Encrypted: #Ep. 46: Why this start-up is crucial for the Dubai Blockchain Strategy!

About this Episode

Richard Ma is the CEO of Quantstamp, one of the leading smart contract auditing firms in blockchain space

In this episode, Ahmed and Nic speak to Richard to understand what on earth Quantstamp do and why their smart contract auditing solution is so crucial to the development of this space.

Richard starts off with his background and how the idea of Quantstamp evolved. Using industrial techniques he picked up as an also trader, he and his co-founder wanted to apply those techniques to provide smart contract auditing services to the up and coming projects which are all based on smart contracts.

Nic dives straight intp addressing key concerns associated with smart contracts such as coding a simple mistake and how would a reissue be implemented. Would it be done through contract modularisation or would a fork have to be implemented?
Richard goes into his experiences back in 2016 where the general consensus is code is law but that narrative changed with the introduction and uptake of blockchains such as Hyperledger and Corda. In term of permissionless chains, he goes into the concept of upgradeable contracts which can be implemented on Ethereum and draws upon an example and takes us through this use case along with the challenges it represents.

We also go on to the topic of enterprise and how Quantstamp interacts with different levels of enterprise clients. One colossal client of theirs is Kakao’s Ground X project (Kakao is Korea’s largest messaging platform) and shares how he has interacted with them and the processes involved.
Richard shares how they approach different projects according to their security valuations and how different they have become over time, particularly the big shift from 2017 to 2019.

Ahmed shifts the topic to why Quantsamp is in cohort 6 of the Dubai Future Accelerators program, which is a 12-week program dedicated to bringing in start-ups from around the world to bring innovation to certain government departments. They were paired up with the Road and Transport Authority (RTA) in order to help them build a secure system to sync up the different data silos that exist in the various agencies of the RTA to bring the coordination of data from days to seconds. Richard shares his current experiences with the RTA explaining how welcoming and open-minded they are in trialing these projects, in particular how the government departments emphasize the business applications and benefits these solutions would bring rather than focusing on the hype that blockchain.

Richard touches upon their global expansion, such as their new set up in Japan and Noumura’s recent investment in Quantstamp. Nic changes the conversation to trust and data standardization and given Quantstamp’s global footprint and diverse clientele, what this means for them introducing standards in the industry and becoming the trust anchor. Richard dives deep into the 3 verticals of standards they are working on, one of which is the Smart Contract Security Alliance (which Nomura and Fujitsu are current stakeholders).

When Richard started the company there were 300,000 smart contracts on Ethereum and now on there are 12 million contracts deployed on Ethereum! This led them to think that security audits should be automated with future anticipated demand and theoretically a token can be used as a security and utility feature to secure the system and verify the smart contract audits. The QSP token of Quantstamp is the token that powers this protocol and Richard further explains the viability of why the token economics could work in the future.

Nic further questions Richard if they would implement AI and machine learning into their business! Make sure to listen and find out what he had to say!

All this and more was discussed on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

Also, the legal bits for the soundtrack used in the podcast:
Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED

Track Name: Warm Nights

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights

License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported “Share Alike” (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.

Full License HERE – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode