The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below. 

00:00:03:01 – 00:00:26:22

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon, and today I got a very special guest with me all the way out in North Carolina. He’s working on a lot of amazing projects and Blockchain today is going to be a very heavily Blockchain focused conversation. We have a thought leader who can speak to everything that’s going on and it can break it down very simply, but then also explain a lot of amazing projects that he has going. John Wolpert, how are you doing today? 

00:00:27:24 – 00:00:29:13

John Wolpert: Hey Richard, it’s good to see you. Thanks for having me on.

00:00:29:29 – 00:00:36:12

Richard Carthon: Of course. I appreciate you joining us today. Before we get started, how about you give us a little bit of background about yourself? 

00:00:37:09 – 00:00:55:03

John Wolpert: I’ve been in and out of technology for a lot of years, have two or three startups, nonprofit overseas once, I was an IBMer three times. My journey on Blockchain, I was working on Watson at IBM, so AI.

00:00:55:26 – 00:00:56:11

Richard Carthon: Wow. 

00:00:56:13 – 00:01:04:19

John Wolpert: And then I got the call to go and check out this Blockchain thing. We got lucky, it got big quickly. 

00:01:04:22 – 00:01:05:07

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:01:05:09 – 00:01:44:02

John Wolpert: We built this thing called Hyperledger Fabric and IBM Blockchain. And then I kind of had an epiphany and Joe Lubin at that very moment called up and said, Hey, you want to come start companies on the next Internet?” And you just don’t say no to that. My boss even said, “Yeah, you can’t say no to that.” And so, I joined ConsenSys three years ago, a little more now. And a year and a half ago, we embarked on this journey with Ernst & Young and Microsoft and now hundreds of other people and companies on this thing called the Baseline Protocol. 

00:01:44:21 – 00:02:25:26

Richard Carthon: Amazing stuff that you’re working on between everything that’s going on with ConsenSys. Eth 2.0 Is recently coming out, we have, of course, MetaMask which a lot of people are very familiar with. Even with Baseline Protocol and having that open source that developers can come and build upon, you are really being an innovator and paving the way for a lot of people to come and join this movement and build technology for the future. But I just want to take a step back. Those first moments when you got to work on Watson, when you got to work on the very first Hyperledger and everything else like that, what was that like and how was it putting all of that together and building the team to actualize this vision of Blockchain? 

00:02:26:23 – 00:03:31:12

John Wolpert: Here’s the fun part of the process for me is somebody said, “Oh, you guys are pioneers.” And I was like, no, no, we’re not pioneers, we’re scouts, right? The pioneers are the ones you’re going to name the towns after and the settlers, but the scouts, usually we go off into the mountains and get eaten by a bear and forgotten by history. So yeah, that’s a certain kind of person. I’m definitely that person, I’ve been that way for 30 years of my career. I like that fuzzy front end, you’re Lewis and Clarking it through the wilderness, you don’t know what’s in front of you. It is exhausting. Some of the best people I know who do that, they do it once or twice. I just keep doing it over and over again. Usually, I’ll hang out in the saloon in the Pioneertown for a while, but then the settlers show up with the churches and the courthouses, and I’m out of there.

00:03:31:14 – 00:03:33:09

Richard Carthon: You’re like on to the next one, right?

00:03:33:11 – 00:03:35:00

John Wolpert: Yeah, gotta go Grizzly Adams again you know. 

00:03:35:07 – 00:03:56:18

Richard Carthon: Our show is a large range of audience and some of the people who listen are first timers, can you at its core explain what is Blockchain and how is it that you’re building upon Blockchain so other companies can build on top of it? 

00:03:57:26 – 00:04:43:09

John Wolpert: Let me preface that by saying I’m an odd kind of scout, as it were. There are more scouty scouts than I was and am. Paul Brody, for example, who was on this Ethereum thing before I was by a year at least, and he was at IBM. And he had gotten eaten by the bear and fortunately got resurrected at Ernst & Young. But, you know, he said Blockchain like exactly four months too soon and by the time I was saying Blockchain and my boss, Jerry Cuomo, was saying it, the CEO of IBM was saying it, so it was okay. We were laying that foundation. He was out there before there wasn’t even a trail and yeah, he fell in a bear pit and that was the end. So, timing is everything.

00:04:44:09 – 00:04:44:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:04:44:26 – 00:05:12:09

John Wolpert: But it’s fair to say that I’m not the vanguard of the scouts, there are others who are that way. Think of people like Vitalik and Joe and folks before them with Bitcoin itself. So, it’s all a progression. So, I think that’s an important way to think about it. It is we’re all sort of early, but there are some that are earlier than them. We’re all kind of living on each other’s ideas.

00:05:12:27 – 00:05:43:23

Richard Carthon: Right. You’re putting the building blocks, you’re doing those next steps and you’re building and refining so that it’s easier for the next lot, right? As you keep scouting. But, you said you started at IBM and then you had the opportunity of a lifetime with ConsenSys and being able to go in that direction. What was it like to be one of the first ones and to, like, pave the way to what is ultimately shaping the Crypto community in a lot of ways of what’s being built upon it?

00:05:45:03 – 00:06:12:16

John Wolpert: That’s another kind of weird thing about the scouting idea, is the way I’m a weirdly conservative scout. And that’s not to say politically, but just in terms of my idea about innovation. In some way, there was a, I don’t remember who said it, but I think it was Henry Chesbrough, UC Berkeley said, you know, “If you’re going to write a book or if you’re going to do something important, you’ve got to pick a fight.” And he’s a very peaceful guy, so he wasn’t saying go out and duke it out with somebody, he was saying, you know, you’ve got to have an argument. 

00:06:12:27 – 00:06:13:12

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:06:13:14 – 00:07:10:21

John Wolpert: You got to take a counterpoint to something somebody is saying. And even when that especially in fact, when people that are really smart are saying something. So, Marc Andreessen was saying that Cryptocurrency and that Bitcoin was the way to go. And we said, “Eh, let’s try fabric, right? And my own team was saying, “Hey,” you know, “fabric and private Blockchains.” And I said, “Eh, there’s some reasons why I don’t like that. It looks like a fancy, expensive and complicated database to me. So, why don’t we just use a less expensive, less complicated, more secure database if we’re going to do that?” So, that was kind of in a way that’s kind of my schtick is saying, “Yeah, I built this thing and you shouldn’t use it, right? Or you should know what you’re using when you’re using it, right? With private Blockchains, I think are better referred to as, respectfully, as shared databases. And there’s nothing wrong with a shared database, it’s just you should know that that’s what you’re getting into. 

00:07:11:03 – 00:07:11:18

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:07:11:20 – 00:07:28:22

John Wolpert: Shared database means that there are other people and other companies who you do not control, who have a full copy or encrypted or otherwise. They have a whole lot of information that both data and metadata that comes from inside your company and you better be really okay with that. 

00:07:29:15 – 00:07:35:16

Richard Carthon: Right. That level of transparency and being able to really have an entire look under the hood. 

00:07:37:06 – 00:08:05:17

John Wolpert: That was an interesting thing you just said. You know, transparency is an interesting problem or it’s an interesting solution to a problem. I’ve been saying this a lot this week, I don’t know why, but somebody got me thinking about this old line, it says, “What your customers want is never so important as why they want it.” 

00:08:05:19 – 00:08:06:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:08:06:06 – 00:08:12:23

John Wolpert: And so, why do people want, why do people say, I want transparency? I don’t think they want transparency, I think they don’t want to be surprised. 

00:08:13:21 – 00:08:14:12

Richard Carthon: Right, I like that. I like that.

00:08:14:14 – 00:08:54:17

John Wolpert: And if you’re used to transparency, then you’re going to be like, Well, okay, I just took my data to Burning Man, right? I am getting a sunburn naked with my data at Burning Man. Is that really the solution I wanted or did I create new problems? I’ve lost compartmentalisation, I’ve lost the ability to say. Especially in the age of AI, right? Coming from Watson, it strikes me that I have a lot of friends at Google with intensive flow and all that stuff. It worries me how much you can triangulate on knowing something about somebody that you shouldn’t know without having the actual data or at least all of it, right? 

00:08:54:19 – 00:08:55:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:08:55:06 – 00:09:24:24

John Wolpert: And there’s so much exogenous data outside of that Blockchain that you’re going to be able to triangulate on people. And certainly the Silk Road guys figured that out, right? Or discovered what happens when you disregard that, right? So, figuring out and triangulating, it’s not so much about whether you encrypt the data, it’s so that all these breadcrumbs we leave behind us in our activities between our counterparties and ourselves. There’s a lot of legitimate activity that you don’t necessarily want to be naked in front of your competitors. 

00:09:25:15 – 00:09:26:00

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:09:26:03 – 00:09:54:15

John Wolpert: And there are some folks I respect who have a point of view that says even that ought to be completely transparent, we should just basically not have any more secrets. I watched Sneakers, I liked the movie. It was a good movie back in the day, but, as a practical matter, I think we’re a long ways from certainly established companies and even startups who have to handle serious things like grandma’s pension or something being okay with being completely transparent. 

00:09:55:04 – 00:09:55:19

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:09:55:21 – 00:10:33:01

John Wolpert: So, what we want is more assurance. We want to be certain that we’re not having shenanigans happen. We don’t want to be surprised by something way up a supply chain that outside of our visibility might cause the steaks that I ordered at a restaurant not to show up on time for the thing that I needed them to show up for, right? Those are the kinds of things that we want transparency over. We want to make sure that if we don’t want to be surprised that the radishes that we just got shipped to us have been contaminated in some way, right? Those are the things we don’t want. 

00:10:33:15 – 00:11:14:18

John Wolpert: So, we want to worry less, we want to save time and we want to not be distracted from whatever our mission is. I don’t think that transparency is necessarily, you have to be thoughtful about what solutions you apply to a problem. I don’t want to sound pithy, but there is an old investor I had who used to say, you know, “We’re not interested in whether or not you have a solution to a problem, we’re only going to invest if we think you have an authentic story about a problem,” because we figure your first solution to it will be wrong anyway. And when that’s wrong, we want to know that you’re going to go up to bat and try again because you’re passionate about the problem.

00:11:16:03 – 00:12:15:00

Richard Carthon: I want to stay on that for a second, right? So, you’re bringing up a lot of really good ideas and things that I’ve spoken with, with other people, like on a deeper level of, again, going to the core of problems or the core of the underlying issues that are trying to be resolved with technology. So, data is a big thing right now. Of course, everything that’s going on with Facebook, with some others, even Apple just going to say, like, “Hey, we’re going to protect your data,” we’re going to do whatever, like data and the safety around it is a large talking point. And Blockchain in a lot of ways tries to help solve it, but might go too far, just like you said. So, do you think that in a lot of ways that Blockchain is perpetually going to potentially cause more problems than it originally sought to solve? Or do you think that ultimately it is like, arbitrarily good, but we need to put more protocols in place to refine it? 

00:12:17:10 – 00:13:40:11

John Wolpert: What it makes me think about is that Blockchain is an invention, right? Or a set of inventions. A lot of the inventions in that pattern of inventions are pretty old things, right? Hashes and other things. It was a novel construction of some things that existed already, a couple of things that were kind of new, but what was really powerful and novel about Blockchain in the very first instance in 2008, right? It wasn’t the invention. It was the intention. It was the intention of some people in how they intended to use a set of things in a certain way to do a certain thing, right? They wanted to you know, it was 2008, right? You know, nobody had faith in the financial institutions of the world anymore. We’re like, Hey, why don’t we blow that up, change it? Let’s do something different. We intend to do something different. The power behind Blockchain is not the inventions, so much as the intentions, Not to discard the inventions, some of them are powerful. The math behind some of this stuff is really good math and really cool, but it’s kind of like saying, “Well, I’ve got a pencil here. I can patent the pencil, I can show it to you, I can write something boring with it or I can shove it in your eye.” And now it’s a disruptive technology. That’s an interesting way of looking, I think, of at this stuff. 

00:13:42:03 – 00:15:13:22

John Wolpert: So, you ask the question on everybody’s minds, will Blockchain ever be useful beyond the thing that we, most people are excited about with the Cryptocurrency stuff? Which I have no story about. I mean, I’m from Michigan, I’m a terrible gambler. I’m not good at that stuff, I got to B in finance. I don’t have a mind for Cryptocurrencies and I have like homoeopathic amounts of the stuff. So, I mean, it’s not even interesting. People are like, Anybody interested in what I have to say about Cryptocurrency is going to definitely lose money. So, beyond that though, the question is what is its utility? And it comes back to that intention of use. If you intend to use it as a fancy database, I think there will always, what makes Blockchain good, Blockchain technology good at some things, makes it bad at being a database for stuff. It’s slow, will always be slower than a comparable machine or state machine for similar specifications, simply because now you’re adding a consensus layer on that. No matter how fast you get things going, it will always be slower than a non-consensus based state machine. So, if you can get away and if you don’t need that overhead, don’t use that overhead. 

00:15:14:06 – 00:15:14:21

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:15:14:23 – 00:16:00:05

John Wolpert: You know, use something else like Mongo or NEO if you like craft databases or any other thing than a Blockchain, private or public. In fact, if you’re thinking of a private Blockchain, you should probably start thinking about a distributed database, a Sander or something like that. Red Couch or Cloudned, then you’ve got good crash fall tolerance, you’ve got performance, you’ve got all sorts of good things and you have a degree of compartmentalization you really have a hard time doing with anything that’s worthy of calling itself a Blockchain. So, that sounds pretty bleak for Blockchain, but then I’m going to turn that around and say, well kind of like Shakespeare comedies, right? They start bleak and they go positive. Tragedies start positive, go bleak. So, let’s go positive, right? 

00:16:00:07 – 00:17:08:15

John Wolpert: So, the positive thing is, but you could use it, but it won’t work. But it will work, if you think of it as and then this is the foundation of the baseline approach, you think of it as middle where you say, “Look, we’re not going to put data on it.” So, per say, we’re going to put hashes or effectively proofs of something. And in this case, the thing that we’re going to put proofs about are not, you might have heard of the phrase proof of existence, right? So, I’m going to take a hash of something and prove that this thing that I produced for you is the original article, because no bits are different, right? Than what generated the hash. Well, that’s a pretty nice invention. As I recall, late as the early 70s, I think, or 60s, certainly people didn’t think that was possible. So, I mean, that’s a really great invention. Hashes and merkle trees. Merkle trees are cool. The question then, but the proof of existence only has one value. 

00:17:08:25 – 00:18:30:23

John Wolpert: Proof of consistency is where Baseline goes and says, “Hey, I’ve got a traditional database over here with a record on a purchase order and you’ve got a database over.” You know, “You’re my trading partner, you’re my supplier. And I need to know that the purchase order in your Microsoft dynamics system and the purchase order in my SAP system are verifiably the same purchase order.” Nobody fat fingered an extra zero, nobody has printed off a fax. Even a DocuSign PDF is still just a signed electronic piece of paper, unless you add business logic and actual field level data, which DocuSign is actually doing and really moving forward quickly on that. So, now you have this signature that says, yes, everybody signed this agreement and this agreement has data. Now, we can say there’s this permanent always-on tamper, supremely tamper resistant state machine that can’t lock you out of ballot operations called the public Blockchain. And it now has a thing on it that says you and I can’t tell each other that one of us didn’t get the memo or that we got the wrong data. We know at least when we agreed that we have exactly the same thing. 

00:18:31:07 – 00:18:31:22

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:18:31:24 – 00:19:44:22

John Wolpert: And if you get clever with that, you can use that same proof as a key and a key value lookup. So, you can start to do interesting things with workflows. You can say, well, this purchase order follows from this baselined master service agreement with a discount table in it and each purchase order that wants to claim that it’s part of that master service agreement and get its proof on the Blockchain has to observe the rules that were written into that original work step. So, it gets pretty interesting from there, but it’s kind of boring stuff where you’re just using the public Blockchain as a bulletin board for Merkle Tree full proofs. And we’re doing it in such a way under zero knowledge so that anybody observing that public Blockchain and anybody can observe it because it’s public. You wouldn’t be able to tell that we even had a secret. So, if zk-Snarks says, “I have a secret, I’m going to prove to you that I have a secret without telling you the secret.” This is we have a secret and we’re going to use this machine over here to make sure that we have the same secret without telling it what the secret is and without letting anybody who’s looking at it know that we even have one. 

00:19:51:27 – 00:20:39:12

Richard Carthon: Blockchain as a whole, there are some things that it doesn’t make sense necessarily for all industries or it’s just a more expensive, slow database protocol. Whereas for some use cases, if speed and all that doesn’t really matter, but you just need access to the data, you need to make sure that it’s always there, that it’s always available, then it has a ton of use cases. So, what you’re doing currently with Baseline Protocol sounds like you’re creating that easy, accessible Blockchain that you can quickly go and make sure that everything is validated. Kind of like your DocuSign example that you were using to where like, Hey, we’re both agreeing that we sign this thing or this data saying X, Y, Z, and it’s time stamped. And like, now that it lives on this bulletin board, we always can reference it back. So for me, that sounds like.

00:20:39:16 – 00:20:43:16

John Wolpert: The only word I would change is it’s not quick and it’s not going to be. 

00:20:43:18 – 00:20:44:03

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:20:44:05 – 00:21:20:11

John Wolpert: It doesn’t need to be particularly quick. I mean, it’s quick and Eth too is getting quick enough, can do some fancy batching with a lot of what people call Layer Two, but really just can be a server that is set up in such a way that it can’t play shenanigans. And it’s just kind of filling up the plane with some proofs and dropping the rivetta onto the mainnet, hadda hadda. So, and in our case, that’s pretty good right? Layer Two really works for baselining because we’re not trying to do any token trading or anything. We don’t have to do things like reconcile, getting back your money or any of that stuff.

00:21:20:13 – 00:21:20:28

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:21:21:00 – 00:21:31:15

John Wolpert: All we’re doing is placing these unintelligible trees of nonsense onto an intermediate thing and then landing it on the mainnet every hour, 10 minutes. 

00:21:31:22 – 00:22:14:24

Richard Carthon: One of the first use cases that instantly goes to my mind is voting. Like a thing as far as like, being able to like cast ballots and being about to be like, Oh, did this person do this with this ballot, with all this information and send it to a place? Like, yep, this person did it, whatever, is a great way to do it. Another thing that comes to mind is when the stimulus package went out, United States and we needed to quickly be able to say, “Hey, we’re trying to send you this money to a specific wallet, are you who you say you are or is this your information? Have you paid your taxes? Whatever it is. Yep, you checked all these boxes, here you go.”And you can quickly verify it. I mean, are those kind of use cases that it could be used for? Like what are some different ways that you see it, like from a practical standpoint, being used in the world today? 

00:22:16:03 – 00:23:21:16

John Wolpert: You just identified several intentions, right? So, I intend to be able to get to make voting suck less. Interestingly and there’s a great video, I don’t remember, English guy, I can’t remember the name, but there’s a great YouTube video out there about a guy that will take apart why it’s a terrible idea to do voting electronically, right? You know, you always want to have that paper back up and it comes down to the problem of layering right. Layers upon layers upon layers upon layers means that, and something as consequential as a U.S. presidential election, there’s so much incentive and there’s so many opportunities you know, right down to you know, side channel attacks and stuff found way down in the depths of the layering. Unless you’re writing, literally having people that can write in ones and zeros, it’s tricky. And even then, if you’re writing in ones and zeros, you still have the machine layer below that. So, that’s what makes voting tricky. 

00:23:21:20 – 00:23:22:05

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:23:22:07 – 00:23:29:01

John Wolpert: Maybe that’s something we’ll figure out, right? Or maybe quantum computing, I don’t know. There’s always a way, right?

00:23:29:14 – 00:23:29:29

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:23:30:01 – 00:24:51:04

John Wolpert: But that’s one intention. The other intention you mentioned is an interesting one. To me, it comes down to more of an abstract thing. I remember in the 90s, everybody needed a Web page and then everybody needed to be able to put their catalog of stuff on the Web page. And then in between that, they needed a spinning logo on the Web page. Remember, that was a big thing. And then after you can have a catalog, you wanted to be able to tell people to click and buy, right? And give you money and now you have e-commerce. It didn’t matter what kind of business you were in, what vertical industry you were in, everybody started wanting to click to buy, click to observe e-commerce. And so you had this kind of very specific set of skills that everybody wanted more or less the same way, right? So, you could write Web servers and you could write e-commerce platforms, but at the end of the day, you could apply that to anything. So, it was specific. You know, when you’re writing a story, you want to find what is the unity of the story? The unity of the story could be one day. So, you know, like that show 24 hours, the unity of the story was that 24 hours of time. 

00:24:51:25 – 00:24:52:10

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:24:52:12 – 00:25:54:06

John Wolpert: There’s a play, The Long Christmas Dinner, which is over 100 years, but it’s all at one table, one family table. And that’s the unity of that story, right? So, you can have vertical unity, you can have a health care solution or you can have horizontal unity like Slack, right? You know, just very specific, you know what you do, you can do it for anybody. For me, baselining is a horizontal specificity, it’s saying we have a lot of problems with data inconsistency and workflow integrity. Anywhere where bad things happen because my database has something different than your database and we think it’s the same, we don’t know because I can’t look into your database and you can’t look into mine. By the way, you probably shouldn’t look into mine and your security officers are not going to let you look into mine. How do we solve that problem, right? So, then can we solve it in such a way that we don’t have to just go full Burning Man? 

00:25:54:26 – 00:26:36:23

Richard Carthon: Yeah, like, databases are meant to talk to each other and there’s a lot of reasons why, right? One, the companies don’t want to just, if there’s sensitive data, you don’t want to just get rid of it and share it openly with the world. But also, if you have like, a secret sauce, you don’t want someone to just be able to come and take it. But if you want data to align, you want to make sure that even if you’re working together, if you’re not, you just want to make sure that you have accurate data. There needs to be a way that the two databases talk without really revealing anything. And if that is what’s being solved here, I think I mean, that is unique, that is like, really cool. And it sounds like a really tough nut to crack, but it sounds like you’re getting it done. 

00:26:37:25 – 00:27:22:03

John Wolpert: I used to work for a company called Strategos and we had this phrase, but the but, right? Everybody says when you’re doing innovation or ideation, they’re saying, “Oh, there’s no killer phrases, there’s no bad ideas. No, I love bad ideas. Let’s embrace the bad ideas, they’re great, Bad ideas all over the place. And if you say, “Well, but that’s a bad idea, but it wouldn’t be if” and then somebody else can say, “But that’s a bad idea for this reason, but it wouldn’t be if.” You do that five times, you could come up with some pretty remarkable stuff by not ignoring the weak spots in the idea, but embracing them and then flipping them, right?

00:27:22:05 – 00:27:22:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:27:22:22 – 00:28:14:15

John Wolpert: So, I think that’s what we did with Baseline and really a good way. As we said, “Here are the problems, here are 10 reasons why a security officer at a company would not want to use Blockchain, but they would if, if and that’s what you get here.” You say, “Yeah, the data is not leaving your database, it’s fine. Leave it where it is. But wouldn’t you like it if your system could tell you that you’re consistent on a record by record basis with your counterparty system without having to actually jack into them or create a new integration bust for every single partnership, which usually costs you a 1,000,000 bucks every time you do it,” right? So, now we can say, “No, we’re not doing that anymore, at least for that particular function, that consistency machine, that’s a common frame of reference. We got this thing that’s always on, it’s always running, it has its own reasons for existing and we’re just going to use it as a bulletin board. 

00:28:15:11 – 00:28:53:17

Richard Carthon: That is a really cool like, brain strategy to think through some complex things that will come to solutions. A mentor of mine, his name’s Sloan Miller, he likes to say that, “You have to find a way to work the angles” and like in any situation you’re in, you might be in a spot you don’t really want to be in, but if you can find a new angle, you can find a way to keep moving forward and and working it in the direction that you want it to go. Man, I really do appreciate you coming and talking to us about all of everything that you’re working on and it’s very interesting. 

00:28:53:22 – 00:29:30:14

Richard Carthon: And man, I’ll tell you what, one of the ways that I really see this being practical, is like, especially as you talk about the horizontal way that you’re getting the Blockchain to talk to each other. I’ve used this before, and if everyone who’s listening, you’ve heard me say this, like, building bridges is one of the most powerful things that you can do. There’s a lot of islands that are out there and the people that find ways to build bridges, to connect everything, those are the winners. And it sounds like that is something that y’all are trying to accomplish here. So, I do appreciate that. And you know, as we wrap up here, I just want to say, what is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners today? 

00:29:31:15 – 00:30:02:17

John Wolpert: I think you put your finger on it. You know, we’re going into a world of hyperconnectivity, we’re going into a world where, for one reason or another, the word Blockchain has prompted a lot of companies, a lot of decision makers to, small and large, right? We’re not just talking about big giant companies, not enterprise. I don’t really get what enterprise means. I mean, if you’re a three person startup dealing with grandma’s pension, you’ve got as many problems as a bank.

00:30:02:19 – 00:30:03:04

Richard Carthon: Definitely.

00:30:03:06 – 00:30:36:10

John Wolpert: In terms of security and GDPR and you know, the new California law, all these things, right? You’ve got compliance and for good reasons. We just don’t throw that out, right? It’s not like that one guy that used to say, “I break things to fix them.” I’m like, No, you should really understand what you’re replacing or you’re just going to be destined to be it. It’s the best you can do, right? If you don’t understand. And so, I think that it’s important to say, “Okay, well, we’re going to get closer together.” It’s great that this word Blockchain has prompted everybody to say that we need to collaborate more. 

00:30:38:29 – 00:31:29:14

John Wolpert: I had a boss many years ago, that was my whole job, was to figure out, He’s like, I think that there’s this other company, these other companies, and our company could work together on these things. But there are things in our company I don’t even know about and I wouldn’t. And the only way to know that we should work together is to already know that we should work together. And there’s just really good reasons why we don’t want to throw open all of our R&D to each other before we know that. So, how do you solve that problem? In fact, the way we solved that at the time was to hire. We created a non-government backed NGO, it hired polymaths and put them in the bench level research labs of all these different companies, and they could tell each other everything that they were seeing on the condition they never told the companies they were working in, right? And think about that, base your opinion for a minute. 

00:31:30:16 – 00:31:31:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:31:31:03 – 00:31:42:08

John Wolpert: It generated billions of dollars, I think half a billion dollars last time I checked with them in just new deal flow between companies that they’d never would have thought to work together ever, right? Material science company and a Pharma, that kind of thing. 

00:31:43:19 – 00:31:44:04

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:31:44:06 – 00:31:51:19

John Wolpert: We have to work together, but we can’t just throw open the doors all the time to everybody. There are real reasons why we can’t do that. 

00:31:51:29 – 00:31:52:14

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:31:52:16 – 00:32:12:06

John Wolpert: So, how do you get both without? And the only way you can solve a conundrum like that is through true innovation, which means you’re looking at a problem, and you’ve got to turn it this way, right? You’ve got to completely change the problem. You can’t solve it within its own structure, you have to change the structure. 

00:32:12:18 – 00:32:13:03

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:32:13:05 – 00:32:14:17

John Wolpert: I think that’s what we’re doing. 

00:32:14:19 – 00:32:56:05

Richard Carthon: No, that’s great. I like that final thought and just like you said, like for everyone that’s listening, we’re recording this so you can watch it on YouTube as well. And he did a visual to where he literally had his hand, palm forward and then he turned it to the side to show you the visual of analyzing a problem. If you change the angle just a little bit, now you have a new problem, you have a new lens, you have a new framework to now attack it. And so, I think that’s a great visual, I think that’s a great way to analyze this. And I think that’s a really cool way to put a bow on this and you know, for you you know, explaining Baseline Protocol. So, appreciate you joining us today. What are some ways that people can learn more about you and learn more about what you got going on with Baseline Protocol? 

00:32:56:19 – 00:33:48:22

John Wolpert: Today, about 12 ago, we started the Baseline Protocol Gitcoin Hackathon. You can go to Gitcoin, you can go to Baseline-protocol.org. I don’t know that the hackathon is on the website yet, but you can get the Slack invite and get on our Slack channel, which has like 840 people on it now, very, very friendly community. This is, I don’t think I mentioned, but Baseline Protocol is an openly governed, open standard and it’s actually public domain. It’s not even an open source, it’s public domain. So, it’s not like an Apache license, it’s a full public domain license. And to all the work that we’re doing there and you could just use it, start baselining your own products or your own solutions, but you can also come in and contribute to the work. 

00:33:49:22 – 00:34:10:22

John Wolpert: Folks that are paying attention to Baseline are good people to be paying attention to you. For folks that are talented out there that are builders or makers, developers, engineers, architects, come on in, friendly crowd, very embracing of new people. There’s some wonderful people who just found us on YouTube and now are leading whole chunks of this thing.

00:34:10:24 – 00:34:11:09

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:34:11:11 – 00:34:31:01

John Wolpert: So, they can get involved and you can win $10,000 right now between now and January six. Well, across seven projects that are on the Gitcoin hackathon that’s running right now. Several projects that are $2,000 bounties, several that are $1,000 bounties. 

00:34:31:25 – 00:34:42:01

Richard Carthon: Thank you for letting everyone know about that, thank you for all the knowledge that you dropped on us today. And John, really appreciate you being with us. And of course, for everyone listening, stay Crypto Current.