Can Blockchain be Utilized? AERGO Open Source Project for Blockchain Popularization [TRANSCRIPT]

SESSION 1: Can Blockchain be Utilized? AERGO Open Source Project for Blockchain Popularization

REPORTER: ANGU DO from Techsuda

GUEST: HUNYOUNG PARK, the CTO of BLOCKO

From the video: https://youtu.be/VzpxPNOhwaE

Angu Do: Wow! Hello everyone. This is reporter Angu Do from TechSuda. We have a special guest today who will explain to us about blockchain service, technology and trends. Please welcome Hunyoung Park, the CTO of Blocko.

Hunyoung Park: Hello, my name is Hunyoung Park and I am the CTO of BLOCKO, currently working to popularize blockchains.

Angu Do: What Coin?

Hunyoung Park: You mean Bitcoin? I had them at some point.

Angu Do: I tried to be familiar with Bitcoin. The worldwide popularity on blockchains has been fluctuating to its lows and highs. IT companies are continuing to improve their technology and constantly generating new types of services. It would be great if you could share with us some of your insights with us today regarding this topic. What topic will you be discussing today?

Hunyoung Park: Today, BLOCKO will be presenting “How blockchains have been incorporated to the market.” In order to better understand this topic, it is necessary to discuss what the required technologies. Furthermore, I would like to tell you about AERGO open source project in details.

Angu Do: Please tell us more about AERGO open source project.

Hunyoung Park: To briefly summarize what we do at BLOCKO, we have been trying to incorporate blockchains to the market since 2014.

Our company have initially been dealing with public blockchains, aka Bitcoin but pivoted to enterprise blockchains after coming to a conclusion that incorporation of blockchains to enterprise is of main priority. Therefore, our company has the most experience and number of cases when it comes to incorporation of blockchains to customers.

Angu Do: Yes, enterprise has shown tremendous interest on blockchain incorporation.

Hunyoung Park: That is correct, In the beginning not many people were aware of blockchains. Bitcoin was the only thing that come to their minds when they heard the term blockchain and we have received many inquiries asking what exactly blockchain is. We explained to customers how to incorporate blockchains almost free of charge and contributed to their businesses even by visiting them ourselves.

Angu Do: Can you please simplify even further what your company does?

Hunyoung Park: Of course Our company was established in 2014 as a blockchain company that develops blockchains and markets them. We also provide SI consulting services to facilitate customers to incorporate blockchains. Our most representative product is a middleware-like B2B product called AERGO Enterprise. We also act as service providers to apply these products. Our company has been present since the beginning of blockchain industry and we were the first to verify GS through blockchains in the country.

Angu Do: That is right.

Hunyoung Park: Yes, right? We have recruited very good researchers. By recruiting researchers experienced in database, distribution database and blockchains, we have attempted to create useful products expanding to the next level. That is the reason our company owns several “first” titles.

Angu Do: Can you tell us about establishment and servicing cases?

Hunyoung Park: Our company has the most cases of commercialization. We have several branches across the world and we received the grand prize at the Singapore Fintech Awards in 2018. Gartner has mentioned us as one of the key players in PaaS and Blockchain PaaS along with AWS and IBM. Therefore we have a great reputation in this industry.

Angu Do: People who are familiar with this industry call it BaaS, or Blockchain as a Service. Well, our viewers are also familiar with this term. Hahaha.

Hunyoung Park: Yes, I am certain that most of the viewers are familiar.

Angu Do: Oh! You have honed your technology since 2014.

Hunyoung Park: That is correct. At the time, a lot of the attention was focused on using the initial versions of Bitcoin and Ethereum. There was no concept of enterprise business. We have done academic presentations on how to use blockchains including verification or e-document stamping. Furthermore, we have helped many customers.

Angu Do: Let’s check out what else we can discuss about.

Hunyoung Park: I would like to talk about why AERGO project is so significant. Since most of our customers belong to this project, we see many of their reactions. At first, the customer display interest, which turns into fatigue as the project progresses. This is called Blockchain fatigue. Although blockchains are considered an innovative technology, the government places institutional restrictions and the use of blockchains is actually harder than it seems. The business has to cooperate with multiple departments such as information security department, which makes internal clearance of blockchains very difficult. There are a lot of questions such as “is data protected?” or “is the security good enough?”. At first, blockchain service providers only provided the technology and disregarded other aspects that arise from the implementation of blockchains. Also, businesses only consider the initial cost of blockchains and not about the cost that arise from such problems. Yes. Extra cost incurs and previous legacies are not very useful and there is sunk cost. There is complexity, cost and technology requirements. Since, many firms only provide technology during the initial phase of projects and do not want to get involved in the following processes, customers feel fatigued due to all the complications. Our AERGO project was born from our desire to reduce customers’ stress and fatigue.

Angu Do: Since customers ask the same questions, a technology that provides total service or providing support would be useful in solving these issues. So you can provide a complete service.

Hunyoung Park: Yes, that is a very accurate statement.

Angu Do: BLOCKO will take care from A to Z.

Hunyoung Park: Yes. That is what we strive for and desire. During our introduction to the market, the customers’ requests were for Ethereum, Fabric or AERGO. As specialized industry such as verification and e-document firms were starting to rise, the demand switched to “provide me with a solution to this matter.” In my opinion, our company will be focusing on providing blockchain based on platform and service. Platforms and services have already taken care of issues such as internal security requirement. Therefore, it would be easier to introduce them to the market.

Angu Do: If introduction of blockchains is a success, the business would be eager to apply it in a different area. In this case, a platform would be easier to be applied in other sectors.

Hunyoung Park: People in the IT Industry were hesitant of using subscription services, SaaS and PaaS in the beginning. Now they are more open to these options. Since blockchains used to be hidden behind IDC, it wasn’t clear what they were like. However, people nowadays think about deploying the blockchains through services or using public blockchains.

Angu Do: This open source project called AERGO. I was not familiar with it prior to our discussion today. Could you please tell us more?

Hunyoung Park: Ultimately, blockchains do not provide any reliability unless they are used through open source. Since the protocol exposes all the codes, nobody would use it unless it is verified. Famous projects are all conducted using open source and our company also provides transparency through Github. As I mentioned before, there are several methods to facilitate customers to incorporate blockchains. We are developing one of these methods through a familiar route. I will get into more detail later on but we proposed a development plan that completely differs from regular blockchains. Although it can be done through regular methods as well. Secondly, a common issue arises from customers preferring private blockchains. A private blockchain means to insert an entire blockchain within a private infrastructure, which limits its access. However, blockchain’s meaning and power increases exponentially when it is linked to public. When it is used in a private domain, there are many limitations. While pondering on ways to solve this issue, we came up with using hybrid blockchain models. Instead of running own server or installing anything for the sake of platform and service, this project allows automated operation when a desired DApp is deployed through Github.

Angu Do: Open source. People nowadays must be familiar with it?

Hunyoung Park: Of Course. We also faced some oppositions. Since IT products are assets, people commented that we are not going to make it if we were to openly share everything. However, we were thinking about the Red Hat model. There is a powerful kernel-based open source called Linux. Red Hat packages Linux and does an excellent job at tech support. From our perspective, we will use our open source AERGO and we will package it, assemble it and provide it to the customers as a middleware with access to tech support. Of course, not everything, such as monitoring tool, will be openly shared with public.

Next Topic: 3 major Components of the platform.

Angu Do: Can you explain to us what kind of platform it is?

Hunyoung Park: There are 3 major components. Firstly, we have the AERGO main network, core technology and core protocol which are openly shared through open source and verified by the community. Secondly, these components are packaged and our B2B products are delivered by AERGO Enterprise. Lastly, our AERGO Hub serves as a PaaS service that combines platform and service to allow use of blockchains. These 3 components would provide the highest customer satisfaction when combined together.

Angu Do: Can you please go into more details?

Hunyoung Park: I’ll try to explain AERGO mainnet in simple terms. For example, people nowadays commonly think that Bitcoin and Ethereum are “De facto standard.” Bitcoin has become an asset and Ethereum is thought as a public backbone.

Angu Do: Yes. Smart contract.

Hunyoung Park: That is correct. However, Ethereum block confirmation takes 13–15 seconds, which is not suitable for its application in businesses. Since decentralization was preferred but services were not running, a high-performance network was necessary. Therefore, we launched a network called AERGO main network, which has a performance that is hundreds of times better than Ethereum. However, it does not provide decentralization well compared to Ethereum. While Ethereum is composed of direct democratic foundation, our work resembles a vote-mediated indirect democracy. In our case, since performance has been heightened, decentralizationhas been reduced. Therefore we are attempting to form a linkage with Ethereum and bring their reliability and decentralization. As I mentioned, hybrid model links two different chains through our internal technology, Merkle Bridge. We provide a technology that allows transfer of digital assets from one side to another. In customers’ private chains, we also create small side chains.

Angu Do: Yes, People think that when everything is linked, it is not rational. They think that decentralization can be done and later on link them like in hybrid models.

Hunyoung Park: A customer’s basic business is run in private chains. Our mainnet’s goal is to transfer assets in private chains to public chains to allow activities such as exchange. The performance is better, of course. We provide different types of services. The most important fact is that we have the technology to move assets and our main network’s security is fortified through a voting process called governance. That should be enough for the main network. I would like to move on to how we approached enterprise.

Next Topic: AERGO Enterprise.

Hunyoung Park: The product we would like to introduce to you today is the AERGO Enterprise.

AERGO Enterprise is a blockchain platform currently used by businesses. It has a performance of 10,000 TPS or more. Furthermore, there is phenomenon called “Instance Finality”, where public blocks are confirmed and disappear. Our services prevent this phenomenon and finalize the confirmation process. Business compliance has many requirements such as security, encryption, security authority check, encryption of data and deletion. These requirements can be taken care of by our company. Our development method was discussed previously. Are you familiar with SQL?

Angu Do: Mastery of SQL leads to affluent life…

Hunyoung Park: That’s exactly it!

Angu Do: Basic of the basics.

Hunyoung Park: Why are smart contracts developed with difficulty? This was our starting question. The biggest problem was that we did not have anyone who could develop using smart contract.

Angu Do: Such engineers are hard to find and smart contract developments are very difficult.

Hunyoung Park: That is correct. Development is difficult and it has to be learned from scratch. Therefore, we introduced SQL into smart contracts. We proposed a development method that can be used by the 15 million SQL developers in the world without even knowing that our products are blockchains.

Angu Do: When I was covering big data in the past, the engineers were very happy when SQL announced that they will be supporting Hadoop. Is this the same as ‘we can use SQL in Blockchains’?

Hunyoung Park: Yes. We ultimately handle data for the customers. Blockchains such as Ethereum can only be accessed through a key-value, which raises questions such as ‘How do I search it?’ and ‘How do I range scan?’ In this case, you could just use SQL, if you are good at it… Although the code is a bit small, this slide shows that we directly use ‘creatable’ and ‘insert into’ in smart contracts. This allows us to easily manipulate data in contracts.

Angu Do: I only know select from… Hahaha.

Hunyoung Park: I am not too familiar with it either. So we created LiteTree from SQLite, which is widely used in the world with hundreds of millions of cases. This has also been openly shared in open source and have received spot lights through media such as Hacker News. In simple terms, SQLite has been modified to be used on blockchains.

Angu Do: Something that has been popularized has been adapted to used on blockchains!

Hunyoung Park: Lite Tree.

Angu Do: I see, Lite Tree.

Hunyoung Park: Now, there is a process called branching. In order to process portions related to fork well,

Angu Do: SQL engineers will be crying in joy. ‘I can finally be a blockchain developer.’

Hunyoung Park: That is right. Users are very satisfied. Another question is ‘What if we used JDBC on blockchains?’ Although SQL are used on blockchains, they eventually have to be combined with contracts. In order to use SQL independently from contracts, the best option would be JDBC. Our specifications are too broad to use ODBC. However we are considering the use of other options such as ODBC or Hibernate. The slide shows a common database code used in JDBC. For us this is the code that runs the blockchains. If you look at it closely,contracts are called with blockchains on general purpose JDBC, making the data in the contracts manageable. We provide improved development methods and technology that allows introduction of blockchains easier. Using our AERGO Hub platform and service, we are trying to introduce blockchain to customers. What we have offered so far was like offering customers with only toppings when the customer wanted actual ice cream. While the customer wanted a complete set to develop services, we have been just telling them that we have blockchain and its applicable solutions. We have not been helping customers with how to develop apps. Through AERGO Hub, we will provide customers with a blockchain service platform that will provide A to Z tools to develop blockchain.

Angu Do: We think it would be Cloud based.

Hunyoung Park: We have discussed the 3 solutions to the question “how can we help customers?

Firstly, instead of only providing BaaS by itself, applications will also be provided to the customers in order to allow usage of blockchain on services deployed by BaaS. One of Hub’s goal is to act as application PaaS that could upload DApp developing applications. Its second goal is to import and use many openly shared services, which will simplify the process by lessening the developer’s workload.

Angu Do: Right. Like a micro service?

Hunyoung Park: Yes. Micro service is an accurate description. Although many people want to use micro service, they are not aware what is there. In case of blockchain service, there are several requirements such as Oauth, Billing or storage. These requirements are not found in a single place and the developer has to look for each component individually in adifferent locations. All these requirements will be provided in single place at our Hub. As a single point service, we allow customers to handily develop products. Lastly, we aim for servitization of the solutions we have provided so far and provide trust-based functions pre-built in to our micro service. For example,if the customer needs electronic payment system, it can be found inside the Hub without the need to create them anew.

Angu Do: It is already here.

Hunyoung Park: You can use it as if you are using Kakao Pay. The customers can import servers by simply uploading source code to Github. A service is provided without the need to worry about which cloud to use. Also, we would provide a function similar to Auto Scaling to provide automated reinforcement of internal resources as their businesses continue to grow. These are the products that our company offers. Since we are a open source company, we put in more effort into open community.

Angu Do: Such as meet-up event?

Hunyoung Park: That is a little bit different . We do things our way and we generally stay away from meet-ups. The essence of open source puts more emphasis on internet activities.

Angu Do: Commit.

Hunyoung Park: Yes. Commit. Verification of the source codes that we provide. This is the most important part.

Hunyoung Park: Allow me to give you some final words on how we contribute to the open community.

Angu Do: Isn’t this the most important topic?

Hunyoung Park: Indeed.Of course, we are based on Github. We are uploading information on our next products through a medium.

Some might even find our medium as bland and uninteresting since discussion on blockchain mediums naturally lead to topics such as events and partnerships. However, our medium solely focuses on technical details. Therefore, retail investors might lose their interests. Since we are focused on technicalities, we are confident that it will be brought out to light. It’s a little embarassing to say this myself but we have the most active Github open source among projects in Korea, in terms of core technology strictly speaking. When we count the number of core technologies, we have the most number of Commit among other things. We were proud that our open source was able to be used in different fields without the need to contact us directly. There are several blockchain studies that used our products as references, such as a study from Italy. We were very proud of ourselves in such cases. We firmly believe that this is the proper way to use open source. Our AERGO was launched about a year ago. The mainnet was the first to be launched on April and it continues to evolve. Successively, Enterprise was created and has been introduced to the public. Since our JDBC technology and mainnet belong to Open Governance, we think a lot about how the users can participate and influence these. At the end of last year, our product was upgraded to 2.0. version, which maximizes users’ influence through voting and staking. We are constantly improving our product since its launch. As I have mentioned, we have succeeded in improving solutions and protocols to a high level as of 2020. We have succeeded in improving solutions and protocols to a high level as of 2020. Since these are currently being delivered well and the open source is working well, our last puzzle piece AERGO Hub will be launched by the end of this year…

Angu Do: Building the foundation to advance into platform and service.

Hunyoung Park: Wow, you have summarized it perfectly.

Angu Do: Did I?

Hunyoung Park: As you said, we are expecting this year to be the beginning to a new era.

Angu Do: Very well. If you have any questions, please leave a message to CTO Park and we will get back to you in a timely manner. Also, if you have any questions on Enterprise, please let us know anytime. Thank you for your time today. Thank you. See you next time, everyone.

Email: ashenone@blocko.io