The Software Outsourcing Show, Episode 13: Blockchain and Emerging 2020 Software Trends

The Software Outsourcing Show is on a mission to explain best practices for strategies, partner selection and ongoing management of outsourcing your software outsourcing development. This episode of the Software Outsourcing Show features Sergi and Alex.

In Episode 13 of the Software Outsourcing Show, Bobby Dewrell speaks with Ukrainian based software development experts, Sergii Sviatokha and  Alexander Stepanenko Learn more about mobile apps, emerging trends in 2020 and demystifying the cloud surrounding the capabilities of blockchain beyond its initial cryptocurrency beginnings. 

The Software Outsourcing Show is your #1 source for information, lessons learned, and exclusive insights into outsourcing. The show is produced by Accelerance, the leading consulting firm dedicated to helping companies reduce risk with software outsourcing.

Transcript: 

Bobby: Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm your host, Bobby Dewrell, and I'm happy to have you joining us this week on the Software Outsourcing Show. Today we have two exciting topics for you. We're talking about outsourcing mobile app development and we're also discussing blockchain technology.

Now, I'm honestly excited about both topics. I personally spent some time in the mobile space working both internally and with outsource companies. So it's always exciting to talk about a space that, A, is rapidly changing, and B, is just close to my heart. And then to talk about blockchain, one of the most revolutionary concepts in technology today, with all honesty, blockchain is changing the way we think about interactions between parties, data storage, security, the list goes on. And I am excited to have two people back to talk about this, both of them from Infopulse, it's Alexander and Sergei.

Now, Alexander is the head of watching service line and a technical manager at Infopulse. He's a former software developer and solution architect, holding a master's degree in applied math and overall experience in the IT industry of more than 18 years. Now for the last 10 years, Alexander has engaged in launching new projects and building teams from the ground up for clients from various industries, such as energy, utilities, IoT, automotive, and many others.

And with Sergei, he's the head of Infopulse business development and Infopulse USA. He's a former software engineer and the head of their delivery office. He has deep technical background. He has a master's degree in cybernetics, finance, and business development. He's got an overall experience in the industry of more than 11 years within automotive, telecom, banking, and many other domains. He's been with Infopulse for about six years now and he's leading the business development activities and expansion of the business to the U.S. Sergei, Alexander, good morning or actually good evening to you. Welcome back to the show. I appreciate you guys coming back.

Alexander: Hi, Bobby. We are happy to meet you again in the studio.

Bobby: Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, a lot of people do this with me one time and then they're like, you know, "No, I don't want to talk to that guy anymore." So it's nice to have someone back for a change, other than Jim Marascio.

Sergei: It's great to see you.

Bobby: So how's life? Is it starting to warm up in Ukraine yet or no?

Sergei: It's quite good, thank you, and I would say that we're still moving to the States and we're still countries that are continuously growing in terms of IT and, yeah, today, it's more and more requests from the...mainly from the States to IT.

Bobby: Oh, well, that's great, that's always good news to hear. Well, today, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about actually, you know, maybe two subjects if we can get to both of them in time. But I believe both that are really in the Infopulse wheelhouse, and that would be around mobile app development and blockchain. So does that sound like something good that we could maybe have a conversation about today?

Alexander: Absolutely.

Bobby: Yeah. And not necessarily together, right, as two separate subjects. I'm not encouraging any mobile app block chaining at this point, so.

Alexander: Yeah, we try to join them both at some point in our conversation.

Bobby: So, you know, one thing I always, you know, like to talk about when we talk about things is sort of the why. And so, you know, we did a little research over here on our end with mobile app development. I wanted to talk about a little bit of the facts around it. And, you know, right now mobile apps are really accounting for over half the time spent consuming digital media, which that was one of those things that at first I thought about wow, you know, that seems a little high. But then I think about my kids sitting around and I don't think they consume digital media any other way. Right? YouTube only comes on the phone to them. But then also we look at, you know, smartphone users spend about 90% of their mobile time on apps, 85% of them preferring a native mobile app over a mobile website.

And then mobile apps accounting for about 42% of all mobile sales for Fortune 500 companies, which really looked at revenue from mobile apps was expected to reach around nearly 60 billion in the U.S., and that was back in 2016. And this is another one that I thought was kind of interesting and it made me take pause and count the apps on my phone. But the average consumer has about 30 apps installed on a device and spends about 35 hours a month using them. I thought those were a couple of neat little points there at the end. But I mean, does that sound right with you to you? Do you see a lot of mobile app development requests coming in? Are people still moving there as much as they were?

Sergei: Yep. To tell the truth, from year to year, we got more and more requests related to the mobile development. Previously, it's more and more about mobile native mobile development. But today, it's more about cross-platform mobile development like React native, like TypeScript, and we have more and more such kind of requests and customers will get the real mobile application that will be not like in a web-based or something like that. It will be a real mobile application but it will be not so costly for the customer.

So, yep, we see a lot. And each and every project right now asking, not for any web-based part, they are asking about the mobile applications that will be installed. And to the truth, talking about the statistics, I don't see how that's 35 hours per month. I'm quite sure that it's much, much more.

Bobby: It's gotta be higher. Right? I said the same thing. I'm like, "35 hours? Wow." You know, maybe I'm on the upper side of that power curve and I don't want to be. So now, you mentioned something there that I think is interesting to talk about and for our listeners, for them to understand, what do we mean when we say cross-platform development? Because we say that a lot. Can we talk a little bit about what cross-platform development means?

Sergei: Yeah, it's pretty interesting points. Alexander, do you want to start from the technical side or let me continue?

Alexander: Yeah, I'll step in to add some technical details. First of all, the cross-platform development allows the customer to reduce the cost, that's obviously. And technically, nowadays, it means that we write the code, which can be compiled then to work on both mobile and even desktop platforms. Regarding the mobile, both Android and iOS as two more significant mobile platforms in the market. And there are a few popular frameworks.

For instance, Xamarin, which is a Microsoft framework, and it allows to create the cross-platform code based on the JavaScript and native .NET code. It's also Cordova, for instance, which is also a JavaScript-based framework, which then is packed into let's say containers, which can be run on the target platform, usually invoking some Chromium engine to render and to handle some standard hardware and software events.

And of course, when we're talking about cross-platform development, we can weigh pros and cons regarding the simplicity of the application and specific needs. For instance, if you need to talk to some very specific sensors like a proximity sensor, or maybe some specific, maybe IR emitter, you need to develop other native application because the cross-platform frameworks, they don't usually allow you to work efficiently with hardware. Of course, you can plug in some native code, some native libraries to the cross-platform application, but it then kills all the pros of the cross-platform development. Right?

Bobby: Right. So if, I mean... I'm trying to understand, right? If it's a little more simple of an application, right? You're maybe not grabbing into the fingerprint sensor or you're looking at a proximity or any of the near field, communication type things, right, that can be hardware specific, this is where cross-platform really excels.

So it's, you know, I came up through mobile for a little while there and spent a few years in it. So not anymore do you have your iOS developers and your Android developers and then your website developers. When we start talking about cross-platform, either in the beginning stages or for simple web applications, we can use one set of developers that can cross all platforms. Is that fair?

Sergei: I would say that the biggest part of what you told is fair. We can talk about TypeScript and native script. Anyway, we'll have some changes related to the cross-platform mobile and to the web-based application. So yeah, the biggest part of the modules classes will be incorporated between each other. But anyway, it will be in the two different branches that will use each other. But that does not mean that we'll get now, I don't know, we need to know one developer instead of three developers.

Bobby: Right, no, I understand that.

Sergei: We need to usually know, like, you know, two people or one and a half people compared to the four people or three people. So the set of the people who are dealing with different kinds of parts or technologies and other stuff. But anyway, yeah, it's not so costly. 

Bobby: Well, let's talk a little bit about the mobile app development life cycle is... I mean, from just your standard SDLC, does it vary differently, or what's that end to end process? Is it pretty much just your standard SDLC or do we...is there more things to think about and consider? I mean, what...

Alexander: Well, of course, it's not too different from the regular development. But there is one very important thing we can consider. It's the size of the modern devices which run all those mobile apps. Usually, it's your mobile phone. And of course the screens are becoming larger and larger, but it's still only a few inches.

Bobby: It's still only a few inches and my big fat thumb, right?

Alexander: Yeah. So you have thoroughly think about the placement of the UI controls and overall user experience. And it means that very important part of the mobile development team and integral part of this team becomes a UI and UX designer. And we have really strong expertise in this domain. We have two different centers of expertise, UI expertise and UX expertise. And those guys help us when we build the new mobile application, they help us to visualize all the user flows.

So we are starting with wireframes, just to map that business flow onto the screens to link those screens with each other, depending on the business flow. Then they start to work on the visualization, on the UI part of the interfaces, test different colors and icons and how to

make it look nice. And only after this UI clickable mockup is ready, it's then very easy to pass it on to the UI developers, to the mobile developers, and they will code it using the already-prepared visual stuff. So this is how it differs mainly from the regular development.

Bobby: And too, you know, I think one of the things that I learned when I was in the space that...and, you know, I mean, I'm going back 10 years now. So really kind of close to the beginning. But, you know, I think it's important what you were saying about the user experience and the user stories there because really, the way I interact with my mobile device and the company or the application behind it is completely different than the way that I interact with my computer, if I'm coming to it there, right? Usually, it's a different set of needs, or it's something that I want to go deeper in on the mobile application. You don't necessarily spend as much time browsing and looking as you do on a computer. At least, that's what it was, you know, when I was around, right?

Alexander: Yeah. And usually, when you use your laptop or desktop computer, you have few ways to interact with the application. You can use your key, but you can use your mouse or maybe some modern laptops and all-in-ones, they have the touch display. So you have plenty of options to interact with the apps, and this is not true with the mobile app. And if any small thing is annoying, the whole application becomes really annoying and, yeah.

And also moving further, so there is another challenge when you develop mobile application. Well, maybe 5 or 10 years ago, when there were much more mobile platforms, at least it was Microsoft and a few other, less popular platforms. It was extremely important. Now we have only two platforms but nevertheless, Android has a lot of different versions which are available simultaneously on the market. It's not the problem with iOS because 90% of the iOS device are up to date, but Android has really a lot of different versions which are on simultaneously, and you have to test and to support all those versions.

Google does great in new Android. Starting from the Android 8, they really do great in terms of unification of these API and they tried to push everyone to be up to date, to provide a more smooth experience to the OEM providers in order to allow them to deliver new versions up to date. But it's still a really important step of that mobile development. You need to test your application on different versions, on different display sizes, on different platforms, iOS or Android and...

Bobby: On different carriers. On different carriers.

Alexander: On different carriers and on different time zones and different...yeah. And there is also these watches which became popular which also affect the overall placement and UI.

Bobby: Yeah, again, the whole wearable space. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that. Yeah, that's right in there. And then what about, you know, for...now we talk about the Android car and the iOS car, right? So that's new coming to us. Hopefully, that's not going to be too different than tablet. But you know, you probably have to have something that overrides that says, "Hey, are you driving? Let's not kill you. Right?

Sergei: Yes, yes.

Bobby: So let's talk a little bit about some best practices or maybe some of your best success stories that you've had within this space. What are some of those lessons you've learned of the best way to do it?

Sergei: Okay, we can tell about a couple applications, yeah, that is...from our side is really good. And on one hand, we have one of the Big Four customers for whom we are doing the hundreds of applications per year. They're using it for their internal usage, most of them written on Xamarin, part of them written on native iOS and native Android languages. And so it's in a massive enterprise development. And usually, as I can see enterprise companies asking us for cross-platform development because it's not so costly, it's very efficient, and it's for internal usage of these enterprise customers. So I can say that one of the Big Four also works in tons of different mobile applications that they're using to support their business. You know, starting from to find a right place in the open space for me for today.

On the other hand, we have today a couple mobile applications for one of our pretty big customers, Mantra, who are based in the United States. And we are doing for them the computer vision and corrosion detection on the metal, so mainly it's in a part of neural networks and detection on the visual sides and corrosion of the metal on the cars. So, and again, that is an iPod application that they're using on the factories and on metal labs to define what's kind of part of the metal is good and what is bad and other stuff.

We do have a lot of different small mobile applications. Yep, we had in the past an ABDirect  project, which is a logistics company, it's Uberization of the logistics when you're the person on one side, and on other one side you have a truck and you have a cargo that you want to move from point A to point B, hence the name, A to B. And main idea is that you are able, like in Uber, to find for you right truck, right now, to move to this track your cargo and to track all that during the whole way. And that was a project that we've done a couple years ago. Again, is based on the cross-platform development. And it's working like in the Uber.

Bobby: Right. Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great...I'm thinking about some of the sorting areas in large warehousing or manufacturing companies where they're trying to move stuff around. And so that's what it is, sort of those tracks of how do you get it from where you're standing now to the next place? Wow. So it's a warehouse Uber?

Sergei: Yeah, yeah, and to tell the truth, right now I see that a lot of customers asking about computer vision in the mobile applications. So we do have right now around five customers for whom we're doing computer vision inside mobile applications. We have a Japanese customer who are asking for face detection for the time tracking on the working place. Today we have a project to make a food detection when you're ordering and when you're ordering that eat into the restaurant. And so we're detecting the eat and we're detecting the person and we are linking the credit card information to the person and to the order and we are proceeding in the payments. Yep, and part of this are based on the mobile application. So again, customers right now trying to mix AI with mobile applications with IRM technologies. And it's quite popular all around the world, from Japan to the States. I don't know, Alexander, do you want to add?

Alexander: Well, I will add a few case studies from my own experience. So first of all, most of the Scandinavian mobile banking probably works using the mobile banking platform developed by us, by Infopulse. Another really popular topic which is on high demand right now is using mobile application for help in retail. For instance, we have a case when we deliver...we combine the AI chatbots and mobile apps to help the car dealers to sell the cars in the shop. So when someone approaches you and asks about, "Oh, well, what can you tell me about this particular car?" Oh, I don't know, a BMW X5.

And a dealer can open his mobile up and ask the chatbot in human readable form, for instance, "Oh, please tell me more info about these X5 for the customer," and he will receive the comprehensive information about this particular car and some options to choose from to tell more about the drive train, about the engine, or some chassis and stuff like this. And the same is true for the drug dealers and healthcare. For instance, one of our customer we do the customizable booklets, online booklets which they show on their tablets. And they contain all information about some specific medicine.

Sergei: Yeah, and also I just want to add and maybe to link a little bit blockchain and mobile applications... Yeah, I'm not able to name the customer but I can tell the story behind. The main idea that right now we are making an end to end platform which is both in the web-based and mobile where we are tracking any food from the part when we are growing the culture to the part when a person's going to the supermarket and wants to buy some food. And using mobile apps, person recognizing that food, for example an orange or something like that. Recognizing that supplier of this orange, and person will get a whole history, how this culture was grown, what was used, is it any, I don't know, chemicals was used and the other stuff. So that is like a new way of food supply chain management. Yeah?

Bobby: Oh yeah.

Sergei: And again, it's a link between...and all that is started in the blockchain. So the main idea is that is in a link between...yep, as I said, sometimes we're linking computer vision and sometimes the mobile apps. Sometimes we are linking in a blockchain development and the mobile apps.

Bobby: Well, and you know, Sergei, I don't think I could have paid you enough for that great segue. I mean, that was perfect, that was right on. So that's kind of a good thing to get in. And let's talk a little bit about blockchain because, you know, I think everybody... You know, we have a little bit of a bet going on at our firm every time something comes in, some new request comes in. They start describing it and we start going, "Okay, blockchain, say blockchain, say blockchain. Yep, there it is."

So, I know we hear that a lot. But let's talk a little bit about blockchain and really what that is and I mean, you know, for me the way to break it down is basically, you know, what blockchain is it's an accounting ledger. But it's a peer-reviewed accounting ledger, right, so that you don't have a centralized administrator anymore. It's distributed across all these peers. And everybody's book has to add up. Right? It's just like if you gave Alexander a dollar, you would write it in your book as he owes you a dollar. Alexander would write down that he owes you a dollar. And then you guys would tell me, "Hey, Bobby, you know, Alexander just borrowed a dollar from me," and then I keep it in my ledger. So if Alexander wants to go back and decide, "I'm not going to pay Sergei. I'm just going to erase that entry," well, it's missing in his book but it's not missing in my book or your book. I mean, would you agree with a kind of a basic description of blockchain that way?

Sergei: I will give the role to Alexander because that is the man in our company who is leading 55 people who are really doing blockchain for enterprises. It's five architects and Alexander, it's you who are doing the core of blockchain. That's why I will give the role to Alexander.

Alexander: Oh, thank you, Sergei.

Bobby: Okay, so, Alexander, you got it. Please accept that I was doing a simple layman's way of saying this, right.

Alexander: Well, so generally, in a nutshell, you're right. So it's a distributed ledger and certain rules. We call it consensus protocol, which allows everyone to agree which next record to put on top of this chain. That's why blockchain because it's a chain of the linked records. Well, and I always propose our customers to treat the blockchain as another fundamental yet ground-breaking platform. Think the same as, for instance, relational databases or maybe file system because the main purpose of the blockchain is to keep data. But to keep data in a trustless manner and trustless environment and allow everyone to trust the data which you then withdraw from this ledger.

So, that's it. So there is a lot of mystery fog around the blockchain over recent years but there was a lot of simple applied things which we can implement using blockchain. Initially, if you remember, blockchain was completely dedicated to the cryptocurrency as you tell us in the very beginning of this part of the topic. But now the focus is shifted towards using of distributed apps. The first, the pioneers was the Ethereum network, of course, with the smart contracts and ability to issue your own coins on their blockchain. And everyone started running so-called ICO which is, like, an analog of IPO in the fiat world. Yeah, just to raise some funds and start your own business.

But the first wave of this hype is over. Now we see that blockchain is moving to enterprise sector. And probably the brightest example, it's my own opinion, but I believe many people would agree with me, it's RippleNet. So it's the first enterprise-level blockchain which is specifically created for the cross-border payments. So before, our cross-border payments meant using of some Swift, or some wire transactions. They go through a lot of intermediaries and you need probably undergoing some currency exchange and all these things. And your transfer from the U.S. to China might take a few days or maybe even a week.

And another thing, you could never be sure that your transaction will succeed at all, because something in the middle of the chain may fail and your money will be frozen, put on hold, and you'll get them back in 30 days or sort of this. And it's simply costly. And the bad thing not is that it costs some money to do this transaction but that you don't know exactly how much money it will cost. In the fiat world, it is through RippleNet. First, they connected a lot of banks worldwide. They agree with banks that all those banks will use this crypto network for doing cross-border transactions. And it allows money, instead of doing some fiat transfers, they simply exchange this crypto coin, which occurs immediately. And only periodically, they exchange the real money when they calculate the final balance and they move a certain amount of money from one bank to another.

And it's much less sum than you need to move if you do all your transaction in fiat money. For instance, you can send $1 million from the U.S to China, then $1,200,000 from China to the U.S., and finally, in the end of the month, you will transfer only this difference. Right? Only some small difference between these two large sums, decreasing the transaction fees and the time.

And what's more important, RippleNet guarantees the price of the transaction before you actually issue the transaction. So when you're going to issue the transaction, RippleNet proposes you a few options, few routes. You can choose either fastest or cheaper or whatever you prefer. And you immediately see the price of this transaction and you are confident that no one will charge you some additional price afterwards. So it's really convenient, it's important, and it became possible only because RippleNet managed to sign agreements with a lot of banks.

And yeah, until recent times, it was the only major operator on the market. There was another large company, Stellar, with pretty similar technique, but they didn't agree with the banks. And being standalone, they were not able to provide the same level of services. But recently, Stellar...I don't know who initiated this process but now IBM works together with Stellar and IBM provides virtually the same options as RippleNet, so it's really good. It's a powerful competitor to RippleNet and I believe that the services provided will become cheaper and better with time.

Bobby: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's really, you know, when we talk about that, that's not just the financial side of it, right? But that's also within contracts, right? When we talk about contracts back and forth or other types of legal documents, I believe that's all within RippleNet, is it not? Don't they... I mean, they kind of look at both sides of it, right? It's not just a financial transaction. It's also some of the holder of the conditions around how that money transfers, correct?

Alexander: Well, yes and no, because RippleNet is still more about the pure money transactions.

Bobby: Oh, okay.

Alexander: If we're talking about some complex documents handling on the blockchain, then we're probably talking about the Hyperledger Fabric because it's the number one in the enterprise blockchains. And they provide their own implementation of the smart contracts. They call them chain code. A difference from the, for instance, smart contracts which we used to have on the Ethereum blockchain is that you can write, you can implement your smart contract on the go, on the node.JS, and even on Java. So not with some specific language but mainly with more languages on the market and they keep adding more and more languages support.

And it's really cool because enterprise development, it's usually...well, it's some Java or .NET developers who are familiar with the toolset and they don't have to learn to study any additional languages or libraries or platform. They simply write the business logic on the language they are most familiar with and that's cool. It significantly increases the development speed.

Bobby: Okay, cool. Well, hey, because we're starting to run a little low on time, so let's talk real quick. I can't have you here and not talk about Infopulse. So let's talk a little bit, what's some Infopulse history with mobile app development and blockchain? Or blockchain I should say, just, you know, not together necessarily. But let's talk a little bit about your history in both of these areas that we've talked about here.

Sergei: Thank you, Bobby. Of course, mobile app development, it's a much bigger history than blockchain. Yep. So talking about mobile development, we are doing mobile development for the past 15 years, I think. And so we have done it in a Windows-based app for...you know, devices that we had 10, 15 years ago. As I told, we have hundreds of cases related to mobile development thanks to a couple of enterprise companies. And as I told, it's pretty massive and it's a pretty big developments studio...

Alexander: We don't have experience in game development on the mobile.

Sergei: Yeah. And today it's more than 200, 250 people who are doing on our side mobile development. I would say that around 150 related to the cross-platform development and 100 people are doing native mobile development. Because as Alexander told, so once we are connecting to some IoT devices, once we are trying to do some really, really difficult deliberations with IRM architecture, some other stuff with augmented reality, we do need to use a native mobile development.

So, as I told, on one hand, it's enterprise applications. On the other one hand, it's starting from Uberization of logistics, logistics and coming to computer vision, to detection corrosion on the metal and the other stuff. As I remember, we also have a crypto-wallet for the blockchain based on the mobile application.

Bobby: Oh, wow.

Sergei: Yeah. But as I remember, Alexander has some such kind of project in his portfolio. Talking about the blockchain, I will again give role to Alexander.

Alexander: Yeah, I will take it. So, talking about the blockchain, we have two delivery centers here at Infopulse. One large team is working with some applied implementation of the blockchain. It's blockchain architects and blockchain engineers who usually integrate the blockchain into some business applications. They know how to work with B2C blockchain, with Etherium, with Hyperledger Fabric, with chains, so with IOTA and a bunch of other popular blockchain frameworks.

We have a core team of, like, 10 people who are deep into blockchain development. They dedicate all their time to the blockchain expertise. And also we have few dozens of guys who are our regular developers with a strong experience in commercial blockchain projects. And we invite them to implement some specific applications, based on the architecture which our core team has developed.

This is one delivery center. And another delivery center is...it's not even developers. It's more scientists, it's mathematicians, it's cryptography engineers, it's blockchain experts who develop the core of the blockchain. So we develop the blockchain for one of our customers and we implement it very, very significant. For instance, we plug in new consensus protocol, based on the new Spectre and Phantom algorithms. We implement the off chain, cross-chain synchronization between the different blockchains. We implement the completely new anonymous voting protocol on top of the blockchain. And this team is smaller. It's maybe a dozen people overall but it's our most powerful R&D center regarding the blockchain expertise.

Sergei: But say that's 55 people whom we have in the blockchain in Ukraine, in Ukraine and a little bit in Germany. This is in a team who are doing just blockchain. And we have a lot of teams who are participating in other projects, in the same projects, but from .NET stack of technologies, Java stack of technologies, and to other stuff. And thanks to that right now, we do have the biggest one blockchain center in Eastern Europe. And so that's why we have a lot of customers. We have many banks from Scandinavia for whom we are doing loan management and blockchain. We have Horizon in California for whom we're doing the core development of the blockchain. And I will say that it's more than 20 other customers for whom we are doing blockchain in automotive for emission control in Germany, for example.

Bobby: Oh, wow.

Sergei: Yeah. So it's different kinds of mixes of industries, of approaches, and of technologies. And yeah, sometimes Alexander is telling to our customers that, "Hey guys, you do not need blockchain." But in most of those cases, yep, we are really one of the biggest and one of the really cool centers who really love and who really know how to deal with the blockchain in enterprise level and in the cryptocurrency.

Alexander: And you know, because of the governmental regulations, the attitude to blockchain differs from country to country. And I can say that we...it wasn't intentionally, but we had to become more or less experts in international laws regarding blockchain, right, and we can even advise what we can do in this particular country and what we don't want to do because it violates the local laws.

Bobby: Well, it's a little funny to explain to some people that really the security of blockchain is the sharing, right? Everybody normally thinks that security is the opposite of share. And really, for blockchain, the backbone of its security is shared. If everybody knows, one person can't lie.

Alexander: Yes, exactly. By the way, talking about the security... So, one of the, I would say, downside of the regular blockchain is publicity because once you put your transaction onto blockchain, everyone sees that transaction. It's how it works, for instance, in BTC and other cryptocurrencies, so everyone sees all the transaction occurred on the blockchain from the beginning of times. And that's why when you tell someone, "Well, I have 100 bitcoins on my account on my address," someone can track all the history from the beginning of your wallet and see that well, you get some coins, you spend some coins, you get some new coins and yes, right now you have exactly 100 coins.

But not everyone likes this publicity because people want to be more private. And that's why new types of blockchains appeared and our customer, Horizon, for who we develop the blockchain core, we specifically do this thing. We do the such-called shielded transaction. It's anonymous transactions. So using the zero-knowledge-proof cryptoprotocol, crypto-algorithms, someone can prove that he has a certain amount of coins without disclosing all the transaction history. And it's really cool because it eliminates this major drawback of the regular blockchain, of course.

Bobby: Yeah, well that's cool. Well, listen, guys, I apologize. We're out of time. But I really appreciate y'all coming back and joining me. And, you know, with that, we'll kind of need to wrap up. I do want to tell everyone listening that we've got a couple of articles that we'll link out to in the show notes, one on how to hire the best blockchain developers, outsourcing blockchain technology, and then also blockchain technology and decentralized mobile apps. So a couple of the things that Sergei talked about there and Alexander as well.

I want to thank everyone for listening to the Software Outsourcing Show and I want to remind you that you can find the latest podcast episodes and show notes on some of your favorite podcast aggregators out there, such as iTunes, Spotify, Google Play. And as always, you can find it at the Software Outsourcing Show. But with that, Alexander, Sergei, thank you very much for joining me in the studio again and hope to talk to you again one day soon.

Sergei: Thank you, Bobby.

Alexander: Thank you Bobby, and hope to see you next time. Take care. Take care, bye.