Episode 9: Yuriy Blokhin (Bitfury – Lightning Network)

In this episode Yuriy Blokhin breaks down how the Lightning Network represents the values for distributed networks that core blockchain hacker communities support around the world. Though an employee of Bitfury, one of the largest companies in the world focused on developing solutions for the Bitcoin Blockchain, Yuriy develops partnerships that benefit the adoption of Lightening as an open-access secondary protocol on the blockchain that makes it more relevant for transactional data. [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Yuriy Blokhin 0:45 We're back in the studio once again for the start well podcast. This is Qasim, the co founder, whatever you want to call me of start well in Toronto, Canada. And this time I'm joined in the studio with Yuri blocking. Who is the head of partnerships at I guess BitShares Lightning Network? Yeah. And sorry for mispronouncing your last name my. Yuriy Blokhin 1:08 That's the lead right Latin pronunciation. Okay, there. Yeah. Yuriy Blokhin 1:12 And then the non Latin pronunciation. Block him for him. Okay, so Yuri blocking. Yeah, there you go. Yuriy Blokhin 1:18 Yeah, that was perfect. Thank you. Yuriy Blokhin 1:19 Um, so, you know, let's just jump into it. I think there's so much on this topic that, you know, our listeners and people in the world, of course, in general, are just, I think hungry to learn about in terms of, you know, Bitcoin blockchain, where there are problems with that connection of the two and and what's ahead of us in the near future, and even the current state and who's doing what in the scene to help advance the technology to make it more usable. I think that's kind of a rough context for this conversation. But firstly, if you'd love to, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Just tell us a little bit about what you do. Yuriy Blokhin 2:00 Yeah, thanks, Qasim. So I started in the tech industry about 10 years ago. And I guess my longest journey so far was a this chat app company called kick, which was started about eight years ago, in Waterloo, Ontario, and I was the first employee there. And you were the first employee? Yeah, employee number one. Yeah, I kick and I helped helped build the first versions of the backhand infrastructure, but eventually moved them to a variety of business development, product management roles. So I kind of have received this very kind of comprehensive tech startup education at Kik. And after that, and traveling the world. For a year and a half, I joined a bit of theory, just during this kind of latest cryptocurrency boom of the 2017, early 2018. And the reason I joined it was specifically to help help that theory build the Lightning Network, which is a way to scale. This kind of the biggest problem of Bitcoin that people make a lot of people have heard already about is this is the ability to send transactions efficiently, cost effectively and time, efficiently. And so Lightning Network was only publicly launched about like, four or five months ago. But it's growing exponentially with a lot of very hardcore, high quality development talent, all around the world working in a very distributed fashion, there is no single point of failure in Lightning Network, there is no organization that kind of owns the project. It's at the very least five major organizations around the world contributing like the bulk of the work. And then there are like 1000s of small independent hacker developers who are working, like on their own time. And like, it's, it's a very, very interesting community to be part of. So it really leaves up to the ethos of distributed work industry, bit of distributed development. Yuriy Blokhin 3:59 And it seems like I mean, it definitely reflects from what you how you describe the Lightning Network, and it kind of reflects a lot of the ethos of open source culture and the whol