Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
So today I am talking to Jason Brown is he is head of business development for Komodo platform. And I’m real excited to have him on the show because Komodo platform is doing some really amazing stuff. David, how are you today?
Jason Brown
I’m doing great. Thanks for asking.
Rob McNealy
So we met a few weeks ago back at World crypto con, and I had a really good conversation with you. And I thought it was kind of interesting how once you started explaining to me and educated me a little bit on what Komodo does, it actually made a whole lot more sense for me, I got a little more excited about it so far, we’d kind of jump into all the nitty gritty kind of stuff. Tell us a little about you. How did you get into crypto and how did you get into working for Komodo?
Jason Brown
Sure. So um, back in 2012 when I was working overseas, I came across Bitcoin and I think was a wired article. And I had heard about it before, but you know, at that time, do you know minecarts was around and you know, the The hype started really catching up so I decided to buy my first Bitcoin which was a lot harder back then and then it is today because there were no real exchanges that you know one accepted PayPal there there was no coin base there was nothing so I looked around on my local bitcoins but the closest place to me was over in Japan The Alba reach and so then I found a site called weird box which excepted Linden Dollars as currency in the game called second second life,you know, personally they exchanged Lindon dollars for Bitcoin. So I was able to buy Linden Dollars in exchange for Bitcoin, probably not the best rate but it was my first Bitcoin and then you know, from there, I just started you know, investigating deep into the field of time there were there was some forks like like coin came out, you know, the precursor dash I called dark coin was out and bunch of, you know, basic forks of Bitcoin and around 2014 I came across a project called NXT and NXT like blew way my mind it was basically it was like the first real like platform that anybody could just really build on top of without any in depth, coding knowledge and had a very lively community. And, you know, I just got involved I from NXT, there was a sub project called supernet, which was really the precursor of what Komodo is today and they were working on cross blockchain protocols and, and things to basically connect all these different block chains which were like islands and we wanted to be like the, the, you know, the bridges to all these different islands. So, you know, if you have coins on one chain and but when did you use the service on another chain, you had a way of doing such And from that around 2016, we started Komodo and, you know, created the delayed proof of work consensus mechanism, which, you know, helps secure block chains. And, you know, from there, we’ve been just developing this idea of a multi chain architecture that we see the future of blockchain heading towards. Yes. Cool, quick history about me and how I got involved.
Rob McNealy
That’s really cool. So you’ve been in crypto longer than most of my kids have been alive. So that’s actually pretty cool. But it’s funny because you you say in this space, I mean, it’s such a new industry, right? Like, no one’s been in this a long time. And this is a pet peeve of mine to like, people that have like, are 30. I don’t know how old you are, but I’m in my late 40s. So it’s like I see anybody who’s like in their 40s and they’re in crypto, but you look at their LinkedIn and only goes back three years. It’s like, have you not done anything the last 30 years? What do you been doing? I always think it’s a big red flag for me. It’s like what have you been doing before crypto? Right. And, you know,
Jason Brown
It’s funny. Yeah, it’s sad. A lot of people you know, they caught on the hype and now everyone tries to be some expert because they, you know, saw some YouTube videos and such before crypto, I worked in the nuclear industry. So to answer your question, I was a nuclear attack to power plants in South Korea. And wow, lab tech and for Westinghouse, so yeah, I had some science background and yeah, basically, went from nuclear work to crypto. Well, this base brings all types of people.
Rob McNealy
Well, it does and like I’m an entrepreneur, I don’t hide anything that I do. I still like my day job is a job you would never even know existed. I’m a floor inspector and a walkway auditor. And those are two jobs. No one’s ever heard of Yeah, and there’s there’s like the but it’s kind of interesting. I’m I’m a forensic expert witness and consultant in the flooring world. And so I deal with like construction defects. And I deal with personal injury cases where people die and have serious injuries. And so I work all over the country doing that kind of work. And I still do it it because Tosca is a community project. Everybody’s got a day job, everybody works a real job besides task. And so I don’t hide that even in my like my Twitter profile. I say, I’m a foreigner, because that’s what I am. But I’ve been in the space like 15 years, and I do really well. I’m actually pretty recognized in my industry, because I’m pretty good at my job, but it’s like, I don’t hide that. Yeah, I have I crave to go to my LinkedIn, I got my crypto stuff and my floor kind of stuff and that’s who I am, at least to me. It seems weird but I’m an entrepreneur and and I’ve had other projects and businesses and stuff along the way too. So it’s like to me this is not weird. It’s just it’s but I’m being honest about who I But it’s actually really tacky to you wouldn’t think about it, but it’s a lot of physics and concrete and similes and all sorts of stuff. So, but it’s a really weird set of knowledge and as a niche, you know, and I think that’s, it’s just a fun niche, but I’ve really flexible schedule. So I can actually Well, well, well, it’s great because I mean, I do I get paid, I get paid a lot when I’m working, you know. And so essentially I have a full time, nice salary, so to speak, for part time work so I can work on crypto almost full time and not have to worry about making a paycheck because I haven’t made any money off crypto as far as our projects in the two years we’ve been doing, in fact, have spent a lot of money working on our project over two years.
Jason Brown
So yeah, nature of the beast. Yeah, you guys.
Oh, absolutely. And I’m sure you guys are doing that with Komodo to I mean, I mean, even a community I mean, we didn’t launch as a our own blockchain originally. But it’s like you. I mean, just going to conferences is expensive. Yeah. You know, we were both in Vegas and even if you’re doing it on the cheap, but still a couple grand for one guy just to go to a conference, I mean minimum. I mean, that’s what it costs, you know, every meals 20 bucks and he’s know every hotel and hotel rooms a couple hundred bucks a night or whatever, you know, it’s like, yeah, Vegas.
Rob McNealy
Especially Vegas. So yeah, I think it’s interesting. And I think that’s cool that you came from kind of that background and I wish more people were honest that they had a life before crypto because it’s so young that I would expect people would have a life before crypto, right. But then you get all these like influencers that are in their mid 30s. And they’ve done crypto for like a year. And that’s their whole life and I’m like, okay, is what tells me is you were like working at like 711 before crypto. You know, that’s what I think I mean, may not be true, but I mean, don’t don’t hide who you are. I mean, and even if you came from the bottom, I would actually have more respect for people, if they’re like, yeah, I worked a 711 year ago, I learned how I taught myself trading from watching books or reading books on technical analysis. And now I make 100 grand a year for my house. That’s a story I want to share with people. Right? Yeah, get it, you know what I’m saying? But they don’t have that. It’s like, you know, and I’m just, I’m just here and I’m like, okay, anyways, I digress. Right? So Komodo Tell me a little bit about what, what is Komodo? Do you guys do a lot of different things. And you know, when I first started looking at Komodo as a super non developer, you know, I’m more of a business guy, a marketing guy. Some of the stuff was like over my head. So basically, what would be the big problems that you guys are trying to address that right now? That’s what you can offer as a service.
Okay, so some of the big problems that Komodo has know platform and is trying to address this one is the security of a smaller blockchain we’ve seen 51% attacks happen across many different coins and exchanges, you know, being robbed essentially because of the attacks. And it ruins the credibility of that chain and you know, the in law these chains on the, you know, dying off if they, you know, get tact often enough. So Komodo one of the major things we do is provide a layer of protection called delayed proof of work for these small chains that can’t get enough miners on their chain to be to prevent, you know, such of attack. And today, it’s lot easier to do these 51% attacks now on small chain so it was in the past. Beyond these days, we have nice hash and mining rig rentals and, you know, even many farms and stuff you can contract out to to run out their hardware. So a chain that only has maybe a couple hundred 86 words On it can easily be overpowered by some guys just willing to, you know, spend some money and nice hash. So, this is a real problem for for smaller chains. So, you know to help them out. And also because we are a multi chain ecosystem So, we have these problems as well. We created the system that essentially checkpoints onto the Bitcoin blockchain. So, to reverse a transaction or reorganize a block essentially past a certain motorisation point, you would have to attack the Bitcoin blockchain first and then also attack your your target chain as well. So, this makes it a lot harder for an attacker to execute this kind of attack on blockchain. So, so, if I had a proof of work blockchain right so this is for proof of work only case. It can be done for Other types of changes. So hybrids proof of stake, as well, proof of stake has some different kind of attack vectors. Then proof of work chains, buddy, it’s primarily made for proof of work change. Yes.
So if I just you know, and I don’t have her for change, but if say I had a proof of work chain project that I was working on. So do you guys come in, you’re coming in just like and supplying a bunch of hash power to kind of insulate the blockchain? Or are the you basically combining with their blockchain? Or is it more like a denial of service protection? What what kind of vector? How does that actually integrate? I guess is the question.
Jason Brown
So okay, is to integrate delay proof of work. We have a group of 64 nodes that will all run a full node of the chain we’re trying to protect. And so there’s normal nodes on the network. But every so often, every 10 minutes, they take the latest block hash, and then they write that block out. First on the kinetic chain and they write the block hash that all the all the protective chains block caches are on into the Bitcoin blockchain in and transaction. So this can be referenced if somebody is trying to do a reorg tax so what that is that a Meijer will mine privately basically they’ll take a chain will split into the mind privately one and they’ll mind normally the other and they’ll send a transaction on the real chain. Okay. And then at a later point in time they with their private chain which they have tons of pass rate on, they, you know, basically broadcast that as the rule chain because so many so much more of the hash rate because his paid hash rate agrees with that private chain, it basically rewrites the history of the blockchain. So, with these motorisation they can only do that a certain only to a certain depth Because of how expensive financially and computationally this is, you know, trying to reorg within a 10 block period is not very feasible. It’s doable. And if there was a sense of transaction, you could just say, hey, you have to wait till the notarization is done. And then once the notarization is done, you know, it’s good. So, basically, the the nodes, they are their full nodes on the protected network. They view the incoming block caches, they’re writing to the kinetic chain, which writes into the Bitcoin chain. If somebody tries tactic protected chain, they could reference these hashes on bitcoins blockchain or on the commodity chain. And just, you know, see, Hey, is this the correct hash or is this somebody trying to rework the blockchain?
Rob McNealy
So is, is this something you said that for newer chain, does that mean that over time that they would wean off of this network or was this like a relationship You would like to see go on permanently for some of these chains well, so with how much hardware that there is out there
Jason Brown
in less than that yellow smaller chain could somehow convince the miners to switch over there and they become a dominant hash rate on for their particular algorithm, then they wouldn’t need delayed proof of work but the reality is even amongst large hash rate change, unless you are the most dominant by hash rate for your algorithm, you under threat above 51% attack. So it’s it’s very hard for smaller chains to be fully protected against this type of attack. You know, for example, theorem classic. Quite a large network compared to many block chains up and proof of work chains out there, had a attack happened on it, which was a 300 block. D reorg that wouldn’t have happened with the are delayed proof of work system because they don’t like to go back 10 blocks so, so even, you know, chains that have massive amounts hash rate still faces threat, and the only one that we, you know, sort of for sure, you know, doesn’t really have this type of attack vectors Bitcoin itself because the mass amount hash rate and but the differences between the, you know, I guess you’d call pool ideologies that they would always compete against each other instead of trying to attack the network which would effectively you know, loot less than bitcoins credibility.
Rob McNealy
So, and you don’t have to answer this, but how do you make money with that? How do you if you’re going to engage with a smaller proof forward chain? How do you guys like monetize that work that you’re doing?
Jason Brown
We’re gonna so um, you know, since Komodo, is a community project as well. You know, it’s the service providers who integrate this are the ones who would be a monetizing, and there’s a fee for the integration because all the notary nodes have to run a copy of this protected chains, you know, block chain. So that’s server space and bandwidth and all that stuff. And then just also the integration part itself, the code that needs put in. So that cost is dependent on the chain if it’s a committed base chain, which is a lot more palatable. It’s pretty cheap. So it’s around five grand a year.
Rob McNealy
Okay, it’s not bad at all.
Jason Brown
Yeah, for normal Bitcoin based chain that doesn’t need that much anything. It’s a little bit more seven to 10 then but if it’s a like a custom chain, it might require a bunch of, you know, specific work for that chain to get it to work, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. So you’re looking between five and 10 grand Yeah, typically for You know, this delay proof of work protection, and like I say gets paid to the service provider who actually implements it. And we have several in our ecosystem that we recommend projects to.
Rob McNealy
So it’s a kind of like a vendor, like a part of the community of part of the Komodo platform community actually has vendors that are doing their own kind of like side hustle and participate that way?
Jason Brown
Correct. Yes, it’s it’s like, sort of like a WordPress, right. So WordPress itself is the free software to build websites and stuff with but there’s many different businesses that build plugins or themes that you can buy to, you know, aid onto the initial core of WordPress. So, very similar situation and Komodo that we offer the core and the course stuffs free but like if you want to have your own module create or you know, this protection added, you know, you have to go through a third party.
Rob McNealy
Make sense. I was just that word camp a couple weeks ago to So, good times. So tell me a little talking about barter decks what is the barter decks piece of your ecosystem all about?
Jason Brown
Okay, so a BarterDex, which now is called atomic decks, barter decks was the previous version it is a our implementation of atomic swap technology, which allows two people to exchange trust mostly between each other but no third party in between is works for pretty much all Bitcoin based coins, as well as the theorem in New York City 20. And we are currently working on getting other types of coins and other types of things like assets and tokens to be able to be atomic swap as well right now. So we can be effectively offer over 90% of the existing crypto world the ability to trust this lead exchange with each other. And this has a lot of benefits for for users and you For businesses who would like to use this as well, the biggest thing is security. We’ve heard of tons of exchange hacks happen, even the great binance got hacked for thousands of Bitcoin, right? And when you use a centralized exchange, you’re depositing your coins with them. And they hold it all into, you know, various addresses. But, you know, they’re all pulled together, you know, more or less. And so that’s an attractive target for a hacker to go after. Where with atomic decks, each user, you know, has their own coins, they control the private key to their coins. So it’s, you know, basically there’s no giant target for a hacker to attack like that. It’s all spread out amongst everybody. If you’ve had a hacker meal, luckily comes across somebody’s private key doesn’t affect everybody else’s thoughts. So that’s one of the big Benefits. The other big benefit is others know, because it’s a peer to peer protocol, there’s no KYC no AML that’s required of the users to use this. And this is another big thing and I’ll bring up binance again, is that just after that exchange hack, where they lost thousands of Bitcoin, there was a KYC hack, where people they still bunch of users like ID as their passport photos, all their information they had to input to get, you know, verified on exchange, leave a bit max actually had something like this happened as well recently. So now, all this information that you submitted to centralized exchange is floating all the dark web up for bid for the highest bidder, and they can use that for various identity fraud crimes. Oh, yeah. Opening a loan in your name. Yeah. Like, what
Rob McNealy
What what’s worse about that is that if they got your information from like a big centralized sees, they know you have crypto somewhere. And now I got like a good lead to try to, you know, dig that out. And so I think that can be used to do targeted attacks and and I’m getting more paranoid about my own personal security and online security and my privacy. And it’s funny because I just deleted like 50,000 emails out of one of my accounts because I was using it like a database, which I didn’t realize that was a big, huge problem. So I fixed that problem. And it was interesting, and I’m getting so paranoid the other day, I downloaded an app, which I’m really excited about using and then they mandate that you upload your entire phone book address book to their app. It won’t even allow you to go any further unless you up they don’t give you an option to not allow your entire address book to be used and, and I talked to the owner of this thing, and I said, I’m not giving you who I go. I asked him first I said who gets That information, is it just looking at it on my thing? Or is it uploading to your database like, well, we upload it, but we won’t share it with anybody. Like, I argue with them. But I’m like, how are you? What happens if you get hacked? Now you have all my contacts, which could also or in lots of people’s contacts, which could be used for, you know, social engineering, all sorts of attacks. I’m getting really paranoid. But I decided not to use the app because of that, you know, so it’s like, I think people need to think about that. So with with the Tomic deck so here’s the question I have about the is as a project is your are those transactions like the volume of those transactions, you know, tracked anywhere like coin market cap or coin Gecko or any of those other tracking services?
Jason Brown
Currently, we have a just a way of tracking I’m just a, you know, it pulls the order book and it just displays it but no current there was Now like official source right now we do plan on releasing a, you know, a way of displaying the statistics of the, you know, the use of the exchange, you know, what trades are available, how much volume, what’s the liquidity, things like that?
Rob McNealy
Do you have volume posted? Do you know what the volume is now? Is the network or is that proprietary?
Jason Brown
Now currently, it’s not much. We’re just in the beta testing stage right now. So we’re making sure everything works, right. We just had our first stress test happen on a Halloween actually. And we were started becoming saturated around 100,000 orders on one single order book and our previous incarnation that was in barbacks was able to handle three to four times as much. So we found some areas where to vastly improve and we plan on having another stress test. I here in about a month or so. So the statistics For the usage suffer not out yet. Just because it’s it’s still really new. It’s the first mobile atomic swap deck. So we’re still hammering out bugs, but so far, it does work out pretty well. There are some orders, but there isn’t much going on right now.
So I’ll give you my unsolicited advice, which everybody loves as as, as coming from as a project, right? You know, we’re projects are stuck in this box, right that especially community projects that didn’t do illegal Icos and things is that we’re not able to really get on decent exchanges unless we have you know, a certain amount of volume on smaller exchanges. It’s kind of like a really stupid catch 22 and that’s one of those metrics, I don’t think is a great metrics necessarily for how crypto products are evaluated, but it is one right now. I personally might personal ethos is I would love at least with our project artist project that we just be all on apps that are atomic swap type apps personally, because I think to me, that’s the future, I still believe it or not like the original essence of the Satoshi white paper, you know, peer to peer digital cash. And to me, I think that what’s happened is that the exchanges have gotten so much power now. And they can pick the winners and losers now, and there’s so much fraud with volumes and things like that. But on the other hand, my own so for our strategy, I would love to get on as many atomic swap type apps as possible, because I think that actually is the better way that I think crypto will get adopted and actually be used and people can just really conveniently move back and forth between kryptos on a mobile device. That to me is the best and has the least amount of friction. However, as a project though, most of those apps are not reporting that volume to the trackers. And so in a lot of ways, we don’t get credit for it. You know what I’m saying? It doesn’t So how do you say, Well, I’m on 20 apps, and we’re getting a lot of these on train on chain volumes, but none of that’s tracks centrally. And to me, you know, I’m just giving you a heads up, if you could get that volume that on chain volume track. I think that would be really helpful to a lot of community projects.
Yeah, it helps. I agree. I agree. Yeah, and just for, you know, potential traders are looking at trying a new exchange and stuff to, you know, they want to see the volume on the exchange before they even tried. So, we do have it in in the, you know, in our plan, and I applied is just because right now, it’s, you know, so know, that atomic data, the mobile app just got released in mid July, so it’s only a couple months old that but we do plan on doing this to, you know, like you said help smaller coins to, you know, to track their volume so they cannot, you know, have more to sit The show be a real boy.
Rob McNealy
Yeah. So is this a native app? Or is this a like a responsive, just mobile web app?
Jason Brown
This is a native app. But we do have a, you know, a web browser version being built as well. But currently, it’s a native app.
Rob McNealy
Is it for iOS or Google, Android?
That’s both iOS and a Android.
Jason Brown
Well, when you get that out, let me know because I’d like to I want I’d love to be a beta tester for that kind of thing.
You can actually if you have a you know, a right now you just download right now it’s on Google Play right now to download and iOS requires test flight. So yeah, I’ll send you the link for that. Sweet as long as you don’t want my address book.
Rob McNealy
But, but seriously, I think that to me, is we need more of that and to me, I’m not a maxi right. And I like I like a lot of projects. I’m also bearish on a lot of projects. are considered big projects now I just you know I really kind of look at things differently than a lot of people in crypto but to me my ideal future isn’t like there being one one coin to rule them all to me I think it’s much better if there were three or 400 really strong chains out there that were built for in you know, specific uses in industries that all you know swap between one another to me that’s so much more decentralized and and so you know, for instance if if Bitcoin for instance became like the only major crypto on the planet that people were really relying on for buying and selling which it isn’t now, and you know, if you have one big dog
Jason Brown
Be sad days that were the case especially with their 10 minute block times.
Rob McNealy
Two day confirmation times. Yeah. But But if you think about it, though, if you just but this is what a lot of Maxis actually want, whether and I don’t care if it’s an eighth math, math Or an LTC Maxie or Bitcoin maxy. Right? They all kind of had this weird vision that their their God needs to win. And to me I said well look at it this way if if you were like usurping national Fiat’s across the globe and your your community now has all that wealth centered on you now have you just made enemies of state level actors that have access to quantum computers? And it all it takes is you know what happens now if the whole globe is like on one crypto and it goes down? I mean, it’s catastrophic. I mean, think of it like Fiat’s right now if you think about Fiat’s. Right now every, you know, every country, sorry, every country has its own fee, right. So if you think about it, and they kind of swap between one another, so there’s 130, hundred and 50, you know, paper fee kind of currencies. That’s kind of decentralized. If you think of a country Free as a community, right now, the globe already has hundreds or you know, hundred 50 or so that kind of do that, you know, it’s really easy to swap between fiat currencies right now. So I think there already is an analog for this. And I think that it has basically if you had if you had the Maxis dream of one coin, you basically have centralized something that already was decentralized to some extent.
Jason Brown
Yeah, it I don’t understand the maximalist thinking, you know, Komodo we already came in with the, you know, the idea that there was going to be multiple chains. I mean, that’s just, you know, just look around even a crypto there’s, like 4000 some projects on coin market cap even now and let alone all the ones being built in private or some closed system. And so I agree with you, it’s, it’s not gonna be on one chain feature. I think that’s very naive thinking is just I mean, from a technical perspective, Can you imagine everybody trying to do everything on one chain blocks will be filled? There’ll be some crazy fee market, there will be delays and getting things done. And then not to mention the politics, like with Bitcoin and the theorem. So it’s Yeah, it’s maximalism, it’s, I think those are guys who just want their bags to go out.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, you know what, I used to think that they were just hardcore guys that really thing. I think there’s a lot of ego involved. And if you think about it, right, a lot of these are the same guys that have no LinkedIn history four or five years ago, and they’ve been telling everybody for five years how great their one project is. I think here’s the thing. I think psychologically, when you wrap your identity and your ego around that project, you can’t change your mind. when things change, right. You’re so wrapped up into that that’s, you know, mentally or socially. You can’t come on and I’ve been telling everybody on the planet to buy this one. coin for five years, and now I see the markets change and Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe there’s some better things that have come along. But oh, no, I can admit that I can have no one wants to admit they’re wrong. Right, you know, or they don’t want to be proven wrong, even worse, right. So I think there’s a lot of that and here’s the weird thing. You know, Jason when I, I stayed out of crypto for five years. I mean, I’ve known about Bitcoin and crypto for a long, long time. But you know, why I stayed out before I started investing and getting excited about it was the Maxis. They’re toxic, they were obnoxious. And and I always start off saying, you know, I don’t take investment from guys living in their mom’s basement that, you know, can’t even hold a job down, you know, kind of thing and that’s what a lot of the early guys that were in crypto, that kind of that stereotype kind of fit with a lot of those guys. And I’m like, you know, I’m just not really interested in giving you and your community a whole bunch of my cash. You know, Even though this sounds interesting, and it took really meeting a lot of like some really, really smart people that were a little more realistic in the space before I actually started opening up and investing in crypto, but even now, a lot of those early guys, I think there are wrong. So I mean, even my initial assessment of like, okay, you’re kind of a dipshit. I was right on them. They kind of are dipshits. And these guys team that turned out to be the Maxis. And and I think, you know, Bitcoin is amazing proof of, you know, concept. I think it’s great at what it does. I’m not sure that I think that there’s been better technologies that come out since Bitcoin came out. And I think that the governance problem is one of those things that I think a lot of people overlook. I mean, the one thing, the one concern I have about a lot of these proof of work kind of communities, is that when they have a conflict, they see the whole community fractures in a very toxic and public way. Like there’s no condom There’s no way to do conflict resolution when that happens. And and then everybody else just sees Wow, on the outside, like, Wow, you guys can deal with your shit. You know, it’s like, and that’s not good. I mean, if you look at it from the standpoint, I mean, think about what crypto is, right? I mean, we’re asking people to take what was normally in a bank, like their 401k is like, and that could be for a lot of, you know, middle class people that can be a lot of money. And we’re now telling them to invest in this new thing, you know, and then, and then you look at how that thing is being governed. You’re like, I’m not putting my money with those guys. They can’t even like get along with each other. And, and their avatars, like some furry rodent cartoon guy, and, you know, it’s like, so I mean, I think in a lot of ways, crypto is its own worst enemy, for her from an adoption standpoint. You know, because of that, and I think that’s actually helped. I think the Maxis are actually holding crypto back in a lot of respects. And they will never admit it. They won’t think that. But that’s just my belief on it. And I hope it changes. And I think it is changing as better good projects come in here guys like you with Komodo and other things that are trying to do really good stuff and solve real problems. I think that’s going to change, but it’s not going very quickly, unfortunately. So you guys just talk a little bit about the entire module that some you guys are working on?
Jason Brown
Sure. So entire is our blockchain creation platform. And our modules allow people to add their own form of consensus on top of the traditional consensus bound and proof of work chains. So what this means is that I’ll give you an example if you’re familiar with gaming at all at people off down competitions to see you know, who’s the BEST gamer there was a, you know, a, like a first person shooter games like Counter Strike baiting. Half of these types of competitions and defeat I love data feed in natural selection. Did you ever play any of those? Oh those now not not this one. Sorry.
Rob McNealy
Well they’re on Counter Strike the half life plan you know, so they’re just
Jason Brown
I used to play a long long time ago it’s okay so one of the things we know about this game is people like to cheat specifically with like game bots and stuff that so that they’re always going to hit their target and so what if you could recreate all of the you know movement on your all the keystrokes all the you know, ways that moved and everything you were able to recreate every step into check to see if like, hey, he moved his keys this way. Is this what happened in game you can sort of, you know, you know, determine for cheating or not now, take this idea and, you know, put it on top of a blockchain that a transaction Won’t be valid unless it’s replicatable by every, every node in the network, we’ve actually created a module called cc rogue. Rogue was a early game from the 1980s it was like a dungeon crawling game was done to ASCII. So the there wasn’t really that many, you know, visual stuff is like characters and stuff in it is very simplistic, but the idea of robots Yeah, like I said, dungeon crawler gets the, you know, and and you can you win. But people would cheat at these games, but with our module, you’re able to replicate all of the users movements and you know, what they interacted with. And so you can see, Hey, is this like, item that they claim they have? Is it real or did they, you know, click on an item and, you know, somehow get it or you know, and this allows chains to to validate programs that aren’t your Traditional like financial ledger style programs like we see with block chains today. So we can add a layer of blockchain and forced consensus on top of other types of programs is basically what the entire modules are. So this expands blockchain functionality quite greatly. The one the issues blockchain so released Bitcoin protocol based blockchain says that they’re not turning bleep. This has been somewhat solved with a theorem style chains, with their interpretive smart contracts. However, we can now with these modules, you know, sort of emulate that Turing completeness with and still have a Bitcoin base chain. So that’s another benefit of this as well.
Rob McNealy
So is it just more of a security layer on top of like, Bitcoin based chain or is it actually more does that add actually additional smart contract functionality to We’d like to
Jason Brown
know, functionality as well. So, to give another example, what if you had a module that said that transactions? I mean, come on so top I had that, you know, can’t be sent to a certain address like like blacklist, blacklist whitelist. Saying, also, you know, time locks things that we see in blockchains. Now, we can actually add on those same types of rules to other programs, and have them verified by the chance of so it does adds a basically it’s a new way of doing the smart contracts, smart contracts as compared to aetherium. Where the put the theory, put the contracts on chain, you have to run through it. If there’s an issue, then you’re trying to convince the chain itself to, you know, either roll back or Yeah, have to fork to update the contract some contracts, you know, have a wait 10 they can update. But if something happens wrong on the on a, you know, these what these modules, then the whole network knows, they know to update, instead of, you know, some political back and forth of well, why should we roll back our chain? Or why do we, you know, why should we do hard fork and so on. So, this solid doing smart contracts is, is a little bit different than what you would find on other platforms, but it allows a lot more benefits than traditional smart contracts.
Rob McNealy
That’s kind of cool, actually. I think there’s a lot of potential applications for that. So as far as the atomic decks and these models, what other kind of interesting things do you have kind of in your long term horizon with Comodo platform?
Jason Brown
So, one of the things we’ve been working on is a paid acid system. So if you’re familiar With maker or am maker dow and die that’s a system for eath theorems stable coins, we’ve created a similar type of system to be used it’s a it’s a modules you can add this to any chain that’s created with committed we’re planning on adding it to the committed main chain itself that you could posit Komodo and then issue a stable coin. Now what makes us different than make your dollars and die is that it’s not limited to Komodo as a deposit and is not limited to US dollar as a paid gasa so that you could basically do any day any type of transaction. So you deposit dash and get dash euro you know so I coined it paid to the Euro but backed by cash. So I think this type of system is going to see a lot of use Because there is a a method of liquidations and such that a lot of traders might like in terms of profit taking and it brings more of the traditional forex and stock trading to blockchain.
Rob McNealy
Do you think something like that could work for gaming tokens? Like you were talking earlier about like Linden Dollars from? Second Life? I’m wondering if there’s an application that can be used with that.
Jason Brown
Um, well, they would be to me, I’m sure something could be made here. There’s very little that can be carried out by now. Crossing over a centralized system, like Goblin dollars and issuing a decentralized coin I would require some deep thought on how to make that work, but I’m pretty positive that is doable. Yeah, some issues you have to consider like if it’s on a centralized system. what’s to stop you know, the enter the game from blocking your account like as we see them World of Warcraft, or, you know any MMO RPG if you violate their terms of service and then the how how’s that gonna affect the you know blockchain tied version? There you have your backing it with Linden Dollars how’s that gonna affect a coin that was issued from that backing of the backing got banned or restricted somehow so it’s the I’m not saying it’s not doable it’s just there’s a lot of lot of thought process
Rob McNealy
Oh trust me the the people part the governance part is the hardest part of all this stuff like I tell people even forking, you know a project like you know, you start with another projects code base and we spent probably six months just trying to figure out how to manage it and how it should be governed. That’s the hard part. You know, everybody talks about oh code this code that you got good code Really the coding is not that complicated. You know, if you got some real I mean, it can be but but in the scope of things in my mind, you have to when you’re trying to figure out the whole governance piece one, you got to find something that people will, will think is fair, right? And then you got to figure out a system that is less likely to be gamed or cheated. You know, and, and so, and then a system that people will use and all those things are really, really complicated. And, and so that’s what I tried to, you know, tell people that, you know, making a crypto project, you know, the coding part is super hard. I mean, that, you know, it’s challenging, there’s no doubt about that. And I’m lucky that I got really, really smart people that know that stuff. When I kind of explained this is what I want in my brain and how do we make that happen? But, you know, it’s interesting to trying to work out all the ways people can do bad shit. When you’re building a project. That’s that’s the complicated So I’m always just looking, I don’t have to know how something’s coded. But if I understand how, what capabilities are out there, it always just makes me think because I’m kind of a serial entrepreneur. So I’m always looking like how could this work in this scenario, I’m always ready to, you know, there’s people that are like Applied Science people, like you got the people that are theoretical, and then, you know, like a nuclear technician might be more applied nuclear science. I think like, I’m gonna apply an entrepreneur like I always kind of think like, I don’t need to know how to code that but I want to understand how I can use that. And so that’s how my mind works. And you know, but you need both of course. Well, I do appreciate you coming on the show. Because you know, I’m big fan of you guys do now that I understand it a little more. I’m even a bigger fan. So where can people find out more about Komodo platform?
Jason Brown
People can find out more about us at our website at KomodoPlatform.com. In a we have a lively community on our Discord. Search for Komodo platform dischord going join us out we’ll be more than happy to do explain more about our technology. And, you know, if you have a project in mind, we have many, you know, helpful developers that will help guide you on on your path.
Rob McNealy
Jason Brown, thank you so much today for coming on the show.
Jason Brown
Thank you.