We have our white paper, we have more coming out, and we have more research being done. We are very much practical. We’re engineers. We want to build things, we test, we simulate, and we see how things work, rather than writing a paper and waiting. That will maybe take a year or two years, and then we build a product that will take another two years to build.
We do them concurrently, and we’re very careful in the research that we do and making sure that what we do does not affect the people who hold value in IOTA.
We’ve engaged some security research firms. We also have cryptographic researchers. We have lots of mathematicians dealing with the network security and attacks. In our white paper, we outline a number of attacks and how they’re possible.
There is a large prize if you are able [laughs] to attack the network. I think it’s $2.7 billion that there’s possibly at stake, and we get attacked every second day. People are trying to figure out how to penetrate the network. To answer your question, yes, we are actively making sure that what we are building is secure for the future.
Even over and above that, in terms of a practical sense, for the individuals using the IoT products, what the Data Market demonstrates is our masked authenticated messaging platform, which enables symmetrically encrypted message streams that are fully secret.
That means that you can publish streams, sell access, change keys. It’s based on Merkle trees, which is really cool. There’s lots and lots of things we can do with that, and that’s one of the most powerful modules that we have.
This is what it looks like, and then you have your sensor map here. These are different companies in Germany. Then we have all the sensors down here. These are the companies we’re partnered with.
We’re partnered with a number different...I think there are number of different universities that are involved in this. The last system that is being... NCKU...
Yeah, that one. [laughs] I always get the acronym mixed up. They’re looking at integrating masked authenticated messaging. While I haven’t been able to share the code with them yet to put the sensor on the network, I think it will be very trivial for them to be able to join.
We have other universities, and so we’ll be able to get them on board, as well. Maybe we’ll have some more sensors in Asia Pacific, which would be nice.
Yes, yes, but our approach for smart contracts or for create execution environments is related to oracles. We look at oracles and we think that’s the way to go. A lot of the systems, they work in a vacuum. You have some data coming from the network, and then it just works within the network.
But we believe that we want to achieve a system where, instead of saying, "I want to pay a thousand IOTAs for something," we say, "OK, I want to pay five cents for something." That could be in Taiwan dollars, in US dollars, and we will provide the mechanisms through these oracles to be able to have the system say, "Yeah, five cents," but the settlement layer is in our in-over.
The contract gets executed and is able to do those calculations. We understand that the technology is very foreign, in the sense that it’s like, "What is an IOTA? What’s an Ether?" It’s very abstract in concepts. I think that’s the problem with this space a little bit, in the sense that there’s all of this technology, it’s great, and there’s all of these really interesting tools.
But, for people who aren’t you and me and these in the room, it’s very hard to say, "OK, now here is this token." They’re like, "What do I do with it? How do I use it?" We want to make sure that we make it as friendly as possible for individuals and allow the tools for developers to be able to hide it if they need to, which is good.
Alongside.
The tools that we’re building, so we have our value transfer software, which is you’re able to say, "I want to send a transaction on the network," and there’s the functionality for that, but there is also using the same sort of private key. You’re able to also send transactions and create MAM streams, and all this type of stuff as well, which is...
Yeah.
As a EIO.
Where we’re going in terms of the foundation, what we’re looking at doing is setting up an alliance, similar to the Ethereum Alliance that will have corporates and individuals being able to be involved.
We’re looking with the new architecture that we’re building for the core client, looking at having it sort of enterprise-ready, being able to have all of the required modules to enable that functionality to happen. In terms of reassurances and security, we’re continuing research into that area, and we’re aggressively following that, but we only recently are able to access the full funding. [laughs]
Yeah, and because of that, the amount of interviews we’ve had with new developers and stuff that we need to bring on board, because we’ve been at capacity for the last how many months, because we haven’t been able to access the 60 or 80 million dollars that we have for funding.
The Data Marketplace was the first one, and we actually had PR on that, which was nice, because we haven’t been able to engage a PR company.
We’re starting to gain momentum, and this is very good for us, and we want to make sure that we do it right, and we pick up the right developers. We engage the community in the correct way, and we also make sure that we get that security right.
There’s 30 at the moment.
But we’re...
Definitely. We’ve got a lot of networking guys coming on. We have a lot more...The area that I’m in is ecosystems, so we do a lot of the front facing for some of the community developers, the work there, so I’m looking to get more able to help me.
It’s been a bit stressful in coming here, and I was in Beijing before, Hong Kong, and now I’m here. Then we had the product launches, and it’s kind of my responsibility while also doing these little meetings and the speaking. Hopefully we’ll have more people to support, so we are not spread so thin, which is good.
Second to that, while we’re working with a number of large corporates and universities, and getting these partnerships, we also have another fund that is available to us to distribute it out to.
An ecosystem, yeah. We have about 22 TI, whatever that means, where at current process, it’s about like 30 million, I think, or a little bit less, and that’s for very small, so in the tens of thousands, where allocations to individuals to be able to build products, given that they have a good track record with their code, and for products that they want to build.
We’re looking for maybe at the governance around that, and we’ve just recently got a fund manager, so we’re able to start to get that moving and get people involved, and have these projects being worked on. Maybe the universities are able to apply for these grants. We really want to build the tooling. We want to build projects and have people be able to utilize the Tangle.
This is why you have the big companies that have the markets and the verticals, they’re great. They may be integrating IOTA, but we also want to have the industries that don’t exist yet. We want to have the person in a small town, behind a computer, being able to have the same impact that somebody who’s working in a large company has, so we will try to enable that.
Our website is horrible.
I have been a vocal opponent of our current website. It is very unclear. It has a lot of graphs, but not a lot of text. We are getting that re-done, which is very good, and we need that.
We need to be able to distinguish ourselves from them...?
That makes sense. I’ll look to get that information out there, because at present, I don’t think we have the, "We are this versus this, this, and this."
Oh yeah, because we say, "Oh, we have a IOTA," and they’re like, "What is that?" We’re like, "Well, it’s really good," and they’re like, "OK, show me." [laughs] You’re like, "Well, we don’t a list yet," so we’ll get the list. We’ll make it.
Like why does it need to be distributed and secured, and stuff? Which is a very interesting concern, because a lot of the applications you see these days like ICOs, and you’re just like, "Just get a replicated database."
You’re like, "What?" That’s pretty funny.
I think a good approach would be we’ve engaged in educational creatives, though, they’re very good at building little demo that individuals can use, even, so we’re looking to go from the person on the street, to the person who is the businessman, then the IT, then the developer interested in cryptocurrency, then like mathematician-level.
We’re looking to get all of that information, so that for anyone who is interested, they can understand. While the description may not be so accurate at the top, we will try and make it so as they might understand more.
In terms of how we are looking in terms of the technology that we are building, we want to get to a point where IOTA is a standardized protocol. We want to make sure that the technology, itself, and everybody contributing to the network...
Yeah, we’re partnering with the standard organizations from Germany. I’m not involved in that process, but I can maybe get some more information on that. Our end goal is to have this as the backbone of IoT and to communication.
Because of that, it’s nice to say, but if we’re not actually actioning any standardization then what are we doing? We’re going down that route to try and make sure that we are able to have these situations where there are these structures, that things happen, and there are no kind of recourse.
We want to make sure we have a clear way of dealing with these things, and when we’re writing these documents out.
Yeah, you can’t just have something be like, "Oh, it changed on Tuesday." [laughs] You need to have something standard.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Very good.
Thank you.
