Consensus Update #8 — Q&A With CEO, Oleg Gutsol and CSO, Dustin Plett
Late last month, Leigh Diprose sat down with Consensus’s CEO, Oleg Gutsol and CSO, Dustin Plett, to ask questions sent in from the Consensus Community. The Q&A session was broadcast live to YouTube.
In this update, we explore what was discussed during the Q&A and how the team is going with the pilot project in the City of South Burlington, Vermont.
Leigh Diprose: Hello, everyone and welcome to the Consensus live Q&A. Thank you very much for joining. My name is Leigh, and I’m the Social Media Specialist here at Consensus, and today I wanted to introduce you to the team, who will be answering your questions.
So, without further ado, we have Oleg Gutsol the Chief Executive Officer for Consensus and also Dustin Plett, the Chief Strategy Officer, who will be answering your questions today.
Oleg Gutsol: Hello Leigh.
Leigh Diprose: Oleg, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with Consensus?
Oleg Gutsol: Sure, my background is in software development, and I’ve been interested in the topic of artificial intelligence for a very long time. Dustin and I have been working together for quite a while, and it’s during our previous company’s tenure that we started developing some of the technology that led to the idea of Consensus.
Just a brief background, we ran a company that was in the photo sharing and photo distribution space, around 2011/2012. During this time, we started looking for image recognition technology and acquired a small company that was building algorithms in this field.
And out of that work, I think the interest in the applications of artificial intelligence technology grew. And so, that was the initial spark, but later on, I went to discover the applications of AI within the governance space.
I then spent about a year working with the government of Estonia as part of the residency program, just learning how the E-Society can work, how e-governance works.
Estonia is a prime example. They’re at the forefront of the development of the space, and it was fascinating to see how the country operates and what is possible with the governance tech space.
So, then having had that experience, I went back, and you know Dustin, and I had been in touch for a while, and he was still at the previous company and saw it through the acquisition before joining Consensus.
Leigh Diprose: Dustin, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to Consensus?
Dustin Plett: Sure, I’ve been on the business development strategy side of businesses for the last decade. So, and Oleg said, he and I have been working together for the better part of that decade primarily with the photo-sharing company and a couple of other projects that we’ve worked on throughout the years.
My interest pretty much squarely lies on the governance side of things. There has been a lot of conversations and a lot of attention in the political aspect of our society, especially around how systems can be improved.
We saw some cases in the last number of years, specifically in primary national level elections being tampered with or being influenced by outside interests that undermine what democracy is supposed to be or what it needs to be.
I think that in the age we live in those systems need to evolve. Not that they’re terrible systems, but at the pace that the world is moving right now, we need systems that can adapt more rapidly. You know electing somebody for a four-year term when we have no idea what technology is going to look like in four years. I’m going to expect them to have a platform for that, to me seems a little old-fashioned and evolving those systems is what I’m interested in.
Leigh Diprose: Fantastic. You know both of you have come a long way, especially in South Burlington, Vermont. Before we go into the questions, Dustin, can I just quickly ask you, what’s the sort of progress that you’re seeing in South Burlington at the moment?
Dustin Plett: Yeah, progress is going well. We’ve rolled out the Consensus Mobile Application there. It’s a two-part platform that we’re continuing to develop for South Burlington. One is the citizen application we are working with them on. I believe there’s close to a thousand users now of the application in that city. The Town Council is using the platform to push questions, outsourcing immediate feedback from the citizens and making decisions with that. We’re still in the very early stages of testing the whole system.
We’re launching the government facing platform in early July, which will allow them to see the data coming back in real time, completing the feedback loop. There’s a road map just for people that are interested in how that product is being developed. There is a road map specifically for the citizen facing as well as the layer above that which is government facing. That tooling is all in the works right now, but the progress is good.
You know what we’re hoping to achieve in South Burlington is progress in several fronts. One is on boarding citizens and the actual UI/UX of both the applications that we’re building. And the big thing is how to work with governments; you know everything from the nomenclature they use around decision making to how to engage. Also, how to be there for them without adding another thing on their plate and how do we make their lives easier. All of that is what the pilot project is about.
Leigh Diprose: Thanks very much for the update, really appreciate it. Now, as you know, we have a very active community, and they have all sorts of questions about the project, and the pilot project, and listing and the mining pool.
So, it was great to reach out to everyone and ask the community what they wanted to know. And we did receive some questions and will also take some live questions at the end of this through the live stream on YouTube. But without further ado, I wanted to introduce you to the first question. Oleg, this one is for you.
So, Stuart asks, “I’m not sure if I understand the POC algorithm correctly. Is it true that the computer mining power is used directly for machine learning? If so, please help me understand how this works effectively?
Oleg Gutsol: Right, so the POC that he’s referring to the Proof of Compute. One of the earliest ideas we’ve started with is to use the decentralized distributed networks that are powered by mining and traditionally using Proof-of-Work , similar to bitcoin, for example.
To expand the energy, to not just attach to blockchain but to use it for something more meaningful. This was the initial spark for building better tools for better decision-making, essentially building solutions. So, what that looks like is building artificial intelligence models using the combined mining power of the network. And that was the initial idea for the Proof of Compute. So, while the topic is incredibly complex, we’ve broken it down into some steps, and the first release is what we think the working name itself, the DLP Proof of Work is the system that allows us to aggregate votes securely and anonymously.
So, that’s the first step into Proof of Computer algorithm roadmap. There’ll be other steps. So, we’ll follow with the ability to do the federated learning on-chain and other exciting things. They will come later. They will take time, and there’s quite a number of researchers working on this right now, but we still need time, and we still need manpower.
Leigh Diprose: Okay perfect. Now, Dustin, we did have in a question for you. Milan asks, “Do you have a plan to run more pilot projects simultaneously or are you going to wait until the South Burlington pilot ends?”
Dustin Plett: We will run for the next three months or so. We will run with all our attention focused on the South Burlington pilot project. It’s critical that we go through the cycle once and get as much right as possible. Ideally, we don’t run another pilot project. We move into commercial relationships relatively quickly during Vermont or elsewhere in the world with some different conversations and with many other nations states that we have developed relationships over the last year or so. Those conversations I think are far more interesting if they are commercial conversations with the full commercial product ready to roll.
We’re pretty close now with South Burlington, but there’s still a lot that we want to find out, test and learn from. But you know in the sense of running a pilot project, I would hope that this would be the last.
Leigh Diprose: Okay. Running a pilot project does need a lot of workforce.
So, this leads us to the next question for Oleg. This one was also sent in by Milan. And he asks, “How many developers are currently working at Consensus?”
Oleg Gutsol: So, we have different groups that attend to different parts of the system. We have six people dedicated to the development of the platform overall.
We have two people new to the research side and the infrastructure in the supporting systems. We’re also looking to expand the team we’re hiring three more developers right now. I have an interview right after this broadcast with one of the mobile developers that we want to bring in. But we’re looking for mobile devs that dedicated to iOS and Android. And to add another blockchain developer to the to speed up some of the core protocol development.
Leigh Diprose: Okay. Now also staying with the same person asking the question, Oleg “Is Consensus going to stick with Proof of Work or going to change to Proof of Stake?
Oleg Gutsol: So, going back to the original idea, we wanted to use the combined power of the network to power artificial intelligence. So, we will stick with that; it’s not a traditional Proof of Work and sense that it’s hashing the blocks.
So, we’re working on different applications of the network of the compute power of the network. But, I think Proof of Stake doesn’t achieve our goals entirely either, so there might be some elements in the future regarding that.
We would probably see them at the application level, not the protocol level. So, staking or some freezing or deposit mechanisms will likely be reserved to the application level, not to the core protocol itself.
Leigh Diprose: Okay, and Dustin going back to your previous question about South Burlington. We did have another question about, “Are we going to have some pilot projects with private businesses or is it only just governments?”
Dustin Plett: The main thrust of my activities is towards governments, with that said, the underlying Sentient network could have applications built on top of it that are business or B2B facing. That’s not a problem, that may happen as we look to open up the network in the coming months. I fully expect that somebody would use the Sentient network to build applications like that. Maybe someday some of the technology we produce ends up business facing, but that’s not the primary focus on what Consensus is doing.
Leigh Diprose: Okay, obviously you’re opening up the network to a lot of governments, you’ve been attending a lot of conferences which is excellent to see. But on the consumer side, the citizen side, Blake asks, “How do you plan to get people to use the app during the test pilot, and any specific marketing plans?” And this one’s for you, Dustin.
Dustin Plett: Sure, so yes, coming from our background the building consumer application, there’s a lot Oleg, and I have learned from building a community of15 million users in our last project. So, somewhat addictive building experiences are certain things we have some knowledge around and some experience. With specific to South Burlington, or specific to any government, I think there are a couple of things that will always have to happen in regards to the roll out. One is a strong partnership with the local government.
Whether that city-state, provincial, the federal level a strong partnership with the government gives us credibility to roll out in a specific region. So, that includes leveraging their messaging, leveraging their brand, making sure we’re making public announcements in those areas so that citizens know that this is a legitimate organization, an authentic partnership, we have the blessing of the government in that area.
So, that’s critical to a marketing or a PR plan, beyond that they’re very traditional methods you know using paid advertising, using paid media in those regions to get people onboarding.
Those are the table stakes of lighting up a new region, but all of the above and continued noise, the continued drumbeat of messaging throughout the pilot project in South Burlington is going to be required to keep citizens engaged.
Leigh Diprose: Perfect. I was going to say; there is a lot of talk from the government as well about their daily progress. I see that in a lot of blogs and news as well. So, we try and incorporate that into updates to keep the community aware of what’s happening, so make sure you check out the Medium Blog and if you’re not following our telegram announcements channel and Blockfolio signal, then make sure you do because all of our updates are posted there.
Now Oleg, this one we touched on briefly before. “What efforts are you making to recruit new engineering talent, and how has recruiting been going in general?” Blake asks.
Oleg Gutsol: So, I guess to the first question in terms of the efforts, again leaning on our previous experience and work with recruiters’ various firms and our network in Canada, but also globally. Our team is distributed all around the world. So not all the developers are in Toronto, about half of our development teams outside of Canada even with some people in the US and some in Europe right now.
So, we’re working with some recruiters as well as hiring directly. If anybody is interested in applying for the jobs, go to our Angel list page, they’re currently four job jobs that are open for positions.
We’re also looking for three developers, and we’re also looking for a great product designer. We have an excellent idea of what we want in terms of product design, and so we’re looking for somebody quite experienced.
In general, recruiting is a lot like dating. Some of it is like numbers, and some of it is just luck. So, we’ve been pretty lucky to hire some of the outstanding developers and researchers to our team, mostly from our network.
Just recently we got introduced to some fantastic cryptographers from our friends from the Ethereum foundation. So, a lot of the outstanding people who have joined us in the past come from our networks and some of the extended networks we have. But sometimes people come from the outside, so a lot of it is you know lucky, but a lot of it isn’t seeing as many candidates as possible.
Leigh Diprose: Yeah, fantastic. It’s great to see the team booming and growing as the pilot project rolls out, and we go into something mainstream basically, which is great to hear.
Oleg, staying with you, Blake also asks, “If you can comment on the financial position of the company? It’s important that Consensus can survive several more years of a bear market where the liquidity is low. Specifics cash reserves would be appreciated”.
Oleg Gutsol: Right, so without going too much into the specifics, I agree with Blake that a robust financial position is essential. You know our goal is to keep doing this for a very long time. I agree with that for the long-term vision that we have it is crucial we position ourselves financially to survive the markets going up and down.
So, we are pretty good, we have years of runway, and you know hopefully this puts some of these concerns to rest. We’re quite well positioned and very well-funded, taken tenure on a road map and our plan.
Leigh Diprose: That’s great to hear for the future of Consensus. Also, Brian asks, “Can you comment on how to plan to deal with the following issues?”
So, the first one “identity verification, data security, vote and privacy, and what audibility?” Now I know that I answered some of those on some of the updates on Medium, but if you could elaborate?
Oleg Gutsol: Oh yeah. I think those are fascinating topics and exciting challenges to address. So, on the issue of digital identity, we would love the world to have a digital identity. It looks to me personally that it will take about ten years to arrive at something like that. Estonia, for example, is one of the countries that has digital ID infrastructure. The applications around it and the layers around it are quite developed. So, there is an API for digital use; private companies can apply to use it.
Not all the countries are like them (Estonia), Europe is going in that direction with the direction of unifying on the digital IDs and all the access from all the Member States being one. There are different levels of technological development that all the European countries have. So, you know we’re working with the world that doesn’t have a digital ID right now. Thus, what we are doing is giving people the digital IDs on our system by verifying their credentials on our own.
And we’re waiting for all the jurisdictions that we are working with to deploy some national or state level scheme — at least an additional ID scheme. It would be much more comfortable, so right now we have to solve the problem ourselves for the jurisdictions, which don’t have it. Our vision is it will go away, and we’ll plug in into the digital ID infrastructure at the point when it becomes available.
Leigh Diprose: Okay.
Oleg Gutsol: So, that’s how we deal with it right now. And on the other topics on data privacy, data security, auditability, it’s quite an exciting development that coincided with the pilot project in Vermont. Vermont seems to be a fascinating place where all the dots seem to connect.
So, I think without revealing too much, we started some work with the regulators in the specific state. The regulations are accurate to the data privacy, data storage, data sharing and all that.
It’s paramount that the data remains private, and we preserve the security of the data and the privacy of the personal information of the users.
So, there’s some exciting development that is going on right now. I don’t know if we can comment on it much. Dustin primarily works on that side of things. He’s saying no.
Leigh Diprose: No, okay.
Dustin Plett: What I will say is that we’re working with regulators at state and federal level within the US to make sure that we’re as on-site as we can be . When you touch government, and when you touch data privacy, you know even bringing up crypto at all in these conversations, it makes people nervous. So, making sure that we’re on the right side of the law and regulators and making sure that they’re aware of what we have planned and leveraging the regulatory systems that are in place to our advantage is all very important, is all key to our success.
We can’t skirt the law; we can’t be anarchists, we have to play within the rules to some extent to change the practices. And that’s been our strategy for dealing with the government, but we will undoubtedly be making announcements around that in the months to come. And these aren’t fast-moving organizations.
Leigh Diprose: Well, that’s what you’re trying to change.
Dustin Plett: That’s right.
Leigh Diprose: Yeah, exactly and well while we’re with you, we have Wei, who asks, “How will the $SEN coin be used in the project pilot and what value will $SEN give to a user?”
Oleg Gutsol: So, one of the things to do in the context of the pilot project is not to just test the systems, the onboarding of users and the business development process, but also to test the incentive structures that are related to $SEN coin.
So, we are doing that again; I don’t think we’ll talk about specifics of how it is going to be used in the context of the pilot and going forward. We’ll do this a bit later. There’s quite a bit of work to be done on the incentive itself. And I think it’s a little too early to reveal what it will be right now. I think closer to the fall and maybe Q3 of this year. Towards the end of the pilot project, and beyond that, we’ll make announcements specific to that.
Leigh Diprose: There is a scoop for you! Okay, I know a question came up this one’s not in the stack. People check the GitHub repository and notice that there’s not a lot happening there, but I know personally a lot is happening. Can you explain why people don’t see behind the scenes?
Oleg Gutsol: Sure, so most of the repositories are not open to the public. Again, there’s a quite specific roadmap to open sourcing the actual protocol code and some of the surrounding infrastructure around it. I’m not sure what the number of open repositories I think it’s four or five.
Leigh Diprose: Okay.
Oleg Gutsol: So, that’s a small percentage of the overall code base that we have.
Leigh Diprose: I’ll leave this next question open to either of you. But Brian asks, “How is federated learning code coming along, and how much data do you think you’ll need to gather for this to work?”
Oleg Gutsol: Okay, so two different questions, federated learning is related to the Proof of Compute, and I talked about before at the beginning of our talk. It requires a lot more, basically what we’re doing right now is finalizing within the context of the pilot the DLP algorithm, which is the first step of it.
I don’t think we’ll make any specific announcements related to the federated learning until the pilot project wraps up, and we open source the code. There’s a separate body of work that we have done, a lot of it was last year that explored the idea with federated learning, but also verifiable computation and the topic is quite complicated. And I think one of the challenges that we were facing is that the verification is quite slow. So, that’s one of the things to address, and some of this work will continue especially given now the there are world-class cryptographers, that we have helping us with the problem. We need more hands and more time to develop that, so we’ll take that time.
Leigh Diprose: Okay, thank you very much for answering that. Now I’ve got the last question Oleg this one’s for you again. George, this time asks, “Have you received any critical feedback on the private data aggregation as a Blockchain Proof-of-Work paper? How is work on that coming along?”
Oleg Gutsol: Right, so I think we answered part of that as well. So, we’ve got three different groups that are working on the technical audit right now and have done some work. And our research team has been working on this with some of the external feedback for 6–10 months, I think right now.
Leigh Diprose: Okay.
Oleg Gutsol: That’s how it’s coming along. I think in about a month we’ll be in a perfect position to post some of these analyses. I think we’ll be able to make it public before actually opening the code as well.
We made the algorithm paper public some time ago and once the analysis; once the cryptanalysis and audit are complete, I think we’ll post the findings publicly before I open sourcing the code base of the protocol itself. So, that’s where it is this is how it’s coming along right now.
Leigh Diprose: Okay, perfect, and just in closing. I wish to ask both of you. Probably something that’s been a bit like tennis going around in the Telegram community about listing. And I know that we’ve said that we’re recording in 2019 and that’s been the case. Did you want to add anything else to that just to let the community know? Dustin.
Dustin Plett: Sure, so when it comes to listing, we try and say as much as possible without saying anything at all, and I hope that the community can understand that. When you’re working with governments, the line you have to walk is very narrow.
You have to play ball; you have to be on. You can’t rush into it like you could if there is a traditional B2B style business and that’s something that we have to all understand.
As we developed a platform, we need to be confident in our technology. We have to be satisfied with security; we have to be satisfied with our utility. A lot is happening at the SEC level around the definitions of utility and apparent ways that companies can skirt that. You don’t have to look too far you don’t do a lot of research to find what I’m talking about. But if we want to do business in the US, we want to do business with US allies which we do, we need to be on the right side of the law here, and there is a path forward with that.
And there absolutely is a path through that, but it is slow, and it is somewhat painful. And there’s not a lot of companies that are willing to do the work to land on the right side of that. We are. And we are having those conversations, and I can tell you right now we are there with a very, very small group of companies. And I know the number of companies that are putting in the effort the time the money the energy to go through this process.
Leigh Diprose: That’s great to hear.
Dustin Plett: I’ll say you know bear with us, 2019 is still the target, but if you understood the amount of work that needs to be done then giving it a 12-month window doesn’t sound as crazy.
But I understand the frustration, too; I understand the community. I know why a lot of people got into crypto; I understand why a lot of people bought the Sentient coin ($SEN) or the ERC 20 SEN.
Again, I understand all the hype of 2017–2018 and what people were expecting the coin to do. We’re running this company for the long term. We’re running it as if it needs to be around as if it’s essential that needs to exist. And we’re running; we don’t want to raise capital, we don’t want ever to go back to you know the valley and do traditional raises as we’ve done in the past. We want this company to be self-sustaining, so for that, we need to balance a few tracks, we need to adjust the R&D, we need to balance the regulatory side of it.
We need to balance the business size, which means we need to have commercial deals in place, we need to be generating revenue and that needs to be funding ongoing from the past the multiple year runway that’s currently in place. Without stepping on any land mines, one of those land mines could be running afoul of the regulatory agencies around the world. That would be an avoidable mistake, and we can avoid that if we take some time to do it properly. So, when it comes to listing it will happen, and it’s going to, but it’s going to have to be done right.
Leigh Diprose: Yes, that’s a great answer and a very wise one. It seems like you’ve got a lot of experience there. So, thank you very much for that. And Oleg, I like to throw it over to you before I say some thankyous, just wanted to ask you if you could share what you would want the community to rally around Consensus? How would you like to see them rally around this project in the future? What can they do to help Consensus?
Oleg Gutsol: I think great help would be to spread the word. To give us feedback on some of the things that they find essential. We are listening you know you are helping us with the community outreach that’s a great help, so thank you very much for you for doing this for us. But, I think a lot of the back and forth a lot of the feedback that comes from the community — a lot of the constructive feedback that we hear is great. So, you know I would say continue doing what was already happening, in a way we’re building Consensus so, that we can all share ideas, we can all come to a common understanding and a move to a better world to more positive outcomes. So, keep doing what you’re doing. Thank you for being with us.
Leigh Diprose: Absolutely and yeah, thank you very much for being here Oleg and Dustin. It does make a big difference to put your faces on the screen and to answer the community’s questions. And hopefully, if you see this video, we want you to share it as well, make sure you use some of the hashtags that we have on Twitter.
And again, I just wanted to say thank you to the leadership team, but also thank you to Mr Steel as well on Telegram who’s helping moderate the community. You’re doing a fantastic job, and it’s great to have you on board as well.
I just wanted to end this and say will most likely have another one of these in the future. Thank you very much, Oleg, thank you, Dustin.
Oleg Gutsol: Thank you.
Dustin Plett: Thank you. Take care.
Good Bye.
