Joe Roets – Dragonchain Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks Rob McNealy here. And today I am super excited. I am talking to Joe Rhodes he is one of the founders of Dragon and coin. They are project been around for some time and i think it’s it’s gonna be a really fun show. So make sure you listen to the whole show because I know you guys out there. He listened for five minutes and then you shut it off. You got to stop doing that stuff, because I can tell that you’re doing that stuff. All right, I really can’t. I’m just guessing. But anyways, Joe, welcome to the show. How are you today, sir?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m great.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So, let’s let’s just jump in here, man. You know, typical questions for a podcast like who is Joe rotes? Tell me about yourself.
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Okay, um, I’m..I’m I grew up in the Midwest. I’m a 25 plus year, software architect. I’m all about software all about open source all about scaling software. And I’ve worked for Lockheed. I’ve worked for Disney. I’ve worked for a lot of interests. firms that that had interesting projects that attracted me. And I came across Bitcoin, one of my guys brought it into the team in 2010. And we looked at it started playing with it, experimenting with it, doing a lot of different interesting things, some stupid, some fun, you know, we’re really early stuff. And this is the only time of namecoin and and you know, way before aetherium and way before much else was out there and ended up jumping around between a few different startups, you know, because I was very interested in the tech and and specifically in its philosophical value, you know, where, why, where it came from, why it was even there. And then ended up at Disney to build what became dragon chain and the Disney released from you know, from in its its own in in enterprise to the world and You know, after that we commercialized.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So tell me about that. So it was initially a Disney projects that got spun out. So did they just open source it? Or was it you know, something that was always kind of that open source community kind of thing? What’s the relationship there now?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
We originally built it, it was very much an experiment is very, you know, very much a bunch of us that were interested in the tech and how we could use it inside of Disney. Um, but I, I knew because we were in, we were working inside a W three, see their blockchain group two, you know, basically explore enterprise applications, and you know, what can be standardized and everything else and we, we ended up realizing that, you know, all these other entities, you know, IBM, Microsoft, a lot of the other groups, some of the banks that were in there, were interested in how we were doing it because what we were describing was stuff that they hadn’t been able to do Because we started from scratch, we didn’t work, Ethereum we did aetherium didn’t exist when we started. We didn’t work Bitcoin or Litecoin, or anything else, we literally started from the beginning. And we had you know, I’m, that’s the reason I even say that I’m primarily a software architect, I’m a software guy. And these things that are patterns in all systems, that’s that’s what I focus on. So I find the, the abstractions inside of a software system that can either make it more flexible, make it more scalable, make it more secure. And I applied that across the board to know basically blockchain and crypto that’s what dragon chain is. And when they realized that we were using devs, that that weren’t blockchain devs they were the devs we already had and that they were able to come in and just build stuff. When we were able to show them that we could actually scale in a radically different way than what they had seen. If I was able to then take some of their questions that we couldn’t answer, because it was all in the inside back to Disney and say, Hey, can we, you know, go through a process and you know, try to source this and you know, they had they already had a process in place. And so it just, it made sense. It made sense for Disney, it made sense for the project, and it made sense for, you know, our working with these other groups. So, that’s how it kind of ended up and yeah, they basically we went through and it’s, it’s now you know, we’ve made it public the process we went through, but it’s, it was a pretty intensive and interesting process that was involved legal involved patents, trademarks and involved the code itself security. And you know, making sure we pulled out proprietary code and things like that, but they just open sourced it and part of that they have a really interesting process that they they have to hand over the code To the person on the outside, and typically, it’s somebody who’s still working at Disney, and who, whose manager or VP sponsor has basically said, Yeah, you can spend every Friday working on this or, you know, something like that. And with with our team, we had a team that was cross a whole bunch of different business units. And so our sponsoring manager didn’t have anything on my time. So we had to, like broker deals between the groups and stuff like that and on Viet on the way out, when they’re going to hand it over to me personally. I asked them, Hey, can you guys approve me to create a foundation so we can, you know, say that will own the IP will own the code? So won’t be Joe, you know, and it worked out. So it’s pretty interesting.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what did you intend for your blockchain to do was there like a specific problem you’re kind of trying to solve with it?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Um, enterprise adoption. If that were the Specific because core capabilities of blockchain and cryptocurrency being proof that something happened at a particular point in time, you know, and that being the core of what even Bitcoin actually gives, is used to, you know, in Bitcoin is that is used to prevent double spend to, you know, to provide scarcity, but it’s all related to the fact that that block can with with a measured amount of security, you know, that’s an actual measurable amount of security that’s been applied to whether you trust that these transactions occurred between these two points in time. And so, you know, we basically were looking okay all of the core, abstracted cases capabilities of the technology itself blockchain. We wanted to to leverage in ways that you know, you couldn’t do with time with Bitcoin and you couldn’t do when aetherium came out, which is, you know, any any reasonable business is not going to put customer PII on chain. They’re not going to, you know, there’s HIPAA data, there’s, there’s all types of things they can’t do. And we wanted to make all of that possible. And to make it much, much more straightforward for a real business to use.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how did it end up working out?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Um, we did. We also want on the inside. I mean, we did over 20 different use cases. We did a lot of different things. Some of them were, you know, internal hackathons and things like that. But there were a lot of groups that were that were using and building and when we open sourced, we went for a year, fully on just straight open source. You know, managing Community Education trying to, you know, figure out what we needed to work on most. And in that year, we realized that the actual rollout and scaling, you know, it was, it was missing, the ease of use factor, the, you know, the architecture is very simple, it’s easy to code to, but to deploy it on, you know, the model that came out of Disney was a large, very large organization that can run all of the nodes themselves if they wanted to, because they have enough business units that you have the diversity, you know, so that all of the enterprise can see, okay, these are the transactions going through everywhere and all that. But we very much needed it to be a situation that if someone wanted to build something, they didn’t have to worry about the verification network, right? That that it would be provided for them. And so that’s why we commercialized and we, you know, created an entity and, and really decided to, you know, build an network and to build the infrastructure to allow people to deploy more easily.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So you build something from scratch which you know which in blockchain is kind of weird right everybody just kind of forks an existing code base that’s been vetted and beat up a little bit. How would you say dragon chain is different than say the base the code base for a theory amor, the code base for you know, Bitcoin or some of the, you know, graphene based block chains.
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Um, it is it’s an interesting thing because like all of the pho policy would have for saying, Okay, I’m going to create my own are not necessarily clickable because we are definitely not coding our own encryption or coding or you know, any any of the cryptography is all, you know, used for outside. So I wouldn’t want to say that it is more than anything a structural peace, where we, for one thing, there are a lot of different things about it. That it is primarily just software and that at every level of our consensus process, we are actually working with independent nodes where every node has its own blockchain. And the consensus is not it’s a hybrid network. So the consensus is not universal. That is, I own my own business I haven’t I have a business node that I’m either ledgering transactions on or I’m running smart contracts on and I can keep that you know, by default is fully private on and the only thing that moves up through consensus is the the protocol elements, which are the you know, basically the wrappers. So my payload itself is fully controlled by me I can expose it publicly if I want, but I’m for a regular business. It’s very fitting all the the same models apply that it’s as if I’m working on a on a server, and I’m storing my stuff there. I’m using it but the difference is that the wrappers around what I’m doing are all going through a six six separate dragon that nodes and then a combined security of aetherium and Bitcoin and aetherium Classic and whatever else we’re entertaining with the time on, which is for the proof so now I can basically show vendor or you know, later the courts if I’m getting sued, I can show somebody, this is exactly what happened and you don’t even have to trust me, you can actually you can actually do the math all the way up to Bitcoin and aetherium. And, and, you know, we we really, from the early days, knew that we wanted to leverage the tremendous hash power of Bitcoin and at any other network, but also the utility that is, um, you know, especially early on when we knew that You know, the ability to entertain with stores or with saya coin or any, you know, any of any of the other important utility networks that we could add as well as traditional that, you know, we’ve done plenty of integrations with RESTful API, very traditional systems that because of our model, it’s remarkably easy. And they are our time to market or most of the projects we’ve been on are really short, really fast build outs. So it’s pretty cool. And it also help with scaling. Because then the fact that every node has its own chain means they can all be independently scaled. They can they can run in with full cloud environments. And Gosh, yeah, is this a really long answer, um, the good the other. The other side of that is when you get into that, one of the other very unique pieces that most people Don’t don’t get yet is our actual scaling is based not on hardware because we’re, we’re cloud based. So we already knew that we could have ended up if we’re trying to incentivize people to run nodes that we have diversity there, that you could have a race to the bottom. Because, gosh, I’m just going to deploy it to Amazon, I’m going to throw up enough nodes to handle 80% of network and undercut everybody on my, my, what I’m going to accept you charge for fees, right? And in order to prevent that, we flipped the scarcity on its head and said, okay, instead of saying hardware scarcity, where you know, most blockchains out there, if you have more transactions coming through, there’s hopefully more fees usually, and therefore more people will procure hardware and put it in place and build a network, right. And you hope that it’s sustained traffic, so that If the person doesn’t know, the fees continue and the traffic continues. And the issue is the time between the traffic start, and when people can actually deploy hardware, which, you know, if it’s in cloud, it can be pretty quick. But, um, it’s not immediate, right? And in particularly, you know, if it’s not something that’s easily done in cloud because of your requiring hash power or anything else, it’s even more difficult. So, what we did is we took what was called DDS s, which was a slumber score, which is a time based component to our token. So if you hold a one dragon for one day, you get one time. If you hold a million dragons for one day, you get 1 million time for that day. And we take that time and that’s the scarcity. So all the nodes in the network competing based upon how long they’ve held how many dragons And they get more of the cut but on the other side the the the radically in at least to me interesting part for for adoption of scalability is the fact that the more time I have as a business that I want to apply to my node, the lower my fees are right and so it but it’s a deterministic fixed price fee for every transaction I sent through and the token price inside the system adjusts every month based upon market but to the general business user, they don’t really care they’re basically I’m gonna pay my you know 5000 10,000 a month for my node or nodes and I know that I have at least this many transactions and I know that the transactions will not go up in price that I won’t have trouble getting a transaction on chain or anything else no matter who else deploys on network right the you know, crypto kitties comes out, it doesn’t kill me. You know, defy comes out. Kill me right cuz right now it’s it’s really hard on aetherium to do business um, and it’s really unpredictable you know minute to one minute to next but with with Dragon chain you know that if you lock in the feed the fees and your lowest fee right now is 2510 millions of $1 per transaction and so you can lock in that number and you know when you have these you know you have the 500 million transactions you’re going to have this month that is absolutely going to be at that fixed price you don’t have to worry as a business you don’t have to worry about getting lunch chain all that’s cooked so..
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So would you say it’s so can you launch a token on your your platform on dragon is there is that part of that or are you do not do smart contracts the same way.
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Um, we do smart contracts and we do have tokens and we have something that we’ve termed a wormhole tech. It’s basically Consider something as, consider a theorem as a different, different universe and a theorem classic is a different universe. And maybe I don’t know what other preferred, you know, maybe EOS or somewhere else that I might have a token that we can map them back and forth. We do that with Dragons. That’s how dragons operate already where we use aetherium for its ecosystem, its token standards and security, right. And it means that we didn’t have to build our own hardware wallets. We didn’t have to do a lot of things. We were leveraging Ethereum for that utility. And you can do that already. We’ve had quite a few people do it. And we’ve we’ve helped out a lot with that. But it’s a it’s a, it’s a scaling question for that right where, you know, there’s no reason instead in many cases for every single transaction to be on aetherium instead If you put it on dragon chain it’s secured to a theorem and secured a Bitcoin and so you can prove all that but then when you’re actually integrating like say is a game that you know the game can be played you could you could roll this into a normal game where there’s no blockchain sold as part of it, but when people realize, Oh, I have this, this device this sword this, you know something that that I have accumulated enough of and maybe I don’t need this one or something else that I can realize at that point. Oh, this is crypto. You mean I could sell this somewhere? How do I do that? And they say it’s an adoption question because then you can get people to play your game without them already being crypto people which is such a you know, nice have a nice have a nice to get normies to play it but then to attract normies into your token, where they’re like, Oh gosh, I’m gonna I was already having fun. Now I realize I can make money doing this right where that At that point, that’s when you integrate with the crypto side and the others cost involved where people pay fees or whatever else. But at that point, it’s it sets its own threshold. Right that you know, right now, you’d have to have a lot more value in a theorem to exit in order to make it worth the fee. Right. But kind of depends on how much is sitting there.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I know I’m going back to when with our project with TUSC. When we started out, we weren’t eath token and it for us the nail in the coffin to build our own blockchain and move away from a theory was the F coin debacle two years ago, where they were just spamming the Ethereum blockchain and like it is right now. The cost to move tokens costs more than the tokens people wanted to move because of the transaction fees, which makes no sense to me and I have a lot of strong opinions but because I’ve been in as a project for a couple of years now as well, and, and I just It doesn’t make sense to me the way his theory was designed From a usability standpoint, and it’s like it, there’s, it’s baffling to me how they came up with the system the way it did. But, you know, it’s, it’s fascinating. So I always like to talk about what I when I talk to people that are developing projects and stuff and how, how do you get adoption? What is your strategy to get people to use dragon chain to build things on?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Um, well, we’ve gone through a number and some of them were, you know, you can get into libertarian side of things with, you know, we our initial piece to the engine was to have what we call the incubator or early on became dragonscale, which was supposed to be a very clean way to get incentivized input from people on the outside as to which projects should be moved forward. Right. And so there’s some funding to that, but there’s some selection to that and attention and and had a lot of really key features where it would have flatly solved a lot of the problems that the SEC is concerned about or other regulators were, you know, how do I avoid people? You know, how do I avoid exit scams? How do I avoid you know, and we had all that cooked in where it’s very clean way to be fair on both sides, where you know, early information, if, if it is correct, could be well rewarded, right. So, you know, people are incentivized to not lie, people are incentivized to end in on the other side, the projects are incentivized to actually deliver, because they don’t deliver, they don’t get their, their distributions of, you know, whatever the funding is on. And we had to pull back for some of that for us based on which was sad because that was clearly an advantage for adoption between a lot of interested parties. And we’re trying still to find we have a new take on it, that we think we could launch in the US but It’s not a top priority right now. And we we, we are actually actively looking actively looking for partners to do it internationally, you know that whether it’s for grants or other selection, but you know, VCs would be kind of primary. But right now what we’re working on is simply scale, you know, to be the the the system that can actually compete against traditional systems for scale. And definitely Trump them on security, and various other features that, you know, blockchain makes, you know, it’s pretty obvious and in that world, and so, you know, we’re really focused there and you know, we just launched a new pricing table where you know, we’d wanted it updated for quite a while. We’re now at transaction fees anywhere from $1 on the high end to, like I said, the 25/10,000,000 of a dollar and we’re getting a lot of interest because of that, and a lot of people are starting to realize what’s possible. And we’re also trying to do a lot of things that might to some seem a little bit you know, like they might not understand but you know, we launched launched on den den dot social and that’s basically a community forum that is native blockchain. So everything on the back end and there’s mining, and we really are trying to build out stuff that people can use both normal people and enterprises, right. So, you know, we just launched dragon factor my five which is a decentralized identity system that the back end has been operational for over two years. And you know, we’re just now Okay, we want to productize this now. We want other people to be able to use this like we have and and we have some really interesting aspects that we found a partner that could help us with some of the integrations that, you know, frankly, were more, you know, banking focused, you know, the typically things that banks do with identity were needed. But we were rolling in the ability to do it in a decentralized way where the user holds their own identity factors and can’t expose them as they wish, right? They don’t have to expose everything, they can expose just the smallest bit of information that passes whatever the business wants needs. And, um, you know, we’re basically, I mean, our strategy overall is very fundamentals based where we build and build and build and we figure out, you know, what does someone need we build it, we figure out okay, what would be a good demonstration of that capability, we build it and we’ve done it enough. I mean, we have a couple of systems that really are well used. You know, we get a lot of Transactions on eternal as an example people saving tweets and saving out various arbitrary information that they want to be able to prove later, you know, make some prediction on bitcoin price. I’ll put it there. And I can prove to you that is not just a screenshot that I photoshopped, you know, it’s this is literally data proven to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of security, you know, so interesting stuff like that. I don’t know. It’s hard to cut through noise though. There’s so much noise out there right.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And it’s only getting noisier isn’t it?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Yeah. Yeah. And all the all the speculation and all of the that that I you know, sometimes that’s a big complaint that I have.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right, I hear ya. No, opinions, right? What do you think of DEFI?
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
I don’t want to, I don’t want to say anything early. Right. I mean, I saw the Fenton. We always played the Fenton thing yesterday on our show, because it’s so well done. If you haven’t seen it explain DEFI, you know, but my take is I think that there has to be, and I’m too busy to really research projects, like I used to, I used to know everything about everything coming out, but, you know, there weren’t as many then either. There have to be, I would make, I would put money down that there are at least a handful of amazing projects in that space, right. And stuff that’s really needed. That’s really well done. And it’s an amazing future. But somehow, they get cut, you know, they get they, they lose attention to, you know, 10 Ds and yams and stuff, and it’s just, it’s crazy, and it’s not good for the industry. I don’t think that stuff, right. Um, and, you know, it’s always the thing where money is such a powerful driver to all of this. And the reason I even got into this, I’m a software guy. So the reason I got into this is this was frankly, the most exciting place to be in software forever, right? That’s the next near the next closest would have been, you know, Linux and open source itself. And you know, that’s very general thing but it’s funny because Linux is very much about liberty. Right? And whether you talk to Stallman or you know, it’s very much about Liberty This is such a key component. And basically Bitcoin embodies that Bitcoin is radically so you know, I’ve talked before about how the fact that it has I say this it basically enslaves humans it incentivize humans to such a level that it’s the most massively focused on processing in on earth is Bitcoin mining it you know, blows away supercomputer metrics and everything else because there’s a money driver. And so the key that, that the world missing is at least that this industry is missing is keeping a balance between that and the fundamentals. Because it’s so easy for something like defy to come along with like, Oh, it’s a way to make money, it’s going to go up next week. All it matters is a green bar. It doesn’t matter what it does at all. And there’s, there’s, you know, there’s value to that, because it can drive people to be interested. But the problem is when people are lazy, and they don’t actually research or they buy tokens, and don’t actually try to, you know, the real incentive should literally be if you hold a token. And based upon your holdings, really, you should be focused on how can I help those projects? Because literally, that is the best thing. It’s not good to say I bought this token or what are you guys doing? Right? Why is this token not for real? Why is this token price not going up? as well? It’s so backwards. It’s like, people shouldn’t be lazy. You You hold it,in our case, our tokens, our software licenses, literally they are modeled from the beginning. We even have a patent on that, on that the token model as a software license that it was supposed to be the answer the licensing answer to what happens right now with commodity compute, you know, with Amazon, you shouldn’t be paying monthly still, you know, it you should be paying as part of and you know, the fact that you are paying for however much CPU use on fits, and we just tokenize that and so if you’re holding dragons, you should be actively seeking integrations business, even marketing, whatever your talents are, right? Um, but a lot of people get lazy and you know, it happens on all projects, you know, where people just want it to go up and you know, it’s, yeah.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I always say you can’t bank on people not being lazy. In fact, I think the reverse I think you have to build systems. That is assumes that and then tries to figure out how to incentivize those people. Because I mean, we’ve run into the same thing right telegram group, why not go up or whatever it’s like it’s it’s pretty interesting. I do agree with you, I think, you know, people should do their research should do homework and, and should be more active and supporting. I’m just I’m not sure that’s realistic.
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
It’s like, I could see that, um, it’s the weirdest thing though, because you think about it. Most businesses, they have customers and the customers have their products and they don’t care otherwise. Right. But, um, you know, Apple and a few other few other companies have had something where it’s almost like a cult where people will actively promote for for no money, right? So there’s some there’s something psychological there on the intent, though, of, of crypto is that the the incentive is built in you hold that you actually own the token. Nobody can take it away from you. You You should literally be as incentivized as possible to actually try to promote, and sometimes you can see it, but it’s not maybe fun. focused, right, anyway.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s interesting because, you see, I say success breeds success, right? Like if it’s starting to become popular that people want to be a part of that and talk about it. It’s that’s that tribal mentality, I think, and even with us when you know, our project, I mean, we’re not anywhere near where you guys are, but it’s like, you know, we can see when we have an announcement or you know, something cool really happens. It just gets people excited and they talk more about it when things are boring or low or not going the right direction. People get quiet about it. And I think part of that with crypto, you know, it’s it’s about that tribal identity and people want to associate with the winning team. They don’t want to they want they don’t want to associate with losing teams. That’s why it’s like you know, Bitcoin maximalist right I mean, you know, I’m not a big fan of Maxis on any project but if you look at Bitcoin maximalist it’s like okay, well you just like went to the number one football team and then you signed up for them and you’re there chiller. Well that’s that’s lazy, you know that, you know, it’s just like, okay, just sit there yay, yay great number one team keep going, you know and it’s like there’s more to it than that. But I do I mean I do appreciate your time and I think this is it’s good stuff and I and I you know I I’m gonna be doing a little more research and dragon I haven’t, you know, you in you know, inspired me to kind of do my own research here and and spend a little more time looking at what you guys are doing because you are doing some different things. And I think I hope the listeners here will take a look at dragon chain as well and see what you guys are doing. And you know, I hope in the future, you guys can come back or you can come back on and let me know when you got some cool, you know, projects happening or some cool announcements. I’d really like that. So, Joe, where can people find out more about you and dragon chain
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Dragon chain.com primary we also do various things on den Deus social. And you know, you can reach out to us on telegram. I mean, there there are multiple official and unofficial telegram groups and multiple languages we have. We even have multiple language layers now and dim dot social so people can at least read about and ask about dragon chain in their own language with their own, you know, people that can answer directly so it’s pretty nice. And there are a lot of places I guess.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate your time.
Joe Roets – Dragonchain.com
Thanks Rob.
