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Rafael: Welcome to Crypto with accountants powered by Betway, where we talk with technologists and crypto enthusiasts as we discuss current events in economy, politics, technology and digital assets with thought leaders from around the world.

Pat: All right, everyone. This week I am super excited to present our next guest, Nev O'Connell, who is a seasoned blockchain expert and senior business development manager at Casper Labs. She's done a bunch of really interesting things, but co-founded Block W, a platform promoting careers in blockchain, was instrumental in setting up Deloitte's Blockchain Lab for Europe, Middle East and South Africa. Nev also contributed to the establishment of Consensus Ireland, which was later joined consensus us. She, where she led, co-led the customer adoption division and helped develop a SaaS blockchain supply chain platform. She's also recognized as the Blockchain Leader of the Year. That's definitely a big deal at the 2018 Dublin Tech Summit and Nev is coauthor numerous blockchain studies. She's done a lot of stuff. The list goes on and on. Welcome, Nev. We're glad you're here.

Niamh: Thank you. Thanks so much for the warm intro and also for having me. Delighted to be here.

Pat: Yeah, we're we're super excited. To start off, could you maybe tell us about Casper Labs and some of the cool things that you're working on there?

Niamh: Yeah, absolutely. So what we essentially do at Casper Labs is we help enterprises solve real problems and it's quite an array of problems. So it's everything from data integrity issues to security to proving ownership of content and rights and better managing that to looking at how to streamline processes, to then even looking at how you can unlock liquidity and better manage assets. So we really help companies by providing software and services to those that are looking to essentially build on a more robust new system known as Casper, which is what we've effectively built in terms of projects. There's an array of projects that we're working on. I'd say two of the highlights that I'd call out are probably first with regards to track and trace. So that's a big particular focus area for us with regards to high value assets. So helping companies figure out how they can use the technology to provide more transparency to their supply chain and and ultimately enable, you know, better and safe consumption of assets. Another one would be within financial services and that would be around invoice factoring. And that's really all about tokenizing something like an invoice and fractionalizing it so that you're enabling quicker and broader access to liquidity and also creating a market efficiencies because ultimately, you know, you're creating a peer to peer marketplace. So yeah, I would say those two are two of the coolest projects from my opinion anyway.

Pat: Yeah, no, I think so as well. Those are really fascinating and I'd love to get into that further in the episode here. Before we do, the one question I want to ask is there's obviously a number of blockchains out there today. What problems is Casper specifically solving and how did this all come about?

Niamh: Yeah. So I'd say first off, like think about Casper as a database on steroids with added functionality. And so how we kind of set ourselves apart from a database and other blockchains in the market is firstly by design in itself. And, and then secondly is with regards to the added feature sets. So one, you know, feature benefit that no other blockchain in the market has is around upgradability but at a protocol level. So what that really means is that businesses just like they do today with any other software, they can upgrade it easily and they'll get, you know, the latest features, security updates, performance enhancements associated with the blockchain. And that's what we're used to doing today, whether it's, you know, the iOS device on our, you know, iPhone devices or, you know, the Linux system with regards to Android mobile devices. And, you know, that just then naturally extends to the smart contracts and the nfts. So businesses can really evolve their technology as their needs effectively change. The second point I'd say is around how customizable the blockchain is. So when you look at the blockchain market today, you have. Chains like Corda and Hyperledger fabric that are purely private blockchains. You have other blockchains like Ethereum that are purely public blockchains. What we offer is companies, the ability to build on a public blockchain like Casper, but then also have their own private permissioned network and easily then move to have a mix of the two. And so they'll keep certain information private, but then be able to prove that they haven't manipulated the data and enable access to that more broadly. And that's not really possible with all blockchains out there today. You're typically either one or the other, public or private.

Trevor: Can you talk a little bit about the mechanic for that? That's actually really interesting. Like how how do you actually handle this sort of segregation? How do people tend to move data between the private and public? Like, give us a little more. This is really cool.

Niamh: Yeah. So it's actually quite easy to do it on the Casper blockchain. You can, you don't. So let's say you decide to even start off as a permissioned consortium network. Even after you've deployed, you can actually migrate over to a permissionless chain and there is a lower overhead costs. It's not as tricky as it would be, for example, to do in terms of like data migration. So that's again naturally due to the way that the virtual machine is built from the get go, it has its own virtual machine and it's one single code base. So ultimately, because it's one single code base, you can configure it to the specifically to your requirements, but you're still going to be able to access, again, the rich feature set and the security, for example, associated with the public blockchain.

Trevor: Yeah. And so what are some of the uses like what are some of the use cases for that kind of like, walk us through what you guys have seen, like who's who's using it? Is it banks, Is it like that? Then go from like their little private to public? Like what are some of the really cool use cases you've seen there?

Niamh: Yeah, I think the hybrid blockchain is definitely getting a lot of traction in highly regulated industries. So financial services, pharmaceuticals, health care insurance and even in the public sector as well. So, you know, they're obviously looking to keep what they need to private, but because of pressure from, let's say, regulatory mandates or the end user wanting for the transparency, they're having to find ways that they can prove that data hasn't been tampered with or provide some access to that information. And so that's how it's being explored in that context.

Pat: Fascinating. So you also hit on upgradable smart contracts as well. And I know not all of our listeners are maybe familiar with what a smart contract is. So maybe if you could give us a quick 101. What is a smart contract and sort of what is the the current state maybe outside of Casper? Right. Meaning like once you have a smart contract, if it's not upgradable, what does that look like?

Niamh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. So smart contract is essentially a self executing digital agreement that will execute when certain terms and conditions are met. So, you know, think about travel flight insurance. If you miss your flight and you take a photo and upload the right information, the claims, documents, etcetera, that will trigger then, for example, an automatic payment once those conditions have been met and right into your bank account. And ultimately being able to automate and execute logic is applicable to basically everything. The challenge, you know, up until when Casper was essentially born was the ability to easily use these smart contracts and upgrade them based again, on on, on the need. So typically what would have happened in other ecosystems was if you needed to, let's say, make a change, you needed to add a metadata and a piece of information because the need has changed. You'd have to basically create a new smart contract, create then mint new nfts and burn the old ones and create a proxy, which is a connection essentially between the smart contracts. Now, what that ultimately leads to is, you know, number one, higher overhead costs and two, security vulnerabilities. And then three, the ability to, you know, easily maintain that completely diminishes as well. So with our NFT standard, you can install no code type NFT contracts with a broad range of functionalities very easily, and it's all versioned. So you can select which version you want based on what you know. Functionalities and features make most sense.

Trevor: How does that sort of, you know. Here with the idea of immutability. I mean, do you like how do you guys think about that internally? Is the balance between blockchain immutability and and upgradability?

Niamh: Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, it really depends on the the the businesses need. So there is a trade off in a sense. You know, you either, to your point, make a smart contract immutable so the data cannot be changed or you make it upgradable so you can add more metadata. The data points will naturally change. But you know, you have that audit log, so you'll see where the changes actually happened and and where the metadata has changed. So, you know, think about an NFT contract for housing records being making that upgradable and being able to change the owner and other metadata makes sense. And you can then, you know, follow that data, see the timestamp information, but you'll see naturally that, you know, the owner, that type of data is going to change over time.

Trevor: And then sort of staying on the theme of smart contracts here, what what language? This is a little bit more of a technical question, but like what languages does Casper support? Is it solidity based or are there other or is it a different language?

Niamh: So the smart contracts, a standard programing language is rust. So there's no proprietary programing languages or tooling. It's wasM and the virtual machine. So anything really that compiles down to Webassembly you can build smart contracts in. And it's purpose built like that again, because we want to be able to attract enterprise developers and use the languages that people are used to using and, and follow typical and standard software packaging life cycle processes in the context of smart contracts.

Trevor: Yeah. Can you so let's so let's, let's kind of drill in just a little bit further on because you know, I love talking about use cases of this stuff. So for you know, do you have any sort of big customers that you or like big users of the blockchain you can talk about? And what sort of things they've built on?

Niamh: Casper Yeah. So one of the projects and one of our customers that we worked on recently was around tokenizing leasing agreements. Nice.

Trevor: Oh, that's really cool.

Niamh: Essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And as you can imagine, like that is applicable to so many things, not just, you know, agreements themselves like contracts, but also, you know, financial contracts. That's another big focus area for us. So being able to take financial contracts and being able to make them machine readable. And so then you can basically take these standards and better manage these assets. And then what's really, really cool though, is what you can do with that. You know, you can run risk analysis, predictive analytics to get a better understanding, let's say, about a bond. It could be a mortgage, it could be a loan. And so it's really providing a better foundation, automating, you know, logic and enabling the better management and prediction then of cash flows and data.

Trevor: I really love that. And so are people mostly doing that with Stablecoins or is that mix of stablecoins based protocol tokens? Everything, Everything you can imagine.

Niamh: So yeah. So right now what we're focusing on with ARM, it's through a joint venture called Nucleus Finance. So ourselves, along with our partners, essentially we've taken the actus, which is an open source standard that works for 98% of financial contracts worldwide. And it's been put together, you know, over the last ten plus years, and we've made that machine readable. And then we've taken already these analytics and analytics tools that already existed for web2 type infrastructure in terms of running risk analytics on on assets and combining that together. So right now that's available on Casper and so other companies are definitely looking at other protocols where you're hearing in the news, you know, of HSBC and the likes tokenizing assets, but the approach is slightly different because they're tokenizing it based on, you know, their definitions of financial contracts, etcetera. Whereas we're taking a more industry view, looking to take the standards that are new but exist in the market and making them more standard and accessible across the market entirely. So, you know, the implication for this is is massive. And, you know, we're really very much just at the beginning and it's not, you know, just the large scale banks that are interested in this, particularly for this type of solutions. It's, you know, the small to medium size financial institutions because they're able to, you know, more nimbly adapt their systems to such type of technology. And so we're starting to see great traction there.

Pat: So. To zoom out on this. Why would someone want to tokenize a like a leasing agreement? For for those that maybe don't understand like because I think one of the common complaints is like, why put it on the blockchain? And I think all of us on this on this show right now, like we get it. But for someone that doesn't understand that, like, why would you want to do that?

Niamh: Well, first off, a lot of these type of assets, they're highly paper based. So you have all this different documentation that's distributed across multiple different firms and a lot of time is wasted even waiting for those information. And a lot of times the information is even lost. So starting to have a single digital repository that people can access and validate and pull information from is huge. That's just very much the starting point. Once everyone has that single, you know, access or view of an asset, it's then what you can do with that because the data can be easily validated. You're cutting a lot of lag time out because then what you can do is use smart contracts to then streamline the process and then enable the execution. So you're really cutting down a lot of wasted time and a lot of efficiency gains will come from that. And then the fact that you're able to then better run risk analytics and AI and analytics just generally on top of that, you're able to better anticipate the needs of individuals, how to better serve your customers and how to better manage those assets, contracts or whatever they may be.

Pat: Yeah, that's really fascinating. One thing I want to move back to is we touched on this at the beginning of just the difference between public, private and you also mentioned hybrid blockchains. So in today's context, how should businesses think about network types referring to private versus public and maybe even particularly from like a financial controller or an accountant standpoint, since that's what we do and who we work with at bit Wave.

Niamh: So a private blockchain is a permissioned network that certain companies, individuals have access to and only them. So you could set up a consortium which could be a group of companies that can only share and access data to that. And within that you can have different levels of controls and permissioning depending on who should be able to see what and who should be able to verify what. So then when you look at a public blockchain, this is more accessible to anyone. Anyone can actually join the network and read the data. So when you think about financial controllers, a lot of the work that they're doing is reviewing private and sensitive information and verifying certain information and giving the green tick and green light and let's say, in the state of a business. And so that's highly, highly sensitive. So the fact that today that is most likely shared via email, uploaded via certain portals, maybe even printed off and even posted to, you know, the financial controller and auditor, that's all completely removed and it's digitized and it's on a very secure ledger that only certain organizations and certain people within that organization have access to.

Niamh: So it really helps, again, you know, remove that manual process, provide a secure database that you can access in real time. And then, you know, you can download reports very easily and run analytics on that in the sense that, you know, we're a hybrid model would make sense. So again, let's say again for regulatory reasons. Perhaps they need only access to certain information, but not everything or what I would actually say is in a hybrid context. Let's say for regulatory reasons. And they don't need access to everything. But it's important for them to know that these companies have been verified by a financial controller or an auditor, and that data hasn't been manipulated. So in that sense, for example, they could anchor the results of that or proof to that to a public blockchain, and then the regulator is just going to read that information very easily. Anyone could as well. An investor could read that information as well. And they don't need access to all the nitty gritty details or even all the individual pages or a report, but they can have the proof associated with this compliance piece, for example.

Pat: Yeah, that's very interesting. So if I'm hearing you right, it's really a situation where some of the data needs to be private. It only the consortium, or maybe it's a single entity needs to access that data because once everything's on the blockchain, anyone can see that, right? Yeah.

Niamh: So exactly, exactly. And if you if you think about it as well, you know, in the context of, you know, pharmaceuticals or even like rock sampling, for example, in the oil and gas industry, being able to publish the results and not all the information making that publicly available, it could be to do a carbon credits as well associated with the company and their emissions. Everyone doesn't need to know every single line item, and that's not also cost effective as well because it just doesn't make sense with regards to that infrastructure. So again, enabling access to certain information, proving that data hasn't been tampered with, it has been verified. That's highly important and relevant for so many stakeholders. If you're willing, if you're looking to, you know, invest in a company, if you're even looking to just purchase a product, you kind of maybe want to know that kind of information.

Trevor: Today, I.

Trevor: Have kind of a silly question, but how do how do some of the economics work out for these hybrid blockchains? Like, do you end up doing a like do you still end up having a token that's designed to be worth value that is managed, or is the idea to move entirely away from? So I guess staking and mining incentives?

Trevor: Um hum. Um hum.

Niamh: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So it really depends on the use case. You know, in a, in a private network or a hybrid network, you don't necessarily need a token per se. You can entirely decouple them and depending on the use case. So for example, we have one customer that's actually using a open, permissioned version of Casper as a DLT. So what they're enabling is the ability for businesses and government agencies to build Dapps on this network. But there's no token piece at all. So they could have, let's say, their digital currency that sits on top of that and they're purely just using that, you know, as the underlying and the data and, and infrastructure for application development and access.

Trevor: Got it. But then Casper, of course, also does then have a a permissionless blockchain that has a more traditional staking based rewards model, right?

Niamh: Yes, it's a proof of stake blockchain. So it absolutely does. So you know there are validators and and you can as an end user, you can stake those rewards. But you know on the enterprise side, that's typically like not really relevant at all because they're using it in entirely different ways. So, you know, in a private setting they could be using again, the features of a public blockchain, but then, you know, creating an NFT and they can call it whatever they want, but they're just using that standard and that functionality and then using it, for example, to even track an asset from farm all the way to fork, etcetera. So you can definitely decouple them if you want.

Trevor: Is there a design here to be able to go from a fully permissioned to a kind of quasi permissionless and then on to like the Casper the Casper proof of stake network itself? Like is that is that one of the paths here as people kind of move between the different modalities?

Speaker5: Yeah.

Niamh: So typically so let's kind of decouple this so you could leverage the public may net to pull in data or you could actually, you know, build off that separately or you could then have your own private, let's say, permissioned version. You can easily transition, you can anchor information to the public blockchain. But if you are, let's say, a company and you have 5 to 7 nodes that are set up as a permission, so a private network, what you would be doing is those nodes and that network would then be able to migrate and transition to a permissionless. So it's a publicly accessible blockchain leveraging that configuration that you've used and and anyone can participate.

Trevor: So. Okay. So then well, I guess the one question I have is, is does Casper itself focus on one side or the other more like, are you guys more focused on the permissioned blockchains at this point, more on the the big permissionless one? Or is it really the combination of those two that that tells like a really magical story?

Niamh: I'd say a lot of our focus is actually on those hybrid blockchains. I'd say most of our work is actually on within that focus. For example, even one kind of solution that we have built with our partners at IBM and Hyperledger Foundation is the ability to enable an atomic swap. Cross-chain So here what you're doing is you're taking a token, for example, on Hyperledger, a private network, and. And essentially enabling liquidity and access on the Casper public blockchain. And they wanted to do that not only to access liquidity, but then also to have access to, you know, the added rich feature set associated with those kind of nfts on the Casper blockchain.

Trevor: Super interesting. So you just mentioned Hyperledger, and I think a lot of people, the listener probably are familiar with with Hyperledger. So from what you just said, you actually have designed this to be interoperable with Hyperledger as opposed to like competitive, I guess.

Niamh: Yeah, exactly. So this fits in very neatly with Hyperledger fabric. And some of our customers, you know, have actually started off with Hyperledger fabric. And and that's how this kind of all really came about. And they were looking to public blockchains that had additional capabilities. And so we've really now formed a strong partnership. And they are positioning Casper, you know, as one of their kind of go to public blockchains for the added feature sets that it has and that, you know, added security as well.

Pat: So one thing and maybe just to kind of zoom back out to a very high level, I have always been fascinated by the what some call the scalability trilemma, which I think is something that all blockchains face. Right? And for those that aren't aren't familiar with this, it's essentially the idea that there's really three things that every blockchain makes deliberate trade offs on, and they're decentralization, decentralization. How distributed is this network? And that gets into like, how secure is it?

Trevor: So the example, the example of that is always EOS, which is like there's like 26 people that run EOS nodes and that's it versus like Bitcoin, which has thousands or actually now eath is probably the best example, which is hundreds of thousands of people running nodes, highly, highly decentralized, although even that has centralization issues around where they run those nodes. But but those are like the two kind of extremes there. Totally.

Speaker5: Yeah.

Niamh: So and then. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to add that with Ethereum as well then clearly, you know, there was issues around the scalability and so that's how these layer twos, like Polygon et Cetera came about to help address that. So, you know, typically they solve two out of the three thus far and there has been a trade off between them to date.

Pat: Yeah, exactly. So and so scalability, transaction throughput, you know, we're often comparing it to traditional like payment card processors or credit card processors. And then lastly, security. How how secure is the network? So I'm curious from Casper's perspective, how do you approach this?

Niamh: Trilemma Yeah. So we kind of actually from the get go, we're looking to address this, and that's really how Casper came about. We wanted to address that ultimately. Why? Because we wanted to build a chain that enterprises could adopt and use very easily. So we tackle really all three of those, you know, Casper is really decentralized. It's a proof of stake network. You can go and look at Cspr Live and other block explorers to actually see that. And it's really a distributed network. It is highly scalable as well and customizable to any businesses needs. So you can configure, you know, as I had mentioned previously, the technology to meet your very specific needs. So again, if you're using in a private context, you're still getting the added security associated with the public blockchain because it's one single code base and it has added security. The fact that it is a proof of stake based blockchain and follows and adds additional capabilities beyond what is typically known as the Byzantine fault tolerance mechanism. And so, you know what It really then, you know, enables on top of that is the fact that you're able to prove that the network because of the consensus and is both live and safe. And so the consensus mechanism we use is called highway. And there are white papers about available online on Casper Labs and the Casper network. So I'd highly recommend checking them out. There have been naturally third party audits etcetera of the network. And what that is able to prove mathematically is that the network can continue to operate and progress even in the presence of failures and malicious behaviors and attacks. And that's all enabled by the proof of stake capability. And so, you know, that is why one of the reasons that a lot of these third generation blockchains have moved, you know, to this proof of stake model and away from something like Bitcoin, which is a proof of work.

Pat: Yeah. And for those that maybe aren't familiar with proof of stake versus proof of work, essentially proof of stake is you agree to lock up some of your tokens to help secure the network where proof of work and that's in like simplest terms, proof of work is, you know, you have these miners that are solving very difficult we'll call it math problems, but more cryptographic cryptography problems. How did I do, Pat, from you're you're the.

Trevor: Technical guy here. No, you did. You did good. I think the thing that's always because this gets back to the the blockchain trilemma is that different types of consensus and different types of of underlying validation mechanisms have different security concerns that come along with them. So proof of work, the way that it works on bitcoin is you have a 50% basically, you you have to control 50% of the network for something like an hour or longer to really effectively attack the network, which is very, very difficult with like with Bitcoin. That's that level of attack would cost billions of dollars. I mean, it's a very, very expensive attack. The. Like when you get to proof of.

Pat: Stake 50%.

Trevor: Because you have to basically control 50% of the network for six blocks. And at that point, you can have you can have tricked people that are watching. The blocks will basically after six blocks, they assume that it's safe to trust it. So you have to control the network for at least an hour, if not longer, to fool an individual that's maybe that's watching a deposit into Coinbase or whatever it is. That's that's what you're kind of like targeting with proof of stake networks. It moves from a electricity concern because really what you're saying is like, I need to rent an electricity to run enough Bitcoin miners for one hour to control the entire network. I need about 50% for that. With proof of stake, you move away from that because you're not solving math problems. What you're doing is you have economic incentives, which is that you have to put up enough money that if someone detects that you did something wrong, they're going to slash you. And so you have to control a certain amount of the network based on that. With proof of stake, you actually it is faster, it uses less electricity, but you only need to attack about a third of the network. So this is where you got there's a lot of debate about this. Back in the day when when ETH was making the decision to go to proof of stake. But you can effectively do an economic attack for about a third of the staked value, the way the proof of stake pools kind of work. So it all comes back. It actually it was a great question to Sage up with was the blockchain trilemma because it all comes back with blockchains to making trade offs and balances between really difficult economic decisions. That's always the core of all this kind of stuff.

Niamh: Yeah, exactly. You know what I'd add as well, just in the context of Casper, I mentioned obviously the highway consensus. We actually have another consensus. We've released a white paper around it called Zug, which will be coming out and it's already in testing phase. So it's going to be really the first protocol within, you know, two years of going live to be able to enable pluggable consensus. So again, going back to your point, Pat, depending on again, their specific needs, you can easily plug in and it's very modular and use different consensus mechanisms if you really wanted to. And that helps with, you know, the future proof capability because advancements are always going to have to constantly be incorporated into the technology. And if it's a flexible technology that can enable that, well then, you know, you're setting your technology and business up for success.

Speaker5: Yeah.

Pat: Yep, yep. That's fascinating. Another thing I wanted to go back to is you mentioned Nfts. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that Nfts are just monkey jpegs, which is not entirely false. There are monkey jpegs, but I'd love it if you could speak to just how you're seeing enterprises use Nfts.

Niamh: Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because businesses are definitely using them in a range of different ways, you know, from democratizing ownership. So enabling the ability to fractionalize the ownership of, let's say it could be art, it could be music, it could be even licenses or even buildings. So imagine being able to own a piece of apartment or a building itself and being able to generate, you know, value on that and participate in a community. So that's really one fascinating area. One of our clients, IP, has been tokenizing patents. They're actually going live next month with 1 million patents and they're going to be scaling that up to 25 million and starting off, you know, with proving the ownership of these repositories of patents and then enabling the trading and licensing of them. Another area would be around, you know, securing ticketing and preventing fraud because as we all know, ticketing is a massive, massive market where there's a lot of counterfeit, particularly on the secondary market. So that's another area. I'd say one area that I find really fascinating is actually, you know, in the manufacturing industrial sense. So using Nfts, as you know, to track digital objects and pull data from different sources and then combining that, you know, with other complementary technology, so Iot satellite technology, so you can track things at scales and know where an asset is at any point in time. And then, you know, being able to run, let's say, analytics and then be able to prevent or predict more. So delays due to, let's say, pulling in data about weather conditions and then being able to prevent further delays of an asset. And, you know, the technology for Nfts is maturing for sure. You know, they are essentially like mini computers. And we will start seeing where nfts for again, digital objects, manufacturing objects will be able to pay for themselves.

Speaker5: Yeah.

Niamh: What are your thoughts? Pats, what are you seeing?

Trevor: No, I love it. I love it. That's great. I love nfts in general around this idea of kind of like ownership that crosses into the digital bound. So I really like the the ticket use case and I expect us to see, you know, Susie's got her her new tour coming up. And I expect to see I'm really hoping that she as kind of someone who's been on the bad end of former like you know she's been on the bad end of of ticket practices around like distribution and counterfeiting and stuff like that. And she's been on the bad end of traditional royalty practices like she's I keep hoping someday that she really gets into crypto because she has all these great use cases for all this stuff here. So I think it's a really good like I mean, she just has all the perfect use cases here. You know, in the last, in the last few minutes here. Neve, I wanted to, to sort of bring us home on a couple of big topics here. So first of all, I want to just kind of ask your thoughts and and you don't have to answer any questions because this you know, if you're you're speaking as a representative of Casper or not, you're able to. But I want to get your thoughts on kind of the general market conditions right now. And I don't you know, that doesn't have to be price predictions. But you know, what's going on with the regulatory actions, the discussion about what's security, what's not a security, What are your thoughts on kind of what's going on in the broader world right now?

Niamh: Yeah, I think it is a really challenging time, but I think, you know, those who are in this space and the enterprises that have been doing this since 2016, they have their heads down and they're building. So a lot of the use cases that we focus on can be decoupled from the crypto aspect. As I had mentioned, I drew on some of the NFT applications. But yeah, it is definitely a challenging time. I think definitely, you know, the shifts to, you know, I the new shiny object, although it's not, you know that new since it's been around since the 50s and 60s and but you know that's now taken a lot of attention in the media as well. And so I think education is now more important than ever before and indicating again how important it is in the context of AI. So I think, you know, when we have more clarity on regulation, on standards, then naturally with that, it's going to really help open things up and enable faster development to market because there's going to be clearer guidelines that'll have massive ramifications.

Trevor: That's I mean, that's certainly what we're all hoping for, is that there actually is that out of all of this comes better guidelines, better and clearer regulation, all that kind of stuff. And you mentioned I think it's a great thing to talk about because it is it is really interesting, especially, you know, for us working at a startup in this space right now. Startups happen in waves. You have you know, you had the Web one wave, then the Web two wave, and then you had there was a security wave that kind of came through in the middle there. And then obviously the blockchain wave. And now we're going over to AI and there was this drop in investment. It was something like from about Q4 had like $22 billion of crypto blockchain investment and then Q1 had like 500 million. So it was like a 90, 95% haircut on the amount of VC going well the exact same time that all that money just shifted over to. I mean it was like this direct 1 to 1 correlation. I then had $22 billion go into it. What are you seeing anything interesting happening in the in that, in that sort of like interim space of of AI plus blockchain.

Niamh: Yeah I think people are starting to want to know how they are complementary or how they even work together. And a lot of people didn't realize how important the two go hand in hand, really. You know, I will be useful if we can trust it. We need to be able to trust the data and the behaviors. If you think about what AI is, you know, it's a data model that receives continual inputs and keeps training. And so if we don't know, you know, what data it's ingesting or how it's adapting, that's a massive concern in in addition to what's being communicated generally around the need for standards. And so I need something like blockchain because it can provide that transparent system. You can have a timestamp record of the information, you know, you can use it also to help govern AI as well because of the design mechanics as well. So having design incentives to, you know, be able to reward AI and performing a certain actions as well, because if we're not able to do this kind of stuff, you know, we're going to continue to see things like hallucinations, which is where, you know, the AI, the technology starts doing things completely unexpected. So using blockchain as a transparent system, removing it as a black box essentially, and as a governance tool is major. And so, you know, we've talked a lot today about hybrid blockchains. And I think this is actually a really good example of how the technologies, again, together could work well, because, you know, you are obviously going to be managing huge data sets, inputs and outputs of the training using AI. It's just huge amounts of data. So what's really critical is being able to share their end results and prove that the data hasn't been tampered with and that's can be put on a public blockchain. Everything else could be on a private blockchain and that's what we call a hybrid blockchain.

Trevor: Well, I think it's an interesting, it's super interesting. I love that take on it. The, you know, where I come down around crypto and AI is I tend to think that at the point at which AI is sort of getting smarter enough, you know, AI's first interaction with money will probably be on, on through some sort of blockchain. Like there's no good way to actually give AI a access to a bank account or, you know, it'll be it'll be one of two things. The very, very first one was I was doing trading like we've already seen AI trading bots and stuff like that for a long time. But then the second model here is going to be is actually going to be if it's spending, if it's investing, anything like that will be around crypto. So I think there's this idea of programable money fits in incredibly well with this idea of generative AI. That's the all the rage right now because that's how AI is going to have to. Touch. Touch. Assets that are on chain like that. So I think it's a oh, gosh. I mean, I think it's the most fascinating. You know, it's one of those things it's almost like underappreciated in some ways is that we're all we're all kind of enamored by writing stories. But realistically speaking, like at some point I will start running businesses and selling. You know, there was that guy who was selling t shirts that his I came up with. And I don't there's no reason like, you don't need a middleman human on there. I don't know who gets the money on the other side of that but an I that starts selling t shirts, collecting money through crypto and then I don't know, setting out to, to rule the world is a very real possibility here. Right.

Niamh: And you know what as well I think I think companies need to like just pause for a second, take a breather and take a step back, because a lot of companies, you know, a lot of their processes are highly manual and or they don't have a lot of insight into their supply chains or the full view. And so being able to then or wanting to jump straight to AI just doesn't make sense because you don't have, you know, at least a semi quasi like automated baseline to start off with. So, you know, just like any technology, if you have bad data to start off with in terms of data format, you're going to have bad data coming out. So really focusing on data formatting and structure and automating to what makes most sense for your business initially is so important before looking at blockchain or even.

Trevor: Ai Yeah, and I think about this a lot at bit wave here just because you know, we deal with with transactions in the in the volumes in the billions. I mean that's you know very very normal for us. Our biggest customer I think is doing 3 billion plus transactions a year. It's one of those things that like AI is going to be a important part of our business. There's just no way around it because the volume that we tend to deal with is so massive. It already is. Like you're already using a lot of different like techniques and tricks that I has pioneered over the last, you know, 40 years to enable a lot of the accounting stuff that we do in that. So it is the data is what's what's changing in the world right now is that there's both AI but the amount of data that that AI is looking at is is is growing at this exponential rate also.

Niamh: Yeah. Yeah. And again, like we really do have to remember that like AI has been around for 60 years, Blockchain is more of a of a nascent technology and you know where we are even in terms of, you know, the Gartner hype cycle, AI essentially is where blockchain was a couple of years ago. And so naturally, you know, it's going to move along the curve and naturally then we're going to see both actually really, really kick off when there are more parameters, regulatory guidelines in place, you know, it's just absolutely key.

Speaker5: Yeah.

Pat: Awesome. Well, Neev, thank you so much for hopping on. Before we hop off here, any last closing thoughts for businesses that are dealing with digital assets and blockchain?

Niamh: Yeah, do you know what? Because there's so many blockchains that are out there, I think it's really, really important to really focus in on like what your problem is and what your priorities and requirements are like. What are you looking to achieve with the technology? What's your success criteria? And you really, really need to, as simple as it sounds, stack rank them because selecting the right blockchain that's going to determine the scope functionality of what you can do and you want to make the right decision, you know, earlier on rather than down the road. It's not about cost cutting. It's about picking the technology and applications that best meet and fit your criteria.

Pat: Very well said. And where can people find you and Casper Labs?

Niamh: Yeah, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or on Twitter and yeah, our website is Casper labs.io, so you can definitely find our team there.

Pat: Amazing. Well, Neve, thank you so much for coming on. Hopefully it's not the last time that we have you on here. And yeah, thank you for imparting your knowledge with us.

Trevor: Yeah, thanks so much, Neve. That was really wonderful.

Niamh: It's my pleasure. Until next time then.

Pat: Thanks so much, Neve.