Alan Chiu on Enya.ai's privacy focused blockchain network

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have alan chu ceo and co-founder of enya alan welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on today thank you for having me you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into enya and with regards to data privacy management all of that

0:24good stuff but i would love to kick off the interview with just a little bit on your background personally and how you got into the space and why you started enya sure i'll need to go back to my undergrad work i study computer engineering in vancouver at the university of british columbia and the first job after i graduated from college was to work at this printing technology

0:48company and what's fascinating was our customers were high high volume commercial printers and you've got these massive expensive printing presses that they needed to keep running all day long and i was part of the team that built the first digital workflow management system for that industry and i had to build a distributed system that stayed up all the time so it started

1:11become very fascinated about what it takes to build software that never goes down and then fast forward to when blockchains started be becoming more prevalent i was like wow this is this is my dream come true i have to jump in very cool love it and then you know that led to creating enya and i would love to hear a little bit for the viewers you know just a high level

1:36overview and sort of the focus of nes platform and the solutions that you're driving into the market yeah the reason we focus on both privacy and decentralized infrastructure is because let me also talk about our co-founder professor jan lapart who's an end professor at stanford he comes from a background of bioengineering and has been operating at

2:00the intersection of distributed systems pride data privacy cryptography and machine learning so when when we met each other and started thinking about the problems with how internet businesses were today a lot of them traced back to the fact that individual users no longer have control over their own data and so we started looking into technologies that exist today that

2:25didn't exist before when the internet was first created and started imagining what if what if we made it easier for developers to build applications that are privacy first and what if we made it easier for users and developers alike to have more fine-grained control over what's access to the data we're not talking about a zero or one black and white situation

2:47where we don't want to share any data or we share everything completely oftentimes it's helpful to have selective data sharing and selective data privacy because oftentimes we do need to share some data in order to facilitate transactions and that led us to creating anya that led us to focusing on making advanced cryptographic techniques such as secure multi-party computation and

3:10homomorphic encryption much easier for developers to use great background and yeah data privacy you know at least in the mainstream world and social media seems like a huge topic nowadays and people hear that oh blockchain may be the solution to that where you get to own your own data and i'm curious obviously being familiar with the problems in the centralized industry and

3:35then looking at the main layer one block chains and then moving to produce enya did you see frictions and holes in the main block chains like bitcoin ethereum some of these layer one protocols in the way that they manage data privacy and it really still needed to be advanced further obviously with the creation of enya yeah so with blockchain so one of the

4:04benefits of course is decentralization and also the resilience that comes from a decentralized infrastructure and sensors resistance but that alone doesn't guarantee privacy oftentimes we see all kinds of information that get leaked on public blockchains and in the in the space of d5 for example trade information or order order flow

4:27information could be manipulated and taken advantage of by various actors to in a rent-seeking way that extracts profits from from individual users who adjust trading on d5 platforms and that's the symptoms of lack of finer grain selective privacy control some data that end users probably don't want to be exposed on the blockchain are getting

4:54exposed and they're they're being taken advantage of definitely and now with enya as a privacy-centric network maybe you can talk about some of the competitive advantages and those solutions that aren't available in projects like bitcoin and ethereum so in at enya what we have developed so far is making it super easy for developers

5:22to implement the data privacy privacy first applications that leave sensitive data on edge devices like mobile phones using techniques like secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption and that gives controls back to the end user to decide what do i want to keep the data on my phone or do i want to allow the developer or the application to perhaps

5:45perform a limited set of operations post encryption of my data and that ensures that my sensitive information never gets out there now that kind of edge-based secure computation approach is very complementary to a decentralized infrastructure that we're building today in the blockchain world where you are able to secure data at the edge device and then give folks the ability to

6:13to control what could be done with their data afterwards then you don't need to worry about sensitive data being stored on a public blockchain for eternity yeah definitely and you mentioned secure mpc twice now and i know a lot of people you know that have gotten into bitcoin and ethereum they understand that those transactions are protected by

6:38cryptography and that there's sha-256 but i'm sure most people aren't familiar with secure mpc maybe you can just elaborate on what really multi-party computation is and how it benefits the users to have that on the blockchain sure at a very high level what secure multiply complimentation is it's this is the problem it sets out to solve let's say you have

7:03two or more parties that own the individual data they want to come together and compute a result that's based on the information that everybody has but they don't want to share the information with each other these could be competitors in an industry but they want to look for fraud together for example or look for suspicious patterns in their data set

7:24that's what secure multi-party computation sets out to solve and it's able to compute a result on the collective data set without requiring all the data to be pulled together in a common place great thanks for that alan and i was looking at some of the networks that are looking at implementing enya's privacy-centric advantages and i saw that you recently partnered with omisigo

7:49omg network which is a project that i'm really interested in and to create the omgx network with more privacy-centric functionality maybe you can talk about that partnership what does that do with enya now merging in to create omgx and what that means for the industry we're super excited about omgx because it is first of all an evm compatible ethereum compatible layer 2 that's trust

8:18rooted in ethereum itself so any d5 projects could or nfd issues could easily migrate to omgx and start enjoying the cost savings and the fast throughput of this layer two solution but on top of that we are also introducing whole new capabilities in omgx and we're calling calling extensible smart contracts and hybrid compute what that enables is a smart

8:44contract developer can now write decentralized applications that trigger code that runs on web scale infrastructure like aws lambda what that means is you can shift the more computationally intensive algorithms off chain to aws you can even implement algorithms that are simply too slow or too expensive to be done in the context of solidity or perform these

9:10computations on chain so all of a sudden advanced computation techniques light secure computation are now possible in the context of a decentralized application cool and you mentioned their defy applications it seems there's been i've seen a lot of information in the news about you know centralized finance versus decentralized and people sort of moving over for their own privacy of

9:35their information but also a lot of these defined networks they're on public blockchains so you know your information is still public although you're not giving your personal information sometimes to a centralized entity it's still there is information that's available out on the networks i'm curious with you know enya having these privacy-centric functionalities also

9:58looking at the defy space how that can fit together maybe you can talk a little bit more about the d5 space how you see it how you see the trends moving forward as d5 continues to grow we're certainly seeing a major trend in diva happening which is a drive towards capital efficiency as well as user friendliness and that makes sense as the industry matures because

10:20capital efficiency the more efficient use of capital would drive higher returns which of course attracts liquidity providers and despite the growth of the incredible growth of d5 over the past couple of years we're still in the early days and there are a lot of user experience issues that need to be resolved including privacy concerns and by introducing omgx with extensible

10:44smart contracts we anticipate d5 project teams to over time start taking advantage of our hybrid compute capabilities to roll out more sophisticated algorithms that lead to better capital efficiency as well as using advanced techniques like secure computation to better protect the privacy of their individual users and the better the better they serve the users the more

11:09users they will attract and the more liquidity they will also bring into that protocol definitely and i saw that your team is developing a lot of development functionalities to help get some of these networks integrated more privacy functionality defy and not and that goes for you know the omgx network i'm sure you have more partnerships in the works as well and i

11:33know that your team's also making it easier for layer two solutions which it seems most of these major networks are and projects that are on major networks are partnering with flare two solutions just because it only makes sense to make it faster and cheaper can you talk about the development ecosystem for enya how you're making it easier for these other networks to come on and

11:54layer two specifically as well sure we have from day one when we started enya we've always been focused on making advanced technologies accessible and easily usable by developers because otherwise these technologies are just going to get stuck in research and never get out there and be widely distributed in the context of omgx what we the approach that we're taking is for one we

12:20are partnering with teams such as polywrap formerly known as web3 api to make sure that we are at the forefront of web3 innovations to make it super easy for developers to build on our platform to build client side apps without having to integrate static sdks into into their web apps on top of that we're also making sure that in terms of integration workflows that we have

12:46we have a dedicated team that provides a lot of developer support to any developers that wish to build on a platform and we also invest a lot of resources in making sure our documentation is current and comprehensive and so this technology matters in driving adoption but also we got to look at the whole picture bring together bring to market a whole wintering solution that

13:09takes the human elements into accounts as well definitely i completely agree allen and with all of these development functions that your team's working on i'm guessing you're going to continue to work on that through the rest of the year i'm curious if there's any major milestones or big road map updates that enya is looking to release through the next six months or before

13:32the end of 2021 we launched the test net for omgx on rinkeby three months ago and we've been super fortunate to be working with a fair number of really strong teams that are going to be migrating their projects over to the omgx platform we have many exciting announcements coming down the pipe in the next several months that i can't talk about right now but

14:00we're super excited about what we'll be able to do for users for developers and to help grow the whole ethereum ecosystem together great well i'll be looking forward to those future partnerships as they roll out thanks for hinting at that and i'm curious you know the next six months i'm obviously your team's working hard but let's take a look down the road you know

14:25three five plus years down the road how do you see the future of these blockchain networks with regards to privacy and data management and anya's role in being one of those main success factors to being implemented across the industry and ensuring that there's more privacy throughout the entire blockchain ecosystem

14:53i think we're still going through a lot of growing pains as as a community as an ecosystem and as a result a lot of developers are legitimately focused on scalability issues cost issues because these are really constraining how quickly we can grow the overall ecosystem but once we've gotten past these shorter term humps the newer users who are just

15:20dabbling in d5 and minting their first nfts are going to start wondering well what's happening to my personal information who knows what i'm doing on these blockchains and what kinds of trails am i leaving on ethereum or maybe other blockchains that i that i'm using what's been happening in the web world across site cookie tracking has been widely reported in the media

15:46which in turn has sensitized general consumers to data privacy issues to a degree that perhaps they weren't as we're aware of 10 years ago so these companies are not going to go away just because they are now trading on a d5 protocol or yield farming on d5 or minting nfts so as an ecosystem we need to start anticipating these privacy concerns and build

16:10private applications that have privacy controls built in from day one rather than react reacting to user concerns after the fact we should learn from the web 2 experience and do a better job in the web 3 world definitely and i think proactivity is the key there and you mentioned that so thank you for that insight alan into the future it's a bright future ahead

16:34and for the viewers that are looking to follow along learn more about privacy centric networks like enya and more about data management and their own privacy and to follow along with these updates and with omgx as well what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved into the communities fantastic so follow us on twitter twitter handle is enya ai and omg

17:01network hq we have a telegram group as well the links are in the twitter this bio we also have a discord server again these links are available on social media looking really looking forward to growing the community together definitely thanks alan i will leave the links as well in the description box below for the viewers all the best with

17:22anya moving forward and let's follow up in the near future looking forward to it thank you