BlockchainReporter recently sat down with Lionel Chocron, Chief Product Officer at Hedera to talk about his new role, future plans for the company and how his previous role at Oracle will help shape this future.
Before joining the team, Chocron was Vice President, Industry and Emerging Technology, at Oracle. Prior to that, he was Vice President and General Manager at Cisco, where he co-launched and scaled Cisco’s fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) business. Chocron previously held roles at A.T. Kearney, Bain & Company, and BNP Paribas. He has an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, a Masters in Engineering from McGill University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Ecole des Mines.
A recent study showed that some of the most popular dApps are gambling related. Why do you think that is?
As a use case, gambling has a built-in concept of largely digital assets exchanged between often untrusting parties. It benefits from platforms which can automate fast, fair, and secure exchange of assets without the need for intermediaries.
Vitalik Buterin recently downplayed the importance of speed when it comes to blockchains, criticising those who boast about their platform’s speed. Do you agree?
Speed is most important as a means to scale. To support consumer and enterprise apps, scale is required in terms of speed, security, and decentralization. Unlike many other public networks, Hedera does not compromise on security or centralization to reach the needed speed. This allows Hedera to deliver all three requirements at scale.
If speed isn’t the end-all of a blockchain for building dApps, what is?
Speed, decentralization, and security are requirements for delivering distributed ledger-based applications at scale. In addition, true adoption of distributed ledgers requires support for accessible developer tools and capabilities. A community has sprung up around Hedera to contribute SDKs, tools, and demos helping developers to build on top of hashgraph.
Hedera focuses on four fundamental roadblocks for blockchain’s adoption. Could you tell us a bit about that?
Hedera seeks to solve four barriers to adoption: technology, security, stability, and governance. Technology needs to be built from the ground up to be enterprise ready. The Hedera public network uses hashgraph consensus for high performance at scale. Similarly, the hashgraph consensus algorithm is formally verified to have met the gold standard of security for distributed technologies, asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance.
The public network space more generally has also struggled to maintain stability as networks continue to fork. Through both technical and legal controls, hashgraph will never fork, providing developers building on the network the certainty they need to support production workloads. Finally, Hedera is one of the only public networks to be backed by a multi-national, multi-industry governance council which will provide technical and strategic direction to the network.
You previously worked as Emerging Technology Vice President at Oracle. What was the attitude towards blockchain that you observed during your time there and how will that tie into your new role at Hedera?
The past few years have seen a tremendous amount of growth in enterprise interest in distributed ledger technology. This has largely surfaced through research, exploration, and proof of concepts. Enterprises have been focused on using the technology for use cases targeted to solve real business problems. As technology and enterprise understanding matures, the line of business executive will ultimately take over the purchase decision to adopt solutions which solve those real business problems.
How soon do you see dApps becoming the standard in the global tech industry?
We are already seeing adoption of distributed technologies for a range of use cases. We are not at the point where many have become standard or reached mass adoption. However, the diversity of apps being built by both our developer community and enterprise customers is evidence that standardization will come quickly.
What does Hedera have in store for the near future?
Our company is entirely focused on driving adoption of Hedera by developers, consumers, and enterprise. We are working to deliver open access to the Hedera network for people to start leveraging the network services for their own applications. We are also working very closely with our first set of enterprise adopters to identify specific use cases they can build on Hedera to drive real business value.
About Hedera
Hedera Hashgraph is a public distributed ledger for building decentralized applications. Developers can build secure, fair, and exceptionally fast decentralized applications on top of it. For more information, visit https://www.hedera.com, or follow them on Twitter at @hashgraph, Telegram at t.me/hashgraph, or Discord at https://www.hedera.com/discord. The whitepaper can be found at https://www.hedera.com/whitepaper.
