Vendia’s Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao on Serverless Blockchain

The Blockchain Gang

The idea of ​​a cloud-centric approach to solving the challenges businesses face using the blockchain to share data was one of those “aha” moments, according to Tim Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Vendia.

“It’s one of those things where you feel kind of the heel of your hand against your forehead like, ‘Duh, why hasn’t anyone built this?'” Wagner told Protocol in a recent interview.

• Wagner and co-founder Shruthi Rao, both AWS veterans, launched Vendia in 2020.
• They revisited the idea of ​​blockchains and distributed ledgers in a cloud-based way with Vendia Share, a fully managed and serverless platform for building real-time, decentralized data applications.
• “We have this thesis here: Cloud was always the missing ingredient in blockchain, and Vendia added it,” Wagner said. “At the core of our technology is a cloud-centric blockchain.”

Vendia Share allows customers to more easily share code and data across clouds, companies, geographies, accounts and technology stacks.

• It enables businesses to have full visibility into all activities and transactions without worrying about their origin, as transactions are immutable through the power of distributed ledger technology, according to Rao.
• “We make sure whoever is going to get the data gets the data in real-time, within five milliseconds, so there’s no manual back and forth,” Rao said.
• “And everything is on the ledger so you can see who you shared [with]what you shared, when you shared … and you can do a fine-grained analysis of what has been shared,” she said.

A database or API that can keep company data consistent with their business partners – be it their upstream supply chains, downstream logistics or financial partners – was a compelling prospect that was not lost on CIOs, according to Wagner.

• But the first generation of blockchain technology ignored the cloud and presented operational obstacles, including single-machine limitations, lack of throughput and scalability, high costs and the difficulties of integration, according to Wagner.
• “We sometimes joke at Vendia that we love nothing better than a failed blockchain experiment,” he said. “Probably half of our deals in the last year are replacements of failed blockchain trials.”
• With Vendia Share built in the cloud, there is access to virtually unlimited amounts of storage and network and processing capacity.
• “It enables us to do things that conventional blockchains cannot: [Deliver] much higher throughput, lower latency, more processing power, much more parallelism, easier integration, Wagner said.

Read the whole story here.

– Donna Goodison (e-mail | twitter)

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Secure the business

In today’s global landscape, cyber security threats are something that all businesses operating on the internet must face, not just huge technology companies. In this virtual protocol event on October 4 at 10 a.m. PT, we’ll examine current best practices for securing both large and small and medium-sized businesses, giving viewers a real threat landscape and information they can use to make decisions about the strategy that best supports their business goals.

Protocol Enterprise’s Kyle Alspach will be joined by a great panel of speakers: Andrew Rubinco-founder and CEO, Illumio; Alex WeinertVice President and Director of Identity Security, Microsoft; Jameeka Green Aaron, Chief Information Security Officer, Auth0; and Devdatta Akhawe, head of security. Figma.

RSVP here.

China syndrome

Swift political winds are chilling U.S.-China tech business relations, and perhaps more than anything right now, companies with operations in China worry about one thing the U.S. government might do: change the rules for investment flowing from China to the U.S.

To protect against cybersecurity vulnerabilities and the exploitation of Americans’ data, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Sept. 15 directing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS (pronounced “sif-ee-us” by foreign investment watchers), to consider scrutinize foreign investments in light of national security risks.

“Everyone recognizes the need to protect America’s national security. But as Congress and the administration consider new tools, like an outbound investment review regime, it’s critical that they get real input from the business community and be precise in what they’re trying to cover,” Rory Murphy, vice president of Government Affairs at the US-China Business Council, told Protocol yesterday.

The oft-stated mission of securing American leadership in emerging technology is at the heart of this potential shift. During a press briefing, a senior administration official listed a “handful of priority emerging and critical technologies, such as semiconductors, quantum technologies, biotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as supply chain considerations” as areas where investment reviews could occur.

The elephant in the room here is China, a country “of particular concern” that has technology strategies that many in the US government believe threaten US leadership in areas related to national security.

But because AI is intertwined with all industries and the technologies they use, AI deals could be subject to excessive scrutiny if a CFIUS rule is written too broadly. “How AI is defined will be important in determining what types of transactions are covered,” Murphy said.

—Kate Kaye (e-mail | twitter)

Around the company

We already knew this, but there is more evidence that Russian hackers is working in conjunction with the Russian military as Ukraine begins to gain the upper hand in the seven-month war started by Russia’s invasion, according to The Wall Street Journal.