On this LAB Radio, episode Aaron Mangal talks technology, Blockchain and BUIDLing with Barbara Bickham, founder of Trailyn Ventures and the International Blockchain Accelerator.

Barbara Bickham is a CTO, Investor and Entrepreneur and founder of the International Blockchain Accelerator

Barbara is a Berkley, University of Chicago Alumni, coder, CTO and Technology Advisor with extensive experience across industries like: FinTech, Fashion, Wearables, Wireless, Security, Media and Entertainment, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain.

Her current areas of expertise are in Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Internet of Things (IoT).

She even won an award from Gartner for her work writing a REST API for an IoT platform.

"I bridge the gap between professionals that speak in technology terms with professionals that speak primarily in financial terms. I represent a company to investors, key clients and strategic partners.

I also have over 4 years experience preparing and evaluating companies for private equity or venture capital financing. Founded an investment association connecting Southern California businesses with venture funding." -Barbara Bickham

The International Business Accelerator is a combination of private sector and non-profit entities' efforts:

"The International Business Accelerator is a joint program of the Community Vitalization Council, an economic development non-profit, and K5 Ventures, an early-stage venture fund that partners with and invests in technology-driven businesses led by visionary founders.The IBA was started in 2014 with support from the US Small Business Administration...

...In 2018 the IBA announced its first sector-specific accelerator cohort on Blockchain for Global Growth taking place at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. In 2019 the IBA will announce new cohorts for more advanced tech, Global Fintech, Female-founders & Women-led companies, a partnership with Southern California's leading hardware accelerator and a Menlo Park cohort partnering with international legal and accounting firms in Silicon Valley."

After listening to this episode you will learn:

• How Barbara began as a coder and eventually CTO, investor, entrepreneur and advisor
• The Catalyst for Barbara to cross the worlds of Investing and Technology
• The emergence of Digital Coast and eventually Blockchain Beach in Socal
• What a CTO is a what role they play in a company
• About the Blockchain Accelerator being hosted at USC's Blackstone Launchpad
• What types of people are joining the accelerator and what they learn
• The most exciting things to Barbara about the Blockchain world

For show notes and more visit: https://coinstructive.com/ep48-blockchainaccelerator/

On this LAB Radio, episode Chris Groshong talks shop with Jeff Zhou, founder of TrustNote, a mineable public DAG ledger with a two-tier consensus mechanism. (Cryptographic Algorithms: BLAKE2, BIP32-Ed25519)

The architecture is designed for high concurrent transactions and confirmation times. 

Jeff Zhou, Founder of TrustNote 

Jeff's background began with chip making and eventually led him to realizing the lack of scalability with Bitcoin:

"A few years back Jeff Zhou started working on blockchain and at that time he developed BTC+LTC dual mining chips and hardware, the technology was sold to a world-wide market.Jeff then tried to develop an IoT software platform based on blockchain technology, and after several months of trial and development, he encountered serious issues with scalability and the transaction fees were very high. Issues like these prevent mass adoption of the blockchain technology and ultimately drove the foundation of the TrustNote open source project and its development of a fast, scalable, and light platform to provide high-performance for everyone on every device at a lower cost."

Now with TrustNote Jeff aims to create a new alternative architecture to the traditional Blockchain construct.

The TrustNote whitepaper elaborates on the details of the project and core architecture:

"Today’s blockchain technologies face many challenges such as network congestion, high transaction fees, and long delays in transaction confirmation. TrustNote seeks to address these problems by building the world-leading public Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) ledger which is minable, capable of handling high concurrent transactions yet still maintain quick transaction confirmation."

Above is a breakdown of how the TrustNote DAG compares with two other DAG focused projects, IOTA and Byteball.

After listening to this episode you will learn:

• About how Jeff worked on secret projects for the Chinese Government before moving into the chip-making industry
• How they combined multiple algorithms into one chip (allowing multiple mining algorithms under one unit)
• Why Mining is big and concentrated in China
• Jeffs thoughts on China and how the worlds borders are opening up thanks to technology like Bitcoin
• What a DAG is and how they are using this technology as a Blockchain alternative
• Why Consensus is one of the biggest challenges to Blockchains
• Why they are aiming to solve this through a hybrid approach of architecture options
• What TrustNote is and how it works and when it's mainnet will be ready
• Why Jeff began with learning C languages (like C++) but also like other languages like Rust

For show notes and more please visit: LAB Radio

On this LAB Radio, episode Aaron Mangal chats with Kylan Hurt about the life as a developer at Edge wallet, a multi-currency wallet with baked in secure Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality. 

We discuss how he became a developer, building a wallet, programming various code bases (like Javascript) and other topics from a dev's perspective.

Kylan Hurt, Software Engineer at Edge

Kylan is a Software Engineer for Edge Wallet, a team that develops a multi-cryptocurrency wallet software and application. Kylan has worked with such organizations as Intuit, Z Global marketing, Knowledge City, Datagonia and Let's Talk Bitcoin.

He is also the organizer of the San Diego Blockchain Development Meetup and previously produced and hosted of The Captain Crypto Show, a discontinued cryptocurrency-related podcast.

Edge, a multi-currency wallet with over 15 coins including BTC, ETH, XMR, XRP and more

Here is some lore about how Edge (formerly AirBitz) came to be from the company website:

Edge’s first product, a bitcoin wallet and business directory, was launched in the winter of 2014, under the company name of “AirBitz” and has been securing millions of dollars worth of bitcoin ever since. Like many others, Airbitz was inspired by the bitcoin revolution and set out from day one to build tools that kept bitcoin users safe and in control.

The Airbitz Bitcoin Wallet was the first application of a security model we coined as “Edge Security”. By the end of 2015, we had successfully packaged up the tools that make the Airbitz Wallet awesome into a software development kit (SDK) that developers could use for their own applications. Our “Edge Security” SDK has since been integrated into top-tier blockchain projects such as Augur, Wings, and OpenLedger.

Airbitz quickly advanced from a bitcoin wallet in 2014 to a paradigm shifting data security solution and multi-currency wallet in late 2017. Given our company’s evolution and coining of the term, “Edge Security”, we thought it would be best to highlight this focus as the core of our brand.

After listening to this episode you will learn:

• How Kylan self-started learning programming from a previously dissatisfying job
• The path he took to go from nothing to building an app (Edge wallet)
• Why Javascript is a more common language for front-end programming
• How you can do a lot of backend (server side) programming with Javascript
• Why other languages force you to configure your own server to write and deploy code
• What nodes are and why they are critical to decentralization
• How 0x works as a decentralized exchange protocol
• A day in the life of a developer at Edge
• How Edge eats their own dogfood through internal Cryptocurrency usage as a company
• Why development in the Blockchain space is bleeding edge and people should realize everything is a work in progress

For show notes and more visit: LAB Radio

On this LAB Radio, episode Chris Groshong chats with Will McDonough, founder of iCash which provides a Proof of Trust Protocol (PoT). This enables powerful use cases like smart contract validation, settlement and Blockchain insurance.

Will McDonough, founder of iCash

Will McDonough is an investor and entrepreneur whose storied career ranges from sports and entertainment management to the world of global finance. In 2014, McDonough led the Initial Public Offering for Atlas Mara (ATMA:LSE) with co-founder and former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, for a market cap of $825 million after acquiring eight banks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Atlas Mara has more than 3,500 employees and is operated by former executives of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Barclays, Standard Chartered and Ecobank.

Prior to founding Atlas, McDonough and his team in the Investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs managed more than $17 billion in private capital of the firm’s current and retired partners. While at Goldman, he co-founded the Goldman Sachs Builders & Innovators Summit, an industry-leading conference bringing together the top 100 entrepreneurs in the world every year.

Prior to Goldman, McDonough partnered with New York-based Avenue Capital Group to co-found a $250 million distressed debt fund called Avenue Strategic Partners. Since 2001, he has run his own highly successful management company called MMG, which has represented the licensing and partnerships interests of many high-profile individuals, iconic brands, and venerable estates including The Estate of Nelson Mandela, New England Patriots Quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady, and supermodel/activist Gisele Bundchen. MMG also co-founded a children’s entertainment company with Andy Heyward, Warren Buffett, Martha Stewart, Stan Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger to build educational content for children.

iCash, a Proof of Trust (PoT) protocol assuring accurate data from Blockchain transactions

iCash’s is a Blockchain-agnostic Proof of Trust (PoT) protocol which provides distributed trust for data input. This means assuring data is accurate using this construct for services like validating smart contract settlements and Blockchain Insurance.

Just as courts and lawyers provide validate appeals processes for paper contracts, iCash’s PoT Delegates provide the same process for digital Smart Contracts.

While proof of stake and proof of work are certainly breakthrough tech, there is currently no system in place to assure users that the data inputs are accurate.

After listening to this episode you will learn:

• About Will's origin story and how he got started as a childhood entrepreneur
• How Will got into Boston College after initially being rejected
• Why he built a company with Tom Brady and represented such figures as Nelson Mandela financially
• What a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is and the benefit of operating as one
• Creating a company ("fund of funds") that provided exclusive access to hedge fund managers that money couldn't buy
• How he developed relationships with JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs
• Why settlement in Blockchain transactions are not always accurate and why that's a pain point for institutional traders
• What Proof of Trust (PoT) is and how it works?
• About iCash positioning as an independent third party insurance provider of Crypto (like buying it for your car)
• How iCash uses Delegates (third-party Oracles) which can be configured for public or private Blockchains

For show notes and more visit: LAB Radio