Johannes Schweifer on CoreLedger's blockchain infrastructure

0:21you're working on in the blockchain space and it would be great to kick off our interview by hearing a little bit about your background and in blockchain and how that led up to you being the ceo of core ledger well i started actually my career as a chemist and i found it or rather co-founded one of the now most successful over-the-counter brokers here in switzerland bitcoin

0:46swiss in 2013. so my first touch points with cryptocurrencies were actually mostly about speculation and well i'm i like technology so that was the reason why i looked for something else something which gives more let's say purpose to the whole technology and that's the reason why we founded chord ledger and that quad ledger we use the technology to implement

1:14real business cases beyond speculation of course everything which you can do with that technology ultimately could also lead to speculation but that's not the primary focus that's a great interesting transition from chemistry and you know quantum computing into blockchain and i think that a lot of people at first get interested based off the speculation but then once

1:39they see the fundamental values of blockchain and integrating into businesses and different industries they stick around and i think that's what your team is doing with core ledger no could you just elaborate on you know what are the main goals of core ledger right now how are you helping businesses leverage blockchain technology the most important thing what we are

1:59doing is we provide the infrastructure which is necessary in order to use tokens and integrate them into business processes what does that mean so mostly you need to document things there is no way around just having some anonymous or unknown objects floating around wherever so be it in blockchain or be somewhere else so documentation is one of the key key

2:24topics and key issues we solve that the second one is the tokenization itself like giving quantity to some virtual or digital objects and that is more than just creating a smart contract so it's hard to explain it in detail and that's the reason why i just skip over when people are familiar with the constraints and restrictions governments implement and they implement more and

2:53more of them as the day goes by so having some forms of governance and rules implemented directly into some some digital objects so into the token itself is important and the last thing is conversion so we call them the token economy essentials and this is what we are providing to businesses ready to use really for getting started right away so what

3:20businesses actually can avoid by using our products is to build everything from scratch which is as we know a very costly endeavor definitely yeah a lot of businesses that try to integrate blockchain you know i've read into the studies and 90 of them or more fail either with the implementation or in their first year of business and obviously there's some room for improvement there

3:45and i guess core ledger's package is trying to lower those numbers so that's really interesting did you study you know the failure points of blockchain integration into startups and sort of pinpoint how you can get these businesses to have successful blockchain integrations well not everything in detail because during the rush or let's say the gold rush of the icos

4:10we had we have seen the good and the bad sides of getting a lot of funding into a new era or a new area of business or new area of technology the one thing was that also kind of meaningless or totally foolish projects were funded but on the other hand it was possible to try out a lot of different things so to elaborate the reasons why projects failed well

4:37some of them really didn't have any any real business case behind them others simply failed because they ran out of funding when the ico bubble burst at the end so a lot of different reasons and those which ran out of money could mostly be traced back to the fact that they tried to build everything themselves it's like a pizza delivery service who tries to build his own car

5:05for providing his service so in that sense yeah a lot can be attributed to the fact that they tried to do everything themselves yeah i could definitely see a lot of startups taking that route you know without a lot of capital to try and get off the ground just building whatever they can to try and utilize blockchain to get through that and you mentioned in

5:26your four pillars that the tokenomics and having a proper structure so that when you do release a product it actually has that ability to scale and to get community and things like that now with the startups and bigger companies that are working that you're working with at coreledger how because they're not doing it themselves fully how much do they

5:47still need to understand about blockchain integrations integrating into their business and how much hand-holding are you doing for these companies still a lot i mean we take a lot of the technical hassle away the how to do it the really code based development part but still they need to understand the individual parts which are combined it's like a big toolbox which

6:13you can use in order to build business processes but it's not let's say a simple click together form of toolbox so we are still years away from that you can just from a user interface click together business processes but we assist with the very basic steps those which are the most costly at the moment because business processes are kind of individual so there's still some

6:41wiring to be done but all that part below let's let's call it the fundamental parts of a project these we provide out of the box and there's so many startups that are looking to utilize blockchain to create something new but there's also a lot of enterprise corporations and conglomerates that are also looking to take advantage of this technology

7:07are you working with companies of all different sizes and have you also focused on the enterprise sector and how is that going we focus on companies of all sizes there is no restriction whether there is a size limit a lower bound or upper bound to where qualitative tools make sense but it's mostly the small and medium companies for

7:33whom we are the most interesting because it's just lowering the entry barrier for those companies to work with blockchain and it's still an absolutely novel field of technology so it's it's young it's 12 years old basically and we're talking about the start of the bitcoin blockchain if we talk about the start of programmable blockchains it's

7:56six years five actually so absolutely it's a grassroots movement there but small and medium companies they will not have a chance to participate in such a grassroots movement and so they have a disadvantage compared to enterprises enterprises can always just hire blockchain developers and try out stuff themselves definitely and there's so many different use cases

8:23for the companies that you're working with i'm sure they're working throughout all different industries as well but more recently there's been a focus on blockchain-based solutions for the pandemic and there's there's been contact tracing potentially voting supply chain management has been a huge you know blockchain integration for masks and ppe and just for the whole

8:44supply chain in general and have you been working with any companies that have been looking at bringing solutions to solve the crisis that we're currently in sure so it's about tracing the origin of goods so there we have started a project then also in the recycling of scrap metal which is let's say partly affected by

9:09backhoe it and where we can bring an improvement and a lot has been going around contact tracing so there we also launched a project which is about using blockchain to maintain the anonymity of participants so instead of really sharing data you could use blockchain just to exchange cryptographic keys and not revealing any

9:36that's great and one thing i was thinking about when these new startups smaller medium-sized businesses are integrating blockchain they may be limited by the tools that blockchain has available you know ethereum is using specific programming languages and it's not always interoperable with other blockchain technologies you know how widely available

10:00are you know for the tools that you provide how how do they work with if the company needs to pivot based on a business decision or if they want to use a blockchain that may not be interoperable with another blockchain does your company focus on interoperability and compatibility with other business solutions and more looking at a forward-looking as

10:22a business maximalist rather than a blockchain maximalist well we created qualitature and details on the assumption that there will be a lot of different blockchains for different purposes so the topic of scalability is a important one i mean ethereum has hit now okay they have not really hit the wall but are about to hit the ball so when we started we started of

10:50course with ethereum technology but always had an eye on other developing technologies so we built it in such a way that it's kind of blockchain agnostic nothing is truly blockchain agnostic so it's like an operating system and you can't expect an operating system to run without any adaptation on different platforms but the amount which needs to be changed and

11:15adapted to the different blockchain is very small so we guess it's around three to five percent but we are of course actively looking for interoperability so the two blockchains we are supporting at the moment are ethereum based and we are working towards or interoperability between those two but we are not developing that ourselves so we take existing

11:39protocols oh great and yeah you're right it's more of a it's more future proofing as blockchains will need to become more interoperable when more businesses are using it but right now the majority of applications and in defy applications are all running on ethereum and i'm curious on how core ledger has been working if at all in the d5 space you know the

12:01decentralized finance space blew up in 2020 it's done a 10-fold increase in the amount of value that's been locked into these decentralized liquidity pools and exchanges do you see that as an opportunity for more startups to utilize core ledger to also capitalize on the d5 movement that is a question which has a lot of different

12:27aspects so one thing is defy has not really served the purpose of non-financial use cases or at least not of the smaller individuals or smaller participants because it caused a huge rise in gas prices so transactions became extremely costly for a whale who moves around 100k no problem but if you're a small speculator and

12:54again it's the speculative use cases which is fomented by the d5 technology then high transaction costs are simply a deterrent but at least it showed what is possible in theory if the system was scalable corelatcher did not directly participate in that movement because it's first of all against the idea of quality to just be a speculative platform

13:22but on the other hand our protocol supports a different form of decentralized finance we don't call it like this we call it a decentralized marketplace and the technical term which we have chosen is a token warp it works a little bit like the connection which you can get through facebook when you say people are connected to everybody on the planet who has of

13:46course a facebook account through six or seven hops and the same principle we applied to conversion of values conversion of tokens on the blockchain which is transparent where people can just trade one thing against another one without needing anybody to directly offer it that can be compared to e5 but we rather try to not do it so yeah i think that's a smart play and i

14:14like where you're heading with having those decentralized swaps and removing counterparty risk and having an exchange of value that's safe and sort of it is very comparable to with the speculation in d5 right now to sort of the ico craze where people are really just putting they're just speculating and i believe that there is a lot of value coming out of the d5 space in

14:38terms of being able to have interest bearing accounts and loans without counterparty risk but i think that sort of needs to be there needs to be a little bit of a retracement and then a finding of the fundamental values of d5 because it has whenever something goes up that quickly you always need to have some kind of little correction and it so i think that it sounds like

15:01your company's staying in the in the right headspace in the d5 movement and we're running a little short on time johannes but i want to talk about the future of core ledger and what does your company have finishing off this year moving into 2021 what are the main goals and focuses for your company as you continue to grow well we started a lot of different projects and we are

15:23pursuing them all so one of them is providing the active sandbox to companies to try out blockchain so the active sandboxes as the name suggests playgrounds for just trial and error of blockchain use cases and we also offer them to universities this is i'd say one of the first places to look at where people want to experiment with

15:51blockchain technology then the kovit crisis has actually shown us the need to help people in countries where they have a huge inflation so we are providing theos that's the token economy operating system and all the tools for starting path economies that's pretty nice especially with the conversion mechanism which i have just explained so that allows people to trade

16:19for example soybeans for cattle with many conversion steps in between if need be but in a transparent way you don't even see them so you can bypass currencies even 8b so if there is a inflation you might want to trade with real values that's wow let's say like barter in the old time but yeah that's super cool bring it into the future yeah digitalized barter

16:46trading and that's that's really interesting and how can the viewers find out more about core ledger or companies that are looking to start utilizing the services that you have or just to learn more about the sandbox well just go to our website baby www.college.net so you'll find information about active sandbox and all our products there great well i'll leave that link in the

17:14description box below as well thank you so much for the time johannes all the best with core ledger moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you very much for the interview have a good day goodbye you