Interview with Shannon Code
Cryptolina, Raleigh NC, 2018
I am here with Shannon Code from Emblem who I came to see speak at Cryptolina and I wanted to get some information to the community about the technology.
Shannon Code: Good morning, thanks a lot for having me.
Thanks for meeting with me. Tell me about Emblem and Coval.
Shannon Code: So, Coval stands for Circuits of Value, it started out as a reward token issued by a company that issued rewards on the blockchain. They did a pivot and I took over the currency and rebranded it and kind of changed its focus to some more innovative things. It is currently traded on Bittrex.
We built a platform around it so decentralized crypto currency applications could be easily built utilizing the token and one of the first applications we are going to be releasing is called Emblem Vault. Emblem Vault is a new type of wallet, a universal crypto currency wallet that is tokenized.
What I mean by universal is that it can hold any type of crypto currency asset that has been created so far and it is pretty future proof so any crypto currencies that will be created in the future, it can hold those as well. It can also hold other stores of value like gift cards or other files, basically that kind of thing.
Awesome. So something that sets it apart from other wallets is that it can hold anything. Crypto currency. Files. How about media?
Shannon Code: Yeah so one of the pre-alpha experiments that we did, we injected some Bitcoin and stored it in an MP3 file and gave it away at a conference a few years ago. With that idea we wanted to make sure we could store all types of media files as well.
Me: That’s getting into Prism….?
Shannon Code: (Smiles)
Me: If I am lucky we will get into that later. Ok, tell me about security when it comes to the vault. Emblem.
Shannon Code: So we use a number of different layers of security. The first thing that’s done is when an Emblem is created, a private key is generated, it is generated in the cloud. Generated outside of the users claim. So outside of the users application. It is then encrypted and then split. So you can imagine it creates a private key, encrypts that private key and then splits that encrypted key into a bunch of different pieces.
Some of the pieces are stored on the blockchain; some of the pieces are given back to the user that created the vault. And other pieces are stored with the identity provider. So it can later be reassembled. But until that event happens to reassemble all of the pieces, no body has the private key.
Me: Really? Where is it?
Shannon Code: Well it’s split and distributed all over the place. My buddy yesterday called an emblem a “distributed private key,” which was an interesting way to look at it because yea, that is sort of what we are doing.
Me: That is pretty incredible, tell me how Emblem correlates to Coval and the platform.
Shannon Code: So there will be a number of ways that users can earn currency, so basically Coval is going to be the economic token to help power and it won’t be exclusive but anybody that has Coval tokens will get a pretty significant discount when using the system. So there will be fees involved, like creating an Emblem might cost a fee, opening an Emblem might cost a fee; there are some planned features that would allow you to spend items inside the emblem without sort of breaking open the entire Emblem.
Me: What do you mean by that, spend Coval?
Shannon Code: The original mutation of Emblem is essentially the vision of a piggy bank. So you can put stuff into the piggy bank but you can get it out until you break it open. Then once you break it open then you can take everything out and spend it or whatever you want to do with it.
Shannon Code: But for our enterprise clients, one of the early features that have been requested is the ability to spend some of the contents with out breaking it open. So that might cost some Coval fees.
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Me: So can you give me some good use cases for people who wouldn’t understand what to do with an Emblem?
Shannon Code: Right, so the first use case that we really tried to make sure that we could handle was this idea of crowd fund. Everybody is trying to do a crowd fund, right I know everybody is trying to do a crowd fund but we wanted to create a way to do it a bit differently. So for example, I have a family member that was displaced by a hurricane, there house got destroyed and they are now at a shelter somewhere. They are out of touch, have no way to raise money.
I wanted to be able to create a wallet address that I could talk about online, make a YouTube video, post it on a forum and people could put funds into that. And one feature that I also wanted was I wanted to be able to say hey you can trust me this isn’t a scam, I can’t actually take these funds that you are donating and disappear with them because I don’t actually have the private keys.
So that is sort of where, part of how the Emblem is formed. We wanted to be able to create these wallets, these addresses without knowing the private key. We wanted to avoid what so often happens in the crypto land, people will say hey give me all this money; we are raising funds and then disappear. We wanted to be able to do this without the disappearing.
In that use case what we would do is post it and collect funds and the give that vault to that person and we would do that when we created it. Looking at the blockchain you can tell who has the right to open the Emblem and people can look at that and donate and feel comfortable they are getting the funds to the person that needs it and not the person who created the vault. That is one use case.
Me: Something I liked about Emblem was the secret sharing, the DAT protocol. Can you get into that?
Shannon Code: A little bit yea, so one of the things we wanted to be able to do early on was secure communication, secure peer to peer file transfer, file storage and we, my partner Michael Sullivan and I found the DAT protocol. It is a science foundation based application that is not from the crypto currency/blockchain space. They are used for archiving data and sharing data from scientist but they utilize a lot of the same underlying technologies and values. Fully decentralized and encrypted. Peer to peer. So we became friends with them and we really liked that protocol.
What that does is it gives us the ability, utilizing…the same way we make a wallet inside an Emblem, the same way we can store all of the value inside an Emblem, we can also create secure file locations.
Similar to, if you are familiar with IPFS, when you upload a file to the IPFS network you are returned a has that is representative of the location of that file…well with DAT, you generate private keys and there is a location that is generated that is also a hash. That location is not known by everyone, its known to you and if you wanted to share it with someone then they could access that location and access those files.
So what we do is make it possible to store that location and file names inside an Emblem vault. Then you can transfer that Emblem Vault to someone else. Then they have the keys and they can go ahead and access those files. There have been experiments up to 70 gigs worth of data be transferred using the DAT protocol, so the entire contents of Wikipedia….
Me: They have been perfecting that model for years:
Shannon Code: Yea they have.
Me: That’s amazing. So what’s next after Cryptolina?
Shannon Code: So one of the things we announced yesterday is a partnership with Finest. So we are going to be incorporating the Emblem wallet deep into their platform. They are going to be our first enterprise level integration. We are going to work on that, there are some extra features they need so we will be building those features in. Next after that is sort of perfecting the wallet and getting that out there. Here at the conference, for fun we wanted to illustrate some of the things you could do with an Emblem so we created these cards. And each card is a wallet. There is a private key underneath the scratch off and you can import the wallet into the mobile app. But before you do that anyone can scan the code and view the contents of the wallet. There are contents inside this wallet; it can be Bitcoin, ether, crypto kitty, Ethereum sorts of things. The card can be reused and you can show off what’s on it.
Say I load up my card with Bitcoin and you have some ether, we can do an off chain transaction as simply as passing the cards back and forth. So we have now done a private off chain transaction that’s not tracked, private and peer-to-peer with low technology. So the next step is making this available easily available on mobile applications.
Me: So mobile applications meaning using an app so simply swap contents of a card?
Shannon Code: Right, so you can imagine, you have your phone and I have mine and I can scan your card and see the contents and say I want to request a trade with you. You would get notification on your application that would say hey there’s a trade that’s been requested. You would pick which Emblem you wanted to trade for it.
Me: So the Emblem would hold multiple assets and I could pick which assets I wanted to trade with you, with others and which I wanted to keep?
Shannon Code: Yes with your wallet you’ll be able to create and hold multiple Emblems. As of matter of fact an Emblem can actually hold an Emblem. Talk about multiple layers of protection. I am really excited to find out how other people use them. We created this so we can do new and fun things with crypto currency that couldn’t been done before. Like I wanted to send you an entire collection of assets. Other people wanted to get a fund of sorts that’s fractional membership. So a group of people all deposit some crypto currency into this fund and the fund buys other types of assets. Depending the percentage of ownership for each user then they’d get returns distributed a month later or something to them based on how well those assets were doing,
Me: Good stuff, anything else you wanted to say about Emblem Vault?
Shannon Code: Another fun thing about an Emblem Vault that since the addresses can be made public by default, is that one of the things we are going to be doing with these cards that we created is that I know the addresses that are going to be distributed on these cards so as the app updates we can gift different assets and airdrop effectively Coval or other fun things to cards that have already be distributed. It is a way we can continue to distribute fun things to cardholders. Similar to how you can do to Ethereum addresses but it makes it more fun.
Me: So, road map?
Shannon Code: We hope to have enterprise deployment by middle of September and the public version to be released between now and then. Over the next couple weeks we hope to have a bare minimum of the IOS/Android version in play.
