Name Service on Hedera! Ken Anderson of Kabuto / King Solomon (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

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King Solomon interviews Kabuto Name Service as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍What is up, everybody? Solomon here. I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. In collaboration with HashPack, we are nailing out tons and tons of Hedera ecosystem interviews. Today, we're super excited to have Ken Anderson. Ken is the Lead Dev Advocate with Hedera. He was the Lead Dev Advocate with Hedera from 2018 until late 2021, and he's also the CEO of Launch Badge, a software engineering and management firm. How are you doing this morning, Ken?

LaunchBadge & Kabuto Name Service – Ken Anderson - CEO
‍I'm doing fantastic.

Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome! So, let's hop right into it. Can you give a little bit of background about yourself and introduce yourself to the audience? Maybe talk about your background in Web3 and your relationship with Hedera, because some people might not be aware of your long history within the Hedera ecosystem.

LaunchBadge & Kabuto Name Service – Ken Anderson - CEO
‍Well, my experience with Hedera goes back to pre-Hedera, when it was still Swirlds and Hashgraph. Launch Badge, my company, started back in 2015 as a software development company. Our specialty was in Telecom software, and we had a number of clients. One in particular was Mingo, who was building a messaging app. In 2017, they decided they wanted to run an ICO and add blockchain features to their app. So, we were in research mode that summer and I came across an article that said Hashgraph was the 'blockchain killer' in September 2017. That's when I started to figure out what’s going on here, so I went to the Telegram for Hashgraph and it was Leemon who started out answering a bunch of questions. There were a handful of other people in there who were helpful in answering questions, but before I even asked a question, I went back and read like three months' worth of Telegram just to make sure I wasn't going to ask a question that had been asked a hundred times before. What ended up happening is I started to understand the protocol and started answering questions for new people. So, I almost became like the de facto moderator of that Telegram channel because I was learning the product too. And what it came down to is, you know, I got my hands on the Swirdls SDK and realized like "holy cow" this is what we've been trying to build - on Ethereum, on EOS, on anything that was out at the time - and nothing was meeting our needs from a messaging performance perspective, strictly from a performance and cost perspective alone. Nothing was meeting our need for that project. So, shout out to Mingo for being the catalyst for that. But yeah, it was one of those things where it was like the use case was driving my interest in the technology. And at one point, I think it was in November of that year, Mance was speaking in Bangkok at a conference. I remember thinking "I need to get a license to this technology" because it wasn't open source and there wasn't a public network. It was just the SDK with a proprietary license. So, I bought a plane ticket and flew out to Bangkok and got a ticket to the conference. And as Mance is coming off stage, I said "hey, can I get you a mango smoothie?" and he said "sure." So, it was Jordan, Edgar, and Mance and I sat around the table, you know Jordan, Edgar, and Mance being like the OG's of have even Swirlds, we sat down and they talked to me about a bunch of stuff. I brought up a whole bunch of community concerns, like open sourcing the public network, whole bunch of stuff. And, Mance kind of opened up to me at that time. And, I remember getting some inside scoop, and him also being like, "Let's not talk about this yet in the public, right? We got some preparation, legal due diligence to do," but it was it was a really eye-opening experience where I gained this a ton of trust in not just the technology but in the team. Like, that was probably my first experience with the team. And Mance said, "Yeah, uh we'll give you a license." So, I said, "Great, I also have some other ideas I want to send you." So, I went home, I actually wrote up a whole proposal about why we need to rewrite hashgraph in Rust. Mance came back to me. I mean, again, I gotta say like the leadership on this team, Mance and Leemon, are some of the most, you know, trustworthy, honest, straightforward people, right? They shoot straight. And so, I remember Mance coming back to me, going, "This looks like a great idea, but just not right now. We've got a bunch of commitments we have to make. So, we're just going to run with the tech stack we have," which I totally get. And so, but he came back a couple of weeks later and said, "Hey, do you want to come on as our chief developer advocate or actually he said, chief developer evangelist." Actually, let me rephrase, I wasn't even Chief. It was developer evangelist is what it was. And I remember taking that, that offer and crossing out the word evangelist and putting the word advocate in there and saying, "I'm not going to be an evangelist, but I'll be an advocate. I'll be the annoying guy inside the company who represents the, the will of the developers externally." And so, that's kind of what happened there. I kind of put myself on hold, made myself a kind of a silent participant in LauncBadge, let my partner take over LaunchBadge and continue to run with that while I went, put myself on loan, basically, for three years to Hedera to help build that community, kind of get everything started, started the developer advocacy team, and in building that team, we built an incredible team with incredible talent. And, I'll tell you, it's grown way beyond now, what I could have done, so I'm really proud of what it's gotten to. As a matter of fact, since I've left, they've hired so many developer advocates and they're handling so many cool things that I'm really excited about. How it's kind of even out of my hands has grown to what it has. So, that's my history with Hedera. And you know, in 2021 early 2021, had some family medical issues, I had to kind of take some time off for. And then at the end of that, I thought, "You know what, we're kind of at the point where we've got a good executive team at Hedera, we've got a good DA team growing. I think I can do more good outside of Hedera." And so, I put in my notice in September of 2021 and then went back to Launch Badge and then for the last year and a half, I've just been back with Launch Badge, which is my company that helped me discover Hashgraph in the first place. That was the company I had started up and had discovered Hashgraph with, but yeah, it's just been a great experience. Three years in that whole startup process is intense, but it was a lot of fun, and I think we're in an incredible place right now.

Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍From the Launch Badge aspect I mean, because I was looking through the site today, there's so many services, and you guys have really accomplished so much already. Can you kind of just talk about what you offer for developers out there that may be interested in learning more about Hedera Hashgraph? What type of services you guys have facilitated so far? I mean, I could go down the entire list for what you guys have on the website, it's extremely impressive. Can you kind of give an overview of those services, the software development kits you guys offer, and the onboarding process for people that are looking to potentially build on Hedera, but not necessarily knowing all of the ins and outs about the network?

‍LaunchBadge & Kabuto Name Service – Ken Anderson - CEO
‍Yeah, yeah, so I'll probably, let's start with the developer side first. We've always been very involved in open source technology as a company. It's just part of our ethos. All of my developers are incredibly brilliant, and almost all of them we found through some GitHub project. As a matter of fact, that's part of our hiring process is we review your GitHub repo.

And so, there's a strong affinity toward open-source technology. That's one of the ways that we find that we can stay current and really have an influence on the Hedera ecosystem is to participate in the open-source side. So, for a while, we were working on the SDKs, specifically the JavaScript, Go, and Java SDKs. In full transparency, we were subsidized by Hedera for those at the time. Now, we've turned that over to Hedera, but I think Lime Chain is now managing those SDKs. We've picked up the Rust and Swift SDKs, honestly, because Rust is where our heart is, for other reasons that are very technical. We continued with that, but we've also built myhbarwallet, which is the open-source web-based wallet. We built Kabuto initially as an explorer and node API alternative to the existing API mirror node. We can talk a little bit more about that later, but that's what we were doing. As a matter of fact, we built Kabuto to be the developer tool stack for instrumentation and tooling for developers. That was the long-term vision. The short-term vision was, "Let's build some tools that are useful now." But in the long term, "Let's build an entire developer experience that is community-driven and really focused on developer experience." And Hedera is going to have its own approach to things, and I think Hedera is a little more conservative in their approach. We can be a little more reckless because we're developers ourselves. We break often and quickly recover and keep going. That's just our mentality: "Let's use the latest technology, figure out where the gaps are, and either fill those gaps or shift technologies quickly." From a developer's perspective, that's how we're involved. We feel like Hedera is just a rich ecosystem to build. There's so much opportunity to build technology there. Now, from projects who are saying, "We want to build something, but we don't know where to go first." We recently launched a discovery process that we do not just for Hedera projects, but for any startup project or any project that is trying to overcome any plateaus or whatever in their growth. So, the discovery process is pretty straightforward. It's a five thousand dollar discovery process that takes us 30 days to do, and what it ends up with is a 30-page document that includes the business requirements, user requirements, and technical requirements. And in the Hedera space and even in the Telecom space, what you get in addition to that is our expertise. So, we get to help enrich both the business requirements and the user and technical requirements. That's a pretty straightforward offering that we have. But beyond system integrator, we actually have a number of projects that have hired us or are engaging us right now to build projects on Hedera.

Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍That's awesome. I was looking through your blog and through launch badge, and you had an interesting blog post from 2020. I would be curious about your take on it now, based on the growth we have seen, whether it be from a decentralization standpoint or you could even look at the user experience on Hedera right now, and how drastically that's changed over the past year. The blog post was entitled "Why Hedera?" and you had five bullet points. I'd be interested for you to touch base on how far you think Hedera and the ecosystems have come from 2020 to today, and what you're looking forward to in the future within these five points. The first one was launch badge building out on Hedera, because it's fast enough to be practical for multiple types of business processes. How much of a shift have you seen from 2020 to 2022? We can look at things like atma.io and the number of services that exist on Hedera that are starting to go live. How much has changed since 2020 and how much would you expect to change in the next two years, moving forward to the 2024-2025 time frame?

LaunchBadge & Kabuto Name Service – Ken Anderson - CEO
‍Yeah well I think Atma.io is probably a perfect example of what I was referencing in that particular point. Right, so that particular point says that there are certain types of processes that are ideal for Hedera anytime you need to have public auditability or public attestation. Firstly, you need the performance and secondly, you need the provenance. So, you need to have witnesses, which is basically you can think of the hedera nodes as a multi-notary mechanism. So, you can think of any time you post a transaction, you're going to get a time stamp and you're going to get 28 signatures. I think we're 28, right? 27, 28, 27. Yeah, but you're going to get multiple signatures on that time stamp. I think that's to me it's like if you go to a legal notary and you go and say, 'Hey, stamp this note for me, stamp this document for me.' You're getting a single person putting a date and a signature and their notary stamp on it and then they keep a copy of it in their own record. That's basically what we're doing, times 27. Right. So, to me, this is incredibly useful from a trust perspective and that actually touches one of the later points. But the fact that it can happen so quickly, and when we're talking 10,000 transactions a second with about five seconds of latency, when I say certain types of businesses or certain types of processes, I'm talking about processes that aren't sensitive to the five second latency. Most business use cases are okay operating within 10,000 TPS, but some business processes need to be faster than five milliseconds or five seconds of latency. There are ways to mitigate that using running hashes and periodic attestations instead of real-time attestations or batch attestations if you want to think of it that way. So, I think there are ways to

Mitigate that in most use cases, but I think Atma is a perfect example. I mean, we see between Atma and AD stacks and some of the other use cases that are going on. You know, it's really the only project that maintains the trust while being fast enough for the use case. Yeah, yeah, that one I can that one I can stand behind because I can look at Algorand has about 5 five-second latency. Solana is about two to three seconds of latency. So when we're looking at latency and throughput, you can probably get similar performance from Solana and Algorand, but the reality is, is like you're sacrificing on the trust factor, and that's the difference is we get to maintain trust and speed here, which is really hard to do in a public space.

Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I don't want to be, well, you know, I definitely don't want to be way too, you know, kind of general within Hedera. But one thing that I did want to kind of ask you, is you know, with more governing members of the network, it's obviously become more decentralized, you know, what are you looking forward to within the Hedera ecosystem this year, for you know, even you know, increasing that decentralization further? We've seen kind of on the road map, um, the community validation aspects and things like that, which I think is going to be incredibly exciting to watch.

LaunchBadge & Kabuto Name Service – Ken Anderson - CEO
‍Yeah, I think, I mean, there's, there's a number of technical things that need to get solved, before we can really scale up, and you know, I don't want to speak on behalf of Swirlds Labs or Hedera and their goals, but the way I see it is, like, you know, sharding one thing we got to get sorted, because the way I see it, as soon as we start incorporating open community nodes, we have to have some mechanism for coordinating or orchestrating those nodes across, the protocol. I mean, theoretically, you could have thousands of nodes on the main net, on the single shard, and it would increase latency, but it's doable. I mean, we technically could do that now and maybe increase the transactions per second, but then we increase latency too, and so there's always this balancing act between latency and that something I expect to see over the next year improvement in latency numbers and we've already seen it come down a little bit. I know that there's some efforts of optimizing hard drive storage access, which will be incredible. Then we can talk about much larger scales of being able to support more key value pairs, smart contracts, and more account IDs. Lots of cool stuff we can do once we can access the hard drive quickly. We've got the new gossip protocol that just came out, the chatter protocol. There's lots of cool things that are happening that are pointing towards improved optimization. I think we're going to see a lot of that. I'm excited for kind of like the trusted community nodes to start to participate. So, if you remember, the phases were starting with council hosting nodes, then trusted community nodes, and then open up to public nodes. There's this process. I think before we get to that public nodes though, I feel like it would be prudent to solve the sharding problem. And I don't want to speak on behalf of Leemon, he's probably a better person to ask on that. Those are the types of things I'm looking at from a node and community adoption perspective.