CVA Podcast: Demetrios Skalkotos, Blockdaemon

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is your host tres ahmed ready to kick off another bite size episode of the crypto valley association podcast a special thank you to ceberbank for supporting us through this initiative as they pursue their mission to redefine finance for the new economy now let's discover together the growing trends of this fast moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains today we are joined by demetrius galcottos global svp of sales at flockdaemon who aim to reduce the complexity of working with blockchains through quick and easy configuration monitoring for high availability

and quality of services with enterprise grade security so let's dive straight into the world of institutional grade blockchain infrastructure hello demetrius how are you doing today good how are you thank you for uh having me today greatly appreciate it thank you thank you and uh well let's start things off maybe by by you sharing with us your first blockchain related experience yeah it was kind of a crazy time three or so years ago i uh just finished up exiting one of the traditional exchanges here in the states working for them and uh one of my peers that i worked with at one of the exchanges you know suggested

strongly that i get into the space and he based upon my background in running p l's at the exchanges and running certain businesses whether it's instant messaging or desktop applications and such and co-location facilities he had a couple companies that he was interested in and wanted to kind of parachute me in and this was all right in the height of the ico craze and how that was uh going on so it was a really crazy time really crazy space and um you know i i think a lot of folks were at that time not everybody but some folks were uh doing things well above board some were not and it was an interesting time so it was

definitely drinking water through a fire hose and learning kind of what this whole asset class was all about what it was attempting to do and obviously you know filtering through a lot of the information to make sure that people were building things that were sustainable uh companies uh versus folks that were just trying to capture the essence of the opportunity yes it was crazy times back then and i think so and say that it's uh it's crazier even now as well we just kind of go to grips with the craziness a little bit uh well it continues it obviously continues to evolve which is great yes and and so tony tell me about block daemon and what you're doing there

yeah block daemon is a infrastructure company we're a four-year-old company uh we started out by building bitcoin and ethereum nodes our job is to really help institutions adopt to the blockchain and provide access to the blockchains so we provide infrastructure to exchanges custodians financial institutions foundations you name it and we primarily work with a lot of crypto essential firms at the moment but also folks that are entering in this space that want to enter in the space and want access to the to the blockchains we're assisting them and providing full node infrastructures for them depending upon the protocols that they're interested in

and also helping them adopt some proof-of-stake protocols if they're wanting to to move in that direction okay wonderful and what would you say your unique selling point is compared to maybe some other providers so for us you know we're we're a pure infrastructure play you know we provide the dev tooling the apis all scalability from an enterprise perspective our job is is our our facet is kind of we're b to b to c in essence so we want to be we want companies to build on top of block daemon to help them expand and scale their infrastructure so it's institutional grade we're iso compliant we should be certified later this year

so we really are building this infrastructure for big large institutions to scale their their business well that's incredible and now with over 5 billion in asset stakes using block demon's infrastructure i mean it's it's an incredible incredible amount uh can you explain further to our audience the importance of staking for for our industry and maybe why so many people are flocking to these protocols well i think the the proof of state protocols offers you know another opportunity for folks to to earn a yield on their assets um i think it's it's a very could be a safer way in essence a more secure way in essence because the assets

you know remain in your wallet structures with your custodians and you're creating a in essence a speaking wallet within your custodial wallet infrastructure and you're only in you're you're creating that smart contract and sharing that public key pair uh which with block damon and it's like a synthetic bond of how we tie that wallet and those assets to stake node infrastructure so we can earn a yield so i think it provides another way for custodians and exchanges and other asset managers to diversify their their revenue diversify their service offering and allow them to add more value to their customers

and and we provide that infrastructure that those firms can build on top of that will allow them to offer that service i say well and i mean being interested with with assets of this size is that that security must be one of your top top priorities so how do you protect your customs yeah so i know everybody wants to talk about you know what's the yield on this particular protocol and that uh you know we really take the approach that our top priority is risk mitigation since our effort and our focus is on the enterprise we need to be maniacally focused on and how we how we provide risk mitigation so we do it in about four different ways right we have we have a range of note services and node service providers

we work with well over eight different cloud bare metal and data center providers we want to offer our institutional customer base both vendor diversity as well as geography diversity we want to make sure when we do deploy from an infrastructure enterprise perspective we're developing and producing a primary node and a fully redundant sphere node dedicated to that client so in case we need to rotate keys or do anything like that you know we're able to do so without without losing any particular step and um so we provide that to them we also we also make sure that we only do manual failovers so in the purchase staking environment

you want to make sure you're doing manual failovers to eliminate any double signing risk at all possible because in some instances if you're doing automatic failovers you know that first node may may have some issues and it'll fail over to the secondary redundant node and that that node may sign a transaction but then the first node all of a sudden feels a lot better and comes back online and catches up and signs the same transactions well we all know in a proof-of-staking environment that's that's a big no-no so we want to make sure that we can mitigate that risk as much as possible the other components are 24 7 monitoring we have a global team around around the universe we have north of 50 employees now i would say 70

of them are all in engineering and operations and devops and then i think to my knowledge we are you know one of the or only the infrastructure providers that provides a slashing and double signing guarantee in our essence our own insurance product to make sure that if something does happen you know we'll cover it for our customers from that perspective okay thank you and and so if we do a little bit deeper now i mean you support over 30 protocols i mean that's huge i remember time when they were much less uh than that around um why do you believe there are so many protocols coming out and will we see

this growth i mean plateau at some point or even decrease as adoption grows yeah it's well it's over 30 over 40 protocols now and uh about half of those are in proof of stake protocols and um you know i don't know if it's going to plateau i think there's a lot of people that are extremely intelligent and smart that want to solve a lot of problems in a lot of applications and think of things differently and offer new solution sets so i think you know some of these protocols are meaning to accomplish some wonderful and great things you know who am i to judge right my job is to

be able to be the voice of the customer uh listen to the customer understand kind of what they want feed that back into my organization and provide that capability for them and actually work with those foundations to understand their capabilities what they're trying to accomplish and how can i help them as an infrastructure provider provide diversification decentralization and the proliferation of their their of what they're trying to accomplish via an enterprise provider so you know we have a commitment to the community we have a commitment to these particular foundations and protocol to help them grow and sustain and um so you know we're not here to judge we're

here to provide what are what our clients are asking for yeah that's exactly what you mean and the community does biddle a lot and they yeah they they work a lot on that front so that's a it's great and i like the positivity for a side saying that it's going to continue to grow and then there's more i mean we want to you know we want to provide the dev tools we want to make that available to the community for its life cycle we you know we want to provide the test net setups and the validators and the full node automation and the abstraction apis you know we want to provide all these things so people can you know make their own determination of how they want to use that particular protocol

i see and following that i mean some very very exciting news i mean you just closed not so long ago your series a of 28 million dollars i mean that's this incredible amount how do you plan on spending this money to grow block gaming if not all all into bitcoin yeah it's uh it's it's massively scaling our business and our infrastructure we have a very aggressive roadmap that we're trying to adhere to based upon a lot of our client demands we're trying to obviously add to our engineering and dev staff our product teams our project management teams our protocol specialists so not only do we provide

depth and a lot of protocols for we support we also want to provide and go deep into those particular protocols as much as we possibly can so it's it's really the expansion and to accelerate that expansion of what we're currently doing now understood uh well and as we unfortunately edged closer to the end of this episode i just wanted to ask you what your vision for the future of the blockchain industry as a whole might be my vision for black daemon or my vision for the whole world for the blockchain industry in terms of where the blockchain stream will be in the next five ten years and and please feel free to chip in where you believe block demon will find itself within that well look i think i think

we're in exciting times here i think you're you're continuously seeing the progression of adoption you're seeing mainstream financial institutions coming out with their thoughts on the space and how they plan on entering the space and how they want to service the space based upon what they're probably hearing from their customers um so i think you're seeing that adoption over time you know it's it's uh you know it's it's a bit of an evolution even though some people think you know they want to say it's a revolution it's probably a little bit of both but you know i think you know these things evolve and i think people need to take time to evolve and

take time to adopt it's great to see you know folks like you know goldman sachs and state street and j.p morgan and morgan stanley and all these folks coming out with their thoughts on the space um it's great to see um you know fortune 500 institutions you know adding bitcoin to their balance sheet and ethereum possibly to their balance sheet again further adoption you know that that didn't happen you know 18 months ago um so i think you're going to continuously see that evolution you're going to continuously see the adoption and you're going to continue to see what protocols are going to are going to win out and what things will what people will gravitate

to and what problems will they solve and how it will continue to evolve i definitely am old enough to relate this to the internet boom uh the internet bubble and bust and and all that proliferation but all that happened for a great reason and what wonderful companies and services and capabilities came out of that and what we're able to do today and the information that we are have access to uh at our fingertips i think there's a lot of analogies uh with what's happening now with the digital asset space and and the blockchain that's um truly aspiring words there i'm interested and maybe if i if i may you mentioned the kind of the boom and bust

of of the the internet like i mean do you believe that we had that that kind of boom or the bust uh in in 2017 or do you believe that's uh that that's still still coming what are your thoughts about where we're at yeah i don't i don't i don't think it's kind of one and done right i mean if you if you look at since i've spent a great deal of my career uh in financial services and in the exchange space any and you kind of study a little bit of the financial markets over time and you know you can look at the fortune 500 you know back in 1990 and the fortune 500 in 2000 they're probably all different with the exception of a few

so i think you're going to have cycles i think you're going to have cycles where things kind of move up and to the right and you're going to have cycles where they're kind of flatlining and they're going to have you know downward training cycles and it really all depends upon the foresight of those of those key executives building their businesses and and are they solving real problems for real peoples and those and the cream will rise to the top and will survive so i think there's more uh volatility in our space there's more positive upward trends there's going to be more sideway trends there's going to be more downward trends and we all need to be persistent and and and get through them and we'll see what

happens in the end so uh again there's there's no uh i think it's it's gonna be just the continuous evolution of uh seeing what's going to uh win out over time wonderful and keeping keeping those hands strong thank you so much uh for for joining us today um do you have any final words uh for our listeners on on where they can that they can find you and and anything else you'd like to add sure i mean i'm on all the social media channels uh feel free to connect with me obviously you can go to blockdamen.com and check out our market center and look at all the

protocols that we support and if there's an interest that we can help you with your node infrastructure uh and or your staking strategy we're more than happy to uh provide that infrastructure and our expertise uh for you wonderful well everyone if you enjoyed this conversation feel free to check out more on our website cryptovalley.swiss where we will splinter events educational material and even provide information on how you can join our growing community thanks again demetrius for joining us thank you for having me appreciate the opportunity our pleasure stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland bye