’re the most active being that most of our clientele are not people off the street. They’re their business owners and C suite level individuals. So LinkedIn, and then nocasescold.org. When Kiran’s talking I’ll drop our LinkedIn link in there as well. Oscar, I had a question for you, which is what do you think needs to happen to make it easier for the everyday Normie on the street to interact with the web 3.0? What things do you see have not been solved yet that need to be solved to allow grandma to operate in this space?

Oscar Jofre 57:29

We, I think, in general, with everybody, we all have parents, family members. I think we’re we’re just talking above them. And I’ll bring this back to the early 1980s. You know, in Las Vegas, we have the annual show, the CES Electronic Show. I don’t know if you guys know the history of this show. It was run by engineers, engineers, and they were so proud of their gadgets building them, you know. And when you went to their booth, they were like, see skid marks above your head. You’re like, but Right. And then one year, somebody came in, and all they did was show it. Here’s what it does for you. So I think Richard that’s the point. I think right now we’re so busy talking using web 3.0 this and we’re using garbled jargon words to mom and dad and grandma and grandpa brothers and sisters and everybody alike. Just show me what is it all? Oh, I love to do that. That’s great. Oh, okay, it’s doing that. I mean, I think that’s the, I think that’s the biggest thing that are everyone as a whole, whether it’s web 3.0 on blockchain, just show do the work that you need to do. And then as an industry, we can squabble whether it’s this or that, but I think bringing it to the frontlines with our language isn’t ever going to work. Our industry, our technology itself is evolving too rapidly to do that. Look, I’m 57 years old, I can’t believe I said that in recording, but I did. I have colleagues that 15 years ago, they stopped, people go what? They stopped. They stop evolving and learning. They, they they they came to a halt. And that’s it. They’re not bad individuals, they just chose a that’s it. Um, they they said Oscar, I’m getting off the treadmill. And these are people in the technology sector. It was just too much every three months it was changing. So can we do that to the average market? We can we need to give them here it is the playground and we’re going to call it you know, whatever it is, and you go in there and experience it. Do they need to know the rest of the jargon component? I don’t believe so. If that makes a difference in your capital raising. Okay. That’s a totally different story. But I think we’re flooding the market with a lingo that is only going to create further fear and alienate when people just really want to have an experience. That’s me. Kiran.

Kiran Garimella 1:00:01

Oh, I couldn’t have said it better. I mean, it’s like, you know, instead of saying, you know, hey, what makes a good mobile phone? Right? Since we’re talking about all the garble jargon technologies? Show them the iPhone. That’s what Apple did, right? Here it is. And it was intuitive. It’s right away. It’s done. And that’s what caused the adoption. For the first no one understands the technology. Is that one Apple? Who knows? Right? I don’t, and, you know, even right, but it’s just an intuitive experience. It’s like Oscar said, show it, and let us use it. And that will make the difference.

Richard Ring 1:00:33

I agree. I think in the crypto space, it’s, it’s been the early days of computers where you had to be able to hand jam code and to get things to work. I think now we’re entering the phase where, from a lot of projects I was watch, I noticed more effort going into the interface to make a usable, easy to use interface the way Microsoft did to computers, right? When Microsoft Windows came out, that was the opening of the floodgates for the average everyday average person to get a computer and be able to use it for something more than just playing solitaire, right? And then I think the last thing, the last problem has to be solved is the recovering your seed phrase, basically, right? What happens when grandma can’t find your seed phrase? And I’m really excited because 48 hours ago, Dr. Lehman bear came out with his solution to that problem. Now, again, this is the first I’d heard, but it was a lightbulb moment, his solution. And that that was his goal, that he’s been secretly working on this for years, and how do I allow grandma to have a wallet and not lose her money right? So I think, easy to use interfaces and password recovery, essentially, that still maintains the security of the point of DLT.

Oscar Jofre 1:01:56

That’s great, guys. I mean, this is a fantastic way. We got an entire year ahead of us, we’re going to have a lot of great discussions. But I think the important thing today, from all of us to all of you is that this is an exciting technology, we’re going to always have two elements of it and everything. It’s a lesson for me to learn as well. As we go through this journey that there’s a we’re going to couple our discussions both from for the those who are really diving deep into the innovation of what this is possible, but more importantly, to talk about the real life cases and how that impacts on everyday lives. I think and to say that it’s it’s real. Did you know As you explain so thank you to both have a fantastic season’s greeting to everyone else. Thank you for joining us our inaugural webinar for KoreChain, follow us on LinkedIn or on Twitter or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you, our speakers as well. We’ll send you an email so you can more than reach out to them. Share your thoughts and your comments and questions. And anything you can help us in join this journey. As Richard said, we we need to do a better job and making sure people have a better understanding. Till next time, happy holidays. We’ll see you all soon in 2023 Take care. Bye now.