This is epicenter episode, 161 with guest Marley Gray.
This episode of epicenter is brought to you by Jack.
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of cryptocurrency wallets. Hi, welcome to epicenter of the
show. Our stocks about the
Technologies projects and starts driving decentralization and the
global blockchain Revolution. My name is Sebastian Juju and my
name is Brian sabean. Kraang we're here today with
Molly, Gray, Marley is the principal program manager for
blockchain at Microsoft Microsoft.
As I'm sure many of you are aware has been very active.
If in the blockchain space they sponsored a theorem def con last
year and maybe this year again. You guys sponsor this here
again? Yes, right twice.
And they were one of the first or, you know, one of the first
big tech companies to really get into the Block Chain space and
now finger Molly was. It was a key driver not.
So thanks so much for joining us today.
Your problem for having me So can you give us a little
background? I think you've been at Microsoft
for a long time. What was what have you been
doing there? And how did your career kind of
evolved to end up where it is today?
So yeah, I'm working on my 17th year.
Microsoft and I started in Charlotte North Carolina so
which is a banking Hub and the United States and came on in the
financial services vertical and I was a trading floor
application developer at the time and I quickly moved to to
our developer platform evangelism team which is
essentially when dotnet first came.
Out. We were going around talking to
software Architects and developers and explaining the
intricacies of how dotnet worked and why you wanted to use it.
Why? It was better spent a lot of
time, doing that. And then came back into
financial services and ended up getting relocated and taking a
job in New York City. To lower two years ago to run
the Innovation Labs there. And that's where I picked up
blockchain again, which is the first time I did.
It was really wasn't aware when I was doing Bitcoin.
Nobody really paid too much attention.
What's going on to the covers too much than just getting your
cryptocurrency working and and unfortunately I lost my my
private keys from very early on so I have some orphan Bitcoin
out there, but picked it back up in 2015 and And incubated
blockchain at Microsoft in New York and got pulled into
actually build out our strategy. And now have a engineering team
here in the product group, but then I had her and I'm leading
up the design and architecture here for that.
So what was it about blockchain that fancied, triggered your
interest. Well being in financial services
there was a so much you have to do around settlement times and
the pain around settlement in the pain Enterprise
organizations go through what an audit is triggered.
It just identifying some of the things that that blockchain
could solve and really was a smart contracts was the hook to
be able to define the data that you're going to share with other
people, but also behavior and intent.
So smart contracts in a large degree really kicked the
interest in blockchain and overdrive because people started
thinking of it in other ways than just a cryptocurrency So we
started to see that more as a platform for delivering
Innovation to businesses and and the way we do business and
really break apart and simplify a lot of business processes that
have evolved over decades. So that's that's what you're
really interested first. It was in financial services
specifically in the derivatives Market, but now it's spawned
into just about Every industry there is Brian mentioned earlier
that Microsoft was one of the first companies to one of the
first large companies, you know, the historical figure and and
Tech the really dive in headfirst into blockchain
technology and infrastructure. Can you describe sort of a high
level, what the strategy is for Microsoft with regards to
blockchain and block changes service?
Yeah, so we see blockchain is being very obvious like
creatively destructive to a lot of our we have a huge Enterprise
business and our customers are always coming to us asking for
innovation ideas or ways. They can improve their Outreach
to their customers, their products or their processes.
And we saw this as an opportunity.
A lot of our customers were having a lot.
Out of desire to at least try watching, which initially was
very difficult to do and how do they even approach it?
So, you know, our initial goal is to say, hey, let's make it
easy for people to learn what watching is and to just get
started and blockchain is a service.
I launched it. Well, it's been over a year now.
Was it its main goal is just to make it easy for people to stand
up. A private blockchain network and
to start tinkering with it and learning it.
And you know, we started out with a theorem but quickly
customers wanted to try out Eros, which has been renamed but
you know, multi-chain now we have chain and a whole bunch of
different blockchains out there. So everybody wanted to try out
the different different block chains and start to test them.
And that's, that was the initial goal.
Now, we've greatly expanded that I'm sure we'll talk about that a
bit later now, but that was, that was our primary goal to
system Meet customer demand to allow them to do it.
We felt like the cloud was a great place to do things.
We call it the fail, fast fail cheap.
Because, you know, I was going to build anything right out of
the gate, that would make it the production that they would
tinker and play and try something and fail miserably.
But With that low cost. So you just delete it and start
all over again. And that's that was our initial
design goal. I agree that that sort of that
fail fast model is really valuable.
I can today, I signed up for, for a sure, I think I'd done in
a while back, but I never really gotten through it with it.
But I saw him for a juror like I had a credits.
I spun up my theory. Mm Network, it took about five
minutes, you just basically set it up and it was really easy to
do, right? So, if I can see that, you know,
having set up a guest node before iMac this was much more
pleasurable is there so much more pleasant experience as a
whole rather than having to install npm and node.
And I like all this other stuff coffins really complex and buggy
and you know, takes a long time just to get you off the ground.
So I think that for a lot of people getting started, I don't
know if they're going that route, but it definitely looks
like something really attractive for someone who wants to play.
Around with like multi chain and right, you know, wants to wants
to get restored really quick. Yeah, so actually, we were quite
surprised when we researching this to learn that as your the
number of data centers that you have all around the world and
how yeah, it seems like a like a massive Cloud infrastructure
which I really was not aware of you talk about sort of, but
perhaps just described for those who aren't familiar.
What, what is azure And how how blockchains fit into the Azure
offering, right? So, Azure is our our Cloud
platform and it is really targeted initially and it's
always been targeted Enterprise market.
And so we started to and also our own internal system.
So our own being and Xbox Live and things like that.
So we initially started to put data centers out there for
initial redundancy speed of light issues.
You know you want to have things close geographically dispersed
and started to work with our Enterprise customers.
And a lot of the major concerns were not technical in nature,
but more government-related. So we need two things in certain
jurisdictions for data residency laws.
So what we quickly found is, we would build these Footprints and
we could put these massive data centers all over the world.
But we started to find out all we need to put data centers in
specific countries or specific regions and they also have to
have a fault domain within that same region.
So it ended up we have over 100 data centers.
Around the world where I think 39 different regions which is
actually larger than our tool. Closest competitors, combined
and its really targeted at what we have a jurisdictional issue
with enough, Custer, man, we're going to put in service our
customers there. And the interesting point is all
those data centers are linked with our own dark fiber.
So we actually have second-largest dark, fiber
Network outside of government where we live.
So it's a massive Network that you're not that you can go
between data centers without touching a public network.
And then we have this other piece.
So this is that massive called, hyperscale Cloud to deliver
Computing on demand. And when we first launched, as
you're actually overshot the market, we launched Azure with a
platform as a service message where you didn't concern
yourself with spinning up virtual machines, you just said,
hey I need, I need a database, give me a database, get I want
to stand up. This web app here's a web app
and you just put your requirements in and
behind-the-scenes. It would make sure that you have
the right resources from a hardware and storage networking
perspective. And then AWS came out with what
the market actually was was they weren't ready for next
Generation applications and so they came out with
infrastructure as a service. So then we quickly followed with
that but now the markets of giving back into
platform-as-a-service you sir. Is he a lot of talk about
serverless environments? Where you have this execution
environment in the cloud where you can reach out and access
capabilities or functions that you need without saying, I need
it to run on this type of hardware on this operating
system. You don't concern yourself with
that. You basically.
So this is what I do or this is what I need.
I don't care how you get it to me.
Just do it within these SLA, and I'm good to go.
Go. So, the Azure is that sort of
worldwide Network where we're delivering data based on and
meeting those restraints around data residency.
Compliance security, our security compliance portfolio is
the best in the business. So when you start to look at
putting things in the cloud you have to have all those.
There's a long list of checkboxes, you have to go
through to get Enterprise customers, ready to start
putting data. And their biggest processing
workloads out there and and that that we're starting to see
customers moving moving in Mass certain workloads and we'll see
more and more go through the net.
New applications were starting to see being built with cloud in
mind. And lastly as yours also hybrid
so you can run something called Azure stack which is an
on-premises private Cloud which Looks and feels and behaves just
like an Azure price. It's a like a setting up your
own Data Center and your own or Azure cloud and your own data
center. It looks like a region and it
can burst out to the cloud for more compute resources or
storage and things like that. So it's that hybrid on-prem and
public Cloud. If you go very interesting and
you mentioned before that, part of the reason why, You guys got
into blockchain was that a lot of Microsoft's clients and they
wanted to try out blockchain and they were sort of looking to you
guys to make that easier. But is there a larger thesis
that Microsoft has about, you know, where technology and
enterprise software is going over the next?
Maybe decade two decades, that informs how you guys are
approaching blockchain and maybe not just right now.
I want to comes to this experimental phase but also
Beyond when we're going to go into production and actually you
know big applications run on blockchain systems.
But chain itself is forcing sort of a business process,
re-engineering effort across Industries.
So because we're dealing with the Enterprise's of these
Enterprises are moving away from business processes operating
within their own four walls which is hard enough as it is
getting interoperability large organization across
applications. But now saying I want to be able
to have that same interoperability between my most
fierce competitor and throughout an entire supply chain.
How do I do that? And before you really have that
option because you didn't have a shared truth, like the
blockchain to be able to share that data and have one place to
go for reconciliation to see where the process of business
processes that crosses organizational boundaries which
is essentially everything in this global economy.
And it touches every every industry.
So with that we said, okay well kind of backed into the cloud
being and blockchain initial at a first glance.
People said well, why would you do blockchain in the cloud?
And it's at first, it does seem seem counterintuitive, but if
you think of what the cloud is, the cloud is essentially a
massive distributed system, we're going these massive data
Data centers all over the place, but your you have different
levels of distribution, right? You just you distribute things
for different reasons, distribute, things for
disasters, right? I don't want to have all my data
centers and Lower Manhattan, that happened in 9/11, and that
was a problem, right? So you need to have redundancy
outside of a geographic area, you need to have data residing
in different areas. So there's, you know, all that
flexibility, but We started looking at that.
We said, okay, customers are going to start wanting to move
to what we call the collaborative economy, where you
you work with each other and it's a part of the business
process. So, Cross organization
distributed workflows is we look at supply chain, it's a very
complex business process. Lots of infrastructure.
Required is a ton of overhead and friction in any supply
chain. NG whether you're manufacturing
a product and getting parts, from a thousand different
suppliers which are actually cascaded down.
So smaller suppliers, or you're producing a movie very similar,
you have a supply chain and how do you manage that?
And then how do you audit that? And we saw that as a fundamental
shift to provide not only that cross-organizational workflow
and shared data and shared execution and Trust sort of
distributed trust but then it sort of changes everything on
the back end to because now you have visibility into your
business processes and where they're in efficiencies, you can
catch fraud a lot easier, you can optimize a lot better.
So you know, our customers initial stance is hey,
Rethinking the way we're actually doing this business
process. We haven't Revisited 20 years
with this technology so we think it's a fundamental shift and
we're really ramping our platforms to work in this
distributed. Not it's not just data
distributions, people think too much about distributed compute.
The stripping of data but really is distributed trust.
And and moving looking at your, your business processes.
And distributing them but having disability out of where they are
at any given time very seamlessly.
I think that's a great way of explaining right, essentially,
the underlying thesis, that that is in a big part of the Block
Chain space. You know, that was sort of the
thesis or the AC thesis a Terrace monads, but all kinds of
companies in this space, right? Like the whole etherium for
business or even public, ethereum is also about exactly
that process automation stuff. But if we agree that this is the
big, the big Trend that is going.
Happened. I would be really curious about
your perspective. Why are the other big tech
companies like Google? Apple Amazon?
Maybe? Facebook are they doing
something but they just don't talk about it.
Or do they have a different pieces?
That means they, they don't see it the same way and they don't
feel like they have to take action and move in this
direction. What do you think?
I think it has more to do with the DNA.
May of the organization. If you look at the two big Tecna
companies that are doing a lot in blotchiness, it's Microsoft
and IBM and we're firmly rooted in the Enterprise even though
blockchain evolved out of a cryptocurrency.
So you have this sort of wide quickly jump over to Enterprise
it's because it's solved a problem in a very unique way and
stood the test of time even though people shot holes in it
and then are prizes quickly said, wow, this is going to
change, this could change How We Do.
This is completely some of them when they fully understood it.
Depending on the business. Either have a near-death
experience, meaning that there are middlemen that they don't
provide much value. Other than friction, into
existing business process, that could be completely
disintegrated, or they saw opportunity and usually company,
see both opportunity to reinvent themselves.
A lot of companies, we talked to, in the Enterprise, they see
this as a catalyst, it's not pure technology is It doesn't
solve every problem, but it provides that Catalyst
opportunity to revisit because Microsoft and IBM are so focused
on delivering value in the Enterprise and working with
businesses on different ways, right?
So IBM really has a massive Human Services business where
we're really focused on the software.
We're not trying to sell Consulting Services, we rely on
our partners to do, but that's that's why you saw us doing
that. I think the reason Not seeing
AWS and Google is they don't have that Enterprise Focus,
Amazon will probably, I mean I can't really speak for where
they are and what they're doing but I think that's why you see
sort of this while we got out front, will they catch up?
I'm sure they will once you get into their get into that.
But the actual customer demand. We're getting it from these
Enterprise customers and that's why we go First, I'd like to say
it was we're so Visionary, but it's really a little bit more
simple than that. And you think that's going to
remain like that in the near medium-term future that the most
activity and interest is on the Enterprise side as opposed to,
to Consumer facing side. I think it will the evolution of
the two will come. I think we're going to go
through, is the Enterprises will stand up distributed.
Ledger is no, probably a bunch of them.
The public. Ledger's will provide an
interesting back then, and that will start to see
interoperability happening. Using the public network as a
bridging mechanism. For assets, are traversing
between watching for example, or even smart contracts to bind
themselves together. Even though they have no
awareness of the other network. So, the public networks become
very interesting sort of utility common infrastructure and then
these Consortium Enterprise blockchains tapping into those.
I think is a very interesting way to see this evolved and
eventually get to the point where we flatten these things
out. We have this Ledger that even
though it's not one Ledger when I have this one, massive
worldwide database that has an identity for Verything and
tracks every business process, but we have a way to navigate a
hierarchy or, or you know, a mesh of these these blockchains
or distributed letters as the evolved.
So I think we will see for the next couple of years, just from
a effort and where people making a lot of bets, and being
employed. And, and looking at solving hard
problems, I think it's going to be an Enterprise first.
I think, you know, there was still sort of waiting on that
consumer facing, you know, Uber or Airbnb scenario.
But if you look at those things, I think it might be those things
will pop up, once you get industry-specific blockchains,
and then those will be ones that cross those industry
blockchains. The solve a unique problem that
involves Financial Services Healthcare and iot for Example
that would be a killer app. It's really the composite of
this. So we're just building basic
Plumbing now and within single Industries, once you start going
across industry that's where you see, we'll start to see these
really killer apps that come out, I think.
Now, before we go into a Bletchley and a little bit more
detail, what Microsoft's you know, blockchain efforts going
to look like I wanted to bring up a concern that I think a lot
of people have and I saw that mentioned somewhere, maybe it
was a comment in front of you talks as well.
So one of the simple premise of blockchain is this idea of
decentralization, decentralized Control, decentralized process
Saying how do you how does that play with something like a
seizure which is a, you know, a centralized infrastructure
provider that really also lives on economies of scale.
Do you think, you know, what's the role here in terms of in
while the technology is being developed?
And how do you think that's going to change?
When some of this technology and these blockchains are going to
go into production? So we talked about blockchains
and Azure, we say you don't most customers are going to run their
entire Block Chain, unless you're just doing Devon test,
right when you're going into production, very few
Enterprises, even though they love us and they want to use
Azure from a risk standpoint, they want to spread their risk.
So they'll say, well, we need to have multiple multiple providers
of this network. So you would put certain number
of nodes and, and Azure, you can put some number, a double.
Yes. You have certain in your data
centers. So when we look at the
blockchain layer itself because the consensus algorithms and the
database gets propagated invalidated between nodes
regardless of where they live. That's the model that we would
love people to have all their nodes and blockchain, but that's
not the reality and so we don't have any dependency.
You can actually Use Bletchley without having a single node in
Azure and and just call up to those services from wherever you
are because it's just something out there in the cloud.
So when we say we look at Azure as being the distributed, sort
of fabric for that sort of distributed execution model and
not necessarily the place where the Ledger Exists even though,
you know, Azure is a distributed system, it's all around the
world but like I said, there's different levels of distribution
and that in that case you might have a Enterprises need to make
sure that they spread their their nodes across multiple
providers. And and its really gets multiple
counter parties because you might have certain
counterparties and I Financial Services blockchain That on
Azure customers. For example there, you know and
IBM, those nodes will still work on the same network.
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We'd like to thank Jacks for the support of epicenter.
So moving on to Bletchley, there's a white paper that you
authored, which is available on GitHub, will put the links in
the show notes which is called The Bletchley white paper.
And in this white paper you discuss some of the evolution
from watching 1.02 want blockchain 2.0 the blushing 1.0
being the sort of UTech so Bitcoin style blockchain.
And then moving on from that, we saw the technology evolves Into
smart contract languages with aetherium and now into a new era
which is what you're calling blockchain 3.0.
Could you talk about the evolution between these
different versions of blockchain Technologies?
Sure. Yeah, so you take so it was a
was built for a specific use case.
So it was built specifically for a cryptocurrency which is
essentially Providence seeing a cryptocurrency transferring A
ship and being able to make change.
So it was built. And it does that very well.
And it's we like to think of you txo, if it's, if your, if your
applications are only dealing with Bearer instruments.
So you're proving ownership proving lineage and transferring
of assets. Then that model works.
Very, very well and but it's somewhat restricted because an
individual Bitcoin doesn't have an ID.
It's just a sum of UT EXO's. And when you spend a Bitcoin, it
it's, you know, is still along with the same.
It's just spread out as other you g EXO's.
Well, when ethereum came out and they introduced smart contracts,
it introduced some, some key innovations that the first of
which was it had an identity. So, smart contract is
essentially an account that persists So I can have an
address and a sign of the identity to something.
So I know it's going to be there.
And I can also Define schema where as you TXS systems are
essentially. I mean it, you can have
properties in your transaction and asset but it doesn't have a
strongly typed schema, which we found very interesting to be
able to Define define schema and then it can have Behavior.
And the behavior piece was the smart contract specified argue
that. It's actually there's three.
Things together the identity building have schema and then
having code or logic there and that was super interesting in
that you could start to write these programs and do
interesting things as an Enterprise developer that that
grew up in that. Well, I went from writing
client-server applications to having a right three-tiered
applications learn some painful lessons about how we manage
State and scale and separation of concerns to make sure that
you can version things independently.
And we learned a lot of painful lessons in the the 90s and the
early 2000s, how to build applications web applications
that could that could scale and and and serve the internet.
So when looked at smart contracts so this is a great way
of of really doing other things on a block.
Chain. However, I don't think it's
going to scale to, you know, massive even private blockchains
that have millions of millions of millions of smart contracts
running on the network at once. So immediately, just went and
said, okay, let's decompose what a smart contract actually is.
And if we look at that, it's you have defined your schema, which
includes the properties that you're tracking and those could
be The example, I always give us with a loan.
So if you take out a loan, maybe it's a mortgage.
You have a mount your borrowing. So that's how much you're
boring. You have an interest rate of a
term and you'll have a that interest rate could be variable,
right? So you could get a fixed length
1 and that's the case, then it's doesn't change, but you can have
a variable interest rate and then you have some rules about
When what's your payment? When's it due.
What what's the penalty? If you pay it late?
And then what's the big penalty? If you really go late, you know
about foreclosure. Those are basically legal
Clauses and at the end of it, if you've ever taken on a mortgage,
you get an amortization schedule which is essentially predicting
your future state. If you make every payment, this
is how much principal is going to be over.
A 30-year period if the 30 year loan.
Now, if it's a float, Floating interest rate that amortization
schedule, can vary based on how your interest rate can go up or
down and things like that. But that's essentially contract.
And we said, okay? What portions of that need to
be? If I was going to take this
smart contract to say, I don't want all this stuff to be
bundled into this one piece of code data, all intermingled on a
node. And when I have 1000 node
Network that, Smart contract runs a thousand times to do the
same thing when I don't necessarily need that kind of
behavior. I want to be able to take out
portions of it. So we said okay, what if you
could say, keep the schema keep some logic that just validates
your data. So like store procedures, like
type of behaviors for relational databases where you're not
putting business logic, but you're just validating inputs
before you commit to the database.
So we could validate signatures and Like and then record the
basic static properties. Like the amount, you're
borrowing signatures of the lender and the borrower, those
are important but to capture but then the Clauses themselves that
the payment the rate that they might need to be recalculated.
And then the conditions of is it late or not?
And then how did that that payment?
Apply that logic? It can be pulled out and
executed somewhere else as long as we can execute it.
And then a test that it actually does what it's supposed to do.
And, and we can guarantee that it will run.
So that's we said, okay, let's let's talk take a different
differently about finding what a smart contract is in a sense.
It's taking what you T. XO BAE Systems always did,
right? They didn't have a smart
contracted to find schema. They always built these
Applications on top that had all the business logic but they were
scheme of sole on the bottom and it's hard to share that stuff
across without using op codes and things like that.
Whereas, this is a little cleaner and it, it feels like it
is built sort of Enterprises for me to have strongly type schema,
some logic that can execute a smart contract to validate my
transactions, but then raise up any logic that doesn't
necessarily have to be on the blockchain and can be We had one
of the shared environment by all the counterparties and get
better performance and scale and all that good stuff.
Okay, so I think you sort of started to explain it with your,
with your answer, what we'll get to in a bit, which is which is
Bletchley. But if I can just rephrase that
in the way that I conceptualize it as a, with this idea of
blockchain 3.0 that that Bletchley introduces.
What you're essentially doing is rather than having all of your
smart contract. Logic State storage and a
distributed Network within one system, which is essentially
what it would a theory, mm does you-you-you, decompose those
components. So you decompose the business
logic, you decompose you take out storage and you take out
State and you take out all those components, you split them up
and then once You once you have that base architecture, right?
Where all of those components can be sort of module eyes.
I mean, sort of like application development today.
We're now, you know, you have your database over here.
You might have cloud storage over here.
You may have some other component over here and they all
interact together, but you're building this sort of moduli
system. But then the other component
that this introduces, is this idea that Rather than trusting
all of this to a distributed Network where it's completely
trustless, you can sort of pick and choose with every component.
What, where's the, where's the cursor?
Right. So if you want your storage to
be fully distributed, the you can rely on just on a fully
distributed blockchain type you know public network to do that
but perhaps some of those functions eating into smart cam
those smart contracts don't need to Fully distributed, the you
can trust some sort of trusted source to execute that logic and
provide results, and that's okay.
And the people, you know, the participants in that wet Network
agree on that. And like some interest rate.
For instance is that sort of a good representation of what what
he's trying to do. Yes, today's magic word is
Bletchley blet CH L. Ey head over to.
Let's talk that coin.com to sign.
In enter the magic word and clean your part of a listener
award. So then let's, let's talk about
the architecture. Describe the blush, Li
architecture for us if you may sure.
So at the bottom, when your provision one or more
blockchains and so you can use the theorem, you could use
chain, you could use core data, you could use your whatever.
You can actually use multiple ones.
So above that is this thing called the corporate fabric,
which is actually, right now, we're running and what we call
Azure service fabric, which is essentially a cloud runtime,
that its tracks behind it could be X.
Number of Linux VMS index. Number one, does vm's depending
on what you're using and they're sort of abstracted from you is
Ben's up more and more resources as you as you go along.
And it manages the instantiation lifecycle and fault tolerance of
components that are running it. So this is that serverless
environment that provides the runtime which we call the
Cripple of fabric the crippled fabric itself.
It is that runtime of you register blockchains with it.
You build cripple, its to run on top of it and triplets, are
these discrete levels of functionality, there's different
types, we have utility crew plaits, which are usually
thought of as Oracle type triplets or Oracle triplets.
We have contract triplets, which are taking that logic for a
specific smart contract and That and within contract triplets,
there's different types of contract triplets as well.
But those are the two basic types and you have the option of
running these crippled its and an enclave.
So they can run in a secure, isolated tamper-proof,
environment that attests to the results so that they've they
run, they ran and did what they say they did without you having
to put The code on the blockchain, but rather just the
attestation of the signature for guarantees that your logic ran
as intended. So and then above that.
So crippled Fabrics poses up sort of an event-driven API to
blockchains underneath it. So you can subscribe, if you
have a smart contract, you can subscribe to an event, so like a
market price. Every X minutes you can set.
So time-based, you could say as a threshold.
So let me know if oil goes above $40 a barrel or below and then
and when it does give me this price in this index and then I'm
going to do something on my Smart contract or you could do
it based on. So that's threshold.
You could do it the other way around.
You could also have them, subscribe.
Two events to select your CRM system.
So maybe your CRM system feeds into a kyc service that you're
using an event that might happen in CRM.
You want to flow in your kyc system to update your, your
know, your customer system that you have there.
So as a whole bunch of that exposes a surface level API as
well above crippled, it's where you can expose a cripple its
functionality to a front end or another system.
Get invoke report from the And have that transaction flow to
the bottom. The other key piece that the
crippled fabric does, is it abstracts the underlying
distributed Ledger from the crippling.
So, the cripple has no notion or no, real idea, it has a
dependency on a specific Block Chain.
It's just running trusted executed code and sending out
signed Json payloads. Which then get additionally
signed by an autoclave if necessary.
The crippled fabric then as it routes, it has bindings format
messages for aetherium chain kurta.
And the like, so it provides an abstraction for developers to
not have to, especially if you're running reusable
components, which is interesting.
You can write these things as a cripple, it and have it work
across all blockchains and not have to write one for each Block
Chain, which makes it simpler Maybe an example for this.
I remember, once, I talked to a, we talked with a bank and
dimension to issue of an interest rate swap, right?
And the thing there is that there are some calculations that
you want to be done. But, you know, calculations
putting on a blockchain, doesn't work very well because they're
just the poor performance isn't nearly good enough.
So that will be a good case, for example, for a triplet, right?
So you would Define that function, you get executed on
equipment and you can, you can If I, you know, as participants
on and blockchain, you can see what was run in that Crypt, but
you can see what data was used as input.
What was the output? So, you know, I could, I could
potentially run it myself. Check it.
So you have, you know, you have lots of performance benefits.
And potentially, as you mentioned, right?
You can you can have that crippled as its own sort of
stand-alone almost like application providing kind of an
API. So if we use different types of
blockchain, you could always play Plug into that same thing
is that that's kind of the what campus make possible, right?
Yeah and you could also keep that algorithm secret so yeah
you run it faster and you might have a IP in an algorithm that
you don't want to share. So yeah it laws that as well.
So if you kept the algorithm secret do then you know I will
be able to see the input the output but I wouldn't be able to
replicate You know, if I was some other participant on a
chain, I wouldn't be able to replicate that, right, right.
Unless you subscribe to that same service.
So from a and as far as the right into the blockchain, if
you're just writing a value down and you can depending on the
level of trust that you have. So some kind of parties entering
those things as perfectly fine with them.
They they trust that algorithm maybe it's coming from a third
party. So Comes from a Reuters, for
example. And they say, you were just
going to use that and we trust it it's going to sign with the
signature that signature is actually based off the hash of
the code that we all reviewed. So we can test that it ran the
code that we all reviewed and that's the output.
So we trust it, but it, you know, maybe it runs in a
co-located space for Optimal Performance and things like
that. So, the Ripple guys wants to do
this project which was shot down called koteas.
Sounds very similar to triplets. Is it some of the same ideas or
how did they differentiate it occurred is heavily influenced
the the first approach, but actually the second approach.
The first approach was for contract prevalence.
So, how do we, how do we pull logic out of a smart contract
while keeping all the goodness of our Racks in the blockchain
koteas, was, how do you do Sakura tested oracle's?
And so, when we looked at various, I talked to the guys, a
triple and and it was it, it was abandoned because it didn't have
the ability to scale this, right?
Worn a massive worldwide cloud provider to stand up this
infrastructure and you know, said, hey, we are, I think we
could probably deliver something like this.
It's not. We don't have the hardware yet,
but it's coming. And let's go.
Build the infrastructure. Such that.
There's a lot of people that have value to inject and systems
and give them a platform for exposing Oracle type behaviors
in a cripple, it, that then Enterprises are comfortable
consuming because you could have the best Oracle in the world,
but if they don't process, it doesn't trust you.
They're not going to use it. So how do we, how do we empower
the smaller innovators in the software partners that we have
and marry them up to these? Large Enterprises that That that
want their capabilities but don't know how to we can't have
that Marketplace to bring them together.
So, there's this idea of a crippling.
I mean, it is some sort of an oracle, write it to a Smart
contract. Anyway, the smart contracts use
it as a source of data that the participants need to trust.
And before the show, we were talking about how that works.
You can you explain for those who are saying?
I mean I can hear the Reddit comments and Twitter comments
already where people are like you know this is just An
untrusted data being fed into a smart contract.
This is ridiculous. Can you explain how a cripple?
It can provide a trusted source of executed data.
So, if you take a cripple, it that would execute some function
like, calculates, some sort of a maybe we can get into some use
cases. But right, you know, a cryptic
that calculates, some sort of a, some sort of a rate, which we go
into, you know, the A long contract.
How can the participants trust that?
Cryptic like what is the software and Hardware
configuration that enables them to trust it?
If I'm a smart contract developer, and I'm going to use
Oracle crippling our utility crippling me, cuz it's going to
provide me some result. It could be just a raw market
price, or it could be a computed value, that that I just need to
have for my smart contract. Well, when I do that, I'm
essentially make a reference to that smart contract that I can
find. I mean, to that, crippled it,
that I find in the each fabric has a A crippled Explorer where
you can discover triplets what they do and you can subscribe to
them. The subscription process is
essentially creating a binding between your smart contract and
the crippling the requirements that you have when you're buying
in that way is you have to have a callback function because it's
an event. So it's a pub sub model so the
smart contract is subscribing to that IT wires up the trust that
says it's only going to accept messages from this.
Rippling address. So the crippled it signs it has
an identity and it's signs. It's messages with that
signature so you can trust. That's just one level of trust
that the crippling can also be running an enclave.
Like I said it could be if you want that level not that every
krimpet needs that for most utility cripples unless it's
doing encryption. It's probably not worth doing it
because you really have any secrets there you just sort of
unless your algorithm secretly want to run it in an autoclave.
You can But essentially that you subscribe to it, you say these
are my this is what I want you to let me know.
Let me know if the markets were open at day and it's 4:00
Eastern Standard Time. I Want To Know 9:00 a.m. eastern
standard time and 4:00 Eastern Standard Time.
I want you to give me the Libor rate and the price of this
commodity or this list of Commodities.
And so the crippled will say okay I'll let you know and the
crippled Goes out and runs. It runs in the fabric, the
fabric, make sure that that crippled it is running that it
is always an instance of it that will fire your event.
It will, if something goes wrong, it'll fire up another
instance. It's so that you're guaranteed
to get that event. It will evaluate the conditions
of the event, you subscribe to, and if it's true, it will get
those values. It will sign its payload, if
it's running and it will send that message, back through the
back of the Fabric which will send it into the blockchain and
that case it's sending it. You'll have to send that
successfully idempotent lie, if you will, to a single node, that
will go to that smart contract and then that will get executed
and sent around the rest of the network.
That's the simplest mode. That's the Oracle contract
previously people would do oracle's and they would inject
or Close to a separate smart contract and then you're smart
contract, would watch that other smart contract and you would
look at local events on the blockchain.
This is more saying, okay, I'm delegating that pubsub model
where the events can happen out in the real world and be
injected directly to me so that I don't have this other smart
contract out there and this intermediary.
That's there. You can still do that.
There's nothing stopping Being someone from doing a queuing
mechanism, like that for a smart contract, in a triplet as well,
but you can do that straight binding between a smart
contract, address a callback function, and the crippled it
for an oracle cripple. It.
So, that's, that's the sort of the, that easy, the easy case.
The, the contract triplet is or control crippled is the pattern.
We call is where you're taking that logic out, you're not just
getting The previous example, you're just getting a market
data, price, or some calculation performed, and then you're
actually executing other logical.
You're smart contract and persisting that if we don't need
that to happen, if we could actually do all of that logic
and just write the results back we can then up shift and move
all that smart contract code up into a cripple it and the
crippled it can then have a subscription to the market data
of grip but that's maybe firing that How's the cripples can talk
to each other? So I can subscribe to other
cripple its events that might be providing Oracle capabilities.
So it would give me at signed payload.
And then I would execute my Logic for my specific smart
contract in that crippled it and then write the results out now.
Contract, triplets are mostly usually going to be running an
enclave. So The Enclave will attest that
it ran in The Enclave. Unmodified at the results are
guaranteed and right. Right, that back down to the
Block Chain. So the Block Chain, you'll have
the results of the computation of the smart contract and then
you'll have the signatures of the crippling and The Enclave.
So, you'll be able to have that full trust audit capability
between the counterparties, which is how a contract crippled
or Okay, so it really all comes down to the level of trust that
you have. And in this crippling, I mean, I
think that for for a lot of Enterprises, this will make
sense because you know, there we're operating in a system that
are there are rules and Regulation and and a prize tend
to trust each other when they are operating within the blanket
of Regulation. And it seems to me like you can
then based on your needs on the specific use case that you're
building you can set that cursor for trust, right?
So if if you need specific application logic to be
distributed and because we need to be operating in sort of a
trust list way amongst each other.
Other and, you know, these specific functions need to
operate on a blockchain because that's the only way that we can
achieve this trustless. Then that will that will suffice
for needs. Yep.
However, for other functions, or other pieces of data, rather
than relying on say, like a prediction Market, to retrieve
the data, we're going to rely on a crippled, it operated on an
operating, on an enclave, where we have the audit Trail for Our
provisioning of the keys provisioning of the business
logic and functions themselves. We can trace that we know it's
happening on an enclave, though. There's a high, there's a high
likelihood. There's a low likelihood that
that will get hacked or, you know, there's the exploited and
then so therefore we have a high level of trust in those results
because we're operating in this, former lies regulated, Ecosystem
or framework. And where do you think this will
go? Then is its It's quite a ways
away from intellectually from etherium.
Yeah, yeah. Watching Technologies of a
distribute everything distributed, you know, the
application stack with ethereum ipfs Beach, ND, B, you know,
we're truck. We're completely trustless.
That's quite a ways away from that, but it seems like it's
enabled by technologies that perhaps aren't Well available
yet. Like that are not really
commoditized, such as enclaves. Where do you see that going?
Like, where do you see this going in the next 10 years with
regards to I'll block chains and these centralized Technologies
but highly trusted technology is, how will they interact
together? Yeah, I think it's a really good
point. I mean, that's a design choice
and and what we're trying to do is inject that design choice in
there. So if you are on the completely,
trust this environment smart having your logic in the smart
contract is the the most appropriate way for you to to do
that. But in the semi trusted
environment switch these Um, blockchains are this gives you
that design as a software developer, and architect?
You go and say, well, we're just the right place for me to do
this based on the requirements and, and sort of move it based
on that, trust pendulum, but also on the Privacy pendulum.
So again if you have algorithms that are that need to be
private. If I have very complex
counterparty multi counterparty, Contracts where each counter
party has to maintain Secrets, all validating the state in
participating in transaction. The crippled its provides a
great framework for doing that. So I think what we'll see is as
we start to roll out the crib but Fabric and you'll be able to
spin up enclaves on demand. So as a developer, you really
don't have to think about. I don't know how to write an
enclave for this chip architecture.
It's simply a property that you checks is enclaved or not.
And you're crippled it, it's actually getting all that
services from a rapper. Anyway so you get that and it
sort of commoditizing easy to do.
Now was who wrote start to roll that out.
When want you to put everything in an enclave, if it's not
required because it is a more expensive, it will be a more
expensive because it's option. So you want to do it kind of
selectively but it's a good tool.
For doing that, I think. Is it, it rolls out of becomes
warm, or Commodities will start to see on claiming being used,
Donna Leon in the cloud, but on desktops, and on mobile devices
as well. So we already have on claiming
on phones, a good bet. We have it on most until desktop
PCS that are Generation, 6 have enclave and capabilities whether
or not the bias supports it or not.
So was We'll start to move this. This type of secure execution
will come more and more prevalent that the differences
in the cloud is it's on demand at hyperscale and you only pay
for what you use, you don't have to go out and buy all these this
hardware and stuff. So I think it's going to be help
the evolution of applications and we'll start to see more more
capabilities come together, but you still sort of need that that
we get the Best of Both Worlds. See a developer and public
etherium. You can then start developing
Enterprise applications, but still use a lot of the same
tools. You purchase things with a very
similar mindset that the difference is, is you start to
say, might call my logic is distributed different than my
data in my state and it's done it.
Different, trust levels, whether it's completely, trustless are
semi trusted, Two very discretionary trusts and the
execution layer. Cool.
One of the main ways of monetization, as far as I
understand with Azure is simply that, you know, I'm putting my
application on Azure. I'm using up some computational
resources and I'm kind of paying by the computational step and I
can certainly see how that will continue to be a role.
But they say okay we make Azure the best platform for blocked in
applications in that way. You're going to get more usage,
but are there also some novel different business models that
you guys see emerging with blockchain on Azure you have
been so for Bletchley we would spend a lot of time talking
about crippled its but there's also some core crippled at
libraries that will be shipping and these will be this is
functionality that we're exposing and Bletchley.
These are the ones that are most commonly asked for one is
identity so that is identity and key.
A management we kind of paired together because they're very
similar. So we have a an Azure, we have
something called Azure active directory, we have over, 800
million unique identities, within Azure active directory,
is the standard for Enterprises to use active directories.
It does Federation has a lot of things out of the box for you
multi-factor authentication and things like that.
So we're going to be providing that as a as a library as a
service. For distributed ledger.
So it'll be a part of the crippled Fabric and keep
management as well. So issuing Keys manage the
lifecycle of keys like key expiration key renewal.
This type of things are pretty hard to do.
We've got a lot of experience in doing that and you tie that with
active directory and you start to have the ability to provision
Keys based on someone's identity and start to provision things
remotely. So you can Have nodes.
Join a Consortium blockchain. As long as you have the right
credentials, you can have a node.
Join a particular Block Chain and the certificates for that
know to participate in that will be delivered through that same
infrastructure. So we're actually standing on
the shoulders of giants hear that stuff that's evolved over.
25 years. So Azure active directory is a
piece of that the other pieces Key Management something, called
key vault which is our globally distributed hsms.
The other one is Around cryptographic services.
So we'll have libraries out there available to you if you
want to use homomorphic encryption zero, knowledge
proof, all sorts of things will be sort of libraries that are
available there as well as a more distributed application
patterns. So we call this Gateway services
so things like that. BTC relay for a theorem to
bitcoin that can be put in that. Gateway, you can write your own.
Multi Block Chain integration pieces but it has a distributed
transaction coordinator and it has a distributed Ledger
resource transaction compensation.
So if you've ever seen how resource transaction happens,
compensation on a relational database.
It can roll transactions back, we can't do that on a
blockchain. So we have to post corrective
transaction so it's a modified version of that but there's
Enterprise development patterns for Complex transactions are
being exposed there and those again are things that evolved
through products like this talk. And to allow your Block Chain
systems to work with the rest of the Enterprise, whether you have
an Enterprise service bus, or any type of product, plug it in,
and make it a first-class citizen on those networks.
Okay, cool. Well, Marley, we're at the end
of our episodes are, but thanks so much for coming on and
sharing your bit about Microsoft's Vision, when it
comes to blockchain and the work.
You guys have been doing with Bletchley.
Thanks. Yeah.
I think it will be very interesting to see know not just
how this plays out once and prices really utilize.
Some of these tools that you guys are building, that others
are building. And then we're really going to
see how that transforms the nature organizations, and how
they work in the fabric of business processes, down down
the line. I think that would be very
interesting to see So, we have, if that we're at the end of our
episode, we are absent as part of telescopic Network.
You can find this show and other shows on, let's open, kind of
calm. And, of course, we, if you want
to help the show them, please leave us in iTunes, from you.
I help you people find the show. So thanks so much for those who
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end and we look forward to being back next week.