With Scroll Network Co-Founder and CEO, Nate Pitruzzello.

With Scroll Network Co-Founder and CEO, Nate Pitruzzello.

Source: scroll.network

Disclaimer: This interview was conducted on 8th February 2019 but was prevented from being released by the team at Scroll. The company was to fold on 17th October 2019 under very suspicious circumstances, dumping on investors.

Nathan Pitruzzello or “Nate” as he is commonly known, was the Co-Founder and CEO of Solutech Inc and the subsidiary company, Scroll Network.

Scroll Network aimed to:

· Reduce costs on moving data where the user is only paying for what they require.

· Increase efficiency in data for companies that need their data in one place.

· The user is able to full monitor their data as each and every movement of data is categorised on the ledger immutably.

· The users data is fully secure, without any risk of rollover or add on fees. Any data movements by Scroll are only seen by the user and Scroll, and not a third party.

· Reward developers that utilise Scroll Dev Tools.

Source: scroll.network

So Nate, thank you for taking time out of your hectic schedule to speak with me.

1. What is your background and what was your life like before Crypto?

Cryptocurrency, blockchain in general, disrupted systems and data security have all been a pretty big part of my life. Considering that I am only 22 (years old), I have been round been around when Mt. Gox (a Bitcoin exchange between 2010–2014) was crazy. I can remember when people were losing money and when people thought that the Bitcoin project was going to go because of Mt. Gox. At the time Mt. Gox was pretty much the only exchange. You could get Bitcoin from other exchanges but most people bought and traded Bitcoin on Mt. Gox (it was reported that Mt. Gox had 70% of all Bitcoin transactions between 2013–2014).

I was around experiencing cryptocurrency when everyone was freaking out and losing Bitcoin. I can remember when Bitcoin had a $550 price figure, and I just saw everything go down with a huge correction. I think Bitcoin lost around 92% of its value from the Mt. Gox crash and everyone thought it was dead, and it recovered! (Bitcoin received its value from the crash and a whole lot more).

I have been around to experience around four really big Bitcoin corrections. The first correction that I vividly remember was around a $30 to $1 crash. I can also remember some people on Twitter saying, “Thank god I sold at $20”. It is really crazy when I look at the corrections now, they are honestly just a trend that Bitcoin does. A lot of people are really scared about these huge market corrections with Bitcoin, they have just not been around here long enough. A lot of the old guard that have been around since the really early days, they are all under the same impression that this is just another correction. No matter what, whenever Bitcoin breaks that correction, there is always a reversal and always some sort of crazy dynamic that goes with that current market shift.

What I mean by this is more people get involved, more cool applications with Bitcoin are used, more companies start to use it. Every correction is like a time (an event in a period of time), as innovation doesn’t happen when bull runs happen. For a lot of people it is like they have money googles on when it comes to crypto assets in bull runs, because no one really notices the innovation. They (mistakenly) just think the innovation is happening, as prices are increasing because of Bitcoin. In reality, there is not really a lot of innovation that goes on in bull runs, because everyone is making such a huge amount of wealth, and there is more wealth being accrued.

Before Scroll, I was working on a lot of decent Hyperledger projects, not really SawTooth projects (Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise solution for building, deploying, and running distributed ledgers, also called blockchains). The SawTooth projects (that Nate has been working on) have been more recent. I have been around with quite a bit (of experience) with Hyperledger fabric. Before that, I was working on my own private Ethereum projects and I used to tinker with Bitcoin occasionally. This is what really got me interested, to be able to build projects for this.

To be completely honest with you, I had a complete tug-of-war with blockchain for a really long time. I have a lot of friends that are very sceptical with the technology and they are amazing developers. One of my friends competes in Hackathon’s competitively (a sprint-like event in which developers and others involved in software development, collaborate intensively on innovative projects), and he could bring so much innovation to this space. He is so fed up with the way that ICO’s have conducted themselves, and that ICO’s seem to just run away with another person’s money. He doesn’t want to touch it (cryptocurrency), as he is very against it. I was also like that for a long time.

We (Scroll) had a working proto-type during the big ICO explosion. We had a working product and had people using the product, which is very unusual. We were offered venture capital (capital invested in a project in which there is a substantial element of risk, typically a new or expanding business) to help scale the business, but we decided to not go down that route. There was a really long time that I was really negative about the ICO explosion. It was like a double edge sword as you could have a really great product, and you can have people just hop on the project and give it bad light, however the people who are supporting it can have a bad reputation. This sees everybody getting angry really fast, and motions manifest. So, for a long time, I was very negative towards ICO’s and creating individual cryptocurrencies.

I thought there were more efficiencies in just using Bitcoin. I demoed a platform trial using Bitcoin instead of an independent ERC20 token, as a utility token. There was an incredible amount of more efficiencies with using your own utility token in a real ecosystem, and not producing a utility token for the purpose of getting one out there so people can buy it, but for really promoting and benefiting a platform. In a lot of cases it is really hard to use Bitcoin and Ethereum, because Ethereum is not designed to operate in a utility-based platform that was not conceived yet. There is more that goes into transacting and validating individual transactions with an adapter within an enterprise system, than just having Ethereum.

I think a big argument that people are making about having altcoins when you have Bitcoin, is you need to be able to create an ecosystem around one ideal, and the only way to do that is to produce an altcoin. In the grand scheme of things, I think altcoins are cool! I don’t however think that there are going to be 500–1000 cryptocurrencies that are all going to be different, for different products. I think that in a lot of cases that there is still going to be companies that accept Bitcoin as payments. In an adoption like world, we would probably see a lot of companies using Bitcoin, due to the shear utilitarian aspect of Bitcoin and its purpose.

In terms of my friends and the people that I speak to, we are all under the impression that one Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. I know that’s cliché and that people like to say it all of the time, like one douche is one douche, but it is actually probably the truest thing that you can say about Bitcoin. When you are buying Bitcoin, it is not like a stock investment. You are buying Bitcoin with the promise of the vision manifesting to a greater degree, and when that vision manifests, the price goes up because of scarcity purposes. The price is fixed and there is only a certain amount of Bitcoin in circulation, and when more buyers enter, the cost to get more Bitcoin goes up. It is just a matter of where your entrance is. Bitcoin has had multiple confirmations in terms of its adoption and its ability to be adopted with the way the Lightening Network is coming out. I am very positive on the outlook of how Bitcoin is going to be, and this is coming from a person that is highly sceptical on most of this space.

The reason why we are involved and to answer some of the questions on disrupted ledger technologies such as “Nate, this doesn’t seem like your forte, why specifically do you want to get involved in disrupted ledger technologies?”. To answer, I will reference Slidedrive, as one of our products. I personally believe the big shift on the Internet now is correlative to data privacy, and Slidedrive is a peer-to-peer file sharing platform that completely eliminates third parties and it allows for an ecosystem of data to be constantly moved between peers. You can create your own networks, friends lists, private chats and private calls. It is a complete a peer-to-peer system with no involvement of a third party. It is a truly decentralised file sharing platform.

The thing with this with decentralised systems is that, you need a level of incentive in order for people to use certain mechanisms on Slidedrive, or a decentralised system in general such as an altcoin or a decentralised currency makes more sense. We had to go through the entire “what if” process, such as one idea in my head was, “let us just use the Chase Banking App”. The problem with this was if you wanted to move a transaction, this being a data transaction, not a regular transaction where you are moving money, we are using a token as a validator to compensate a server cost or a node cost. To use Chase Banking App and to use USD (United States Dollar) did not make any sense because you have to pay the wire fee, you have to wait for the transaction settlement with the bank, and all of this needs to be before you move an actual transaction fee that is way less than 1c. The average data transaction if you want to move a simple file, it could cost one third of 1c. These are very cheap transactions and using USD just wouldn’t make any sense because of the wiring fee.

We also tried out using Bitcoin and the problem with using Bitcoin was that you need to be able to essentially scale with the Bitcoin blockchain, and you need to be reliant on those payments. The problem is if you were to have a business adopt Slidedrive or applications specifically, and we were to use Bitcoin, then it would be under the impression that we are maintaining that system, because there is no way that any big enterprise that wants us to handle data would utilise a validation token in order to move their files. This would be crazy considering the general decentralised factors of Bitcoin. You can make the argument that Bitcoin is totally open source but that doesn’t mean that we own it. It is not necessarily that we own our utility token as well, it is more of an ability to ensure that the ecosystem is healthy and duly ready for true adoption in that manner.

Apologies if I went off on a tangent!

2. What initially attracted you to the world of cryptocurrency and what initially inspired you into launching into SoluTech Inc and the Scroll Network Development?

I put a Medium article out the other day stating with decentralisation, everybody wants it, but there are no refunds and no insurance. You need to be totally accountable when using decentralised platforms because they are designed specifically to go against user comfort, due to the fact that we are raised to believe that our comfort zone are these centralised systems. If you think about it, probably since you were raised in terms of money, there was always somebody talking to you about a bank. There really are no banks in blockchain. It is just people with wallets that are storing currency and you use the currency when you need it for certain things. This is what cryptocurrency wallets are. Banks will take custody and the private key wallets are so convoluted that the variables are so crazy, that it would be very difficult for an average human being to spoof a private key. I would not say that you are your own bank but you have your money back.

In terms of what attracted me here, I would say, peer-to-peer payments could be one of the greatest inventions that we will see in the next 100 years. Even if Bitcoin is not around within the next 3–5 years, which I highly doubt by the way, it would have paved the way for something greater. I like to use the analogy of MySpace verses Facebook.

I have always been involved with Bitcoin, on and off. I didn’t really know where to take the idea. I think that we (Scroll Network) are in the same stance with projects like Enigma (Enigma ENG is a crypto platform that’s trying to solve the problem of privacy on the blockchain by giving access to data storage and privacy while remaining scalable), where we recognise the individual values of the technology, but we are looking at it of more of the perspective of, “what would really drive adoption and what makes the most sense?”. We are never going to put something out that is technologically insensible or that is bad for the platform, just so it benefits an ecosystem. It needs to go hand-in-hand, and there is a lot of things that is very convoluted about this space, especially the fact that most people thing that utility tokens can do anything when in reality utility tokens are not currency. I see a lot of the time when people say, for example, “Oh, I can’t wait for my Lemon Coin be accepted at this vendor, but I also want to use my Lemon Coin on the Lemon Coin platform”. If you have an ecosystem that is pulling demands from multiple different arrays and there is not enough of an income to feed that fix of constant demand, and economically this does not make any sense. If you have an overwhelming demand for a currency and you have a certain pegged price point and you also have a certain supply of that currency, with there being a constant demand incoming for it, and there is a need for it but no sellers, “what do you do?”. You need to have a very defined reason as to why you are producing these assets. The demand verses supply stream should be very well crafted.

I think what attracted me to this space is that I recognised that a lot of projects where just piggy-backing each other. I was seeing that a lot of projects where not very unique. I still think that a lot of people get confused as to what Scroll does, and I am happy that they do. When people look at Scroll, I do not want them to think that we are just another rendition of what you have seen over the past two years, because everything that we have done so far is very, very different. We take a very long time to make decisions, we don’t really hype up announcements on purpose because we see true value in platform adoption over time. We don’t really try to drive the hype vehicle, and we don’t look to partner with influencers either. This is not something that we do.

We are very much our own project, and slowly we are becoming a very formidable entity in this space. From the perspective of someone looking out, they might not see the development. From those in our community, I would say our community is extremely excited for the products that we are putting out, and most are really excited to use Slidedrive!

I think what really attracted me to the cryptocurrency world the most was that true decentralisation could work. This crazy Bitcoin experiment, and the test of decentralisation, that is thing could actually work. If it does actually work this will change the world dramatically. Please think of being an interplanetary species for a moment, and think about how the benefits of digital currency would be in encompassing interplanetary species. I like to thing about stuff like this sometimes! I know it is far out there, but digital currency and peer-to-peer currency totally make sense, they really, really do. It is not something difficult to comprehend and the concept of Bitcoin makes a lot of sense, it really does. If it is not Bitcoin, it is going to be something else that takes the mantle in my opinion.

3. How did you set about your learning development and did you have any specific goals, inspirations or role models that stimulated your creative success?

I have always looked up to other CEO’s of other companies mostly away from the blockchain space. I find it difficult to be excited about certain blockchain projects as I don’t know if they are going to always be around. We have usually had an issue where we go to these really big events and speak to other blockchain projects, and they will have no clue in how to describe their own blockchain technology. We always bring a demo along with us (to blockchain events) so people can try it out. In comparison whenever we speak to others, they are usually very clueless as to what they are actually building and it is really hard for me to place my trust in others that are in this space, due to the fact that it is very hard to tell whether they are assimilated enough as a team to move forward. I am not necessarily saying that they are not being truthful, I am just stating that they are not really assimilated.

I think for inspiration, if you could put it that way, I have always looked up to Bill Gates. I know this perhaps a very thing that most entrepreneurs will say, but the fact is I did not think that I was even going to be an entrepreneur for a long time. I thought that I was going to graduate from college, and get a nice job at a company, maybe at a company such as Microsoft or Dropbox. I thought that I would be working in a cool role such as a Software Engineer or a Data Scientist, and I thought that was going to be my life.

We have been working on SoluTech related projects for around 2 and a half years now and we have only been funded for around 8 months. This project is well into development and that is why we are able to push out developmental events much quicker, and quicker in the perspective of expectation.

I didn’t really think that I was going to be an entrepreneur, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be. I didn’t know if I really wanted to take on that role. Though I did see an incredible amount of value in decentralised data. This was also before that everyone started waking up to these data breaches that started happening. The things that are happening in the news now, where you see these big companies such as Facebook, Amazon or cloud based centralised systems providers are being breached, this is something that I thought of 2 and a half years ago that I thought this could potentially be a problem. I saw all of these cyber security risks being huge issues.

SlideDrive as an idea. It was a manifestation of an expectation that cyber security will get really bad. When we came up with the SlideDrive project we actually raised the Kickstarter (Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects) for it, as we were only at college. We managed to raise around $8,000 USD on Kickstarter. I was so excited when we raised this $8,000 USD as we could finally afford the software that we needed. We never tried to overstep our bounds with how much money that we actually needed and we have always been responsible about it. It has been a crazy ride and a lot of people that I was pretty crazy for coming out with this idea, a peer-to-peer decentralised file sharing system.

Some of the more adequate developers would compare us to IPFS (InterPlanetary File System is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system. IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files). I would say that IPFS to SlideDrive is a pretty huge competitor, but I would say that we are better than IPFS, as we are quicker and more secure. We also have a more user-friendly interface (than IPFS). SlideDrive is not going to play a really “clunky” application, it is going to feel like that you are using an everyday App. This is what we want people to feel like, and we do not want the consumer experience to fight you. We want you to be able to get done what you need to get done on the platform, and we want you to benefit from it.

I guess this is where my inspiration comes from. Bill Gates was an inspiration to me because no one really knows what it is like to start a company up in college. You are extremely young and you have this really cool technology, and you do not really have a lot of work experience prior. When you try to go public with your company a lot of people deem you to be a child, and they tell you that it is very difficult for you to grow up with your business, and a lot of people doubt you. This happened to me relentlessly, but it does not happen anymore because we either work with or we work on other things with other entities and such. We are well respected, but it took a long time to gain. I think when a lot of the blockchain community first started to notice the project, we had a lot of young college kids working on it and people looked at it and thought it was crazy that it was only a bunch of young kids working on it. This was one of the biggest hurdles that we had to get over. We have some older and more mature people working here now, and also some young college kids that we have brought in, as well as others that have only just graduated too. We have expanded our engineering team quite drastically.

Scroll and / or SoluTech plan to work like a 9am — 5pm job. People can (if they want) work outside of these hours, as I do. I work weekends, and I work a lot! We do have people who want to work here, as it is a cool career being setup, and I am excited about that because it shows longevity in what we are building. I really looked up to Bill Gates as I am sure he really understood this point. He really pioneered the whole college start-up type of movement, and I am sure that he got a lot of scepticism as well. I really look up to that!

4. Scroll is a very promising project that could benefit a lot of users. In every project there are challenges and difficulties that one must be overcome. Could you give us an insight into how you deal with such challenges and you learn from them to progress in future?

I think that the biggest roadblocks was, the first one was ageism and the second one was for ourselves to continually bring in developing talent. We do not outsource any of the code that we write. The reason that we do not do that is we are very protective of the intellectual property that we are filing. If we were to outsource the code it would run a risk, and there is a lot that goes on in the world of programming where people do steal source code, and it is a very big reality. We do not outsource any of the code, we hire developers in house and we pay them a salary. This is what we do, and we work on the systems in our own office.

I think on point no. 2, it is that we continually draw in talent and we have some amazing people working here now. It was really tough to vet certain devs (developers). Point no. 3 is making sure that we build a platform that is wanting to be used and not just a DApp that we throw up with a smart contract, in hope that people wan to use it. We want to make something that is adoptable.

5. What are your favourite aspects of Scroll both from a technical aspect and the team that you work alongside?

I think what I enjoy the most is seeing my project grow and seeing my business grow, and it is a business now, not just a project. I think the coolest thing is seeing it grow and seeing this vision of decentralised data sharing really grow up and manifest in the way that I thought it was going to. We came with SlideDrive concept when everyone was still good with trusting Facebook with their information. This was when we came out with it, and as such we got an incredible amount of backlash from it. I thought that if we didn’t come out with it at that time, that it would be a done deal as we would have been out developed, and someone would have come out with it. The reason that I believe that no one came out with a SlideDrive concept before was it didn’t make sense to some people, and it was able to be competed with. Some of these ideas in blockchain are amazing, but you need to look at the disruption value. I actually have a really good friend who has had two start-up exits, and he told me this and it is called disruption value. It is where you look at an industry as a whole, and you review what everybody else is doing and then see what makes sense. So, to be an advocate for centralised systems, consumers are buying the products and they are ok with it. This is a very hard industry to disrupt. Industries that are easy to disrupt are when those companies are crumbling in that category. We are now entering an era where people want their data to be decentralised and they want to own their own personal information on the Internet. It is much easier for us to disrupt that than disrupting something that is very concrete and formidable.

6. And finally, to close our interview, do you have any tips or helpful advice for budding entrepreneurs looking to enter the world of cryptocurrency?

If you are going to enter cryptocurrency and you want to issue an asset, make sure that you do it in a way that is transparent, and do it on a way that is not for you. If you are issuing an asset it is not for you for the entrepreneur, what is for you the entrepreneur is your ownership and entitlement in your own business. The tokens that you issue are for the platform and those are not meant for your own personal gain. I do not think that utility tokens should be rewarded in that way. What makes you the entrepreneur as being unique, is recognising that your business should be your output, and not some tokens.

I would recommend to really think twice before doing an altcoin, and before producing an altcoin to make sure that it really makes sense to do it. The technical analysis beforehand of — should you use Bitcoin, should you use Ethereum or should you use a bank wire. If these things apply to you and they are more efficient, then you do not need to produce an altcoin. You do not need an altcoin to simply just replace the currency that you were originally intending to use. It has to have a real world, make sense, use case. If it doesn’t it is not worth doing it. Though, there is no shame in producing a blockchain project that would use Bitcoin instead of an altcoin, as truly decentralised systems such as blockchains require some cryptocurrency of some degree.

You need to look at it in perspective of what the world needs, if you build from the consumer to your technology, I think that you will see much better feedback. I think that our project is very small though, so take my advice with a grain of salt. This is just something that I notice from other projects that I have spoken to, and some other creative teams that I have spoken to. It is pretty much in general what the institutional ecosystem is like, such as when Venture Capitalists are evaluating blockchain projects. I think that they really look at the fact that, “are they creating stuff that matters?”.

If you can’t say that it matters a lot, I do not think that blockchain is something that should use. It is very limited, clunky technology, and this is due to the fact that there is practically no one in the industry. I would not be fooled in terms of the numbers that you see in terms of Bitcoin’s trading volume to assess how Bitcoin is growing. A lot this is not so true. I would look at with a grain of salt, even when the big bull run happened back in 2017. This was just because the media and the news got a hold of it, and Coinbase was available for people on the App Store. This was just very easy access to Bitcoin. I would look at that in perspective and I would really evaluate that because we are nowhere near close to what a real adopted Bitcoin would look like.

Thank you very much for your time Nate!

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Published at Sun, 20 Oct 2019 11:23:44 +0000

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