Interview with Dan Larimer, CTO of Block.one and EOS.IO, about the future of blockchain technology.
How did you get into the world of Blockchain technology and what are you working on?
I started out thinking about changing the world to really solve the problems that are impacting society. That’s why I got into Bitcoin. Over time, I’ve been developing the things that need to be built to solve the problems that I see around me. So I first had to solve blockchain scalability, blockchain governance and blockchain ease-of-use. With EOS.IO and Block.one, I get to make blockchain technology easier to use so that developers can build the next generation blockchain applications even faster. It’s been very great and exciting that I get to work with Block.one and make that happen.
What are your big plans for EOS.IO in the near future?
We have many things coming for EOSIO in the future. And at present, actually, if you follow our github, you’ll see that we have a number of exciting new updates. We are going to be expanding the database capacity by introducing RocksDB, which makes it more available to more users, and we’re making the blockchain data easier to query through actions with return values and some other innovations around WASM-QL.
So we’re really trying to make the blockchain more accessible, the data more accessible, the tools easier for developers to use, because we’ve already solved the scaling of the process and the transactional processing, with 5,000 to 10,000 transactions per second.
Going into the future, we aim to solve the data size aspect of it, as well as just making the APIs for developers easier to use so they can be more expressive and build their apps more quickly.
You’re also working on a new social media projects, what can you tell us about your new social media network – voice.com?
Voice is currently in beta, and we’ve had a ton of great engagement on the beta platform. I’m very excited to be working with Salah, the new CEO of Voice to really transform the future of social media and the future of online publishing.
What makes it different from other social media networks?
The biggest differentiator is that we’re connecting authentic, real unique people, and we’re building an attention economy into the platform to further foster engagement. We know that users are rewarded for engaging, and even in Voice beta, where all the tokens are just temporary, we’ve seen tremendous engagement with the incentive system and the platform.
In your opinion, who are your main competitors in the crypto market?
The crypto market is made up of people who are using blockchain technology to further real-world applications. At Block.one, we build EOSIO software, but we’re not competing with blockchain; instead, we’re competing by providing real goods and services like Voice to the world.
We’re focusing on real-world use cases and building the blockchain technology that we need to make those use cases a reality.
Do you believe that mass adoption will be implemented soon? If so, which cryptocurrency will be the first to achieve such success?
Mass adoption of blockchain is inevitable. All the major companies are investigating the technology and they’re going to deploy it to empower their systems, to increase the level of integrity, auditability and transparency. So, it’s already being adopted en masse by engineering departments and then the R&D (Research and Development) teams of all the major industries. When it occurs, mass adoption of blockchain will be transparent.
You won’t even know you’re using it, similar to how there has been a mass adoption of various databases or the web: the backend infrastructure that people use is transparent, but they all still use it. That’s how blockchain adoption will occur, where gradually the services you use will be powered by blockchain and you won’t even know it.
What are you thoughts on the future of the industry? What do you think blockchain technology will look like in the coming decades?
You know, if I knew that, I wouldn’t need a time machine. I think the world’s going to be moving toward more accountability, more integrity with blockchain. Stronger identity will be a bigger piece of the future, but who knows what the monetary landscape’s going to be.
Where I think the technology is going is why I think blockchain is critical for every business that cares about the integrity of its business model and accountability for its actions. We want to collaborate and work with everyone in the ecosystem by pushing forward with technologies that facilitate integrity in society. We want to embrace, welcome and collaborate with anyone that shares our vision for a world powered by blockchain technology. When blockchain wins, everyone wins.