Tech Talks 2022: Wolfram Blockchain Labs

Sam.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tech Talks. We're streaming live here from Wolfram Technology Conference 2022 in Champaign, Illinois. And we've got a lot more traffic in here now. It's hustlin and bustling. So I am joined by John Woodard, who is the CEO of Wolfram Blockchain Labs. And we're just going to be talking about the Blockchain chain labs today. Hi, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, absolutely. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. How's the conference going for you so far? Have you given any talks?

No, I haven't given any talks. I won't give any talks. I, I may go to like one or two seminars at this point. It's kind of like maybe this is my eighth or ninth technology conference. So it's pretty much like, I don't know, like sort of old habit in many ways for sure. It's always kind of laid out very similar way. So it's interesting from that perspective to see the things that are actually a little bit different every time.

Yeah. At least there's some consistency. People. Our people habits.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Cool.

Well, I would love to hear more about these, the Wolfram Blockchain Lab. I'm still pretty new to the company and it's something that I would love to hear more about. And not just hearing about the technology, but hearing more about it as a whole. And I'd love to hear a background on Blockchain as well.

Yeah, I mean it's certainly exciting because every time that we've given an interview we can see kind of both the consistency of our vision overall, but then also the really thing that's exciting is seeing the progress that we've made over the past years. And so that's always been really interesting, exciting and kind of invigorating.

Very cool. So could you just go ahead and explain more about what the Wolf from Blockchain Labs is? Just for the viewers who are out there that might not know.

Yeah, sure. So we've had kind of this interesting view I think of like we have an interesting view of technology in general at Wolfram Research, where we're driven really by a long term mission in R and D. And that makes us different than a lot of other companies that are out there. And I think along with that we also pay really close attention to our users. And in this way with Blockchain, Maybe in like mid of 2 3rd of 2013, people were asking about the price of bitcoin. Unfortunately we actually didn't invest at that Point.

Bummer, unfortunately.

I know, right? But we did kind of take note of that and start kind of building different things. And in 2016, we integrated our first blockchain at that point, which was multi chain. And then over time, we gradually figured out, hey, we can actually integrate more and more blockchains into Wolfram language by hosting those blockchain nodes in our colocation centers and then connecting those to the Wolfram technology stack. So that's what we've been doing every year. We've added more and more blockchains and interacted with more and more blockchains. So it's been pretty exciting from that perspective. I think in like maybe 2018, 2019, we really started to focus on what we felt like our overall view for blockchain space would be. And a lot of that is thinking about this kind of economist future is kind of a way that we think about it. And what we mean by autonomous future is that, you know, we can imagine maybe in 10 or 20 years even, where a lot of things are just consistently kind of done in the background by kind of intelligent agents just kind of doing things for us. And that may have to do with what we call distributed ledger technologies or dlts or blockchains and smart contracts. So it's kind of like in 2018, 2019, we figured, hey, there are all of these different areas. Let's kind of trim these down into areas that we want to focus in the short term, even as we think about this long term autonomous future. And so what we did was say, hey, we're really good at doing these blockchain integrations, integrating these into Wolfram language and allowing people to access the blockchains both from the data that exists on those chains, and then also sending transactions to those chains. So that's one clear area. And then the other two areas are blockchain intelligence in general. That's kind of like looking at the analytics of things that go on on those blockchains and then Oracles, which have to do with actually providing computational facts. A lot of the stuff that we've done over the past 15 years with Wolfram Alpha and providing those to smart contracts to help trigger different clauses on those smart contracts. Sure. And that was basically what we focused on. And the thing that's been exciting over the past few years is we've kept building and building on those areas. And the way it is, like right now, I think kind of right after tech conference, we're really going to be working on pushing out a brand new site and actually showing a brand new website and showing the progress of more of those features, which is really exciting for all of us, not only at Wolfram Blockchain Labs, but I think also at Wolfram Research.

Absolutely. It's always nice to see a vision come to life like that. So that's great. You actually answered one of my questions. I was going to ask you more about those oracle and blockchain intelligence. Is there anything else that you wanted to elaborate on that?

Yeah, I mean, again, it's just, it's super exciting because I think what we've done is looked at kind of a lot of these different cross chain areas. I mean, that's kind of what people put oracles and other things because you can kind of think about blockchains existing as a digital ecosystem in a way. And each of these digital ecosystems are kind of unique. And guess what's the best way of putting it kind of on their own island.

Okay.

And so if you want to get any information off the island, you have to have some kind of device to get information there. And so oracles are kind of one of those areas, but there are also other kind of cross chain areas. And one of the exciting things that we're coming out with pretty soon is we're actually working on a white paper with some collaborators of ours on cross chain oriented sort of things. So when we look at blockchains kind of existing on these islands, in a way, these cross chain bridges kind of connect them, or oracles kind of connect them together with both kind of things that happen in the world and then things that happen on the different blockchains. So we're really focused on looking more at how those things will work in the future and coming out with ways of describing how we plan to work within those kind of ecosystems as well.

That's very cool. I can tell you're very passionate about this.

Yes, absolutely.

That's always great. It's good to know that you're working with what you're passionate about. You know, that's everyone's energy end goal in life. And so it's really good that you're able to be, you know, really working with what you're passionate about. I guess one question I just thought of is if I, you know, blockchain is slightly a technical topic in general and not everyone knows what blockchain is. If I was to be explaining blockchain as a whole to someone who's not very technical, how could I do that in like, simple layman's terms?

Yeah, yeah. So I guess the way I would look at it is I would talk about it as being a distributed ledger because it's a little bit easier to think about it as a ledger and a ledger. If you're familiar at all with accounting. Are you? Okay, great, great. Good. Because I don't have to explain accounting at all. It's kind of like if you have this ledger, you might think of a ledger at a table that, that I only have access to. And if I only have access to this ledger, you essentially, you have to trust me that I'm writing down the things correctly. Right. Like I might write your wages down or like how many hours you work. But you essentially, you have to trust me.

Right, okay.

Well, if you had a ledger that was publicly available and was transparent, now you don't have to trust me. You can just look at the ledger yourself. And that's really at the core what blockchain is really about. It's making it kind of trustless. So now you don't actually have to trust any person that you're interacting with. You can just look at it yourself.

That's very cool. I'm going to have to play this back and memorize that for what I tell everyone.

It's a very high level kind of explanation, but that's kind of how it works.

Yeah, you spoke about it in a way that's easy for people to understand. So I really appreciate that. What can the viewers look out for in Within Wolfram Blockchain Labs coming soon or in the future?

Yes. So I would go back to kind of the blockchain intelligence side of things. So we are also working on that. We've been working on that within the Cardano community. So Cardano is a blockchain that we actually work pretty closely with, both the Cardano foundation and then IOG Input Output Global. And so I actually went to a Cardano NFT conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. I think it was this month. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, October.

So yeah, very fun.

Yeah, so it was fun. It was really interesting around Cardano NFTs. And so what we're doing there is we're actually working on kind of the governance area of analytics. And again it goes back to kind of the explanation of DLTs and blockchains that if you're doing governance, you want to make things as transparent as possible where people can see the information and make decisions on the basis of the information that's publicly available. So this is another thing that we're working on and coming up with pretty soon. So that's also exciting.

That is exciting. And I understand you guys have a conference coming up in the spring. Do you want to talk about that?

Yes, absolutely. So it is a yet to be named conference. We are still trying to think about think different names. So if there are people out there watching now, certainly put conference ideas in the comments and I will take a look. It's kind of going to be a blockchain science oriented conference where we're trying to bring together folks from academia, from blockchain industry, from kind of consortiums who are working on blockchain related projects as well. And so it's pretty exciting from that standpoint because there are not a lot of conferences out there like that. Most kind of focus on more the consumer area area as opposed to kind of the science kind of area. Sure. But that also makes it hard to figure out a name because the obvious names people have kind of come up with and used. So we're now trying to figure out, okay, well, here are some keywords. How do we come up with the name that's going to work that someone hasn't taken already? So that's what we're doing now with the name, but it should be in May in Boston. It's really exciting for that reason because we're kind of also doing a lot of research around kind of the academic ecosystem in blockchain, which there are a lot of really high end universities and research institutions that are working on blockchain related items or research groups that are working on blockchain related items. So it'll be nice to have a really strong idea of that ecosystem and interact with that ecosystem leading up to the conference.

That's very exciting. Cool. It's always nice to. Wolfram is just such a unique company is what I've found in my five months of working here. And it's cool that, you know, you guys are putting on a unique conference as well. Everything, every little step of Wolfram seems to be unique and seems to be a niche that we're hitting. And it's just a very unique place to work and a unique company to follow. So this is very exciting.

Yes.

Cool. Well, do you have anything else that you'd like to share with the viewers?

No, I think that's pretty much it. Although we are like starting like lots of interviews. I think as we discussed earlier, we've joined like the UTXO alliance earlier this year, so we'll be doing a lot of interviews with them. So again, if there are people who are watching out there who think that we should interview them, like certainly like post below in the comments and we'll, we'll take a look and see if we can fit you in.

Very cool. Well, thank you everyone for watching this tech talk. And thank you, John, for taking, taking time out of your day. I know you're very busy and talking to us and everyone should make sure to keep an eye out for the new website coming out and for the conference. It's going to be next spring. Have a good day.

Sa.