Guest: Blane Sims
Company: Truebit (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

While blockchain was originally created to facilitate financial transactions, it has evolved to include other interactions and use cases. Although we are just beginning to see what blockchain and the broader Web3 world can offer, many organizations are drawn to the benefits of transparency, resilience to failure, and efficiency.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Blane Sims, Head of Product at Truebit, discusses the evolution of blockchain and decentralization and the problems it is trying to solve. They go on to discuss Truebit’s new verifiable computing platform and the use cases Sims is seeing.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Sims gives us an introduction to the company and talks about its origins as a research project. He tells us about founder, Dr. Jason Teutsch, and his research in game theory and how that has been important to Web3.
• Sims discusses the evolution of blockchain from the Ethereum blockchain and how its original purpose was to facilitate transactions between parties that had no basis to know or trust each other. Sims talks about how it has become apparent that blockchain can be applied to lots of different interactions.
• Sims feels that in the future we will see the convergence of the concept of decentralized trust and new technologies like generative AI. He talks through some of the enterprise use cases he believes will come out of this convergence and how that ties in with Truebit’s work in the Web3 world.
• One of the key trends with compute is that cloud-based compute is now predominantly serverless. However, Sims talks about the extension beyond cloud-based compute, edge-based compute, and how this ties in with a broader evolution toward decentralized compute which is where Web3 comes in.
• Sims tells us about their new verifiable computing platform, Truebit Verifier, and how it works. He talks about how it gives you a certificate that says the code was run correctly to enable users to convey trust to whoever is dependent on their code and data.
• There are numerous benefits of decentralization for developers, and Sims talks about the top three reasons developers look to Web3: transparency, resilience to failure, and efficiency. He discusses how Truebit Verifier helps developers run their code transparently and have a certified proof they can attach to the blockchain.
• Truebit Verifier’s first live use case is coming online later this year, a supply chain-based use case. Sims goes into depth about the use case and how they needed a way to move data securely from one ledger to another. Another use case is in making royalties for artists’ songs more transparent.
• Sims provides us with an overview of the trends he is seeing in the industry saying that many people are fixated on generative AI and for developers AI does provide an opportunity to scale up and do much more. However, this places pressure on other processes like security where some checklists and procedures are still very manual.
• Sims talks about the challenges of validating AI-generated code and knowing if it is secure. Secondly, ensuring the data you get out of a model is accurate, particularly in use cases in medical science where the AI is making diagnoses or making critical financial decisions.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.