Joseph Weinberg on Shyft Network and decentralized citizenship

0:23that shift network is a decentralized network protocol but how exactly is it differentiating itself in the blockchain industry and what specific solutions are you guys providing yeah we took a fundamentally different approach to a lot of the current systems today we've been largely in the Bitcoin space since early 2010 and so been involved in many

0:42other protocols up until this point we started shift about two years ago the real focus of shift was to enable identity verification validation and the ability to send credentials across multiple different block chains multiple different networks with a focus on institutional as well as more broad-based public network infrastructure capability is and so

1:03everywhere from banks institutions Bitcoin exchanges regulatory bodies that we work with actually quite often as well as central banks and governments have been a big focus of us so kind of more around the you know larger traditional and kind of the ability to merge or bridge the more crypto ecosystem with the traditional kind of infrastructure space it's really what

1:21we've been focused today it's very interesting and yeah I was I was looking into shift I know that there's a lot of fraud and trying to identify people especially for microfinance and all the financial services that blockchain can provide to the industry so with shift network are you guys building in an identity protocol into the core layer of shift or how does that work yeah so

1:45basically it's we look at identity and I think actually the true goal of identity is to not have to give people your information to verify that in fact I am who I say I am and so the question is kind of like how do you derive identity and then really that's the big kind of question that we've really asked the last two years and so the identity network has effectively baked

2:03into the network itself but really what shift works on is the ability to take data assign it or validated against multiple different dispensed in by doing this you're basically creating this kind of network of trust and from there you can start to derive identity or data or compliance requirements definitely seems like a differentiator in the industry not many are focused on

2:27identity so if somebody was just looking at shift and comparing it to other block chains and they were like a blockchain libertarian or like a crypto anarchist would they be scared of a network where they had to put their identity in and or would it be comforting as you mentioned that there are no centralized parties that actually are privy to this information the information is if I

2:52understand correctly the my identity being on the blockchain is encrypted and only I have access to that yeah so we don't hold any identity information ever on top of the blockchain I mean the blotching maintains gdpr compliance as well so we ensure that privacy of the data itself is only stored across the participants that you already work with so you might be a Bitcoin exchange you

3:12use it every day it could be a government passport system no data sits on the network we just create an encrypted way of you to validate or use those different trust anchors as we call them or institutions to certify or validate on your behalf without having to violate any privacy requirements so it's really about how do you enable more confidentiality and more secrecy but

3:32more transparency and ability to access better informations that's really interesting that you brought gdpr up and that's been a topic with blockchain as many people understand and blockchain that once you put something on the blockchain you can't really remove it now if I understand correctly let's just say I was gonna go buy some crypto currencies from coinbase and they

3:53required my identity and it was on the shift network I could authorize that party to have my identity information and as the way I understand it from how you explained in the beginning it's sort of a zero knowledge proof sense where I can I can send it to them and they don't really know who the details of it but they know that I've proven my identity and I guess in with the GDP our

4:17compliance I could then revoke my authenticity towards coinbase if I wanted to remove it and if that's true then that also possible to remove it off the blockchain completely and does that make it not immutable or how does that work yeah so because the any information isn't stored on the blockchain itself it's more of a receipt that in fact I have worked with someone in my between

4:39base as an example there's a certain revocation profit process where we can basically dismally date that existing or that former receipt of course it depends on the compliant requirements and depends on varies based on the use case but effectively you're providing consent from the customer to ensure that I'm allowed to use this information in the event that you have to retract that

4:58information you basically have a Reeve era fication process to basically D anonymize the transaction and the address from the person itself and so that's a lot of where focus has been the other big area that we've been focusing very heavily on is a solution to the Financial Action Task Force and the KYC problem that the ecosystem at today so I'm this kind of all plays into the

5:17exchange question of how do we passport information how do we make sure identity information is more secure and then exchanges can actually passport this information on behalf of customers without violating all of these privacy problems that we have today so that's great and how has the development been for the shift network when did you first start the development and at what stage

5:35in the roadmap are you currently at yes we started about two years ago we can work in the ideas for closer to four years a lot of early participants in the ecosystem but we used heavily worked on development last year and a half networks ready to launch in the fourth quarter we have major institutions with government projects with the government of Bermuda they'll get announced the

5:53next few weeks that are going into phase one for identity systems of the nationwide level as well as working with some largest decline changes to the world on solutions to global governance compliance problems so we're quite advanced in terms of you know projects and most cases in space today that sounds great and how about your team how large is your team right now

6:12do they have expert knowledge in identities or just blockchain before and are you guys growing yeah we have quite a diverse array of people across very hard core core core developers and we're protocol level developers the team size about 35 today and of course we have other partner companies that are kind of joining a new working class Woodleigh across different areas and focuses of

6:35the network itself a lot of us came directly from the more encryption key side of course up to the block inside and then kind of expanded a plethora into much more traditional business as well and so we kind of have a very broad array of things actually work so that's great and was the idea of incorporating this identity and the way that you've developed the shift Network

6:59completely from scratch or did you have some role models in terms of other block chains that are currently running right now yeah so we weren't heavily with a company called block stream for much of the early days in the Bitcoin space and we were looking very heavily on new ways of building participatory systems across different exchanges and different types

7:19of use cases that dealt in heavily regulated environments and how we can basically extend new privacy capabilities for the customers and these projects with these exchanges and so a lot of our early work came up with these new types of designs and of course we're always looking and seeing whether the problems that you know exist in our ecosystem how we can make those you know

7:38a reality for not only us but the broader role itself so a lot of combination from a lot of different is the roadmap look like for the next six months you mentioned that you're launching the main network hopefully by the end of this year is it just head down and development and what needs to be done yeah so we will announce phase one of some of our government projects

8:02in the next month or so you know be a big focus the project will launch in the fourth quarter and so the main network will be live and ready we'll be working on a lot of optimization after that as well and we'll actually be heavily focused on taking the network it's really focused on interoperability so we'll be actually distributing it's smart contracts across multiple

8:20different watch hands so that it gains this kind of security surface across many and then heavily focused on releasing a global solution to compliance for all the big money exchanges around the world today to allow security Gosport approach so those are kind of the big projects and a lot of the development services that's great and one of the major topics that's been

8:39hot especially with Bitcoin and aetherium is scalability and also the consensus algorithm on how transactions are verified and how that can be done faster what has shift Network done with their consensus algorithm and will it be scalable enough from the main net launch to support the entire world yeah and so the way that we have taken approaches to things we believe

9:03that proof of work and the way that Bitcoin works today is very important for security but we also look and realize that you need different layers to be able to accelerate or speed up certain types of business processes and so basically what we've worked on is the ability for shifts interoperability bridging layer to actually start to work across other networks to leverage or

9:23gain the advantages that these networks hold so certain processes run faster on Els as a faster blockchain is an example we should be able to use shifts core infrastructure logic across certain block chains to perform faster operations and so the idea is that you have this layer that assigns improves this data across everyone and certain types of requirements will happen in

9:43certain types of blockchain environments depending on the use case that's required and we see this as kind of the next phase of being able to do a lot more collaborative interoperability a lot better ability for projects to actually work across diverse ecosystems and kind of conform to certain types of requirements when required so that's great and what one thing that is of

10:05existential importance once the main that is launched and to grow adoption is to have a good developer ecosystem that allows for people to easily create gaps and make usable platforms on top of the network so that they can actually gain users how are you guys planning to have this developer ecosystem you know is it are you working on that right now are

10:28there any gaps that are sort of coming out for shift Network and how do you foresee that playing out yeah so we took a very logical approach of working with the etherium community very closely we're also you know originally from Canada and so we were involved in their list you know fundings and development of the theory I'm actually a lot of the co-founders or lief collaborators of

10:46shift as well and so we took a very heavy approach to making sure that everything we're building would work across the existing applications in the dream environment and would also be able to do gain in the logging innovation happening and so from that perspective we have about three to five apps that will be coming on to the network to basically initiate or start you know

11:05kind of deck xual with the engine as we call it and one project that we've been working on very closely called alchemy is a project came out of tech stars in New York they'll be working on ships as well to gaining the advantages of interoperability and cross network bridging as well so a lot of areas that happened in identity as well as outside and kind of more traditional defy space

11:23That's great now we've talked a lot about the development and the technical side but I'm interested in the business side and not just apps but the network itself and how that's going to play out is there a business model built in to shift network or some kind of economy or some kind of token and how will the investors or holders and interested parties in shift network grow

11:47their value yeah so it works very similar to have etherium functions today the gas is used in order to execute transactions against smart traffic contracts the big difference is that it's not only meant for monetary transactions and that all of the data requirements that sit across all participants in the network so what's a in one Bitcoin exchange and I have to

12:03transmit information to another one for compliance requirements you're basically paying the cost of data retrieval data discovery and data transmission across the entire network itself and so it acts as a kind of morbid data market in some context I guess in many ways and so the currency itself is mainly used and derived for those types of purposes and

12:23that's kind of been the main focus the revenue model is very hardly focused on how you basically make the cost of writing data transactions and of course processing transactions from the data perspective very cheap and accessible to enterprises so the way it's designed is so that you know whether you're a MasterCard or you're in Nasdaq with millions and millions of users you can

12:42actually use this network without sacrificing any type of scalability throughput the cost requirements that are usually required in most blocking contexts today so it's been very well architected and designed to ensure that it meets the needs of both the current existing market and future markets great and is that shift coin or token available right now or will that

13:01happen at the main net launch no meaning that launch will we'll start working on its use cases it's use cases will initially and initialize out all of the actual distribution of its of its bits tokenization and currency model and you'll be it'll be working over the next three to five five to ten years actually on a distribution curves great and

13:19Joseph what are you looking for right now in terms of I know you're working towards the main net launch so are you looking for more developers or looking for more investors or strategic partners right now yeah looking always looking for more partners we've heavily focused on the enterprise space but of course more people kind of involved in that data area broadly is

13:37always interesting and mainly looking for developers new ecosystems new people working on new interesting projects that we can either help you know push over the line and kind of help them work on the ecosystem and kind of people that are interested and how do you incentivize developers when there's so many block chains coming out now and a lot of people are interested in

13:58developing on the theory amore OS how do you convince them to develop on the shift network so the beauty of it is if you're working in the US or anything on aetherium you basically we like to see whether or not you'll port parts of your some more contracts and just use parts of shift in the existing iOS apps that you're building as well as aetherium so

14:16we're not asking you to move everything to shift but just extend shifts API base so that you can now use parts of its function without sacrificing the existing system infrastructure so working across everyone basically so that's kind of focus that's great and if you are interested in getting more developers how can they reach out to you and learn more yeah on Twitter and

14:37Joseph Weinberg or at shift network of course you can send us a telegram that shift network as well and pretty much every other place at shift Network awesome Thank You Joseph that's all the time that we have for the interview today but it was great learning about shift network and all the best in leading up to the main net launch let's follow up in the near future and see how

14:59chef network has grown that was great thank you very much you