Enabling India’s Blockchain Engineers

In conversation with Caleb Kow — on BUIDLing with Tezos

We think it’s safe to say that we got to know several interesting personalities at Genesis DevCon. In this edition of Hard Fork @ Genesis DevCon, we met with another note-worthy person — Caleb Kow, President, Tezos Foundation, Southeast Asia.

We had an exciting conversation about how a blockchain like Tezos is making significant strides towards enabling the creation of a unique blockchain platform and evangelizing it to developer communities all over the world. Caleb talks about leveraging #Tezos to enable India’s blockchain talent to reach greater heights.

Getting to know Caleb Kow

Caleb Kow is renowned in the tech circles given his business experience. He has expertise in strategic business development, startups, M&A within the Asia-Pacific data-center/web-hosting industry, highly scalable infrastructure deployments, hybrid mobile web applications, and emerging technologies.

Presently, he is heading the Southeast Asian division of Tezos — a blockchain platform that provides solutions for the issues that blockchain adoption faces to date:

• smart-contract safety,
• long-term upgradability, and
• open participation

Tezos is primarily working on building a developer community in India, increasing its networks, and consequently, bringing about the #BUIDLing of more blockchain-based products and solutions.

Salient points of our conversation with Caleb

A Brief introduction to Tezos

Tezos is a blockchain platform that prides itself on blending formal verification techniques into a whole self-amending ledger that has a governance component. ‎Tezos is one of the only blockchains that governs itself by establishing a true digital commonwealth.

‎A commonwealth is a group that chooses to be linked together because of their shared goals and interests. Tezos aims to empower their token holders to work together to make decisions based on a consensus that will contribute to improving the protocol over time.

It was founded by [Arthur Breitman[(https://medium.com/@arthurb) and Kathleen Breitman who conceived this vision for a blockchain that will implement a new way method of governance. This was set to be achieved through a streamlined process to engage the participating nodes so that the protocol can be future proof.

The Tezos Self-amending Ledger

Here is how Tezos the self-amending ledger works:

‎- The on-chain governance in Tezos is self-amending, that is to say, that upgradations are not limited by hard forks or soft forks. ‎

• In a self-amending blockchain network, developers can incorporate a formal, on-chain mechanism for proposing, selecting, testing, and activating protocol upgrades.
• A developer can propose an amendment, and these can be voted upon in cycles.
• As and when a cycle opens, an idea to add or amend aspects that the protocol would benefit from will be proposed.
• The developer would then upload the code or a contract. Following this, the proposed amendment is put to a vote in the network.
• If the proposed amendment is accepted, it then goes into the testing phase on the testnet.
• At this point, others on the network would be able to let anyone test out the code, find the bug, and anyone can get insight into how the network can function.
• Subsequently, another voting process happens. If the amendment passes, the code will be seamlessly deployed by the next cycle that takes place.

Caleb added that many chains today are fixed and are not upgradeable to be future-proofed. However, Tezos is enabled with the self-amending ledger concept to deploy upgradations and is therefore future-proofed. He also added that you cannot entirely prevent hard forks, however, you have a very open, transparent process that everyone can participate in.

‎Every blockchain has it’s ideological and directional differences. In proof of the work concept, the person with the largest mining power calls the shots. Tezos opens up participation to anybody without this limiting factor. He also added that this feature of Tezos is drawing several organizations to build their products/solutions on Tezos.

Acceptance of Tezos oversees

According to the interactions, Caleb has had with several startups, enterprises and govts, Tezos is a well-reputed blockchain platform. He expressed that ‎when companies want to adopt blockchain platforms, they look at certain factors:

• ‎Community support
• ‎Developer Support
  ‎- The technologies that support the platform

In this sense, Tezos has been effectively resourceful. Most adopters were drawn to the features of Tezos that enables security in finance-based applications.

For ‎financial institutions, the facilitation of formal verification is a significant selling point. It makes #BUIDLing even more secure by identifying bugs in the early stages of deployment and prevents any issues from arising.

The most interesting use cases materializing on Tezos

Use-Case No. 1

• Caleb sees great potential in #dApps that facilitate money transfers with the added escrow element.
• It seamlessly builds trust between two strangers through a smart contract.

Use-Case No. 2

• #Tezsure, a peer-to-peer insurance platform built on Tezos, is a very interesting application where the users can create customizable insurance products.

Use-Case No. 3

• Another use case that Caleb found interesting was the tokenization of digital assets.
• Allowing people to participate in owning a small fraction a large asset was unheard of in the past.
• However, blockchains like Tezos can help enable this aspect of ownership of property.
• A lot of interest has risen in the idea of tokenizing property among large-scale organizations and escrow holders, people who own property.

Such solutions are being built on Tezos. And what makes this a lot more interesting is how seamless transfer of ownership can be incorporated into these systems. And due to the presence of security in smart contracts, financial institutions rest assured that things won’t go sideways. These advancements will help bring in the next wave of financial transformation.

As an added advantage, Caleb also added that ‎this sort of technology is independent of cryptocurrencies as it is inherently based on blockchain. So, governments and organizations that are still making up their minds about crypto needn’t worry about being exposed to it.

India’s Blockchain Developer Community

‎Caleb believes that India has a potent, immense developer community. He stated that the students and developers who approach the Tezos teams are a step ahead with the formulation of ideas to solve challenging problems, and more so, they are seeking out the right kind of platforms to support their products.

He expressed that we’re seeing a new generation of students who try to solve day-to-day problems and they’re taking up the challenge of building it on a blockchain as opposed to mainstream technologies and platforms. He believes that with this attitude, working knowledge of blockchain technology, India’s engineering community is a formidable one.

Incentivising developers can motivate them

India has the second-largest number of blockchain professionals in the world, second to the USA. Caleb Kow expressed that Tezos is looking forward to bringing Indian developers onto their self-amendment blockchain. This is something strategic in the long-run.

Tezos will not only be able to make the Indian developer community more blockchain-forward, but they would also be able to motivate and incentivize them with the right incentivization to BUIDL. When developers propose amendments that get accepted on the chain, they get economic incentives via the the the Tezos token (#XTZ).

Additionally, with more training initiatives and formal learning workshops, and by forging partnerships with universities and higher research institutions, Tezos can evangelize the self-amending protocol and the developer community in India will be able to contribute to a successful amendment protocol.

Watch the full episode here

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About this special show — Hard Fork Specials

Hard Fork Specials has been devised as a shorter version of our talk show which we will undertake to highlight either a burning or important topic, a new technology, a special set of people or if we come across something special to showcase from the global crypto and blockchain scene.

About Hard Fork

Hard Fork is India’s first TV Talk show dedicated to Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. With this show, we want to raise awareness, inspire learning, showcase achievements, discover innovations, provide advocacy, find solutions, and answer questions about #Blockchain and #Cryptocurrencies. Season 1 — Getting India Started up on Crypto and Blockchain — and a special series on Women in Blockchain has been being aired on the *founderINDIA TV platform on Amazon Fire TV and also simultaneously cast on its YouTube and Facebook channels.

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