Yeah, So we focused on the US Air Force and more specifically an agency
within it called US Transcom, which a lot of folks don't know about,
but they're the command to control hub for pretty much all data orchestration amongst different
agencies as well as contracting partners. So it's arguably the largest data creator in
the world and not easy to get into, right. And I wrote the
proposal on not a need topic. Mean, they didn't list this down like,
hey, we need blockchain, which is usually how they procure solutions.
I did an open talk is saying hey, you may have never heard of
this, but I'm going to tell you you need this, and they said,
all right, we'll give you a little scratch see if you can prove
it, and we did. This content is brought to you by Uphold,
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Uphold, please visit the link in the description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto
Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and with me today is Benjamin
Diggles, who's the co founder and chief strategy officer at Constellation Network. Benjamin,
great to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me, Tony.
It was great meeting you at the DC summit and talking shop, so
I'm glad that you invited us on. So this is awesome. Yeah.
Absolutely. We met the DC Blockchain Summit and I got a bit of a
preview about the Consolation Network, and I was like, wait, I gotta
get you on the podcast because this sounds really great. You're working with the
government, and the fact that the government's using blockchain in itself is pretty amazing.
But before we get there, tell us about yourself. Where you're from.
Where'd you grow up? Yeah? Yeah, so those that know me,
I hail from Portland, Orgon. I grew up on a rural sheep
farm ount in Oregon, so that's how I started my life, and I
went to a small high school. I graduated with sixteen kids, so it
was very small. And the only reason I bring that up because I think
it's such a weird factoid, is one of my fellow students I graduated with
is named j R. Willett and he's the guy that invented the ICO.
So I can't believe I was at like Backwoods organ and this brainiac next to
me is the guy that created the ICO. So I want to celebrate JR.
That's pretty amazing. Hold on, so hold on, he created the
ICO? Did he work with like the folks at Ethereum or other projects?
Yeah, I mean it's a whole I encourage people just to type in JR.
Willett, w I L E T and read all about how he went
about it in you know, twenty eighteen. So yeah, he was a
real pioneer and so I'm very proud of him. So I just know,
for you know, thinking crypto, that's a pretty cool factoid to check it
out for sure. So was you know your first encounter bitcoin and crypto via
JR? Or was it you know, separately, And then you're like,
wait a minute, JR knew what he was talking about or something. No,
I mean back then. Of course this you know dates me, but
I graduated in nineteen ninety eight, so we were still talking web one back
then, so the idea of cryptocurrency was well into the future. But we
recreated, reconnected after I found out that, like, wow, you played
this role, so we got on the phone. I was like, buddy,
what you know it was? And he was equally just like, wait
a minute, you're working with the Air Force on blockchain. It was just
kind of this interesting collision of worlds. Always had mad respect for him.
But my first encounter with bitcoin was from a friend named Ian Mitchell, a
really close friend of mine who passed away, so I would like to give
him a shout out. He introduced me to bitcoin in twenty twelve. I
started buying at about four dollars, but at the time, let's be honest,
I didn't see the potential. It was more of just this funny money
that was kind of interesting expression to mess around with value. But I had
to give a shout out to my co founder, Ben Jorgenson, the CEO.
He's the guy that really unlocked my mind around the possibility, and that
took place in twenty seventeen. He was like, you got to get involved
in blockchain, man, because he knew how important data sovereignty and privacy was
to me. He's like, you got to get involved in this. I
was like, no way. Everybody's the star of their own movie in that
industry. So yeah, that's when I sort of took the red pill and
realized that digital assets and you know, blockchain is going to be the way
of the future, and I dove in hard. Wow man, you bought
bitcoin at four dollars. You're an og man. Oh yeah, I mean,
I guess you know, it's funny. I many people that it's always
like this competition. I got there when it was thirty cents, like yay,
and I you know, I've always been somewhat of a bitcoin maximalist,
just because of the amazing expressions that brought from peer to peer payments and this
mostly the resilient network that distributed ledger technology. This new term that came out
through bitcoin was like, wait a minute, we can apply this to a
lot of things beyond just finance. So that's what really made me excited.
Wow, that's so amazing, man. And you know, hindsight is twenty
twenty and I often think about what if I was early like that to bitcoin,
I would have pottly sold it early, not see the value back then,
because it wasn't as prominent as it is now. There wasn't these different
use cases and thesis and much more. So, you know, did you
sell early? Did you hold on to some you know whatever you can share
there? Yeah? Yeah, what are you the Feds? I'm just I
know, so I my wife and I Actually, funny enough, when bitcoin
was right around four hundred dollars, we got hit with a big tax bill
and we were like, all right, we got to come up with some
liquid together. It's like, oh wait, we have this all this bitcoin.
Let's let's sell a bunch of it. And to this day we call
it the multimillion dollar tax bill. Right, it was painful, but we
continued to stack our bags after that, and so I've always been one to
a proponent of holding onto bitcoin as long as possible. So yeah, I
would. I'm certainly not living on that four dollars bitcoin today. I'll tell
you that I appreciate are you sharing that. I'm always fascinating because it's so
intriguing, right, different people from different walks of life and how they first
encounter bitcoin and how they treated it. You know, you have the bitcoin
pizza guy spend ten thousand bigcoin and pizza and today he's like, oh my
god, you know, yeah, yeah, painful. Yeah, all right,
let's talk about Consolation Network. Give us an overview of the blockchain and
all the things that you guys do. Yeah, I mean, you know,
we founded the company in twenty seventeen, and you know, we knew
we were going to be different from the day we started, and so we've
never really tried to be one of those sort of me too companies. Hey
we're going to try to take this on or be the ethereum killer. And
don't get me wrong, we have certain expressions where we're like, hey,
this is where the shortcomings are in some of these linear blockchains. And for
that reason, we created you know, ours as a directed a cyclic graph,
and we were heavily you know, inspired by Iota and some of the
other DAGs that have existed, but we wanted to be also one of those
first movers in the directed a cyclic graph movement, to the tune where we
even named our cryptocur and sy dag dag so that harkens back to our design
principles. But one of the things we really focused on, not one of
the thing we really focused on, was being data focused and really working on
developer tooling for adoption that would focus on legacy systems. You know, a
lot of stuff is kind of building into this new Web three future, which
we certainly support and believe in we have tooling for. But we thought,
what if we had a micro service framework that could dip into these legacy systems,
bring sensitive data on chain, to bring the promises of Web three to
the Web two world. Because a lot of people don't realize, I've been
in enterprise most of my career, it's really hard to rip and replace existing
systems and you know, workflows and whatnot. And so we thought, all
right, well, let's focus on the validation of complex data types and data
management solutions, and so our DAG token, the utility of it is is
the validation of data. And one of the big decisions we made was to
have a network that not only was, like I said, developer friendly,
but could work with any data type in the world, which makes us very
attractive to I would say some of these antiquated people like the DoD wow and
you are a ERC twenty token. It's a ERC twenty blockchain on top of
Etherem. So this is one of the biggest nit misnombers. And I always
probably shouldn't lead off with that that we are our own native blockchain solutions,
so we are not built on any other ecosystem. We are our own native
ecosystem, built from the ground up to the tune where we even have our
own token standard. We call it the L zero and that's because to our
knowledge, we were the first L zero protocol that was out there, so
we wanted to harken that to the L zero token. So our token types
while very similar to ERC twenties in the sense that anybody can mint and launch
any type of token they want on our network, but it is an L
zero. So that's what makes us, I think a little bit special in
this industry that we're not built on ethereum, and that allows us to bring
in those amazing qualities of digital assets through our L zero token with the match
speed and scalability of the DAG infrastructure, so we're not stuck with, you
know, gas fees. We have a very robust network that has feelus transactions
and is wildly scalable, even though I do believe that felis is scalability are
becoming commodity and that's not as interesting to the industry as much anymore, unless,
of course, you're paying those pesky gas fees when it comes to ethereum.
Right, So do you have a smart contract technology enabled on your blockchain?
And then my information may be wrong because I read like that it was
ERC twenty but that's completely wrong. Well, you know you're not wrong,
just so you don't feel like you're going crazy. When we launched, we
launched as an RC twenty to take advantage of the big developer liquidity of the
ERC twenty ecosystem. But we did a token swap about two years when we
launched our main net and that's what went to our native token. So if
somebody says they're still holding onto Constellation R twenty, that's sort of a dead
token that happened before the launch. And I'm really proud of that strategy.
I think it worked out for us, but that tends to be a misnomer.
But to answer your first question there, as far as smart contracts,
we made the decision to be, like I said, a micro service framework
focused on legacy, very similar to a red hat if those that know that
technology stack that said, so, for us to work with smart contracts is
imperative because we live in a very smart contract world and I truly believe in
smart contracts. I think they're an amazing expression and application of what can be
possible with blockchain. So we do this through bridges and other approaches, and
some of the work we actually do with the government is through an agnostic smart
contract platform and we partner with Simba Chain. For those that know who that
platform is really great guys, and they have well more than just smart contracts.
So that's how we approach it. Wow, and the dagtoken you mentioned,
tell us a bit about the tokenomics around that. Yeah, yeah,
I'll tell you what I can. You know, we've got roughly three point
five billion in supply right now. We're sitting at about one hundred and fifty
million dollar market cap, and of course that changes with the wind right and
we're sitting somewhere around top four hundred tokens, which seems not like the closest
to the front bench, but when there's now at this point millions of tokens,
that looks pretty good, right, And you know, I would say
that the big thing around our token is that if you want to buy it,
you can use uphold right now. And top exchanges we work with are
like gate io and cou Coin, m exc and so there's some really great
ways to express the token. And right now our targets are really focused on
tier one exchanges now that we've proven a lot of stuff out. But the
reason that's been tricky for us is just because we are now zero, right
if we were an ERC twenty, our ability to slot into you know,
coinbase is literally just a little bit of paperwork and some due diligence on the
business side, all things that of course we've passed. But we have to
be very kind of strategic of how we integrate the L zero token as a
new category amongst our ecosystem, which I think is a really exciting swim lane
to be in. For sure. Now we got to talk about why is
the US government using consolation and howard to using it? Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's always kind of a funny thing, right like, because there's
sort of like I kind of look at it as a paradox because this industry
is sort of worried about the government because we haven't gotten the regulations. We
don't really know what's going on. They're sending people notices and whatnot out of
nowhere against rules that don't exist. And that's a lot of this stuff we
saw in DC, right. And this is a really exciting year because I
think the election year is sort of forcing the hand for us to figure this
out. People are tired, they're tired of us not like really figuring this
stuff out, and so for us to have made that decision, you know,
my background is enterprise. I was with Oracle five years before this.
When I joined this, it wasn't to be the star of my own movie,
butther how do we create true adoption? How do we see if there's
an actual there there is this going to actually affect through existing workflows or is
this a farce? Right, because a lot of people don't really think it's
going to make its way into the real world. I personally wrote a contract
proposal back in March of twenty nineteen, so we effectively have been working with
the government since then since I won that award. And it was around a
thing called multi domain command and control, which is sort of a mouthful that
just really means, you know, peer to peer orchestration of data amongst different
constituents, either within the government or the porest environment of contracting partners outside right,
And I thought, well, guys, if we're able to secure payments
using bitcoin across these constituents anonymously through decentralization, what if we took that to
a private network where we could actually use the same sort of methodology without having
middlemen to orchestrate really sensitive information amongst folks. Because we are a data focused
platform, and the term data exchange thrown around a lot, but really what
that's evolved into is what is known as secure information sharing, which is just
a higher security around communications because we all know that there's some real lackluster attributes
that come with HTTP when it comes to hacking and leaks and corruption and all
that stuff. And so I've always been a big believer in open source and
sharing the wealth, and I believe that this industry is such a big pie
that we should all be collaborating and working together that I created a program called
iron Spider. It's an acronym because if you know the government, they love
their acronyms, and it stands for secure Interoperable Peer to peer data resilience.
That's what the Spider stands for. And I don't even like spiders, but
so we created a program that invites all Web three solutions to come on because
we don't believe there is one blockchain to rule them all. And I'm very
proud of that. And so we've invited i would say about six companies that
are now actively a part of Iron Spider to really push the envelope of this
blockchain toolkit that will allow the government to create standards for communicating amongst each other.
And it's a really beautiful thing. And so since then, like you
said, five years, we've never missed a milestone, never missed a task
order, We've delivered everything on time, and we continue to kick total ass
with the government. I'm very proud of that. That's amazing and congrats on
that. And I want to dive a bit deeper into that because to your
point, you know, as you started with, a lot of people are
concerned about the government, Hey get your act together, we need clarity and
so forth, and there's lawsuits coming from this agency and that agency. The
government. Are they recognizing, Hey, we're behind a curve here. We
need to get our systems upgraded. We need to use blockchain to improve efficiency
communication, like you said, preventing hacks and the ability for hackers to take
advantage of things. And did they approach you or you pitch them and to
confirm it's the US Air Force. Yeah, So we focused on the US
Air Force and more specifically an agency within it called US Transcom, which a
lot of folks don't know about, but they're the command to control hub for
pretty much all data orchestration amongst different agencies as well as contracting partners. So
it's arguably the largest data creator in the world and not easy to get into,
right. And I wrote the proposal on not a need topic. Mean,
they didn't list this down like, hey, we need blockchain, which
is usually how they procure solutions. I did an open talk is saying hey,
you may have never heard of this, but I'm going to tell you
you need this, and they said, all right, we'll give you a
little scratch, see if you can prove it. And we did. Right.
It was a long road, but as of October of twenty twenty two,
we were validated by the Air Force Research for Lavatory as secure, scalable
and DOOD approved and you know, while that sounds very sexy and it is
a big badge of honor for me, that still means that now we're moving
this into production, we're having to really test it out. But they said,
yes, Constellation does what it says it can do, and it can
make a big impact within the DD. But the issue is is that they're
so laden with you know, antiquated an old technology that bringing in some godlike
technology is almost an immediate no, right And I worked at Oracle. Everything
was a no, so you had to get I was really good about working
relationships and being like, no, no, think of it this way.
And so it's been a lot of education and evangelism and dare not I talk
about crypto. For the first three years, I'd never mentioned it because that
was like Ponzi schemes, human trast you all these awful things, and I'm
not saying they're wrong, but at the same time, there's a lot of
good. So I just kind of focus more on the technology and where they
really clicked, where it was like the big aha that got mind share across
a large swath of stakeholders was we don't have to rip and replace your legacy
solutions. We can work alongside them today by adding a few little tiny bits
in here to increase your security one hundred x and they're like, okay,
let's do that, versus all these vendors are coming in saying, hey,
we have to completely reroute your system, we have to train your people on
new disciplines, we have to get new kind of web attributes, and we
haven't had to do that, and that's what's allowing us to really move very
quickly through our engagements. Wow, that's amazing. And is it kind of
the old fashioned government contract where they pay you and you come in and help
them to get this all set up or is it a different type of relationship
because you are a public blockchain. Well, you know, they do a
lot of different types of relationships. Some of them are very R and D
focus on grants. If you hear about a government grant and usually have an
open i'm sorry, a research institution like a university or whatnot, or a
nonprofit to build out some sort of an idea that really doesn't go anywhere.
It's very important. I'm not saying it's not important research, but the contracts
are really focused on production, like they have this pathway of phases to get
you into a production so that they can actually absorb this and start utilizing it
as a true solution. And so that's where we've been sitting. And the
reason why I just keep telling everybody in blockchain or anybody in the world get
involved with the government is they don't take IP, so it's not and they
don't take equity. So for us to get money to essentially build against our
roadmap, they just want to be the first in line to absorb it and
they want to adapt it to their use cases. So they all talk about
this adaptation like, all right, you got this blockchain, can you wield
it against this use case with the system overview and the operational overview that we
have in front of us to actually be effective. And that's what we've been
working on over and over showing yes we can, Yes we can, Yes
we can, and it's been going really great. So that to me is
what's so beautiful about is we're getting paid to build a roadmap, we're adjusting
it for the government, but in turn it's attracted a lot of enterprise that's
looking at saying, well, heck, if the DoD trust this blockchain,
they're an American blockchain solution. They're highly scrutinized. We have to do the
right thing. We can't cutch corners, we can't be shady. I have
to be docks. I have to be out there. It garners a lot
of trust, which I think is the most important expression we're all looking for
in Web three today. Absolutely, what's your security layers? I guess is
what I'm trying to figure out. Because if you're using you, and I
say it's air Force is using an other enterprise, right, They're concerned about
data and they don't want that in the open. Is there like a layer,
subnet or whatever it is that protects all this information? You know,
it's not profound, and it almost sounds kind of cheesy, but it's like
we're basically giving them an intranet because we have two flavors. You can use
our public network or you can use a private network in which you can issue
your own node validators for the security, and depending on how fast you want
your transaction speeds and how secure you want the network, you just horizontally scale
more node operators within your own infrastructure and so. And they work with pretty
much every cloud platform, Amazon, Google Cloud platform and so forth, But
there's a program called Platform one, which is really their hosting provider that allows
them to manage these solution soup to nuts. But we're not a SaaS pass
through. What that means is software as a service. We're not managing it
for them, so we don't even know what the data is. We don't
see any of the data because they run their entire network. That said,
I've been pushing them. It's a slow push, a gentle nudge that I
believe that public networks is really where those amazing things take place. And I
think as more of these expressions come through public networks to show that they're safe,
they're secure, they're going to start to do what I would say is
a hybrid because there's certain networks a lot of people don't know about, like
the cipper net arguably the most secure network in the world that's terminal based.
This where all the top secret, really you know, sensitive stuff comes from.
I believe that's going to be replaced by by blockchain here in the next
five years. And I know that may be wishful thinking, but it's just
it's in the cards for sure. So in regards to the timeline of going
to full production, and so forth. What can you share there? How
long? How long the process are they? I know, government moves slow.
They do move slow, and it's for good reasons, right, Like
you know how it is you bring a software package into the government, it
may have a back door something that could be detrimental. So the level of
scrutiny is the highest I've ever seen, and I've worked on some pretty hardcore
enterprise stuff. But that's a good thing, right, makes me feel good.
If they were just like, hey, here, we're signing this up,
I'd be like, oh, man, America is in a bad spot.
But you know, usually the pathway is about two years. They say
three when they first stick or shocked me, and then I had others say
you could do it in six months. We're probably about six months into the
pathway of production, and I imagine by the end of this year we'll be
in one of the tiers. So they have a thing called Asle two that
represents sort of like the not top secret or secret, you know, sensitive
information, public information, and then once you get up to like Aisle five,
it's like controlled unclassified information. Aisle six is top secret, and it
goes up from there, and that requires some of us to have clearances.
I have clearance, so that allows me to work with some sensitive stuff,
which was an interesting exercise, let's just say that. And so it's a
really great program that is scrutinized. You know, they take your whole repository
or get all your stuff. And so, yeah, we're on path,
and that to me is going to be my legacy, my friend. Once
we're like rocking in that production experience, I will feel like I've ruled the
world because this has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my
life. Oh, I can only imagine. So did you have to go
into like uber background check like everything, what did you do back in nineteen
ninety five or something? You wouldn't ninety pages and I had to get printed
picture. But I've got a you know what, it's called a common Access
card that allows me to get on any base, you know, and access
government systems and share files and whatnot. So it was a badge honor.
I called my dad. I was like, hey, Dad, do you
remember when we were young, and You're like, hey, keep your nose
cleaned. Kid. You don't know what you're gonna be doing in the future.
It's like Hey, we did it. Wow, that's amazing man,
and congrats on that. I'm curious about, you know, given that you're
working with the US Air Force, are there other government agencies or factions of
government that are also interested given that they may be you know, moving secure
data and so forth. Yeah, I mean it's a great question. And
I can also talk a little bit about some of the use cases here.
So even though I talk about US Air Force, that's not the only agency
we work with. We are, We're connected to the US Treasury Department,
State Department, NASA, Space Force. You know, we've done some exploratory
work for the CIA, Department Homeland Security, so a lot. It's wide,
right, we wanted to have a very wide set of tools, but
go deep with some of these institutions. Iron Spider is just my baby,
and so that's why I talk about it the most because I'm just hell bent
on that being the standard expression for what we can and bring to the table.
But with that, it's all around secure information sharing, right, it's
not profound. People just want to put data from the source on chain to
ensure it hasn't been tampered and that they can run quality assurance on it to
you know, it hasn't been corrupted. It is what it says. It
is that goes a long way with just some basic data sets, right,
because a lot of the stuff we do is through email, a lot of
stuff over Wi Fi. I mean, all of these are threat vectors that
can are honeypots if you will, but they're also very interested. I'd say
one of the hot topics is around trustworthy AI. That's another thing. It's
like, Okay, everybody's goga over AI. They're sort of jumping on it
without asking questions, no contemplation, let's just go with it. But there's
real issues with you know, hallucinations, corruption, Maybe even the algorithms themselves
have been tampered before you ran it and after and you didn't even look at
that as a threat vector. And so they want to be able to put
as much of that from like large language models and pen that to a blockchain
as well as the algorithmic algorithm itself to ensure that, hey, when we're
about to launch something significant or even automate something significant, we need to have
those checks and balances in real time saying yep, this is good, to
go go forth and do whatever shenanigans you're going to do or hey, stop
the system. Something has either been missing, corrupted, or there's a man
in the middle attack. But we're trying to prove that that actually can't happen,
which I know, again might be a little bit of wishful thinking,
but we're certainly doing what I would say is some of that leap frog stuff
right now. And one of the other use cases I would say is around
IoT and machine to machine. You know, we're buying drones and we're using
systems in America. I mean, where's all the manufacturing happening. It's in
China, right there's kind of a conflict of interest there if we're going to
hit economies of scale and be first movers, but we outsource all of our
manufacturing. So how do we ensure that we put you know, blockchain or
a pen data from enclaves or IoT sensors or whatever it may be to ensure
that we understand the provenance of where these things came from and we know that
they're doing what they're supposed to. We're not being you know, undermined by
our adversaries. Cool question on in the AAI and blockchain relationship, do you
see it as a symbiotic relationship where blockchain helps the police AI, but AI
also helps improve certain blockchain attributes and processing data, and so for them seeing
a bit on both sides. I think you alluded to some of it one
hundred percent. I mean, we use some AI in our blockchain. I
just feel like every company uses AI somewhere. We just don't boast it because
it's like just sort of fundamentally baked in. We don't think much of it.
That said, you know, as data is collected, because we collect
a lot of data, and those hashes of the data more appropriately, they
get bundled into snapshots, and that snapshot is a rich treasure trobe of data
that can be used for not only traditional data management solutions in business intelligence solutions,
but to your point, adding AI to that to model it and be
able to optimize that data is a whole new frontier. You know, we
have a strong relationship with Forward Edge AI, which is another government focus entity
that does AI algorithms, and they're just like stoked to be able to take
this data that we are basically proving the fidelity and the source and attribution of
and then running against these AI models. I believe that beyond just the expression
you're talking about about doing cool things with AI on top of these snapshots,
to have blockchain to enforce and keep that AI trustworthy and honest, so we
know the source. What I would like to call an assurance score. Hey,
this thing has a ninety eight percent assurance score that we know all the
data where it came from. We are as we're positive. Do you want
to rerun it till we get to one hundred or we want to isolate that
two percent to make sure that it's not a backdoor. I just think it's
the hand to fit the glove, and it's crazy to me that it hasn't
really clicked yet with the AI companies circling back to the government and using consolation.
Obviously, you mentioned your approach was to talk about block off chain,
not crypto and things like that because there was certain stigma years ago, right,
I think that stigma is starting to fade away now. However, are
they aware that you guys have a token. Are they aware of the situation
of you know, what's happening in the United States? Would there's not clarity
for the entire market except maybe bitcoin, or they don't care. They're just
like, hey, this is attack. I'm going to build it. Whatever
the sec whatever the c FDC, whatever this these people are doing, I
don't care. Well. I would say the gamut is as colorful as it
is. Just in the commercial sector of interest in blockchain, I meet generals
that are bullish. They're all about they've been mining raven coin out of their
house, really weird stuff stuff. I'm like, wow, you are warming
my heart. I can't believe that. So they're all about it. And
then there's others that are like, oh, this is the biggest rug pull.
I can't believe you're doing this, Like this is you know, there's
a lot of opinions right that said, as we all can see, what's
happening at the hill is that it's gotten too big to ignore, and you
know, the money side of it is frustrating. I think that's really held
back the adoption and expression of what can happen with blockchain. But at the
same time, inversely, it's brought a lot of attention to it. So
it's kind of a tough one to look at. But we often use the
word digital assets the term right like that to me is like the soft place
for people to feel a little bit better. About about crypto because when you
say digital assets, it sort of removes it a step away from finance,
which cryptocurrency because you have that currency piece. But we start thinking about like
the utility of like NFTs or like we have we have a utility token that
validates data. How can digital assets do procurement at the edge in real time
like a micro payment from a micro service from one sensor to the other.
This unlocks workflows that a lot of people blows their mind and creates efficiencies that
we've never even been able to dream of. So I often say it's like
ice tea without ice. If you don't have digital assets involved in your workflow,
you're missing out on some of the most amazing expressions that this industry has
to offer. Absolutely, what's on your twenty twenty four road map? Yeah?
Yeah, I mean so we you know, we have an interesting makeup.
We have essentially three divisions in our company. We have our we have
a hardware division, which we call our door traffic miner, And that was
an expression we decided to really get into the deep in space years ago.
I didn't even know what deepen was until about six months ago. I was
like, oh, there's a term for this around validating data and rewarding people
for their contribution using the hardware for you know, the data that's being sold.
Pretty amazing stuff. So that's one division. The next is our enterprise
in federal which I run, which is our engagements in the enterprise and federal
space not profound. And then of course we have our Web three world right,
and that's where we're heavily. I feel like the more money and effort
and expression I can get through Federal, the more we can sort of,
I guess, for lack of a better term, gamble with Web three tools
because it's still not yet defined. You know, things are fickle, NFTs
we're so hot, like you know, two years ago and now it's a
four letter word ironically, you know, and now we're in the world of
meme coins. I mean things I didn't even know is. I was like,
wow, nazi coin is a real thing right now, Like I didn't
expect. I didn't see that coming, right, And so our roadmap is
heavily focused on things like how do we really figure out our snapshot fees right,
because we are a feeless transaction network, so we want to figure out
a way to really highlight the value of snapshots, so as people create data
that they can make money off those snapshot fees. In accordance with Constellation,
we have a lot what we call metagraphs coming online. This is essentially a
metagraph is a sub network if anybody can build their own blockchain on top of
our network, which is awesome, and we launched our metagraph public capabilities in
Q four last year. So now we're seeing people come out of the woodwork
in an amazing way building their own solutions, which makes me so happy.
You know, they're minting their own tokens and all that. We have a
really big hackathon coming up because of that in July to try to get more
people to just kick the tires and see what's possible with this, because we
want them to realize how easy it is to configure and drive these things.
But I'd say our big one is that we are about to launch a decentralized
exchange at the end of this year, and a lot of that wrapped around
because we have our own our own token standard by having an an L zero
token. Yes, there's a drawback that we don't get to participate as widely
as we want through the Ethereum liquidity world and developers outside of bridges. But
by having our own sort of treasure trove, it allows us to create a
dex in a way that isn't bolstered by the shortcomings of these predecessors that we
are up against. So yeah, and we even have an interesting thing around
a social token that we're going to be launching here soon, but I'm not
allowed to talk much more about that. But we want to be seen as
fun, Tony, even though everyone's like, oh, you're the boring,
you know, federal blockchain. You know. So I do understand the meme
coin thing. I think it's really cool and fun and everybody wants to have
a good time, and we need to do a better job at showing that
we can actually create things that are fun for the Web three community. I
love it, man, That's that's really great. And uh, I wish
you had like another couple hours to talk about it because I'm really intrigued by
how the government is using this blockchain. But we'll have to schedule you back
on to come and talk about, you know, things as they progress.
But I didn't want to get your thoughts on the crypto market at large.
You know, we've seen incredible adoption and launches of ETFs bitcoin the e theorem
METF just got recently approved. Love to get your thoughts on that, especially
as someone who bought bitcoin at four dollars and where we're at today. Yeah,
yeah, I you know, crypto is interesting in the sense that I
feel like it's unleashed a lot of nervous energy in humans because it feels like
there's this gold rush happening right in front of them. They're like, how
do I get in involved in that? And I often categorize people into two
buckets, which I think kind of creates me as a reductionist. But but
they're either running towards something or they're running away from something, right, And
a lot of people are like, I hate my life. How do I
get crypto rich so I can stop being or doing the thing I'm doing today?
And that opportunistic energy, there's no lack of that in this world,
right, Versus those that I've seen that are up at three in the morning
reading tokenomics. They're understanding the technology, they're getting involved in communities, they're
contributing from a developer perspective, those are the folks that really wore my heart,
right, Like there's plenty of people that want to get rich out there
that said, you know, when it comes to this ETF stuff, as
I mentioned it being an election year, this stuff is well overdue. And
you know, I just think that a lot of these companies like JP Morgan
Chase, a lot of the big guys, black Rock, you know,
oh, you can name some of these monolithic, huge companies. They've been
waiting on the sidelines, where as weird as it sounds, a trillion dollars
doesn't really mean much to them, but all of a sudden, once it
gets the two trillion, they're like, oh, maybe we might want to
get involved and diversify. But once you start having that institutional money get involved
without relation, you're gambling at the highest stakes table you could possibly be at.
And so I think there's this breath of fresh air that like ethereum and
bitcoin are here to stay. Folks like these are now becoming staple expressions that
we can all trust and use in meaningful ways and we don't have to look
over our shoulders. So I'm excited to see more of this come out and
more support by key constituents within the government to making this real for all.
So I think it's a big win this year. And I've mentioned many times
in the past that twenty twenty four is the year that Constellation poors concrete,
and I don't really feel like that's just for us, meaning we're making big
decisions on where we're going to be for the next ten to twenty years as
a company. But I feel like it's also coinciding what's happening with the industry
at large, that folks like the ETF stuff are pouring concrete, which to
me is awesome. Yeah, And we also saw like a ton of movement
on cryptoregulations with the FIT Bill getting passed in the House. We're seeing Democrats
aligning with Republicans to help get this through, and like you've been stating,
it's an election year, that kind of lights a fire right under some of
these people. Are you optimistic? You know, maybe by next year we'll
have clear, comprehensive regulations signed by the President and things like that. You
know, I would hope, so, you know, Unfortunately, sometimes it's
more of a power play for governments to operate in the gray. You know.
You can see that for example with like what's happened with marijuana, right
Like we all kind of know that, you know, it's not the Devil's
not going to swallow the world if pot exists, but yet it's just an
easier situation for them to tap dance around, especially with what's going on in
the pharmaceutical industry and the fact it's a weed. Same thing happens with crypto,
Like anybody can grow a pot plan at their house, anybody can mint
a crypto currency, you know, like pretty easily. So this changes the
game. I'm really hopeful that we're going to put some big stakes in the
ground as a country, and the whole world's sort of looking at us right
like, what do you guys get it? Because they're going to do whatever
they want in Russia, China, elsewhere, but America. For us to
be able to go to a bank, that's me going to be a big
moment where it's like, Hey, I'm at a bank and I hold up
my wallet and I sign and they do a bitcoin transfer for USD directly at
my bank. That's when I know we've we've sort of made it right because
that will be the precursor to all institutions absorbing this money because it will be
trusted, insured and backed by institutions that we all trust, namely banks.
So fingers crossed. But as you know, in this world, tomorrow may
be the weirdest news we've ever experienced, you know, so let's hope.
So yeah, absolutely, all right. I got some wrap up questions here
for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, what would
the theme be? Wow, it's an interesting question. You know, my
wife and I were big gamers. I love gaming, you know, I
don't. I don't have any headsets or anything like that, but you know,
I do think that the metaverse is a very exciting thing. That's I
kind of go back to my statement escape escapism is the hottest it's ever been
right now, and nothing spells escapism harder than the metaverse, right, Like,
Hey, I want to put this thing on via different avatar, live
a whole different life, and I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that,
but I would just you know, I'm sort of a a heal the world
type of guy, right I wish that there was expressions that really bolstered forgiveness
and healing and abundance. I'm a big abundance guy. I believe that we
live in a universe of infinite abundance, And so I don't really care if
there's escapism in the metaverse as long as those really great attributes of humanity come
into it and it doesn't turn into what most stuff does on the internet.
You know, just read any YouTube comment thread and you'll see that, you'll
see the deveolvement of human nature, right, And so that's what worries me,
is that when people can escape who they are, they often do these
awful things, you know, like Westworld, right, And I wish we
could be in a planet where we're actually forgiving, healing and creating abundance for
each other and lifting each other up. So I know that's kind of a
weird answer, but I'm sticking with it. No, I agreed, agreed,
And like personally what I'm I don't even care about the escape of film.
I just want to use like the metaverse to like, oh, I
want going to see what's happening like a real time what's happening in Rome right
now? And yeah, that's what I interest me. Or I want to
watch his artist paint something or something, but I don't necessarily want to be
an avatar or like you know, but just like more like learning, I
guess is what I'm looking forward to for the metaverse. But yeah, to
your point though, escapism and social media and what people do online, that
is gonna I don't know. Maybe it's gonna make things worse. I don't
know. Yeah, we'll see. Like, as a gamer, I believe
AI is going to play a big role. I would love to be able
to go in a metaverse and be like, hey, can you make this
look like Halo? Can you make give me you know, give me these
attributes from these games and it just automatically creates an environment based off of me
manifest my will. I think that's really cool, right. You know,
one thing I will say, Tony, and this is not profound. Humans
want to have fun. Man, We all want to have fun. And
that's what I think that the metaverse really allows is a platform for not only
education and opportunity to see really cool things Like I remember showing my nephews Google
Earth when I was when I was younger and be like you go anywhere with
this thing, look at this, you know, blowing their minds. And
I think the metaverse is going to make that seem like you know, table
stakes. Oh yeah, all right, I got some rapid fire questions for
you? First is favorite food on doo? Favorite musician or band? I
don't really have one. I just like electronic music, so I don't really
follow anybody. I know. It's a terrible answer. I would say Nine
Inch Nails is pretty good, but that was my angry phase when I was
a teenager. Favorite movie Matrix hands down. Oh yeah. Our favorite book,
History and Power of Mind is the book that changed my change my world.
Written in nineteen oh two. It's a very esoteric books. It's not
a light read, but it's my favorite book. Sits next to my bed.
I'll check that out. And when you're not working in consolation, what
are you doing for fun? Hanging out with my best friend, which is
my wife. We've been married thirteen years and we're just two peas in a
pod. We love playing games. Like I said, but a lot of
people don't know, I'm an electronic musician of twenty five years, fascinated with
synthesizers, drum machines, samplers. I know the history of every piece of
equipment you basically can imagine, but nobody cares. If somebody is like,
hey, wow, you have a TV three or three, It's like I
fall to my knees and I start crying. I just want to hug them
that they actually know what it is. So I love making electronic music.
That's awesome, Benjamin Pleasure, and I definitely have to have you back on
because you guys are the government's blockchain, as it would seem, so I
got to keep a close ear to what you guys are doing. So but
thank you so much for joining me. Heck yeah, Tony, thanks for
having us come on. And I love love that smiley candor of yours.
You're a good man, so thanks for doing what you do for you,
me and the industry. My friend,