Blockchain Enterprise: An Interview with The CEO Of Nuco

Bockchain Enterprise: An Interview with The CEO Of Nuco http://blockgeeks.com/blockchain-enterprise/ My name is Matthew Spoke. I am the Founder & CEO of Nuco. We are a Toronto-based enterprise blockchain software company. We have been around for about seven months now. Nuco is a software company that focuses on building blockchain for networks in enterprise companies. We essentially piggybacked off of some of these open source protocols and decided that this would be an interesting technology to apply in the context of what could close the network of known participants, such as banks, hospitals, insurance companies, you name it. The same general purpose infrastructure that Ethereum is to the public domain, we wanted to build a version of that intended for a close network of participants. A simple example that people often point to is in financial services, being able to create a close-payment network, for example, between a group of domestic banks. In Canada take the five biggest Canadian banks and, say, they wanted to create a faster payment or settlement system, they might decide to do that on the distributed network rather than creating an intermediary organization for that. Outside of finance, we have also done some proof of concept in as remote use cases as healthcare or IoT. In healthcare we did a proof of concept around pharmacies and clinics existing on a network together so that they could track the issuance of prescription drugs and verify that the prescription was legitimate, that it wasn’t being used at two different pharmacies, and so solving this idea of fraud in the prescription world. That’s another example. The market that I look at when I think about spreading around is the enterprise market. We have two focuses. When we say enterprise we say, for example, the Fortune 500 companies that are the incumbents in these industries, and the banks and the insurance companies that don’t want to be disrupted by this new technology. The other category of enterprises is the new software companies that are in fact the disrupters, the ones that are coming in, our generation of the PayPals of the world that are going to be like the new bank or the new insurance company. So we’re trying to make sure that what we’re building is relevant to both of those groups. But today when you look at running any type of proof of concept or eventually going to production on a network like Bitcoin or a network like Ethereum, a lot of the challenges have to do with performance of those networks, like how many transactions can you process, the regulators wanting to have some sort of control as to who participates in these transactions, so can you close off these networks. There is also scalability and security and all these kind of high-level bucket items. Ethereum’s recent challenges have pointed out the fact that it’s probably a long way from being able to process real financial services transactions in a regulated environment. So we’re trying to solve all of those things with a built-for-purpose infrastructure that is intended for these enterprises users. There has been a healthy amount of proof of concepts in prototypes and labs and RnD that is happening. Everybody seems to be coming to a similar list of limitations. We hear it from every customer we talk to, it’s always about performance, security, scalability, integration requirements. The blockchain world operates in a little bit of a vacuum, so the [crosstalk 03:15] companies a blockchain. But in reality those blockchain networks are going to have to integrate into your sales forces, your Oracles, your SAP systems, or others. These are the real-world implications that have not been solved yet, because everybody has done their first proof of concept to say, hey, I don’t want to tokenize something that might represent like a stock or a prescription drug. How do I implement that into an existing process is the next step that people haven’t figured out yet. We made a pretty conscious decision upfront that we were going to hire talent locally in Toronto. We wanted to grow a team that had the synergies of being in the same room together. So we opened an office here, we made sure that the people we were recruiting could physically be in that office, especially because we’re bringing on people at different levels of experience with this technology. We found that they could learn a lot faster by sitting next to somebody who might be slightly more experienced than them. But that means that we were limiting our pool of talent to graduates from universities that are around the Toronto area, and we’ve got some great schools, but it’s still limiting to a certain extent. The second thing that became evident to us is we were not only looking for blockchain talent, we were looking for talent that was smart enough and well established enough to learn how a blockchain infrastructure changes the way you build software