BlockDaemon makes it easier for developers to run blockchain nodes

0:21what are the problems that you saw companies entering into this market and what is the main solutions that block Damon is looking to fill into those problems yeah great question we started block Damon a little over two years ago after I've been trying to keep an ethereal note in sync for quite a few months and rather unsuccessfully not being an engineer myself but knowing

0:47quite a bit about how to deploy VMs and working with sort of cloud formation tooling from my previous experiences as an entrepreneur and so the that was sort of late 2017 when the crypto market was exploding and everyone was launching tokens left right and center and valuations were going through the roof the chasm between that enthusiasm and the sad reality of the

1:13physical network infrastructure was what led me to start block Damon which is really dedicated to bridge that void right so to democratize node operations fall and to help with the decentralization and functionality right and so decentralized networks require a lot of arcus tration there's a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that these networks perform quality with

1:38to a high standard and it starts with a quality node and so that's really at the core of what Damon does great and there are a lot of new companies looking to integrate blockchain and spin up nodes to start integrating that into their business units and it can get very technical but I know block Damon is doing a lot to make it simpler can you

2:00explain for the businessmen and investors that aren't really developers you know how exactly is implementing block Damon solving all this time and money for on the development side to get blockchain integrated into companies yeah sure so the key thing to understand is that a note is the physical individual ledger that makes you knows one small part of a

2:24decentralized ledger so there's hundreds of copies in each of these copies live in individual notes and so in order to really have control and participate in the network running a full note is very often a core requirement for institutions who want to really offer warranties and liabilities and need a guarantee the adequacy of the information that they rely on

2:42and each blockchain protocol speaks a very different language than the other and so deploying a full Bitcoin note is very different than doing that with aetherium and doing it you know for any of the other more popular protocols in the space like I own and Canada for example and so these consensus mechanisms are always different software implementations that require different

3:06types of machine sizing and so there's a lot of speciality knowledge within each protocol and so in order to really stay on top and ensure that you know distinct and qualitative all the time you need to have an expert who is on staff 24/7 because really what you're doing with the node is you're the node is only functional if it's functional all the time a note that works 80% of the time

3:33isn't really what you need and so really what you're buying more than the physical setup and the deployment which obviously we also automate them a lot faster than anyone else it's actually the continuous management and performance so you never have to worry about you know and that's really kind of what that's really what enterprises and institutions are buying is the ability

3:53to not have to worry about is the node sync correctly other write transactions finding its way through the node am I gonna get in trouble am i causing network delays am I even up for an investor if I'm on a validator and I've token connected on my notes is the value of my tokens at risk and so you're really buying peace of mind when you come to a solution like us that's

4:15great and can you talk a little bit about maybe any specifics behind if you're a company and you're considering whipping up some nodes and you're speaking with block Daymond but then you're contemplating just doing it yourself you know how much easier is it to just use block Damon and is it really technical to go through all of this node infrastructure in-house yeah I think the

4:40key thing is with us the whole complexity is extrapolated away from you while still giving you ownership and security around the node right and so you do have all the privileges and the benefits that come from owning a full node but what you don't have is the continues let's call it kicking of the node in order to ensure that it's in sync so these nodes are really smart

5:05transmitters that interact with any any other node in the network within certain time intervals and so bit core node is every 10 minutes and there's nodes that do that in nanoseconds and so you need to make sure that every time you hit the target and so the technical complexity of that is fairly high if specifically if your standard is you know above 99.9% for example and so

5:29that's really the complexity I'd say for even the more mature and larger networks unless you really build up a large-scale infrastructure organization it's just also not cost conducive and so the companies that run infrastructure in-house maybe the top 20 large exchanges and then you're slowly coming into the water where it's like hey can we outsource this to streamline some of

5:56the cost and so you know we have trained engineers that do this for a living full time around and we've commoditized this right so what is expensive and complex for you is you know cheap and works perfectly with us and so there's just really no need to make that one of the key challenges your business has very similar with how Club computation cloud

6:17computing worked very early on right so people moving certain things away from on-prem their own data centers and saving costs and focusing on the real applications while using cloud is very similar and you mentioned that it can be very different setting up a Bitcoin node to an etherium node and there's also a lot of enterprises that are experimenting

6:40with private or hybrid blockchains you know like hyper ledger or ibm's technology does block taemin work with all of these different types of infrastructures if the company has a certain specific set of needs yes and no so we like to support public networks that are based on open source communities just because we feel those make for better decentralized networks

7:03and ultimately you know we want to be you know we want to build things that defined actual customer use cases there are permission networks that are you know needed and enterprises want to run and we make a decision on a case-by-case basis if we actually onboard it on our platform which is it comes with clusters backup systems monitoring modules reporting modules all that type of stuff

7:26and so when something sits on our platform it comes with a very high degree of quality and we evaluate each protocol very carefully if we actually onboard it because we need to bake we need to be able to build a viable business model on top of it because ultimately each protocol we support requires a dedicated full-time engineer as well as you know customer

7:47service and infrastructure resources on our side and so yes we support hyper ledger for example we're the first network cloud deployment tool on hyper ledger and we support permission aetherium nodes for particular projects that said we see a lot less demand on those than we see actually for the larger public networks that's really interesting and one of my questions is

8:14about the infrastructure that block Damon uses to actually strengthen the security of companies that are looking to you know run this technology is there extra security benefits from doing it with block Damion rather than in-house as well it depends a lot on what in-house looks like right to be clear I mean we're not doing rocket science but what we do is bring best practices from

8:40the traditional InfoSec world to the crypto blockchain world which as a combination doesn't happen very often so we're internally ISO compliant we adhere to large international software security standard we get externally audited and so our whole concept is of bridging the truth right so meeting enterprises and institutions halfway and offering them

9:03security and certifications to assure them that what we do is viable and secure and obviously you know we integrate and work with a lot of the larger customers and a lot of the times you know we have to go through large procurement and purchasing departments and there's quite a vetting process going on and so what I would say is that as the most battle-tested system in the

9:25space we were the first hybrid cloud platform offering no deployment solutions in blockchain we've had a lot of bad stuff happen like any any bug that can happen happened to us at one point in time on some protocol and so because we're a SAS company we sell nodes four dollars a month you know our a good chunk of our product roadmap is bug reports from existing solutions and

9:47so building experience in this space is really the most valuable insurance you can have in order to protect yourself against attacks on anything else in combination with certification and rigorous standards mmm-hmm that's good to know and question about your customer base and you know deploying nodes it's nodes it seems like something that could happen at a global scale do you work

10:10with companies all around the globe or is there a specific region or industry that is you know working closely mostly with block Damon we're a global company I would say at this point in time we have offices in Ireland Germany and in the u.s. we're also currently building out a footprint in Singapore and Asia and so because we're a software platform

10:32and we're self provisioning people can go to our website block Damon comm and purchase and launch nodes in all regions in the world we have data centers we are integrated in Asia Australia and different subsections in Asia for example and so that's been a market where we've seen a lot of growth very similar to Europe where we're also kind of increasing our footprint where we you

10:58know find markets that are craving what we offer which is you know plug and play is secure a high-performing infrastructure definitely and you see to be expanding quite rapidly and block Damon did just complete a 5.5 million strategic funding round so congratulations to that could you talk a little bit about your partners in the raise and what are you using that

11:20capital for moving forward with expansion yeah so we have some large enterprise sort of sauce type investors like Comcast ventures bolstered lira hipbone some New York centric investors where we're headquartered and where we came out of out of the sort of startup ecosystem and in this round we also invited some of the leading more blockchain crypto centric investors to

11:43participate so we always you know we try to do both so we try to have traditional investors who really force us to think through classical SAS metrics scaling revenue all the sort of stuff that keeps you really grounded and focused as well as were the guys who might have a much more a higher appreciation for the Cebu sky potential of for decentralized networks and accomplished

12:08and so and so in this round we invited hashkee coin chairs blockchain comm we have folks like coin fund participated spice VC fen bushi Capital kinetics or really strong a selection of Asian investors specifically and so you'll see that there's some European funds as well as Asian funds because we do find it's easiest for us to go to market alongside

12:34investors who have other vested interests in a respective market because it's a great way to get introductions and it's a great way to find the leads and identify opportunities because you have local experts you can reach out to so we lie we rely very heavily on our partners and investors and they're also all customers and so it's an exciting process but you know this yeah it's been

12:58it's been a hard time on you know structurally managing obviously the current pandemic but fast it's been the most productive time in terms of revenue growth and scale so we have fortunately not seen a lot of impact of the crisis quite the contrary there's actually a lot of networks going to main that a lot of our customers actual fun nations that are launching physical

13:23blockchains and so you'll see that a lot of the large POS networks are slated to go live you know as we speak really and so every time that happens you know we make a little business and so fast it's been a very rewarding time key funding purpose for us is to one ensure that we can scale up in certain regions as well as to build our customer support all the

13:47sort of types of things that you need when you're slowly moving up into you know more professional setup where we want to make sure we offer 24/7 customer support where we can really rely on also the quality of people that we bring in while also supporting more and more solutions and so part of it is engineering part of it is sales for quotes and then part of it is customer

14:11service focused very cool Constantine it sounds like a great list of partners that you have and I agree having that mixture of traditional investment firms as well as the crypto investment firms is a great synergy so all the best moving forward with that you know we're running out of time here but you know if you're to bring one thing to the table

14:32in terms of what's coming next for block Damon in the next six to 12 months what do we have to look forward to it's a great question I think for us the next big step is to actually allow people to deploy and manage nodes on any infrastructure in the world and use block Damon plugins so rather than actually buying a full note that we manage and end service you actually you

14:56know we will sell you the tools we use internally to do this directly and so which will be a lot cheaper and lead to a lot more nodes to be run in the world so that's what we're excited about over the next 12 months is to see the explosion of nodes to support all these exciting projects that we see grow alive that is exciting and so if there are companies or just community members

15:19looking to learn more reach out and get involved with block Damon what's the best way for them to learn more information yeah block Damon com is the best way to do that we have a marketplace you can kind of surf all the different protocols we you can find out what these protocol stool the machine specs software requirements in order to interact with

15:38them and then we have live chat also right on the side and I'm in it all the time talking to customers and so we're obviously working on making this very easy and so if you're trying to get in touch and it takes you more than a minute and you're persistent enough tell me about it because I'm dedicated to make response times very fast and sufficient so please come and visit us

16:00and we offer free shared Bitcoin notes also to get people started to experience what it looks like to actually physically run the note awesome well thank you so much for your time constantine i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers i appreciate you taking the time to come on the show all the best with everything moving forward with

16:18block damon and let's follow up in the near future thank you so much thanks session