Leemon Baird on Hedera processing 4 billion transactions

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Lehman Baird the co-ceo and co-founder of hedera hashgraph Lehman welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks it's great to be here you're very welcome it's been a wild 2023 so far in cryptocurrency and I've seen hedera

0:21in the news a bunch of times and it's a blessing to have you on the show so thank you so much for taking the time excited to dive into all of the recent initiatives and what hedera has been up to in the protocol growth and just the growth of the ecosystem so let's just start from the very top for those who aren't familiar and also just a little bit about you know how you

0:41would describe hedera hashgraph let's start there and then we'll dive into more of the recent news okay so hilarious hashgraph is a public Ledger in 2016 Mance Harman and I decided to do this thing and we had this great technology the hashgraph that was very fast and secure abft all these good things but we decided to make a public Ledger with the biggest names in the

1:05world Google and IBM and LG Electronics and big Banks and big legal firms and top 10 universities in the world which was just crazy but in 2016 that's what Max and I said we're going to do and we put the amazing team of people joined us and we have just built an amazing thing they have done an amazing job amazing yeah no I saw like a bunch of huge names and it was sort of early on

1:30before the first 2017 run thinking like oh are you know are these really big companies actually interested in this technology and seeing some other blockchain protocols sort of going from the ground up trying to make a more of a Grassroots effort it's nice to sort of see a switch and like now we've seen two cycles later that these huge companies are all over

1:48this stuff and I think that you were really early to the game yeah yeah we were that's right we go through so many cycles so far this is something amazing we're in the Crypt of winter now and they'll come back out of that eventually it's been an interesting ride yeah definitely and even though you know it's sort of a crypto winner it seems like there's a

2:07sort of a mini run of attention and awareness back on projects and it looks like you know your team hasn't really stopped with working hard and also making big Partnerships and stuff can you talk about some of the recent news I think you know what I'm talking about I've seen across news outlets all over that hedera is making big Partnerships and continuing to grow

2:30yeah so it's just amazing it's all coming as a flood and it's because of years of hard work but now we're just seeing amazing things so Dell just joined us a good portion of the entire internet runs on Dell equipment and so everyone knows who Dell is they just joined and they're very interested in their edge things so they have equipment in retailers and on oil rigs and things

2:51they have equipment at the edge and they're very interested in tracking and recording and understanding and being able to optimize things at the edge which is I'm excited about this is a great use case but then you have people like adma that have already deployed it so right now right now we have 500 transactions every second coming from Atma which is just

3:14mind-boggling this is a project from Avery Dennison and you know they have they do stickers like barcodes and RFID stickers and they track things they track 20 billion things it blows my mind food it's in all mutably on The Ledger The Ledger the hashgraph that hedera runs is keeping track of 500 new things

3:44every second and this is stored immutably you can search it has a timestamp it's like a notary public service a timestamp that says this is what the entire Ledger agreed on and is a cryptographic proof that this is what the entire Ledger agreed on we're doing 500 a second so if you go to realtps dot what is it net you can see the real TPS and it's real

4:05TPS and when people first saw that they said oh you must be cheating and just talking about your consensus or something internal stuff no no it's real it's real users from real customers real TPS doing real business applications fascinating wow we've got the we just had the highest tvl we've ever had recently we had the highest usage not just of the consensus service

4:27that's like that notary public but also of the smart contract Service and of the crypto Service they're at all-time highs so we have just been seeing an enormous flood of interest in some of the things going on with hedera right now and we've been releasing more reports on our Treasury and on our roadmap we went to Davos Davos this year was interesting yeah and

4:51I can tell you more about that just all sorts of things going on all at once and with that first of all that congratulations on that Dell partnership yeah I don't I know I think people a lot of people just think you know Dell they have some computers but no they actually you know they run a lot of the internet and a lot of these businesses and I think that's going to be huge you

5:11know on the edge cases there as talking about oil rigs I can imagine you know the blockchain being used way outside of finance and people don't really think of those use cases at the beginning so they're but they're they're huge the mark the markets are exponentially large and I read into that partnership a little bit and I saw that you know it

5:29says Dell is joining the hedera governing Council and I'm curious about the council and what that means and you know is it like a decentralized governance or how does that sort of fit in for the companies that join into the council to work with hedera it is it is very decentralized we have 28 council members right now each of them has an equal ownership equal

5:51control of what happens we're going to keep building we're planning to build a 39 and then we have term limits and they will be rolling over we'll have new companies coming in and new universities coming in the whole purpose here is to have governance that you can trust so these are Big names you know who they are they have a reputation to protect they're not going to do

6:10something that hurts their reputation they are equal you don't say well we have a million of them but you know five of them have all the power no no they're exactly equal all 28 of them someday will be 39 and they'll have it rolling over they control what we do so they control what features are going in and how the network runs they're running nodes too

6:30we're about to have Council community members also run nodes but the governance is good governance and I'll tell you with all the scandals that we have been seeing in our industry recently people are starting to say you know what we need a project which has good governance has transparent governance none of this smoke-filled rooms people in the back room deciding

6:51what's going to happen we don't even know who they are no no you know exactly who they are they publish the minutes of their meetings you have transparent governance and good governance and that you can trust it not that you had any trust any one council member I never trust any person don't trust anyone but there's a bunch of them keeping tabs on each other checks and balances that's

7:12what you need yeah it's great to see and you mentioned there about not just the transactions being at an all-time high but also the tvl and then on the D5 side you know having value locked into the protocol I'm very curious about that as you know I feel like D5 is going to be a huge narrative coming back when people get more interested in the space and from

7:35what I understand you know hedera working with all these large companies it wasn't as much focused on that ground up in the D5 decentralized exchanges in the previous cycles and now I feel like it's gonna take the World by storm and you know move up very quickly compared to sort of the ethereum Solana ecosystems that already were over saturated at the top of the last

7:54run can you talk about the development of defy and finance specific applications on hedera and like if that's a major focus of the dapps that are being built yes it is this is a major Focus this is why tbl's at an all-time high and growing rapidly so over the last couple of years we said we're going to have native tokens we put native tokens in so

8:17now you can trade tokens for a tenth of a cent doesn't cost you know 30 to transfer a token to someone we have native tokens we also have Smart contracts that are made much faster with smart contracts 2.0 and they can reach out and do things with the native tokens so when you need the intelligence of a smart contract you have it and it's in solidity it's an industry standard but

8:37then you have the speed and the inexpensiveness of native tokens and they work together and so this caused a lot of interest and so more recently what we have seen is saucer swap is on hedera and is doing great and now at Healy Swap and bubble swap have joined them they're not joined them they're competing with them but they have multiple defy systems that are really

9:01doing a lot now on hedera and so what we see is just this exponential curve of people getting more and more interested in doing defy on hedera doing things with tokens and with nfts this is this is a real growth area we have several areas that I'd say are really growth areas this is one of them you have some things around ESG and carbon credits it's a real growth area and you have

9:22things about tracking like what you're seeing with Atma we have several different real growth areas there's even things like games which really is just part of the nft story all sorts of different things going on now it's time fascinating that even in this sort of conditions of the market you know I feel like it's potentially the beginning of something

9:42big because people aren't really realizing you know how much interest and growth that's going into this yet in the mainstream so there could be a major turning point which could help all blockchains sort of move into the real world and gain more adoption and actually have people use the innovations that they're creating so and with the D5 applications

10:04and these decentralized exchanges it people are able to go and start creating dapps or making development on the on hedera and from what I understand the you guys also have a foundation the hbar foundation that helps startups move into hedera or funds them or bring strategic advice things like that can you explain what that relationship looks like and how that

10:28works and you know is there a huge interest in new people starting to develop on hedera oh yeah so we're very decentralized the council is the governing body but that's all it is then you have hedera LLC with these 28 companies it'll do 39 that are governing they make the decisions but then you have the great giving bodies and so at the h-bar foundation gives grants to help you

10:52build they can give grants to big people but they can also give grants to little people they can give grants a small startups they can give grants to the whole range of people building on hedera to help you do so and they are very interested in some of these Hot Topics and you know D5 I think is one of them and some of the other ones I said ESG and games and other things are big

11:11topics with them but it isn't just the hbar foundation and hedera then you also have the hashgraph association and they give grants and they're doing training they're gonna have certification programs cool stuff there and then there's the Science Foundation the DLT Science Foundation so we've got a lot of different organizations and then you have swirls Labs who are doing a lot of

11:32the coding and building them the system we have turned into a big ecosystem of separate organizations and this is fantastic and this was our goal from the beginning yes we had to start everything in one company and now it's spread out a whole bunch and so it is very decentralized and for hedera itself all that's left now is the governance everything else has been split off into

11:54separate organizations that are truly independent and for hedera it's really like a doubt you have the on-chain voting the every time there is a change to the code base or to pricing or to how the H bars are used or even to adding new council members it's on chain they have to digitally sign and that's what makes it happen now they also have meetings where they vote with words but

12:22then they have to do on-game chain governance that's where the real power is on chain so that's that's how we did centralized a lot of that's just come in the last year I think we're coming up on the one year anniversary of some of these splits some of them I think are maybe now slightly more than a year so lots of interesting things going in more recently wow that's very cool I

12:42didn't know about those other foundations and how the ecosystem is growing and you mentioned there about the ESG and going to Davos I'm curious on sort of what kind of use cases you see and what kind of companies you see running ESG initiatives on hedera because I feel like you know this tokenized carbon credits is one thing but I feel like there's a lot but I've

13:06heard a little bit about that and I feel like with all these large companies that are partnering with hedera joining the council they're very interested in ESG initiatives so maybe you can hint a little bit about that you're right so at Davos this year it was interesting we're in the middle of a crypto winter there were fewer blockchains that came to Davos but it

13:26was interesting what the tone was it was less of the wild hype and more of here's real applications in the real world that are changing the real world this is what we need and this is what we're seeing we are seeing real world applications even when you say things like D5 typically it's been within our industry us trading with each other and loading crypto so you can buy crypto so

13:47that you can load more crypto but it's now starting to move into the real world as you can tokenize things in your supply chain you could use them and borrow against them and start doing defy in the real world this is the theme is that we have been insular we've been a little startup industry you know all the just we talk to each other and now we are actually seeping into the real world

14:09there are fantastic real world applications being built on us as an industry and then hedera is just really doing well on that and so we're just having all sorts of things that will impact people for real you said ESG so things like carbon credits and carbon footprint is an enormous thing right now people want first of all they want to build on a ledger that is green

14:30we use less energy per transaction than any other major Ledger UCL University College of London has published two reports now on this and we are something like a thousand times better than Visa cards even credit cards wow we're better than all the other ledgers and then compared to either something like ethereum you know it's millions of times just yeah it's lots of energy there

14:52the amount of energy you do per transaction for hedera is extremely low so it's very green and then we buy carbon credits so we're carbon neutral let me buy some more so we're carbon negative so that's cool but that's just the Ledger itself being green what's being built on top of it is more interesting so we mentioned say dell what they're very interested in is many

15:12of these ESG things you can be buying and selling carbon credits you can be doing tracking of carbon footprint which is the other half of the story which is also important we can be doing why would you want to put carbon credits on a on a ledger on a DLT or a blockchain well the reason is you can stamp out all kinds of fraud there is a lot of fraud

15:33going on right now in the carbon credit industry and people can be double selling things and people are hard to audit them well if you're putting your information through our consensus service then it's immutably stored for the world you can never go back and change things and so you can then have people audit it you can see that you're not selling the same tree twice you can

15:52have people audit to say oh you're claiming you saved a forest but that Forest wasn't in danger anyway you already owned it okay so there's all kinds of fraud that we can help address this way and then there's the guardian system that is built on us that helps people to track their footprint track their tokens buy the tokens and put them in this is all the stuff that Dell is

16:15extremely interested in and lots of other people are too well that's that's incredible to hear because I feel like when people look at the energy consumption of blockchains they sort of and put it all in one little picture you know the news just says well Bitcoin or ethereum use a lot of energy so therefore crypto and blockchain altogether must be horrible

16:39for energy right when it's actually the opposite from from what you're saying you know there's actually carbon negative and I've seen other initiatives where even in Bitcoin as well where you know they're using Excess power to help power communities and I feel like that narrative needs to be flipped on its head and probably when these large ESG initiatives start you know using

16:59hedera's technology in a more public-facing fashion then once they're involved then that narrative will shift I agree so again we've been such an insular industry the real world doesn't know about us and so they get these things of oh Bitcoin uses more energy than Argentina and they say I guess blockchains are a bad thing okay you can't Target the whole industry with the

17:20same brush it is not the case and we are doing real things in ESG and the world is now starting to learn about it and that's good we want to continue that there's a lot of excitement about ESG right now even Davos that was one of their big themes let's talk about that stuff there's a lot of interest in this right now so this is a good time definitely and one of my mentors who's a

17:43Davos regular had him on the show as well and he was specifically talking about the ESG initiatives in blockchain and how he sees marketplaces more specifically he thinks and you touched on it there about just the transparency and the auditing and being able to transact with carbon credits you know whether buying or selling or helping places and actually prove that you

18:07know you actually made an impact and it's like you're not just saying that you're double selling trees or you know you actually help protect force that didn't have anything wrong with it so I feel like that's one of the early use cases is creating marketplaces for people to transact with each other in a transparent fair and auditable way I agree and also because everything is

18:29so cheap and fast and transparent you can create new kinds of markets that haven't existed you can take energy and carbon credits and put them together and have a single token so that as I'm buying my energy I'm buying my carbon credits there's all sorts of innovative things you can do and we're just scratching the surface right now this is the tip of the iceberg we have a lot

18:47more to do no I know there's a lot to do and I'm curious if you can hint at any of those things you know in the in the 2023 roadmap whether it's you know in the first half or throughout the year sort of what are some of the major initiatives that you're focused on and obviously there's so many things to do okay so the rest of the world is

19:07focused on things like Guardian is making ESG easy and oh there's a game asphalt a triple a game about to come out that has hindera tokens in it is very cool anyway what we are focused on is making it all work well so we are adding features that make us even more compatible with ethereum we've run solidity from day one but when it has to look at it at an account

19:30ethereum accounts work differently from ours and now we're making it so you can look at them as if they were in ethereum account why would we care about that it makes the tools a whole ecosystem of tools work well with us so we have pushed more than most ledgers on being interoperable and incompatible and equivalent in ways that make those tools in your current scripts will work really

19:50well you know your solidity programs smart contracts will work really well this is a big Focus another big focus is that we're doing things like d-rec oh we need direct the whole industry needs it so here's something that hedera is working incredibly hard on we're putting real resources in it and giving it away for free absolutely across the industry

20:09and that is if you have your coins or your nfts how do you not lose them you could give them to a custody service not your keys not your crypto you could keep them yourself in a hardware wallet hey that's good what if you lose it what if your car runs over it what if someone breaks in and steals it from you want to make sure that

20:36no one can steal your stuff but you also want to make sure that you don't lose your stuff so d-rec is a way where you spread it out among helpers they have little pieces of your secret information and here's the most important part every day your phone behind the scenes invisibly is going out to each Helper and saying hey do you still have that piece that you're supposed to have

20:55and it isn't just multi-sig on The Ledger you don't have to do that a single key on The Ledger is fine it's taking that single key and breaking into pieces which means you could do other Secrets as well how about your password manager you could take something like one password and have that be spread among your helpers so that you don't never lose it and it can be encrypted

21:12where they can't see it you're given the little piece PC way that are ways that they can't see it show your secret sharing this is so important if we want Grandma to use our industry to use blockchain or DLT to have crypto or nfts it cannot be the way it is right now you have to have a safety net every area of her life we have a safety net you've got to have a safety net and so

21:37we're doing direct to give Grandma a safety net where it's invisible it's easy it's behind the scenes she just needs to get a few helpers and then if the worst ever happens she can recover her her assets and if you want to do something like cold storage you can even have it where she doesn't have the key and anytime she wants to spin from that cold account she has to have all the

21:58helpers helping her this is the goal we have a beautiful demo we have some code written I have multiple organizations now that want to go write libraries for this we this is not something we are owning this is not something that we are making any money off of it's entirely for the benefit of the community and so I'm spending real time helping other

22:18organizations write the libraries for this which themselves will be open source and everybody will have it that's one thing I will work on state proofs will allow you to do interlegic Communication in some really powerful ways and sharding in some very powerful ways we're adding all sorts of features you can go see the hedera improvement process the hip

22:36process now you're going to see a lot of features that people are asking before people are debating right now the community is debating and eventually it'll get approved and get implemented tons of stuff going on this year wow no I think what you touched there about the private Key Management is especially important and there is just a huge gap from who's already involved in

22:59in cryptocurrency and digital asset management and the mainstream you know the other 99.95 of people that don't think that writing words on a piece of paper and trying to hide it somewhere in your house is gonna you know be able to store your life savings and like there's a huge disconnect of how can we make that 10x better so yeah Grandma and Grandpa can come in and not

23:21have to worry or you know they forget where they put their piece of paper and all of a sudden everything's gone so thank you for working on that and yeah that's the infrastructure layer at the bottom just making sure that your assets are safe so you can actually use them on the ESG Marketplace or in defy that's totally necessary to bring

23:42more people in especially with all the major companies you have partnered with that are going to be have different use cases with different level levels of technological awareness and people who just aren't in crypto Tech or Finance are going to be able to utilize this technology yeah exactly big companies need something they can trust this is a way

24:00to be able to trust today maybe the best they can do is a custodian which is just a horrible thing we wouldn't do something far better for companies and then for just Grandma I said or how about nfts and games just some kid playing games you spend hundreds of hours and you get all these cool nfts of your your outfit and your sword and your magic and stuff you want

24:21to take it from game to game and then you lose your key you've lost hundreds of hours of work you know that's really bad okay so you could say well it's just a game it's just a kid it doesn't matter no it matters so d-rex goes across the board to make all of this real this is what the world needs to start using this stuff in the real world amazing I'm looking forward to that

24:40coming out and if I was to try and follow along with the updates and join the community and see how the progress is going and look for new daps and applications that are coming out on hedera as well what is the best way to stay in touch and to join in the communities yeah so hedera.com has links to lots of different things so we have telegram

24:59channels and we have a GitHub repos we have all sorts of places where people are discussing things we have the hip discussions going on we have our white paper we have token economics we just published a new update to the Token economics we continually publish updates to the roadmap you can see all of that stuff and hedera.com has links to all these different things there are links

25:21to where you can get wallets you can get custody Services you can get exchanges that and you know which exchanges use money you can there's list links to all sorts of things there sounds great Lehman I'll put that in the description as well and thank you so much for all the insights into the growth of the protocol I feel like this is a major turning point and I'm excited

25:41so I'm going to be joining those channels to follow along as well and appreciate you taking the time out of the day to come and speak with everybody all the best with all these updates in 2023 and Beyond and let's definitely follow up in the near future oh thanks it's been great being here with you thank you