Asaf Zamir – Chief Technology Officer and Cloud Consultant

Yesterday I had a chance to see a presentation by Mance Harmon & Tom Trowbridge, the Founders of Hedera Hashgraph. Hashgraph presents a potential for a next generation ledger solution, or in simple terms - The next evolution of Blockchain technology.

The actual Hashgraph algorithm was written by Leemon Baird, a highly gifted individual with a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Baird has a long history of Math & Algorithms, specifically around machine learnnig and more recently distributed consensus.

Hasgraph promises to tackle some of the biggest issues with Blockchain: Performance, Security & Governance.

Hashgraph Performance

The most critical performance metric for any Blockchain/Ledger is TPS - Transactions Per Second.
Here are some TPS numbers for the most popular Cryptocurrencies and traditional payment processors:

• Bitcoin 2.5 TPS
• Ethereum 15 TPS
• Visa 1700 TPS (avg) to 4000 TPS (peak)
• PayPal 115 TPS

And Hashgraph's promise?

• Hashgraph 50,000 TPS - 250,000 TPS

If these numbers can be replicated on a public ledger, we're looking at a potential mass-market solution without any of the familiar growing pains for the foreseeable future.
Hashgraph also promises to integrate Sharding to allow for even larger distributed applications on top of the platform.

Hashgraph Security

Hashgraph claims to have achieved the highest theoretical level of security in the crypto industry, the coveted "asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance" or aBFT for short.
Without going too much into the details of aBFT, they present an elegant and efficient way to replace Proof-of-Work, which thus far has been the dominant BFT solution.
This potentially gets rid of the obvious energy-consumption and hardcoded slowdown issues of the system.

Hashgraph Governance - the council of 39

In order to avoid the immediate 1/3 dishonest nodes problem, two thirds of the initial tokens will be given to a council of 39 Major Corporations & Organizations from different industries and locations. Those entities will not technically hold the actual tokens, but they will have committees to eventually decide when to release those tokens to the public. All revenues from sale will go back to Hedera.
This event will occur when the token is of high enough value, such as that a 1/3 dishonest node attack will no longer be financially feasible.
It remains to be seen whether it's possible to determine when this will happen, as well as preventing a single actor from gaining too much power over the economy as a whole.
Hedera Hashgraph is definitely trying something unique here, and it's mostly a matter of time to see how it works in a live public setting.

A distributed Ledger that is fault-tolerant AND can do over 250K TPS can truly usher an era of a decentralized, user owned internet.

Not many know this, but I've had my eyes set on Zug long before Ethereum registered its foundation there. The quiet town that is close enough to Zurich for a potential daily commute, yet still small enough to give you a genuine Swiss experience, was in my top 3 relocation candidates list since 2013.
So together with the growing Crypto scene there, it was the perfect storm of events that gave me the final push to move to Zug.

Between Cloud and Crypto

In the summer of 2017, we at Cloudwith.me have introduced a new token to usher a new age of Cloud.
The plan is multi-faceted, and quite complex, but to focus on the current stage - The new Cloud Token is made to be the de facto currency to purchase Cloud Services.
Whether those are servers at Cloudwith.me (currently supporting Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure), or Cloud products at other Cloud providers & merchants that will soon adopt the Cloud Token.
Due to this exciting turn of events, it has become more and more critical to keep up with the fastest changing tech landscape in the world - Crypto/Blockchain technology.

Why Crypto Valley?

I often hear that a decentralized technology should have a decentralized ecosystem, I guess the physical world doesn't work that way.
For Crypto, there seem to be 3 main hubs: Zug, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
As I'm already living in Europe, speak German, and am not a Megacity person (HK & SG aren't technically Megacities, but they sure feel like ones), Zug seemed like the obvious choice.

Zug is also the home of The Ethereum Foundation, Crypto Valley Association, ShapeShift, Lisk, and thousands of other Crypto companies.

With a direct flight to every major city in Western Europe within 1-3 hours (not to mention the train connections), it's a prime location both from and to conferences/meetings.

What's Next?

This move has been the slowest settling period I've had, perhaps with the exception of my initial move to Berlin. I keep trying to find a reason for this, and I think it has to do with the suburban lifestyle of Switzerland. I'm used to getting all my answers online. In fact, with enough research, one can have almost the same knowledge as a local, before moving to a capital city. This all falls apart when one moves to a smaller town. Local knowledge is just not out there in the Googleverse. The simplest questions such as "Who's the best Internet Provider?", or "How does waste disposal work?" change drastically even between communities.
The best solution for this is - joining local groups (some are even on Facebook), and be patient - you'll figure it out sooner or later.

After finally settling in, I feel like it's time to get to work!
I'm working on 2 key directions at the moment, as well as a potential 3rd one.

Business Partnerships

The goal is to finalize an agreement with at least 2-3 cloud providers/merchants to accept Cloud Tokens.
We have had several talks with several niche cloud providers, but the complexity of Token transactions has been the biggest blocker here. Since we rely on the Ethereum blockchain, we are limited with the amount of simplification we can do on our end.
However, recent developments on MetaMask are inching closer and closer towards a sane way to pay with Ether & Tokens (almost PayPal-like). Seamless integration is a matter of months, if not weeks, so it's definitely a reason to stay positive.

Technological Partnerships

As mentioned above, promoting seamless token transactions right from the browser is not only beneficial to our Cloud Token, it's beneficial to the entire Ethereum community. In fact I would go so far and say that MetaMask has the potential to lead to mass adoption of the Ethereum blockchain.

The priority here is contributing directly to MetaMask, as well building integrations/plugins for the extension.

Bridging the gap

The 3rd potential direction is more of a trend that has been bothering me as of late.
I see a huge gap between potential contributors/investors and actual developers.
There are a lot of campaigns out there, talking about incredible ideas, but without technical knowledge investors are left guessing in the dark. I believe there is plenty of work to do on this front,
both on the technical side, as well as on the human side.

One last thing - I've made a few design changes, time for a refresh :)