Yeah, very cool. We’re live.

We’re recorded.

First of all, thanks for having us. You’re an inspiration. The first time I heard you speak was at Meet Taipei. We’re Unitychain, by the way. I’m Joshua.

We’re all Js.

We’re working on solving blockchain scalability. We think our approach may have figured out a way to stay decentralized, secure, and have great speed, which is formally known as the Trilemma, coined by Vitalik. We do this through use of what we call the Unity Protocol and DHTs.

We’re in Taipei. We love Taiwan. Jon’s been, for a while, doing Taiwanese. I’ve been here now three months, and I’m otherwise living in San Francisco. I think we’re going to have an R&D department in Taipei for a very long time.

Yes.

It’s great to hear what you’re doing, just in the broad scope of Taiwan, and how radical your approach is. Even with the IoT stuff and blockchain, I know that you guys are quite familiar with Iota.

OK, I’ll pull that out.

This is actually, unfortunately not. This is just for us. This is like, Christmas Eve, we had it. We just recorded it.

The core concept here, there’s not too much to show right now, but basically, we have a blockchain running from a DHT. In case anyone’s wondering, DHTs are distributed hash tables. They are incredibly scalable. It should be able to handle up to, frankly, millions, of nodes.

What you’re about to see is a very rudimentary, hard-coded proof of concept, but we have a DHT implementation called Kademlia. We were running very basic, rudimentary Unity Protocol consensus on it. This is our CTO speaking here.

Nice. Just to show that it’s not always a consensus?

That’s basically the concept. These errors are showing that there isn’t consensus being reached. This is the early stages. This is the precursor to our test net. We’ve only started developing on the actual coding of this about five weeks ago, but we’ve been focused on just research in the meantime.

There’s a lot of things we could learn from other projects, first of all. Like Laren just mentioned DKG, distributed key generation. There’s a project called Dfinity that we’ve learning from. It turns out some of the mathematics they use is similar to us. There’s some properties that are similar in our approach, which is good to see.

That we’re not in a complete black box, that there are other people smarter than us looking into this and qualifying and validating these ideas.

Yeah, on-chain numbers, not random generation.

We’re happy to meet you, and to start to build a relationship with you. As we make developments, product upgrades and updates, it would be great to periodically, maybe once every quarter, just, "Hey, this is what we’re doing," just so you’re aware of it.

We wanted to ask you a couple questions. Juin, you had a couple questions about just the ecosystem?

DLT, for sure. DLT is what we’re also framing ourselves to be DLT launching, not cryptocurrency. We will have likewise some unit of measure for computation services. Speaking of education, you mentioned one of them as part of our community-building efforts, we actually will be focusing a lot on education.

We know that if you create great quality content once, it’s very, what do you call it? The costs of letting an additional person have access to it is basically minimal. We will produce a lot of quality content and educational material, and that will be broadly, of course. It’ll be just about DLT, at least to say, "This is what we’re doing at Unity Chain," just a little of that.

That’s certainly, we think it’s important education, sharing the information, and getting people involved. Especially from the young age, so high school to college. Create some programs to help them out and initiatives.

There’s a lot of brilliant people that are in school, and even not even in a school. I’m a college drop-out.

I’m not even going to send my kids to school.

No, but seriously, also, in Mandarin, too. We’ll do it in English and Mandarin. We’ll do translations. We see that Taiwan is a great location geographically. Also, with Southeast Asia, it’s easy to get to Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, China.

Politically, yeah. A lot of people speak English. Great resources, high IQ, on average, so that’s great. Actually, when I met Jon, he was in Taiwan. If it wasn’t for Vitalik, I’ve heard him talk about Taipei or Taiwan a few times.

If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have been a little more skeptical, like wait a second.

I think we made the right decision. My first time here was in June, July. We’re still a startup, very much. We’ve been self-funded until now. Things are moving fast, and we’re very optimistic that we’re on the right path.

This is important technology that we want to bring to the world. I think more than anything, we would love to, as we make these milestones and hit these milestones I’ll show you...We’re actually, we’re not forking the existing chain, and just doing a proof of state, concept. We’re doing a whole new model.

As a result, of course, you don’t know exactly how it’s going to unfold. If we’re able to pull off what we think we can pull off, or create something that is more fair, more democratic, more open, and potentially more impactful for the world.

We’d love to keep you updated on this as we move forward. You’re an inspiration to us. It’s super cool that someone in government would have someone like you put in such an important role.

I was like, "Whoa, yeah. ML, machine learning, AI, blockchain."

I did.

Yeah.

It’s getting serious already.

Blockchain is perfect for governance, at least for voting. That’s clear. As long as you can prove one individual, one node, or one individual, one entity. Then, of course, liquid governance, the ability to delegate your vote and change it with a few clicks.

It’s a direct democracy. That’s the way it should be. I’m sure the Founding Fathers of the United States, had they known about this technology, they would have designed it that way. Why wouldn’t you? We are thinking about on-chain governance from the beginning, and we’re designing it.

Actually, that’s one of the beautiful things about going last in this game. We got to see all these other projects, like Tezos that just focuses on governance. OK, that’s interesting, a study that we said...

We got to study these protocols, to pick and choose the parts that we liked, the parts that we didn’t think worked out very well. We’re trying to build a unified plan, of very long-term thinking. I personally believe that this type of technology is game-changing.

It’s simple, in a sense, but I don’t think, originally I didn’t realize how much non-trust there was, how many middlemen, non-trust, and how important transparency was. Of course, you say that, it sounds like, "Yeah, it’s obvious."

When it’s technologically and mechanically proven to provide that kind of capabilities, it does change society on a big, big scale.

It changes things, really, We are thinking about on-chain governance. I think the future of government is going to be direct democracy. If not on planet Earth, at least on Mars.

That’s wonderful, that’s wonderful. Actually, I’m curious, I would love to hear in a snapshot, what do you think the world’s going to look like in 20 years?

I would love to see you think the world is going to look like in 20 years, as far as let’s just talk about governance.

I know, of course.

That’s for sure. That’s one thing I’ve noticed. I have lived in different parts of Asia before, in Hong Kong, some time in China, in South Korea. Taiwan is very progressively, politically, and the society.

Small things like not having trash cans all over the place keeps it clean. Sure, Taipei, especially is an older city, but it’s a clean city. That goes to show a lot about just the people. It’s interesting.

That was wonderful. You guys have any other questions while we have Audrey’s time?

Exactly.

That’s great. Actually, you mentioned the IoT all around Taiwan, trusting government sources. These are, maybe at some point, actually, it would be pretty cool if we could integrate with that data.