My guest today is John deVadoss, the founder of NGD Enterprise Inc. NGD Enterprise focuses on the blockchain developer experience and tooling for the NEO blockchain. Neo bills itself as a “rapidly growing and developing” ecosystem that has the goal of becoming the foundation for the next generation of the internet — a new economy where digitized payments, identities, and assets come together. Initially known as Antshares, this project was believed to be China’s first-ever public blockchain when it was launched in February 2014. The open-source platform was subsequently rebranded to Neo three years later. As well as creating a worldwide community of developers who create new infrastructure for the network and lower barriers to entry, the team behind this project operates an EcoBoost initiative that’s designed to encourage people to build decentralized apps and smart contracts on its blockchain. Previously, John was a co-founder of the InterWork Alliance, which is now part of the GBBC. Earlier, He was a general manager at Microsoft for close to two decades, during which he built out the architecture for .NET v1, Visual Studio Tools, the Microsoft Application Platform, Microsoft Digital (which he scaled to billion-dollar P&L), and more. He led the early service-oriented architecture and cloud architecture incubation initiatives for Microsoft, which led to Azure. Our conversation covers a wide range of topics including Neo, Bitcoin, developing software, scaling infrastructure, multi-chain and interoperability, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing John’s background and his experience leading teams at Microsoft. John discusses how his time at Microsoft gave him insight into how to scale infrastructure and how to create tools for developer communities. Our conversation transitions to discussing developers. John explains general misconceptions and the network effects of programming languages. We discuss why we should be building developer tools in the crypto-space to attract millions of developers globally to the blockchain. Our next conversation topic centered around Bitcoin. John illustrates the importance of Bitcoin and how Bitcoin is an institution. We also discuss general misunderstandings traditional technologists have about blockchain and the major themes they fail to grasp. John excellently discusses the developer ecosystem of the blockchain space and why we attract nontraditional builders. Our next conversation topic was centered around code and auditing code. John gives great insights into how you should think about code and what to look for when auditing a project's code. We transitioned from blockchain and web3 to discuss web2. John discusses why web2 was a bad detour for humanity. John illustrates how web2 evolved from being focused on user-generated content to surveillance capitalism. Another major topic of discussion was the possible applications of web3 protocols and projects. One area we discussed was the application of the protocols to municipalities and other government organizations. We finish our conversation discussing interoperability and the future of multichain. John excellently demonstrates why we are headed to a multichain world and the difficulties we face implementing interoperability. This was an amazing conversation with so many insights from general software scaling to Bitcoin to web3. Please enjoy my conversation with John deVadoss.

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