Joseph Lalouz, CEO of Bisontrails, explains why his infrastructure company joined Facebook's Libra Association. Bisontrails runs blockchain nodes for multiple protocols. The Association uses one-member-one-vote governance and plans to eventually open participation beyond founding members.
Hi everyone, I'm Giovanni and today with us, Joseph Lalouz, CEO at Bisontrails. Bisontrails is among the members of the Libra association, the governing body that will be managing Libra, the new cryptocurrency developed by Facebook. Joseph, first of all, can you tell us about your company?
We're an infrastructure company to help companies, custodians, exchanges, app developers, decentralized web developers, deploy infrastructure in, into new protocols and blockchains. And so we're essentially building the infrastructure layer in between the application itself and the blockchain itself. So we make it really easy for teams to be able to build on top of blockchains. What we do is we help people deploy and orchestrate nodes that are decentralized, globally distributed, highly available, highly secure.
So why did you decide to participate in the Libra project?
There was a very noble and very ambitious cause that the Libra association was trying to do, which was truly trying to bank the unbanked and create seamless payment systems, a global payment process and seamless remittances globally. And that was for us was a very mission aligned initiative.
That is for sure an inspiring mission. But values aside, what is the financial reward which Bison Trails hope to gain out of Libra?
There's maybe an interest rate on the global baskets or the global reserve that Libre association is creating. I don't think that that is a primary driver or incentive for us. So we're an infrastructure company looking to power the next 20 years of decentralized application building and decentralized participation. So for us it's really about how do we help companies, entrepreneurs, funds, exchanges, custodians build on top of these blockchains. And if Libra is going to be a very successful blockchain, it needs to have infrastructure to support these kinds of services. And so that's where, when we think about, from a business perspective, why we think it's valuable. We think that it has the potential to be as successful as any of the other protocols that we work on.
Interesting. And what Bison Trails has to offer to the Libra Association. Why do you think you were chosen to join the initiative?
They approached us mostly because we're, you know, a protocol agnostic, blockchain, agnostic technical team that had experience working with a whole bunch of different protocols, with different consensus algorithms, with different network topologies, different types. One of the things that was attractive about us is that one, we were specifically focused on the infrastructure side, which is key, a key component to the success of a network. And two, we were a crypto native infrastructure company. And quite frankly, there's just not a tremendous amount of teams that are focused on this problem. And so one of the things that we bring to the table is a wealth of expertise in particular in infrastructure and running and deploying nodes and helping people do that easily and working really closely with protocol teams and technical teams to support the network as it goes from zero to testnet and through the mainnet.
So many are concerned that Facebook will use Libra as an instrument to increase further its influence as part of the Libra association. You are supposed to keep Libra democratic network. How do you plan to do it?
The idea is that each representative of the Libra association, so each member of the Libra association will have one vote, equal vote. So everyone that's involved has one equal vote. And so all the decisions that are going to be made on a governance, from a governance perspective are going to be made democratically. So the association will have a form of what I would call like management or administration to take care of like everyday things and also make sure that the association is running smoothly, like operationally, but. But it doesn't have like a. There's no governing element to it. The association as a whole operates as a true democracy. And the idea is that over time you can open up access. So right now it's like a federated network with all of the association members. And over time you can move towards a permissionless system. As the network grows and scales and becomes more stable, you can start to open that up and allow more access to it.
Thank you, Joseph. That was very informative. Here with us today was Joseph Lalouz, CEO at Bisontrails, one of the members of the Libra Association, a cryptocurrency project backed by Facebook. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more cool stuff. Cointelegraph like subscribe and hodl.
