This is a very special podcast for us as it is our first debate format on Insureblocks. We were extremely privileged to have two titans/Jedi Masters from the blockchain community join us for this podcast. On one side we have Richard Brown, Chief Technology Officer from R3, builders of Corda, advocating for enterprises to use private blockchain systems. Whilst on the other side we’ve got John Wolpert, Team Lead at Web 3 Studio at Consensys, builders of Ethereum based blockchains, advocating for enterprises to use public blockchain systems.

Have a listen to this fascinating podcast and if you’d like for Insureblocks to organise more debates on our show, do let us know.

 

About Richard and R3

Richard is the Chief Technology Officer at R3 an enterprise software firm that are the founders of Corda. Corda is an open source blockchain platform designed for the enterprise world. R3 initially began as a consortium of large financial firms trying to figure out what opportunity does blockchain represent for their firms and the implication blockchain may bring to their businesses. As part of this learning exercise and exploration they reviewed a number of blockchain platforms before deciding to build their own blockchain platform called Corda. Corda is available in an open source format and it is being used by a large number of firms to solve some interesting business processes.

 

About John and Consensys

John is the leader of a team at Consensys called Web 3 Studio. Consensys is a company that is dedicated to building a platform to enable people to build on the Ethereum blockchain. John’s Web 3 team focuses, as he puts it, “on novel unexpected and exciting use cases that can help developers really get behind blockchain and Web 3.0”

Previously John used to be the Global Head of Products at IBM’s blockchain and one of the cofounders of Hyperledger. However, John, doesn’t define himself as a Hyperledger guy or an Ethereum guy but more as a “stateful internet” guy. He is a big fan for pushing the managing of states in a decentralized manner.

 

What is Blockchain? - John

According to John, blockchain is just one part of an evolution of the internet towards a stateful internet. In other words an upgrade to the present internet that is essentially led by companies soloing servers sitting around controlling state, memory and business logic.

“There won’t be one chain to rule them all.” But now, I believe that in order for the Stateful Internet to avoid descending into a fight at the gates of Mordor, we do in fact need a trustless, permissionless, decentralized root chain playing umpire.

This can be done today in a decentralized manner similar to how we experience passing messages right now with packets of information going back and forth between different routers. However, managing state is a lot harder than managing passing messages. As messages go through a router, a router doesn’t have to remember what state it was before, what state it is now and coordinate that state with billions of other routers. Ethereum offers the ability to manage state between routers in a decentralized manner.

 

What is Blockchain? - Richard

For Richard, blockchain is a technology that enables us to do something we couldn’t have done before. It enables multiple different computers,