Blockchain Innovators with Conor Svensson and Kyle Thomas

Hi, it's Conor Svensson here, Founder and CEO of Web3 Labs. This is a conversation I had a with Kyle Thomas. Kyle is the CEO and Founder of Provide. Provide is a leading enterprise blockchain whose platform could be used to quickly launch up enterprise blockchain applications. In addition, Provide have been working with Unibright and have created the Baseledger Protocol to fulfill the major requirements of enterprise organizations for participating with Baseline enabled business processes. In our discussion we covered the Baseline Protocol and where blockchain is gaining significant traction in enterprise. We also talked about the convergence of enterprise DeFi, what service level agreements and invoices have in common, and how identity is going to be the next big thing in blockchain. Okay Kyle great to have you here. Hey Conor, great to be here, thanks for having me. No problem at all. So let's start with some how you first got into blockchain, because Provide's been going for a number of years now and it would be great to learn more about the path that took you there in the first place into founding the company and then also learn a bit more about your journey with the company in terms of what you started off trying to do versus where you are now, because obviously a lot has happened in in this last few years. Yeah, this is certainly a loaded question! So, Provide got started actually back in 2014 as an enterprise, sort of an enterprise logistics company. We were really focused on Uber, sort of an Uber for enterprise approach and started off outside of blockchain. However, I had had my eye on blockchain at that time and we had a deal, like an eight-figure deal fall through and I took a step back. I was sort of like hmm maybe this isn't the right path for the company. So I actually took a step back at that point because I was already sort of 'one foot in, one foot out' looking at blockchain and I actually took a couple of years off of Provide and I took a step back intentionally to say you know, 'how can I pivot the company into the enterprise space?' Because, you know, the blockchain space there was obviously this vacuum in the enterprise blockchain space. So, I took some time. I was just doing some cyber security work during that time and really sort of refocusing on blockchain. And there was a vacuum for a reason in enterprise blockchain, it was a few years yet before we would get sort of to where we are now, right? So I really started Provide back up in the middle to latter part of 2017 and that was really when it got started as Provide, the Provide that you know today that's focused on blockchain in the enterprise space. In late 2018, we co-org'd, where we organized rather, ETH Atlanta which was what put us on the map. We soft launched Provide late that year and that's what put us on the map in Atlanta with folks like CONA and really all the large enterprises turned out for that event. So, that's sort of how we got our start. Yeah, nice, nice. One of the classic things with blockchain is - people say about it being a solution looking for a problem in enterprise and it has certainly evolved more and more in terms of the different use cases and so on. So, to those people who do sort of have that view, where do you feel like the real sweet spot is for the technology in it, where also which is a reflection on the traction you're seeing as well with your work? Yeah, it certainly was that for some time it felt like from 2017 until late 2019 there was, you know we had we had built this sort of solution for developers. It really started out, or the idea at least, was to make something for developers in the same way that Twilio had given developers SMS, you know, wanted to give developers blockchain. A very easy to use, programmatic interface for blockchain and we succeeded at doing that. But it still felt like a solution looking for a problem. Then I think a lot of that changed, we'll get get to this I'm sure, with Baseline. What I had seen come the mid to latter part of 2019 was the need to go sort of higher in the value chain and towards solving an actual problem versus only providing these tools for developers so they could go find a solution for the problem. It was really we needed to find a solution. We needed to find it, because it was so early and so that's sort of where where the idea for Shuttle came. So Shuttle's a product that we've been envisioning since mid 2019, to the latter part of 2019. What Shuttle originally was, was essentially like an orchestration tool and work group management tool for organizations to create sort of consortium-like group work groups where everyone in the work group, every organization that joined, would get an IPFS instance and an EVM client instance deployed. And really what that solution was, it was for data sharing. Right? It was like sort of the early, it was Baseline kind of before Baseline or maybe I guess Baseline had started privately in EY, ConsenSys and Microsoft. But, it was Baseline before Baseline became a public thing. It really was around the use case of data sharing and to me that's really the compelling use case that's foundational for supply chain and all these other use cases that are starting to crop up. I think data sharing is at the heart of it. Yeah, yeah. And, when you talk about data sharing, for those people who are kind of less well educated on why blockchain does fit so well because of course there's various cloud type platforms that provide these sorts of capabilities between organizations, but there's some unique properties that blockchain provides there, of course. Oh, yeah. And so, for those people who are less familiar with that, what would you say are those key things? So really, the non-repudiation of claims, meaning organizations being able to receive a message from others and basically being able to prove that you actually sent and someone actually received a message or piece of data. You know, I think that's not really present on a lot of like the 'Drop Boxes' or the that sort of solutions. The Amazon S3, though you know you can't really guarantee that an audit log is really an audit log on some of these solutions. And so, the earliest incarnation of what we had built at Provide, on top of our existing tooling. That's what was cool about Provide as well, we actually built on top of what we had built for developers. We actually built using the 'Amazon approach'. We used our own, you know dog fitted our own platform and so the tooling continued to mature as we as we built Shuttle on top of it in late 2019. I think that the strongest thing about all of it was the non-repudiation of claims but also doing so in a way that preserved some level of privacy, the degree of privacy, that you wanted to keep. You didn't have to share the entire binary data, you could just share some representation of it like a hash, or something to that effect. That way you could distribute the actual data to only certain parties in the work group and again that's very like Baseline-esque I think, in sort of our our approach. Yeah and with Baseline, obviously you've mentioned it a few times already, how did Baseline slot into this because you said that the work you were doing earlier on with Shuttle and IPFS and having the EVM in there, it was so well aligned with this and so when Baseline came along there was just this really good synergy for you, right? Yeah, it was funny because... so I'd had a few conversations with John Wolpert, I guess in mid 2019 or towards the latter part of 2019 and I had shown him Shuttle and he was like 'oh yeah you got to be a part of Baseline' and so I joined the EEA in the main networking group as a result of those conversations with John. And I think that the rest is sort of history, the way that developed. We joined the TSC as a result of those early conversations and it was just a good fit from the start. It just resembled the pattern where we sit today. Very early stages, like we didn't have a privacy service or anything at that point for zk snarks or anything yet but that's sort of what we built over the course of 2020 to add to that existing architecture. And then so in effect what you did, Baseline came along and what was there was more like a proof of concept that had been done for a specific use case and you came in and, I guess, well brought it in to Provide but kind of made it more of a kind of service rather than it being like here's a very specific use case. You sort of opened it up and enabled people to be able to deploy that sort of architecture more readily. Yeah, I think that's a good characterization. Speaking about like Radish34, yeah that certainly was the POC that EY, ConsenSys, Microsoft had incubated and released as open source. And yeah, it wasn't really reusable, it was a good POC but it was looking at it and saying this looks a lot like Provide in our architecture for Shuttle. How can we make this more scalable and make it easier for developers to build stuff using this new pattern because I think we're onto something here. Yeah. And then and you went truly down the rabbit hole with the code there, right? You were busy there for a while doing all sorts of refactorings and just repurposing it so it's just more accessible. Have you been able to step away a little bit or is it still that you're still finding yourself getting pulled in a knot? So, I would say we deprecated the Radish34 bits, we learned a lot from it certainly. We created a new service, a new privacy service, to add to the stack. We added like Kubernetes support and hardened the existing stack a bit but then really made use of some of those existing components like NATS and our contributions to the NATS ecosystem and those bits are still there today. I do still find myself just sort of crawling out of the rabbit hole, just to get pulled back in there a little bit there here and there but, the team has really grown a bit since early 2020 and then since Baseline, since we joined the Baseline community the team has grown a bit, so that's certainly been helpful. But yeah, I still find myself enjoying some of the privacy code and really hardening it up. Yeah, I still get in there sometimes. Yeah, yeah, it is fun but then you suddenly look up and you realize like the whole day's gone by and there are some other things you're trying to work! Yeah! That's why there's the night, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, Baseline itself, of course it was early on it was a collaboration with EY, ConsenSys and Microsoft. Provide got very involved but then there's a number of other organizations that you're working with as well on this stuff too obviously, Unibright, Nethermind and some others there. Certainly, Unibright, you've got a very close relationship with the team there and how do they kind of fit into all of this? Yes so, that was one thing that I was very pleasantly surprised to find, when we joined the EEA and also the Baseline community was Unibright, and just how, because they're really focused they have decades of experience on the enterprise integration side, namely with SAP and that pattern. If you have a really strong integrator, the pattern for SAP integration will, a good tip will take you far. When you talk about the context of other traditional systems of record like Dynamics and others, even all the way to like Excel, the difference between an SAP and an Excel integration is quite large. But, on the SAP side it's much needed to have that sort of trusted partner and because of their decades long experience in that space and also their vision, their sheer vision for like low code or even no code on enterprise blockchain integration, it was very well aligned. You know, they had this token, like they were actually an issuer, the issue of UBT and they did it in the right way like they're a team that stood behind what they had done with UBT and they stood behind their decision there and then the community and they wanted to do something much bigger with with UBT. So it was a great synergy and opportunity there, one - on the enterprise integration side and two- on the UBT side. So we sort of acquired a bit of the Unibright technology stack in late 2020 when we announced that partnership. Provide, Unibright sort of became this one message and one sort of commercial focus when it comes to the blockchain and the Baselining side. That seems to have been the right move. Yeah, we're doing well with Unibright and it's great to see the community work together in such ways, it's kind of magical! And the Baseledger technologies, is that something that you're working on with Unibright or is that... It's absolutely something that we're working on together with them, yeah. So, Baseledger is this new network that folks are sort of getting behind, it seems like. The idea for Baseledger was to create this sort of layer one / layer two interoperability in the context of Baseline and also while adding UBT as a sort of a gas token for this network. So we're working very closely with Unibright to launch the initial test net for Baseledger. I think it looks a lot like the Provide stack to be honest, I think it looks a lot like the provide stack with a Tinderman consensus sort of underneath it, which means sort of translated you know, it's a really good opportunity for Provide to open source some of the core bits of the stack at this point with the Baseledger test that'll release here pretty soon so we're looking at open sourcing the ident in-chain vault and privacy services alongside this release so it's pretty exciting. So, how does Baseledger kind of fit in with with Baseline? You said about connecting layer 1 and layer 2. Of course with layer 1 would be like a public Ethereum network and Baseline provides an integration, as you said earlier, for like system of records between different organizations where they use the Ethereum network as that kind of source of truth for information that's being exchanged, albeit in a secure way so that the specifics of what's being exchanged aren't publicly visible to anyone looking at the Ethereum network. Yeah, so if you look at the way the Provide stack is used by our early adopters it sort of sits at the edge, like really close to the ERP system. Like it runs on the same network for example and so to that extent it's already this distributed system where you've got...Well Provide does run its own hosted environment but then every organization also runs their own hosted environment. So for example, CONA provides their own fully standalone hosted environment for the bottlers and so each bottler then connects to that environment and so if you think about it like this and all those bottlers also share an SAP system also provided by CONA. So the Provide stack sits very close to the edge if you consider each organization the edge of the network. To that extent, the Baseledger there's a lot of primes, there's a lot of proofs that are generated in a Baseline workflow. Each workflow has work steps. Each work step can generate a proof and in many cases more than one, depending on the organizations as they're proposing new states for the network. All these proofs can be written to Baseledger because you don't want to write all these proofs to the Ethereum mainnet because that would add to the cost and complexity and clog the network up even further etc. So you can write these proofs to Baseledger and so as a workflow reaches finality or exits like when, let's say you have a five step workflow like procure to pay workflow, you know you have a PO, an SO, a shipment notification, a goods receipt and an invoice. That invoice, that is the exit, right? When that invoice is cut, the workflow is over. And, you can have many tens or hundreds of thousands of these in a year if you're a large organization. So, each one of those workflows when it exits, we can then take the result, each one of those proofs of course, having been written by way of Provide privacy to Baseledger. We can then exit those into some layer two for example. We could at that point decide 'oh this this makes a lot of sense to use a state channel or Optimism or some layer two EVM compatible layer two and start to roll these proofs up in that layer. So, we can basically have like the raw workflow exit proofs and then we have on layer two, sort of the zk roll up of that and then once that zk roll up reaches a certain volume or time limit, we call it a million dollars or 15 days or a month, whatever, we can then exit from that layer two onto layer one. So we have on Baseledger just the proofs all of them, the zk rollup proofs on layer two and then the zkzk roll up proofs go to layer one. So, that's sort of how Baseledger facilitates and fits into the whole process. Hopefully that made sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in effect, it provides a mechanism for people to more rapidly of course, exchange information but also make additional information available to other participants on the network that you wouldn't necessarily want to share with the whole of the Ethereum network. Yeah, it's not that it's the data that you wouldn't want to share, it's just that you wouldn't want to write that data to the Ethereum network. It's basically, maybe this is a bit of a dirty word, but it's a public permission chain that uses UBT for gas and it operates just the way the Provide stack does today except, it writes all the data that gets written by Provide, by our privacy service, and shared with the participants in the work groups that are privy to the off chain and on chain data in workflows in those work groups. All that data, those proofs rather, get written to this public permission chain that's underpinned by Tendermint consensus. Yes, so that's another a key property generally of Baseline is that fact that it's always proofs that are being written to the change rather than the actual raw data itself which satisfies those needs of enterprise. Right, and it's not hashes either, that is a good point. It's not just the hashes either it's actual proofs which is also I think, a key differentiator between that and sort of the proof of existence that we started out. So Shuttle started out as sort of turnkey proof of existence back in 2019 and it turned into turnkey zk snarks at the end at this point. So you've mentioned the fact you're working with CONA. Is that work still ongoing or where have you got to with it? Because it's a very high profile client and it's obviously a great use case as well for Baseline and also the Provide stack but yeah, how far along are you with the work? Yeah, it's gotten pretty far along. I think we're targeting September this year for'production, production' so we've deployed this to CONA and it's running currently and we're targeting a September release. We're pretty close with our partner Concircle on getting their solution for their SAP connector if you will, and this was also by way of the Unibright SAP connector getting that solution certified and what that is, is something that we've developed with them specifically for automating the configuration of multi-tenant SAP environments for Baselining and so that solution is obviously most, if not all, enterprises require SAP certification for running anything in 'production, production' with real money. So that's where we've been working and testing with the second largest bottler in the United States, in North America rather, and that's United Bottling. We've been working in a production, like a copy of production sort of environment. But in September, I think we'll see as early as the end of July, we'll see that that Concircle EBC plug-in certified by SAP and then I think we'll see in September, I think we'll see the first invoice - the first real money invoices - handled. Yeah, that would be an awesome milestone! So outside of the work in supply chain, are there other areas that you're seeing big interest in this technology? Yeah, so absolutely. We're looking at... so, ServiceNow, I think we demo'ed ServiceNow a few months ago on one of the Office Hours, Baseline Office Hours. That use case is really interesting because ServiceNow is I think, they're the fastest growing company, I don't know, they're like one of the fastest growing companies in the world I believe, that's a pretty bold statement but, I think that's true. At any rate, they're a very rapidly growing company that took interest in the work in the technology. Their CEO is the former CEO of SAP, I believe and so that's an interesting synergy. The use case that we're really really interested in is starting off with incident management because you usually have a lot of organization, a lot of different parties involved in in incident management. So, there'll be some vendor that deploys, it'll be a customer obviously, there'll be a vendor that sells a solution and then there'll be some other organization that's responsible for maintaining it or making sure that things run smoothly in production, for example. So you'll have a lot of incidents that happen and I know many organizations that have this issue. These incidents will happen and someone will like look at their phone it'll be like three in the morning and they'll be like no thanks and they'll like turn it off, right? They'll like snooze the alarm or whatever and they'll just like dismiss the incident and that's a problem because it doesn't get looked, doesn't get resolved. And so I think that there's a pretty huge opportunity to apply the technology in that sense. To enforce for example, SLA compliance and so we're looking at how... and so incident management is the first step and then the SLA compliance part is the second bit and if you look at that together and you look at what an SLA typically represents, it sort of comes full circle back to an invoice, right? So if you look at an SLA, you could say'oh well this is just an invoice waiting to happen', every 30 days fill in the blank and the time period, right? So I think that's another interesting one that can lead us down the path of enterprise DeFi and I think that's kind of what we're looking at in the context of ServiceNow and there's some pretty large banks that have gotten excited about that, who are actively checking in and like looking into the tech in that context as we build that out the service now, that's very exciting. Those are the two areas that we're most focused on I think, in terms of the supply chain, the procure to pay model and also the SLA incident response model. But then there's also just general enablement. Other organizations that are large that want to get into this space all want, the market for tooling is still very much a real part of it. Yeah, and you mentioned there with SLAs and almost that angle for enterprise DeFi, and what's your take on where we are in terms of this convergence of some of what's been happening in DeFi and enterprise, taking note of opportunities there? At one extreme you've of course got the the financial speculation and the the crazy returns that people are getting, but then you've also seen things like Aave, one of the leading DeFi lenders actually opening up their lending pools to enterprises with KYC and so on and so of course when we're coming at it from the things like technologies like ServiceNow and supply chain and systems of record, it is a different sort of angle there and they're different types of use cases. But at the same time, what's your take on how there's the opportunities for convergence with some of the DeFi stuff and what you're seeing in enterprise? Well, I think DeFi, you know, the DeFi space has been very very small compared to what it will be when you have all these really large corporations adding all that volume and liquidity into DeFi. I think it's just a matter of time. There's going to be some success stories that are measured, that are reported on, that really I think, tip the scales if you will or like tip the balance of the risk appetites in the enterprise space to be like 'okay this isn't some ponzi scheme'. Not to categorize DeFi as a whole as that already, but you know there's perceptions, right? And people don't want to lose their jobs so they just play it safe but once there's some tried and true measured results, they're gonna jump in because it makes a lot of sense, right? I think you can look at this opportunity sort of as like a turning point in the world really, for financial inclusivity. I think a rising tide raises all boats in that sense because you know what I think is these organizations and the opportunities, especially like the procure to pay side, is for providing instant payment for invoices and I think that creates a better quality of life for a lot of people and even the smaller players, most importantly the smaller players, in supply chains. You know, the very small raw materials provider can get paid a lot faster and so they can make sure their families have food on the table instead of waiting to get paid. That's a really great opportunity and byproduct of what this movement I think will result in, in the sense of bringing much greater financial inclusivity to the even the smaller players. It's a huge point that as well, just like that general inclusivity but also as you say, if you could almost the whole invoice, finance and factoring processes, if you could actually take advantage of some of the innovations and DeFi and start to provide it in those contexts then that's going to help so many people and companies. You must have found too, like especially when the company was smaller, you live and die a bit on some of your invoice terms and if someone's gonna you know, they're not gonna pay you when they say they are, that can be a real problem for making payroll and these sorts of things. So, yeah, it touches so many people. Yeah, it does. We've been working on sort of a Baseline work group or workflows where Provide is privy to these workflows and for example, CONA, and really even in the SLA when it's generalized, we've been able to generalize that for use there too. What these workflows are is essentially the proof of the invoice but not the full invoice data. So, while protecting the company's data, the company's invoice data, we can essentially use Provide payments, which is another one of our properties that we've had this vision for some number of years, really pass through in terms of the user experience passed through to some third party financial facility to provide credit decisions on the buyers and then essentially Baseline the credit decision. Then, for all the invoices that come out of that process, for example like a bottle or as it gets a credit decision, the proof of that decision alongside all the invoices that the suppliers opt into having paid immediately, all of those invoices can be proven against the credit decision and we can essentially provide a stream of those invoices to DeFi without actually sharing the raw invoice data. So that means we can scale the DeFi offering that we really want to enable, we're actually enabling it, right? We don't want to provide the financing or anything like that. We just want to enable the tokenization so that some other party or parties can provide the financing. So there's a number of great conversations that we're having and we have some liquidity that's been offered to actually buy that invoice stream, so I think this year we'll see real money invoices be financed and DeFi, which is good. It's really, really good progress because I think that's what's going to be needed. There's going to be that story and the measured results that come from that I think, in order to enable the broader ecosystem and sort of quell any fears about jumping in for CFOs to really wrap their hands and heads around how this works. Yeah, that's definitely a huge one. And, going back on to the workflow topic, you've also got a low code component to the platform as well and I know previously when you spoke about it, it was due for launch. Has it launched now or are you still working on it? So, we haven't launched it. What we've done, we've given a preview, it was pretty far along some months ago, when we demo'ed it. It's still called Shuttle and yeah, it's a workflow designer that's really for ecosystem operators. It's for operators that want to define the workflows and also invite the participants into a Baseline, their baseline ecosystem and so CONA is the initial case that we used to really build that out. It allows the no code, sort of the drag and drop, no code design of an arbitrarily long or or short workflow and then it makes sure that all the participants that join have all the artifacts. I mean, that's what the protocol does today and so Shuttle, we actually have brought in this really incredible boutique design shop and we've actually invested quite a bit of money in this relationship to make Shuttle the best user experience that you could possibly find in the blockchain space for enterprise I think, in terms of this sort of ecosystem design and operation. We pushed the launch date back because of this. We engaged this third party to come in and really help us design it. We took what we had built and we didn't throw it away, it was quite robust some months ago when we showed it off, but we've really been focusing on just making sure that the UX is completely thought through and designed from the ground up. Just to make sure that it's the most beautiful product that we can bring to market. I think that we're probably about two months out from launching it. Yeah, nice, nice. That's awesome to see and look forward to it being out there. Yeah, I can't wait for it to come out. So outside of what we've discussed so far, if we move away from enterprise, what are you interested in apart from that side of things in blockchain? Of course, NFTs can be a little bit divisive but in terms of the bigger picture and what I guess, what you're most excited about, what would you say that is? I would say it's identity. That's a pretty generic answer but, yeah, I think in the context of being able to prove stuff, right? Which is really what Baseline is all about. It's about being able to prove things without sharing certain data. I think there's a lot that needs to happen. The fangs of the world have really created a lot of pressure, I think, on this space to innovate and create identity solutions for consumers to really take back control of their privacy when it comes to advertising and just in general. Like, you know, Alexa is listening to us right now probably! So I think from the consumer side, I think that's really very important. There's stuff out there today like Global ID, and some other interesting projects, that are sort of ledger based, giving you the ability to prove certain characteristics about who you are, to prove that you are who you are, whether that's by way of proof of phone number or address or whatever that might maybe. I think that's really interesting when it comes to Baselining you know, sort of connect the dots here because then you know in the future you could see a world where you know consumers are incentivized by brands to still participate but in a much more organic way. When you leverage tools that give the consumer back some control over their data. So I think that's most exciting because it's such an important, it's so needed right now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's such a hard problem as well and it's going to take time because so many enterprises are investing heavily in this space but it's going to take a while before we see the fruits of that labor. Exactly, yeah, that's true. One step at a time though, right? Yeah, the enterprise is still pretty much the focus but yeah, I would say there's other opportunities in the future around identity that would be interesting. But also too, I think it's fascinating as you draw the parallels there with the work you're already doing though with Baselining and that it does apply there too. Because, as with the decentralized identities, ultimately there is some sort of proof that they're referring to of a document or whatever else that verifies a claim that's being made on the actual identity there and so there's that nice kind of alignment. Yeah, you can make the connection, you can connect the dots. What's interesting though, when you have the idea of self-sovereign identity but then you've got to prove somehow that that is your driver's license number which is, which is not yours. You know like, your proof of phone number is still, it's not yours but there's still some way to disconnect just blindly sharing your digits. Which is still a good step forward and if you do it with enough things, then if you can parlay that together with a few different things you could really prove whether someone is who they say they are or not without sharing the data. It's definitely a possible thing to do today with the tech that exists, that we have implemented. So it's just a matter of getting the fangs of the world to... Throw away all this data they already have and embrace the decentralization... Yeah. Cool, cool. Well, Kyle if people want to keep abreast of what you're working on and what Provide's doing, what are the best ways for them to keep up with everything? I think the Baseline Office Hours is still a pretty pretty solid way. It's Wednesdays, I believe it's at noon every Wednesday. We present something probably once a month or twice a month. You can follow us on Twitter it's @provideplatform, you can follow me it's @kylebt on Twitter as well. Yeah, I'd say those are probably your best bets. Typically, we're sort of trending toward that, I guess, the ethos that Ethereum community has sort of always exuded, which is just inclusivity and openness so if you reach out to myself or someone at Provide you'll get a response. Awesome! Well, Kyle it's been fantastic having you here and I look forward to continuing to see you going from strength to strength and more stories about these big enterprises embracing Provide too. Conor, thanks for having me today, it's been fun catching up! Cheers, speak soon, cheers.