Stephanie So on Geeq's layer 1 protocol for mainstream adoption

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have stephanie soh co-founder of geek stephanie welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today thank you thanks ashton pleasure to be here you're very welcome let's just dive straight into the geek protocol what it's multi-chain solutions that your

0:23team has been working on i'm interested to hear what's special about you know this kind of multi-chain solution because i believe that the future is multi-chain and all the blockchains should be able to speak to each other flawlessly so let's just jump right into it with to start a high-level overview of a geek protocol and the solutions that your

0:43team has built thus far and then we'll dive into everything multi-chain that sounds wonderful so thanks for giving me this place to start we also think that from the beginning that blockchain platforms had to be thinking about scalability from the beginning and multi-chain was the obvious place to look for us the protocol

1:11is something that we cared a lot about to make reliable and what we wanted to do was we wanted essentially to create a technology that de-risked using various transfers and applications on these blockchains so we've gone away from the area of finance and crypto and d5 to concentrate

1:41on working on the underlying ways of making blockchain work in a way that you count on that is yeah that's that's perfect definitely and i feel like developer focused and sort of you know heads down sort of working on the long term it's easy to sort of get caught up in crypto hype or prices of this and you know release dates that often get pushed

2:08back because you're focused on actually building a product for the long term exactly right i think it's it's got a lot to contribute to the future definitely and now with this multi-chain can you talk about how exactly does that work with geek i know are all of the different chains being launched internally or people can just go and start launching their own

2:33chain through geek the ultimate vision is to have a platform that's open and people could go on and launch their own chain yes the idea is that geek is developing an infrastructure that simply takes care of the blockchain protocol part and if you are an application developer or

3:00a blockchain developer you'd have your own idea in mind about the kinds of functions that you'd want but you wouldn't necessarily know a lot about how to make the protocol safe how to how the ledgers would work that's our job so if you wanted to have your own business that uses an adapt you'd come to the geek

3:26Hub and you'd combine your code with the geek validation code and off you go sounds easy and i'd like to get a better scope of exactly how much your team has built and how long you've been working on it because i know multi-chain protocols in any layer one protocol is a many many year you know job it's not something that's

3:54built in a day so how long has your team been working on this so the idea for making a new protocol was really begun in the very end of 2017 that's when blockchain was really hot everybody was jumping into it and again it looked risky and i'm a very risk-averse person i thought wow you know there's an

4:22opportunity here but we need to go back to the drawing board so i would say the real work started in december 2017 and then we launched a token several years later and i'm always reminded of that quote somebody very famous the scientist said if you give me a problem let me think about it for 90 of my time and then i can solve it in

4:50the last 10 and that's sort of what we've been doing we've studied the industry and thought about the solutions and now we're now we've been in development for the last year and a half or so wow that's fascinating to hear you know you often hear of the horror stories of the person who bought bitcoin on the very top in 2017 and they had to hold through

5:16a multi multi-year bear market to finally you know reach a return that was way higher in the last most recent bull run here in 2020 but it did take five years i'm curious on your perspective of starting the company sort of at that top and then seeing 2018 1920 as you're building looking towards the future seeing you know the market reaction and what people are thinking of

5:43cryptocurrencies and their underlying value as sort of depreciating as as the price was going down well i think my reaction was sort of like everybody said except we had this project going and at the very beginning when it was in the bull run and going to the top i sort of had my head down all the time like oh don't look at that right because we're

6:08not ready and then when when things started going south the problem for us was that you see some projects that start going having problems or people complaining about crypto as a as a industry or blockchain as an industry and we had to be very careful trying not to get tired with the same brush

6:36so that's that's been our challenge i think as the cycles go through is to stay fairly heads down just doing what we can do until his time is right to burst out definitely yeah very cool and you mentioned about making the protocol easy for app developers to be able to launch their app

7:03and or people that want to use applications and not have to worry about you know the blockchain underlying protocol part of things can you talk a little bit about you know that the end users and the people that are using the dapps or they're using their their wallet or the assets and you know the perspective that of the ease of use and low barriers to

7:24entry and how you're approaching that to reach more of a mass adoption and that's my favorite topic it's the end users i think who who have to realize the value of these new services and so from the company perspective we've come to the conclusion really that what geek is doing is it's a new

7:51kind of software company and so the end user's ability to use the software and get value of it to simplify their lives do things they've never done before that's the real objective that's how everybody wins right and so what we are doing is we're partnering with

8:17People who are my favorite kind of people who have been stayed blockchain agnostic in the way that they've been developing middleware and software and data analytics who also believe that the interface for the end user should be super easy and then our job is to make it easy for them so the partners right to incorporate

8:44into their products and so at every level it gets it gets easier up the tech stack and we need to be secure enough and reliable enough that these technology partners will trust us and adaptable enough that they can integrate it into all kinds of applications and then ultimately the user will benefit from both their products and this blockchain

9:12capability which is new definitely and talking about the tech stack and adaptability building an entirely new protocol is a lot of work and you also as you mentioned you have to focus on interoperability as a multi-chain protocol and now what i'm seeing in the industry is a lot of these other protocols connecting back through to the through the evm or you know

9:40interoperability to the blockchains that already have a large network effect when you and your team were developing geek protocol from from scratch did you take inspiration from some of these other layer one protocols or how do you initially design a multi-chain protocol do you do it with blinders or do you take a look at you know polka dots ecosystem and

10:05ethereum and what they've done we learned from everybody right this is a case where i would love more dialogue between projects and i would say that there are specialists in every area one of the reasons that we think that multi-chain was so important

10:34and then interoperability has to come after that multi-chain just functionally that's the way you have to build it but you have to have that i problem in the beginning of your head it's like as what i said before right you have to think lay out the entire problem think about it for that ninety percent of the time so i would say we started working on

10:59multi-chain and interoperability before others were and the conclusion that we came to which is a little bit different is that in order for those links to be smooth we decided to have a unified set of messages a unified set of proofs that could be interpreted from each chain sometimes people say it's a unified

11:27security model because if you go from one chain to another chain and they don't have the same security model and i love getting into the weeds so stop it if you if you want but if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing then the interoperability is subject to vulnerability and so what geek is doing is saying you know everybody understands this common

11:54Protocol you know that's a that's a great point stephanie because what we've seen in the markets recently with decentralized exchanges and different protocols not really being fully interoperable and speaking to each other having to use bridges to transfer assets from one blockchain to another it's often that the bridge itself has a vulnerability and we've seen hacks of up

12:22to half a billion dollars or more through those bridges themselves where the point was to be multi-chain and move this asset to a different blockchain and in the process all of the funds were lost so i feel like security as you mentioned is a super important aspect and i'm curious on obviously it gets technical and you know you probably need the cto and a

12:48team of like cryptographers to figure out the best way to keep assets secure but obviously that's a very important aspect of a protocol do you have any insight into the security aspect on geek being multi-chain yes so and you're right i am i worry a lot about the end users who are are

13:15there's a there's a commonplace assumption that the users or someone will always discipline the market in the sense they'll always watch for a possible vulnerability but the idea here is that people are doing fascinating things but it's such a new field and so there are very few people who are watching everything and a lot of a lot of times these exploits

13:44come out of the blue so what geek does is we really are are stripping down things so parts are very well known to us and that in the first iteration means that we're not building with any smart contracts so there's no variety of smart contracts to

14:11keep track of we know what the code is supposed to do and we're making sure that the code does that which takes a lot of testing you know trying to make that robust but at the end of the day we're not introducing the kinds of things that are too sophisticated for what we can keep track of right now and so keep it simple yeah

14:38actually i do like that approach and i've seen that with other blockchains like the cardano blockchain which has been in development for years and you know the joke for a while the running joke was that you know they don't really have smart contracts yet the major vulnerabilities of the bridge and on ethereum almost every hack that's happened not you know barring centralized

15:04exchanges you know the defy hacks are all because of smart contract vulnerabilities and errors in the way that smart contracts were executed or coded so having the protocol in you know in a similar way that cardano is building out the infrastructure layer first and then introducing smart contracts when they see that the security is airtight i think is a great approach

15:30thank you're you're someone that i really like having known about geek yes amazing and i know so there's still a lot to be done on that side but one of the things that your team has already developed out at least to start is the geek network token and i know that's going to be an integral part of the ecosystem moving forward as it develops out further

15:59can you touch a little bit on that please on the token and how it will function throughout the ecosystem and how it will create a sustainable ecosystem for all the participants that's really important to part of your audience i bet one of the things that we do two of us of the co four co-founders are economists by training and so

16:27Things that we worry about are public goods and people shirking and people free riding and just not doing what they're supposed to do right and so the geek protocol itself uses the token as a system of rewards for work that is correct

16:54and we call it honest work because it has to be provable and there's only one way to prove it which is you know the short way of saying that is it's honest you've you haven't cheated you haven't tried to benefit yourself at the expense of anyone else so this goes through the validation part of the infrastructure let's take one chain out of many

17:20that one chain has its own network of nodes so very quickly those nodes do work and if they can prove that they've done the correct work they get paid and that's automatic through the through the protocol so there's no auction bidding there's no competing for work they just show up and if they've done the right thing they get paid in geek and that's automatic and it goes into

17:46their coin account and they can they can leave and we keep track of them they can be they can be trying to get away with stuff and they're audited the system self audits it's it's a way to make the mechanism flow of this sort of labor market i think of it as a labor market of nodes interesting

18:12And with that in the works i feel like that's obviously an important part of validating and ensuring a proper consensus and throughout the ecosystem i know there's a lot more to develop with the multi-chain part and the dapps and end users what can you tell us about the road map for the next six months to a year and what's the most important parts of geek still

18:39to come out everything's important i'll tell you what we're focusing on what we're focusing on right now is building this what we're calling geek native apps so we want this system to be usable from the beginning and the only way to show that it's usable from the beginning really is to identify problems that exist and we can

19:08solve and start getting people to use them so that we have word of mouth we have enterprise adoption and people can see how it works right so we're very focused on our first geek app which is an attestation app we have a demo out i don't know if i can advertise the website but

19:35oh okay you can find it on certified certified.geekdata.io and it's exciting because it's starting to see the fruition of here's the infrastructure it supports this certification process which is the perfect use case for blockchain because it's validating things right that's what you want in a ledger that you hope isn't changed

20:04and for geek we can always find one that hasn't been changed and that's provable sorry that's technical again but what shows on top is that it just looks like an app so it's a web app and people are used to seeing that and they put some data in and they

20:31We asked them if they want to sign it and are you sure and then off it goes and they don't see that from the app it has to talk to the blockchain and the blockchain does its thing and they don't have to worry about it unless you're really technical and then it's really cool and then the back end is the block explorer which you can check to make sure

20:58everything's okay but from an easy user standpoint that's what we think that's what we've been getting a lot of feedback that people like that approach just make an app work please i understand that and then you know oh blockchain cool yeah i completely agree and i always say blockchain will reach mainstream when the mainstream doesn't know that they're

21:24using it yeah yeah i think that's right great stephanie well i will leave the link to that native app in the description box below and we don't have a lot of time left but for the viewers that also just want to learn about these other roadmap updates and just overall on the protocol and to find the majority of the geek community that's speaking about it

21:48what is the best way for them to get involved on that front i would love to give you our socials the website is geek.i oh we have explainers we have articles we have all our announcements we have pointers to all the tests please try the tests we want the people to break it before we push it out as product so

22:15feedback bug reports everything is set up for that and then follow us on twitter we're geek official find us on telegram we're geek official geek g-e-e-q has been taken by like rappers and things so we're geek official great thank you stephanie i will leave the links in the description box below as well to make it easy for the viewers i appreciate you coming on and

22:44speaking about the protocol all the best with all the work you and your team still have yet to be done and let's follow up in the near future thanks so much i really enjoyed it thank you