Lionel Chocron, Chief Product Officer at Hedera Hashgraph, was born in France. About twenty years ago, he came to the US west coast to receive a Masters degree at UC Berkeley, whereafter he eventually took a job working at Cisco. He spent 10 years there focusing on emerging technologyhe ran the Internet of Things business unit at Cisco for yearsand corporate strategy. He then joined Oracle to lead the emerging technology industry solution group, which was focusing on imaging technology, IoT, blockchain, and AI.

He crossed paths in 2019 with the co-founders of Hedera Hashgraph, and grew excited about blockchain technology. At the time, large companies were adopting public ledger tech, and he saw the potential for Hedera Hashgraph to become third-generation distributed ledger technology.

The adoption of blockchain is going faster than I've seen in IoT and AI, said Chocron, noting IoT takes longer due to the need for connecting millions of devices. The time it takes to really get the value on the IoT side is pretty long. On the AI side, you don't have any hardware to install, but the volume of data that you have to be able to analyze to raise the level of insight that your AI machine is giving you, minimizing what the market calls a false positive, is huge. You cannot do it in a few weeks. It takes years and years and volumes of data to be able to train your algorithms. Adoption is great, but it is a game for those who have access to the data to be able to optimize.

Until a company or startup gets these prerequisites to play balleither the hardware for IoT or the data for AIyoure on standby in those industries. With blockchain, its easier than IoT and AI, for, in its journey towards mass adoption, blockchain relies on neither major hardware investment nor on major volumes of data.Now, from proving the value to scaling, says Chocron, thats a different discussion, but at least you can demonstrate the value pretty quickly.

At Hedera Hashgraph, he focuses on enabling small, medium, and large companies to adopt distributed ledger technology. He helps them integrate with the tools and the ecosystem out there today. Blockchain and distributed ledgers are pretty well understood, said Chocron. Everybody knows what a ledger is. When you start understanding a distributed ledger, and you start paving the path of how you can use an ecosystem of companies that are working together and sharing information on the ledger, whether it's a private and public ledger, it clicks pretty quickly and people see the value in it.

Hedera Hashgraph CPO Lionel Chocron at Blockchain Expo 2019 in Santa Clara, California.

Whether or not public ledgers are adopted depends on performance, stability, security, and governance, he says. When I was looking at the first generation and second-generation players, as amazing as they've been, and are doing today in terms of paving a path for a new industry, there were a lot of shortcomings in terms of performance, stability, security, and governance that my customers [at Oracle], the big companies, were seeing as a no-no, said Chocron, with whom I spoke at Blockchain Expo 2019 in Santa Clara, California. The third generation that's coming today is going to address that, he believes.

In order to be adopted by enterprise, a distributed ledger will need to be fully integrated into what companies are doing today, he says. Enterprise is already running use cases on private ledgers like Hyperledger, for instance, so an enterprise-facing blockchain company like Hedera needs to help clients integrate into Hyperledger.

Alongside performance, stability, security, and governance, another challenge for blockchain isnot having a complex and fully matured regulatory environment. The regulatory environment for blockchain is still not fully defined, and not just in the US, but globally, Chocron said. There's enough room for interpretation that it's pretty critical for companies, like we've done, to carefully look at the path in front of us to make sure that we stay aligned with what we believe the regulatory environment is going to be. While companies have been looking at private ledgers, they also see value in a public ledger, and they are also trying to understand the regulatory environment to be able to move in that direction.

Such companies are also trying to wrap their heads around how to use the tech, as was Chocron when he first made the leap from enterprise into the blockchain startup world. Unlike in other startup environments, when you are joining the blockchain industry, you have to deal with the token on-ramps and token ecosystem, such as wallets, custody, etc. This barrier to entry doesnt exist in the traditional startup world.

In the blockchain space, it is actually a pretty big challenge not having had the experience, he said of working with hardware wallets, etc.. This is a learning curve that the industry is going through today.

Besides the regulatory uncertainty and a new stack of technology to learn, the rest of the blockchain industry reflects more traditional ones: This is about building use cases, proving the value, developing, and technology, deploying on a POC, and so forth, said Chocron.

Originally posted here:

Hedera Hashgraph CPO: The Adoption Of Blockchain Is Going Faster Than Ive Seen In IoT And AI - Forbes