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Founders, Quantum Curiosity & Real-Time Blockchain: QuStream Journey
Recorded: Sept. 4, 2025 Duration: 1:23:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. so How's everyone doing today?
Hello, hello.
Hey, hey.
Hi there.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
Very hot here.
Nice.
There's like 40 degrees and a lot of sun.
Sorry, I think we are having some trouble with Arata.
Let me check real quick
can you all confirm you can hear him
all right it might be a me problem then.
Eggspace is, as always, surprising us.
Or not surprising us. I'm not sure what to say.
I would just join back in a minute.
Please, everyone, allow me just a minute.
Thank you. Sorry about that. Hello again, Arata. How are you doing hello hello i'm good can you hear me now
yes it's working perfectly i had to restart the app don't know what was it
yeah but yeah i'm not surprised anymore to be honest yeah back at qstream we have a reputation of uh space is not not working
yeah it seems to be the same for everyone so i don't blame you definitely not
all right so um i'll just get it kicked off officially then, now that we have talked about a little bit and finally fixed all the technical issues that we were experiencing.
And welcome everyone to another episode of the Partner Spotlight, where we sit down with the people building Web3 and also shed light on the stories, the challenges, the innovations powering the next era of decentralized
tech.
Today we are thrilled to have in principle not one but two guests joining us from Qstream,
which is a project focused on delivering real time blockchain data across chains, helping
builders, analysts, protocols unlock insights the moment they are created which is
really important and key to all blockchains out there we will get into that in a minute
first please let me introduce our guests so unfortunately we don't have adrian neil right Neil right now with us. He's in a very important meeting that came in as an urgent thing.
But yeah, he will be joining us as soon as he can. Allow me to still introduce him. He's the
co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Adrian brings with him an impressive background leading engineering and infrastructure teams.
He's a two-time winner of the NATO Defense Innovation Challenge, an internationally
recognized cybersecurity and cryptographics expert who brings a strategic eye to how data
moves and scales in Web3. We have joining him as well Ishiki Arata. He's a Qstream's Chief Operating Officer,
Co-Founder as well.
Ishiki's background spans cyber security,
full stack development, project management.
So, yeah, having worked across both startup
and enterprise environments,
I saw his ability to blend execution with system thinking I'm sure makes him the ideal architect
for the operational scale of a Qstream so in this case we have sorry do you prefer to be called
Ishiki or Arata? whichever sounds more natural to you, so I think Ishiki sounds really nice to me.
It sounds a bit Japanese as well.
Yes, it is Japanese.
Oh, okay, okay, I see.
Okay, so Ishiki-san, welcome to the show.
Thanks for joining us.
Where are you talking to us from today?
I'm talking from romania romanian the name was uh yeah my name was uh
personal choice uh it's not my birth name i changed it later because okay okay
and buddhist philosophy oh that's very interesting
sofia oh that's very interesting very interesting and beautiful country um romania i was there
earlier this year if i remember correctly in bucresti um i had a really great time over there
really great time yeah it's uh it's nice here great um so yeah what do you think we
about we get started uh ishiki with an introduction from your side
okay so uh thanks for the kind presentation.
Yeah.
I guess I will start with the beginning, how Qstream came to be.
I thought you were studying from your childhood. Yeah, so Adrian is working in the banking industry for the past 40 years.
He's an expert cryptographer and member of IACR, which is the International Cryptography
Association since the 90s.
Association since the 90s has very extensive knowledge in this area and
lately his current role at the Capgemini is a senior director and global lead for
post-quantum readiness basically what he does is he advises you know
uh governments banks military etc on how to get ready for the quantum
uh threat era whatever
so yeah being in this position and and having knowledge about all the current quantum algorithms
and post-quantum, let's say, defense solutions that are currently on the market, he was advising all his clients that they cannot use what's currently out there because
they're not really safe. I am really scared if I'm really honest with you all regarding that
and we will get that. Yeah, I'll try to explain during this space a lot of concepts regarding and
give info about the whole situation as detailed as I can.
Basically, the current algorithm scene is split into two main categories asymmetric encryption and symmetric
encryption asymmetric encryption is what all blockchains currently use and not
only it's mostly used for data that's in transit so whenever a request is made
for example I don't know let's say your bank details or whatever, they are encrypted using asymmetric encryption from the database to the front
end or wherever it's requested.
And this is how everything works right now.
Basically, asymmetric encryption consists of a pair of two keys, public key and private key.
The public key is obviously public.
Whenever someone wants to send you a message or encrypt data that only you can access,
they take the public key, they take the data, they join it together,
and only the person with the private key that's paired to that specific public key can
decrypt and read the data so what's going to happen is quantum computers are very very powerful
at doing maths calculations that sort of thing so the public key is going to be enough for a
quantum computer to find out the private key within you know minutes hours
that's what I've heard eventually told you yeah what I heard and I'm kind of
scary yeah don't be scared that's good's good. We will talk about this with Ishiki.
But one thing that I wondered, Ishiki, actually, and before we get into the technical part, you know, that I would like to know about you is I saw you have on your bios that you were an artist. Could you tell us a bit more about that part of your life?
artist. Could you tell us a bit more about that part of your life?
Yes, so I finished, I graduated art school. I did engraving, painting, basically I
explored the whole visual art spectrum. I ended up with Photography, you know later on in life as I was traveling it also gave me a
They go well together
Yeah, nice nice nice office an artist but along the way I
I went into graphic design website design layouts and then
from there i learned programming so i switched to yeah programming coding and so on then a bit
of cyber security so yeah it started from mark yeah that was a very interesting thing i saw
on uh well i checked a little bit your
LinkedIn and I saw, oh, he used to be, you know, focusing in art and I've, yeah, also
kind of wondering, you know, how that has, you know, helped the way maybe you see things,
right? Which is a question I have for you later on as well um but yeah thank you so much
for the introduction to you know to q stream the introduction to what adrian you know what he has
done uh who he is as well um yeah hopefully he can join us also very soon and well hopefully you know he gets things sorted out uh quickly or well maybe better
say efficiently and that it doesn't create any kind of trouble um yeah so I think we should kick
things off with you uh Ishiki you know and maybe at the core of it all like the problem that you're
solving right um so in really simple terms right first and very simple
question what is qstream what does qstream do and who needs it the most in web3 today
so what we solve is precisely this quantum threat to encryption and we do it in the absolute
way meaning it's basically unbreakable by any quantum computer now and later and
this is important because some algorithms out there currently, they are probably capable to withstand quantum attacks for like one, two, three years.
But as the computers get stronger, and they will, because we can see it from normal computers that the improvements are always exponential.
Yeah, at some point they will all be broken.
And what Adrian has managed to innovate, invent, is simply unbreakable because it works in
a way that very strong calculations cannot break it. So, current algorithms and the key pairs
are held together by very complicated and hard math problems.
Ours doesn't use any math problems.
It works in a way that cannot be broken.
I will go into detail now or later of course
basically we yeah i can get a bit into this and what he actually made of course
so one of the two nato awards he received is for something called OTP, which is a one-time pad. It's a military communication system. And as I was mentioning, Adrian has been in this field and, you know, advising different entities on what algorithms to use. And when he saw there's nothing on the market
that's actually viable,
being a cryptographer for all his life,
he said, okay, let me try and find a solution myself,
if I can.
So what he did is he built something amazing
on top of the one-time pad
On top of the one-time pad that he had already received an award for before,
that he had already received an award for before.
it's for the first time when symmetric encryption can be used in data that's being in transit.
So what symmetric encryption is, different from asymmetric, is you only have a single key.
It's the same key that you use to encrypt and decrypt the data and it's mostly mostly it's only used
for static data like databases and so on because for example let's say I send you
a message I encrypt it with the key I send you the encrypted message but I
also have to send you the same key for you to decrypt it and the problem is how do i
send you the key in a way that it's not in plain text and not intercepted right so that that was
the challenge for since forever nobody had any reason to address that because everybody was using the asymmetric encryption for this thing.
So, yeah, now because of the quantum threat, people are alternative.
So, what's very interesting is how he actually found a way to send the encryption key along
with the data that's being sent.
And not only he managed to send it in a private way that cannot be intercepted,
the vehicle or the mechanism that sends the keys so strong that it cannot be broken even by quantum computers.
So I can now explain you a bit how that works.
Or if you have other questions until then regarding
what I said until now, feel free to ask them.
Yes, of course.
So what I understand is that pretty much everyone
and who's participating in the Web3
is at some point going to need this kind of technology, right?
Because we have these supercomputers, quantum computers,
as you mentioned, upcoming in a very short term, right?
So, yeah, that's a great overview, you know,
especially for listeners who definitely, you know,
not aware of this um I was kind of aware
of Ishiki um you know I joined the blockchain crypto back in late 2017 and back then was already
a hot topic right oh quantum computers are going to to break the internet you know to break the blockchain to break everything
right uh but then we were told that this is something very long term right so I guess my
question is what is the situation in the market or in the world that you see and made you go we
need to build this right because maybe from from my eyes it
looks a little bit different like from my eyes i was thinking this is a problem of
the next i don't know 50 or 100 years
ah yeah well what i can say is there's different global research companies that are you know
let's say the not the standard but yeah the go-to so for example Gartner is a
company that publishes how close the quantum threat is so yeah you're right
it started like in 2040 then they lowered it to 2035, then they lowered it to 2030.
And now the last one was the recommendation was that every big company, banks and so on should be ready by 2027 to address.
address yeah yeah yeah so you know as expected things are developing exponentially so
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
for example one of the bigger breakthroughs was the microsoft chip majorana one
that was for example so before that there was the Google Widow chip and that was nothing, let's say, unexpected.
So people in the industry were expecting that kind of quantum advancement.
But the Microsoft chip was something that actually surprised experts in the field because it was uh it was much way more ahead than expected
all right i see could you tell us a bit what are these cheaps and like what has the microsoft one
changed which is i think what you were getting into but uh just to provide a little bit more
context to everyone including me who are not uh you know very knowledgeable in the
yeah so yeah basically um let me get like a bit more into detail about this so of course chips are
uh binary meaning you know the zero and ones that that all the hackers and tech.
Yeah.
So basically a bit can have two states, a zero and a one.
So for example, you know, it's like 000010.
That means actually two, right?
0011 means three and then so on. to understand using all these bits you can basically cover
pretty much all the possible scenarios
so what quantum bits are doing is they exist in
both states so they're also a 0 and a 1 at the same time
so this is something actually if
you think about it it's like a mind-blowing power so they can for example the chips that were
released they can they have more calculation power than all the computers combined in the whole world
the computers combined in the whole world together right now and yeah they are not even
it's just the early the first releases let's say okay okay yeah um sorry for interrupting i have
a follow-up question i guess does it mean for example if we put it in the, as a human, right, in an example, we can only look at the left or at the right, right?
Does that mean this kind of, you know, computer, they can look at the, like, if we put it in human terms, they can look at the left and right at the same time?
Yeah, you can say that.
Basically, it covers all possible combinations instantly, pretty much.
Oh, wow. Okay.
So that's why the calculation power is just mind-blowing, so they can break any math problem that holds the two keys together, if you understand. That's where we're going to.
where we're going to. So the only problem with this quantum bits is that they are unstable,
so in order for them to work with maximum capacity, you need them to be stable. So what
they are now trying to do is they're trying to find ways to stabilize this quantum beats. So this way they won't produce like,
let's say fire errors and things like that.
And the Majorana, because you asked what was different,
they released a different, it's called logical qubits.
So they have like a different way of using the qubits,
which makes them much more
efficient and stable um i don't know the exact numbers but before it was believed like you need
i don't know let's say 100 000 qubits to break the shower there is the encryption and with
microsoft's qubits logical qubits you only need like 1000
of them so yeah the breakthrough is very big I see yeah I see and if you can I wanted to ask
a maybe an opinion question to you right because sometimes some days ago I was scrolling
through crypto Twitter and uh I saw I think it was El Salvador um you know the country has some
Bitcoin retailers and I saw they they did a defensive um action which was they split it
if I remember correctly please anyone in the audience correct me if i'm
wrong um they did split it their holdings into different wallets which was supposed to be like
a defensive action against um quantum power um again please if i'm you know saying something
that's wrong please correct me but yeah um is that something effective so okay I guess there's two
reasons why they did that and how it would actually be effective one would
be that probably the first quantum computers that are going to come out
let's say from somewhere like I don don't know, North Korea or their purpose
is going to be to break big Bitcoin or crypto wallets.
And they're not going to be, let's say, the most advanced, right, or the most powerful.
So it will probably take a longer time to break an encryption so that's why i think one of the
reasons why they split it is because it might take a long time and they would break one and
then they would see and you know have time to move the others or whatever and the other reason is
so if you do a transaction
action the public key is exposed on the blockchain so that's why some people are moving and not
using into like never used wallets that don't have the public key exposed so basically they can't
the hackers won't be able to find the public key in order to use it to break and find the private key that makes sense all
right yeah of course I have been reading also about these um scam tokens you know that some
people send to wallets that have some transaction history or activity um all right so one defensive
mechanism that actually works um is to send your or like have a cold kind of a cold wallet
that only has an uh deposit transaction right is that what you're saying
yeah so basically this for now is like it's some kind of now of course yeah all right all right i i see i see it um yeah so i think this is you know probably a
super nice advice uh from an expert like ishiki you know who is well very much involved in in
all this quantum technology you know um be it as somebody who's developing it or being somebody
who's um sorry'm developing these counter
mechanisms you know or yeah a practitioner so yeah do take his advice
if you could I did have some questions for Adrian I had some questions for you
you know but since Adrian is right now not available. I think I would just proceed with the questions that I had for you.
And yeah, then once Adrian, you know, joins us,
he has also some questions.
Otherwise, we are shooting them all at you,
which is unfair as well, right?
If that makes sense.
It's fine.
I'm not an expert in the field, but I am...
Sorry. Yeah, you muted yourself. I'm not an expert in the field but I am
Sorry, you muted yourself.
I've educated myself a lot during this past month to a year with Adrian in this business so yeah I think I can answer pretty much anything that you know on a non-expert
audience could I mean I think that makes you an expert already maybe you're not the expert
of the experts but I think definitely you are the expert in the room yeah i mean i can produce it i can explain it
to some degree yeah yeah yeah yeah of course of course um that makes you definitely an expert
already uh definitely in front of me and well but i will just proceed now with the questions that i
have for you so for ishiki um you have worked across engineering operations, right?
So and international teams as well.
You have a kind of a different background, right?
You were an artist.
You were focusing on photography and discovering your path and whatnot, right?
I was wondering, you as a COO, right?
And co-founder, of course, of Qstream.
How has all these super diverse experience shaped your role at Qstream and shape your leadership?
I don't think I can, you know, precisely pinpoint but uh yeah i mean you need some sort of creativity especially
i've been involved in the web3 starting from 2016 and then in 2021 a bit during the last cycle with
nfts so i have like a pretty decent understanding.
So, for example, when I first met with Adrian and we talked about the encryption and what he built and everything. i think it helped me come up with a very interesting and
functional solution to i would have to like go a bit more into detail of our product so i can explain yeah yeah of course of course please do so i'll go back a bit to the part where i'm
explaining that adrian managed to send the encryption key over,
a symmetric key over to other parties. Basically the way he does it is he breaks the key
into eight parts and hides it inside the random generated Q block it's called. It's just like a
block of random numbers and letters. so he hides the key there in different
places and the receiving and you know there in the receiving end point
basically has instructions on where to locate these eight pieces and construct
the key at the other side so a quantum computer cannot break this because it doesn't follow instructions
uh it's very the entropy so basically the randomness of the block and where the pieces
can be hidden makes it unguessable let's say even by quantum computer it would take
a very very long time to brute force it and on top of that it's built on the one-time pad mechanism
which i talked about which basically makes each key a single use so for every time you encrypt
or decrypt a message or you sign a blockchain transaction or any interaction you will receive
a new one-time use key so even if someone would somehow break the
cue block and get the key they can't do anything with it because it can only be used once
so now that you understand you know briefly how the the mechanism works basically needs a
basically needs like a piece of software which generates the Q-blocks and sends
them to you know whoever uses the encryption right so we need the
infrastructure or a network to serve this purpose let's say you know some
high-profile clients I don't know, governments, banks and so on, will probably self-host all this infrastructure.
You have to give it uptime, like if you have a blackout or something and then your service goes down, you cannot decrypt or encrypt messages, so that's bad.
So you need to have a guaranteed uptime.
And in theory, we could provide this with a series of nodes, servers.
But then we would have people could say that it's a centralized service
and we would have access to their keys and so on so the solution i came up with
with adrian with adrian solution i came up with a way using the blockchain and web3 to
cover this this part and we did that by building the Qstream network, which is basically a web of community-operated nodes,
which host this Qblock delivering services. And they are completely decentralized. We are using vertical sharding across nodes,
meaning that there isn't a single node
that has any access to all data.
So it's even us at Qstream,
nobody can have access to the encryption keys and so on.
It also guarantees uptime, having thousands of nodes around the globe even
if the power goes off in one continent the service will always function so yeah we we built a
interesting thing i'm actually very proud yeah i mean definitely you sound proud and also
you know it gives very much peace of mind um knowing that you have set up you know all these
um kind of anti-apocalypses you know measures which is great and yeah so i guess i have um two two new questions you know
from from your answer um which is regarding the qstream competitors right do they exist
and that's the first part of it and second part of it would be um what is qstream doing different from them which i assume you know you have talked about
it as well um yeah but i just wonder so i guess the question is one
qstream competitors do they exist um and two what are they doing and what are you doing that's
different okay so short answer is no.
Currently, we don't have any competitors.
Okay.
Yeah, let's say our competitors would be people trying to upgrade the current algorithms,
trying to keep the same system using private key and public key so
they're still trying to find a way to make asymmetric encryption work but
that's they are now starting to realize you know Adrian saw it ahead of time
let's say because yeah he's that's what he does every day for the past 20 40 years um so now the whole industry
is starting to catch up especially the crypto side uh so from our you know interactions we
had with other blockchains and so on and engineers they've been trying to implement um
We implement lattice-based algorithms, for example.
Okay, let me structure it in a way to make sense for everyone.
Okay, that'll be... Yeah, I was wondering what is lattice as well, you know?
Yeah, okay.
So, in short, what people are now trying to do or have been trying to do these past years they've been
trying to make the math uh problem that connects the private key with the private the public with
the private key they were trying to make it uh stronger so it uh withholds quantum attacks
the problem with that is uh there's multiple problems with that One of them being that it's probably impossible to do that.
Like I said earlier, it may be possible for a short period until they get stronger and
stronger than you would still need to change these algorithms.
So that's why they invented this term called crypto agility.
Probably you heard about it.
It means that basically we are ready to be agile and whenever this algorithm is broken
or it's not good anymore, we'll just swap it with a better one and so on.
This is stupid to say the least.
You cannot place critical infrastructure on this kind of base.
It's crazy. And the second reason is the way they are trying to make it harder,
obviously, it's by making the algorithm takes up more space, more memory, it's slower.
So, you know, in five years or whenever quantum computers come out, everything's going to be like faster.
You know, everything is going towards being faster and more efficient.
And we're going to have blockchains like snails because they have this huge algorithm complicated because it needs to be quantum safe.
So there is this institute in the USA, it's called NIST. Basically,
they are the ones that are, you know, some years ago they said, okay, let's see all the algorithms
in the world. If people can submit it, we will verify them and we will come out with the best options that are currently on the market.
They had these rules, let's say, that it had to be like an asymmetric, it had to be like
serverless and it had to be, they had some rules.
Basically they were trying to maintain the exact same way that algorithms currently work, Aristatia and so on. And there are a few algorithms out there
that blockchains have been trying to implement. Some of them have actually implemented.
For example, ETH was trying to use Falcon. They were almost done with the implementation. They
were going to announce it and everything. Then in the last moment,
they found some vulnerabilities and they stopped everything.
Yeah, that's just an example.
What we are doing different is we walked away from
trying to solve the asymmetric problem,
and Adrian basically solve the unsolvable problem until now which is
making symmetric encryption be used in transit data so that's what we're doing
what we did different right thank you so much ish. Oh sorry, you had something else you wanted to share with us?
I think for this question, if you need further explanations or something is unclear, let me know.
I think it was very much on point and thank you so much for restructuring the whole thing to help us.
What I wanted to add was that NIST had these rules in the beginning.
So people would try and create only asymmetric algorithms that mimic the current ones.
And now the past year or so, they realize that, you know, there's nothing good coming out.
or so they realized that you know there's nothing good coming out so they have broadened the
the rules you know basically now they accept anything just to have something that works
that really works and it's you know reliable so yeah that's uh also interesting to take notice of
all right yeah um thank you so much.
Like, actually, I wanted to, like, also thank you, Ishiki, you know.
Thank you for being here, of course.
But thank you for breaking down things for everyone in the space.
I tried to, you know, educate myself on topics before getting my guests, you know, on space but unfortunately this topic is a little bit too deep um but yeah one thing that you changed um like in my mind you
know ishiki it was i always saw it as a um pun intended i guess one or zero kind of game, like quantum computer or not quantum computer, you know, but actually it's like, it's a race, right?
In the end, like you're scaling things gradually, I don't want to say slowly, but it's gradually, you know, coming up.
And for example, when I read the news about El Salvador, you know, like splitting their holdings and I saw some comments like, it doesn't make sense because when computers, you know, become like when they use the quantum computers, they're going to break it anyways.
And I was like, oh, okay, that sounds like something that makes sense.
But then, yeah, you explain to us that it's not like happening overnight.
Right.
And they keep trying and it's very much a process, right?
In which, yeah, they will always be trying
and you would always have to defend yourself, right?
So, yeah, I think that's something that was really important,
at least to me of course i'm sure
that the other listeners who have uh the problem with quantum is um it is kind of gradually but
when it happens it's going to be sudden and nobody's going to warn you beforehand so you
know people imagine like some days someone's going to say, OK, in 30 days we're going to have a quantum computer.
So get ready however you can.
It's not going to be like that.
Most probably it's just going to be like, you know, someone like North Korea or like don't imagine malicious entities out there.
entities out there they're in the race themselves to get their hands on this
because it's the holy grail of you know breaking anything from data to wallets
to money to so on so it is gradual but when it's gonna happen it's gonna be
sudden so you're gonna hear on news that the five of the biggest Bitcoin
wallets were you know drained or something
like that so that's why you know gardner and all these people in the field are saying you have to
be ready you know as early as possible uh yeah because when that could when you're gonna hear
the news that something like that happened it's already too late if you're someone big yeah yeah sorry sorry i thought i
thought you um yeah before like bigger bigger you know enterprises companies blockchains and so on
you know they can't wait until you know it becomes a reality they have to
be prepared before because nobody knows when it's going to happen right so do you think this is
going to be like um um even more exaggerated version of what a nuclear bomb you know back in
the day back in the you know and that is during the world war um do you think it's going to be
like a even a bigger impact because you know, when you said nobody's going to warn you,
actually made me remind, you know, of, yeah, nobody warned about that either.
You know, like, well, I mean, not like on the news, you know, like, oh, get ready.
Like, it's going to be in 30 days, you know, there's going to be a huge explosion.
That's going to happen for sure that's guaranteed that some businesses
you know some blockchains a hundred percent they won't be ready and they
will be just wrecked that is the fact that it's gonna happen the extent to
which is gonna happen that different thing but yeah it's 100 sure that some
you know are not going to be prepared um yeah thank you again uh ishiki and also in the previous
response you meant you talk a little bit briefly you know about when you and adrian you first met
and i was wondering when you guys first met um where was it how was it and when you first met and I was wondering when you guys first met
where was it how was it and when you started to you know discuss and work
things together what made the collaboration click like what in your
mind said okay I need to work with this guy okay so let's do a bit of that so the first time i uh
heard of adrian actually was uh my father was uh you know reposting his uh
post on linkedin he was talking about you know exactly these quantum threads and the encryption
and so on and i thought like, like, this is interesting.
Like, I read one of his posts and I understood that this is something that, you know, sooner or later, you know, be it three years, five years or whatever,
this is something that the whole world is going to need to change because encryption is absolutely everywhere.
In all industries, all domains, you know know everything that's digital uses encryption
so the market is like infinite and it's not optional so everybody will have to switch
encryptions at some point so i thought okay this is something you know like an incredible opportunity
so i asked my father about adrian if he knows him. And yeah, apparently they knew
each other. My father was an investor in Adrian's previous startup, which was where he got his
second NATO Defense Innovation Award. It was a company called Oxford Biocron.
I'm not going to go into details of what he built there. He built there something very interesting also.
And he got some VC investments and he ended up being kicked out of the company and had his codes basically stolen or something like that.
And yeah, so he said, okay, we can meet him.
We actually met in Switzerland.
Adrian is from UK, but he's been living in Netherlands
for a while working at some of the banks there, then in Australia.
And now with Capgemini, he's in Switzerland.
He lives there.
So we met in Geneva.
And, yeah, he explained to me the situation with the VCs and so on.
and so on. So he said, okay, look, I don't want to, you know, go through this again.
So he said, OK, look, I don't want to, you know, go through this again.
And he said that, you know, given the nature of blockchain and crypto, that it's all based
on encryption, it will probably be the first industry that will get hit by quantum threats.
So he said it makes sense to, you know, go there to Web3 and crypto.
know go there to web 3 and crypto to me it sounded like a great great idea so
yeah that's how I had more experience with crypto he had very little in terms
of you know communities you know how all this how the stuff works he didn't even
have like X account for example and
discord and so he was more in the technical side of things right so that's how you know we met and
said okay let's try and do something here so yeah i took me a few months of you know having a lot of
talks with him where i would understand exactly how the algorithm works,
you know, how like everything, you know, part of what I explained today and more.
And then when I understood how everything works, I could come up with a solution regarding the
delivery vehicle, which turned out to be the blockchain with the community nodes and what we've built here so far so yeah it was very interesting yeah thank you so much for sharing
as you can you know for being so transparent about it um it's great to hear how the chemistry forms
right and yeah definitely it's not only about skills i would say um you know you both
present a different set of skills right uh but about mindset alignment too um which is something
that well you definitely you know um you managed to somehow understand all that he he had to explain in a couple of months. I'm not sure many of us would be able to do so.
Maybe for others it takes years.
To be honest, it was a bit of a challenge.
I just want to say he's an amazing guy, really humble.
You would imagine he's like this crazy genius you
know the crazy science scientific right he's really like a sweet sweet man so
he's very technical and the way he was explaining to me you know it took me
quite a while to understand I had like times i thought i understood and then
from previous talks i understood more and realized it was not you know it took a long time uh and
even now like when we join um you know it's too bad he couldn't join this one but we can definitely
you know do another space we need to get them yeah we need to get them for sure you will see
that he's he's very technical like he goes into a rabbit hole of you know technical details and
it's very hard for like on you know untrained or let's say people that are not in the field
to understand so yeah my my challenge was first for me to understand from his technical
explanations, me not having such a, you know, in-depth technical knowledge, and then, you
know, wording it in a way that everybody can understand. It's still a challenge. I mean,
what we have is something really exceptional, but it's very hard for people to understand, you know, in crypto and so on.
So, yeah, this has always been a challenge since we launched, trying to make people, trying to explain it in a way that's, you know, understandable for everyone.
How it works, why, why it's so, you know, innovative and so on. But, yeah, it's so you know innovative and so on but yeah it's uh
it's interesting and fun for me even now to like i you know i keep explaining this i think hundreds
of times to different people and in different places and uh yeah i enjoy the same every time
it doesn't get uh yeah i can feel you you genuinely enjoy it and we definitely
will need your presence as well um we need we probably will need a translator you know from
from adrian that's for sure yeah i think uh we definitely will review your calendar as well, you know get you on the session as well
To translate things I'll probably be like, you know, SOS please help
But yeah, I mean, you know so far I think
you are doing in an amazing job, you know in in
spreading the word in
explaining things in terms that the the
average guy right which is well i mean unfortunately me right and and all the listeners for sure and
i'm sure they're geniuses um among the the audience but unfortunately i am not one of them right
um but yeah still we are curious you know we would like to know we would like to
learn and that's you know something that uh yeah um thanks to you right thanks to people like you
um who who are able to quote unquote translate you know these things um we can get a better understanding. Yeah, so again, thank you so much, Ishiki.
Now I have another two questions,
which is regarding,
I think you probably have to do with this,
the name, right?
So QStream.
I assume this is something
that your creative mind came up with.
And what does QStream refer to? I assume Q stands for quantum.
Okay, so this is actually Adrian's creation. Oh, okay. So when he first published the algorithm,
you can, you know, I don't know how much you would understand of it, but you can find the published papers on the IACR website, which is the International Cryptography Association.
On our website, there's a documentation page.
You can find all the PDFs and links there for who is curious.
So he named in there Qstream.
It was spelled Q-stream, so it didn't have the U in it.
It was Qstream.
It's basically the part that generates the Q blocks.
So it's the blocks where the keys are hidden.
So he named it Qstream because, yeah, I don't know.
That's how he named it in his papers.
So I said, okay, you can't use like q dash stream let's use q stream like with a u like q u stream so okay okay fascinating uh yeah again
um shouldn't jump to conclusions you know i assumed too early. And yeah, I saw somewhere also quantum irrelevant, right?
Could you tell us more about what that actually means?
Yeah, so I think I touched on this earlier
when I said that quantum computers
are very strong at doing calculations,
but they are not so good at logic basically or following instructions are not more they're not
more powerful than normal current computers right so for example for a
current computer to guess the instructions inside the queue block and
then read them to get the location of the eight parts where the key is hidden.
That's something that no quantum computer can actually do. And even if they do it, there's so
current algorithms, including RSA, SHA, and the new ones that are quantum safe that are proposed
by NIST, they are all based on something
called conjectured security so you can you know google it or chat gpt this stuff which basically
means it's based on the assumption that the problem is so complicated that it cannot be broken
but it there's no mathematical uh certainty behind it, right?
So this was true and it helped for current encryption like Ariste and Shah.
In theory, they could be broken, but there was not a computer strong enough to do that until now.
So quantum computers are going to be strong enough and break it, right?
So the new algorithms and the old ones, they're all based on this. The assumption,
it's not a certainty, it's just an assumption that the problem binding the two keys, the public key and the private key, is just too strong for a computer to break.
The difference with Adrian's algorithm, and you can find this in the paper that was published,
and also we have a double blind peer review.
What this means is his papers were given to experts, scientists, to look over them and basically test or verify the claims that what he says there is true that it's actually this strong
in blind meaning that they don't know who actually made this so they don't have like a bias you know
like oh it's a from adrian he's like a really expert in the field so it must be true because
you know he knows what he's doing so he passed with the paper a double blind peer review in
germany uh it's going to be published in a book that's going to have a conference at the end of this year. You know, you can find this stuff. I don't want to go into it, but yeah, we can find this on our media.
mathematically calculable I don't know how to say this correct you can yeah
it's mathematically proven that it is unbreakable so the 504 quantum hardness
beats that it's written everywhere basically everything that's over 500 is
just unbreakable so it can be 1,000 5,000 or 504. It's the same strength.
And you can find the math behind this inside the paper that was published.
Basically, in short, how you calculate it is the number of characters inside the Q block and all the possible locations of the eight fragments of the key where they can be put into.
And yeah, this would take an eternity to try and brute force, let's say, to randomly guess the location.
And then even if you find that, you still can't use the key a second time
because it's only used once,
then you generate a new one.
So that's why we are using the term quantum irrelevant
because no matter how strong a quantum computer will get,
it just won't be able to break our encryption.
So yeah.
Because it works in a different way than the quantum computers
used to attack let's say a key yeah thanks for the explanation uh ishiki you know i love that it's kind of philosophical right at the same time it's technical of course um but yeah i think
you know to be really honest and transparent with you
like quantum irrelevant is kind of self-explanatory uh but yeah of course you know there's an
explanation behind that we don't know right we know the name we know it says it's irrelevant
sorry we actually we actually had like some media stuff and we we removed it from everywhere quantum irrelevant
because for people that know like the first impression is that it's irrelevant in quantum
space or something like that oh use it lightly or you know use it after an explanation you know
but yeah we have i understand event booths and so on that were previously designed with like quantum
irrelevant so we looked at it and say hmm if someone who doesn't know quantum stuff sees this
the first thought is that okay we are irrelevant you know in quantum oh okay
we are using it but more lightly now okay i understand i understand now yeah i understand
your um you know your angle and where you're coming from what i understood from when i first
saw quantum irrelevant it was like um quantum is irrelevant to us you know meaning uh that
quantum computing will not break it uh but yeah now that you mention it yeah there's
definitely you know it could be seen the other way like you know we are irrelevant in content
all right all right now i understand um yeah so thank you for addressing that thank you for the
extra context you know and uh yeah it definitely gives a whole new layer you, to like what you're building, a kind of a extra, you know, vision on what you're
doing. And yeah, now moving on to another section, Ishiki, which is we often get questions from our
community, you know, regarding these partnerships, right? We've seen seen qstream mentioned um you know announced the
partnership with uh with anchor and of course there's always the thought like okay so what is
anchor doing for these guys um is anchor genuinely working with qstream on something you know or
is it just for marketing you know like i always the same, but it's actually the context.
Could you share a bit about how Anchor is working with Qstream,
how Anchor is supporting Qstream, assisting it in its mission,
and what the collaboration looks behind the scenes?
Sure.
Initially, we started up by hiring some in-house developers and trying to build
the blockchain ourselves and the whole infrastructure. At some point, we realized that there's a
lot of work behind the encryption part, like the encryption nodes and the network and so on.
And it just simply made sense for us to... One second.
Yes, of course.
Give me one second, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure ishiki
i want to take this chance to um yeah to to note that uh ishiki yeah to know that ishiki is this is generally he has something to do
i haven't sent him any money in the
You know behind the scenes. I am not sending him any anything for him to read regarding the partnership with anchor
Ishiki can you confirm that?
Yeah, so at some point, you know, we I
was in touch with someone from Anchor for a while.
Initially, we said, we got this and so on.
But then we realized with the migration, we just had a lot on our plates to handle.
And yeah, I mean, doing it in-house, it's fine, but it takes probably longer to make sure that there aren't any issues.
You know, I mean, there will always be issues, right?
We just didn't want to take the chance and have some big issue that would be very bad,
especially, you know, launching this stuff and being, you know, like, let's say, one of the first in the field.
and being, you know, like, let's say one of the first in the field.
So, yeah, that's why we thought, you know, it makes a lot of sense
to go to someone that is doing infrastructure for a long time,
has been building for big projects, you know, they've been, like, battle tested.
So we know we're on good hands on this side.
And, yeah, so what we're doing is we're focusing on the
encryption notes our let's say proprietary your custom stuff and we're working together with the
anchor team uh so to implement them into the blockchain
to implement them into the blockchain.
All right, thank you so much
and appreciate the transparency.
You know, it's yeah, always great to put out
how these partnerships take shape and practice, you know,
and yeah, just pretty much clarify,
this is not just some marketing.
What I want to add is that, you know,
I've been doing crypto last cycle and i've
been dealing with a lot of crypto projects uh and yeah working with anchor is more like working with
like a corporate you know everything is very well structured you know feedback responses
is it's i don't feel like i'm working with like uh you know crypto or web3 company
right right right yeah i guess um you know we try to offer the best of both words and well
hopefully we are you know making it and yeah And yeah, thanks for your five-star review, Ishiki.
But yeah, as always, I appreciate the transparency.
You will be more influenced later.
I hope, yeah, I mean, definitely, you know,
thank you so much for that review and yeah for providing the context um so well we are a little
thank you so much for that review
and yeah, for providing the context.
bit past the the 60 minutes mark that i initially you know had booked you for i'm sorry about that
uh ishiki i have um just to you know finish it off i think uh adrian unfortunately he won't be able to make it. But yeah, we definitely need to get him on board and get him to speak.
I have a couple, two questions, but these are very light,
you know, just to get it more relaxed, right?
Like, end, ending part of the session.
So, yeah, before we wrap up, a a couple final questions just to zoom out a little
bit um curiosity if you weren't in web3 today ishiki what kind of project or company you think
you would be leading instead uh something related to
something related to probably you know web development cyber security this stuff
all right so you're keeping all the photography part as a hobby yeah for sure
Yeah, for sure.
Okay.
Yeah, it's a hobby.
Okay, I understand.
Yeah, always fun to imagine, you know, like kind of the alternative timeline, right?
And, you know, tells us a lot about what drives you.
To be really honest with you, I thought it would be more on the artistic side or photography side, you know?
more on the artistic side or photography side you know um but yeah i guess cryptography and
cyber security is what actually drives you which is great yeah actually what drives me is like
learning constantly i think and yeah it has to be like in a field that i it's interesting and i
enjoy so cyber security you know programming stuff, you know, it's always changing
and it keeps my mind occupied with something interesting. So yeah, definitely it would be
something in this field.
Nice. Good to know. We would still have you around, even though, you know, if you weren't
building in, well i initially i
asked in web3 right but in the end it's really related so yeah good to know we would have you
still around and another one which is kind of an advice right for those that are building that are
um starting companies and and so on like what's you think one underrated quality you believe every early stage Web3 team or project should cultivate?
From your experience, of course.
This is hard.
I think in Web3 specifically, you need to have openness to community. This was something that, you know, initially some people
were like, oh, you know, Adrian is this, you know, big shot. Why are they even here? Why did they
launch a token like a meme coin? You know, they're sitting here talking on Discord with us all day and it was probably seen like a red flag, I guess.
Yeah, but then, you know, as time passed, this actually turned out to be, I think, one of our strengths.
It works both ways.
We had like amazing feedback from community you know it makes sense that you know i had a bit of you know
interaction with web3 and crypto but i'm not there every day to know everything so we have people in
the community that you know that's what they're doing daily so they know everything uh let's say
in the market so their feedback is very valuable and uh yeah i mean this is you know other
people probably pay huge amounts to advisors you know to get this kind of information you know we're
just lucky and uh friendly cooperating with our community on all aspects pretty much.
I would think Web3 especially,
you need to be not necessarily focused on community especially,
like you also need to have a product,
work and stuff like that,
but have a connection or openness with the community is crucial I think.
And very beneficial.
Yeah, thank you for providing that POV right from maybe like a non-wetry kind of eyes.
I never thought being kind of connected to the community or giving importance to
it would somehow become a red flag since we've been doing it since the early days right ishiki
i think you joined in back in 2016 you probably checked forums you check everything telegram
back then it was projects that let's say didn't have much of a product, but their core asset was the community itself or connection to the community.
But regarding projects that actually have a viable product, especially one like we have or with someone on the team like of Adrian's, I don't know, background.
It seemed a bit sketchy to them.
You know, like I remember in the first,
no one when we launched, he answered to someone on Discord
and used the word bro or something.
And they're like, oh, this guy is not real.
Like, for pictures, you know,
he sent them pictures of himself drinking a glass of gene
and yeah they made him write on a paper like adrian or qstream so we had to pass all this
reality checks first you know before people said okay these guys are real you know yeah i understand
even now it's like newcomers when they join
they're like this you know how is this real like they should be dealing with
these seas you know and all this stuff lunch on yeah why not in the next
episode we actually make it it makes for a much interesting story to tell we launched yeah
of course of course and in the you know in the next episode when we have adrian over here i'm
going to request that he calls me bro uh you know do that that's something that i'm going to request definitely and yeah that was actually my my last question
uh for you Ishiki well it was pretty much you know the question for both um but unfortunately
I guess Adrian you know couldn't make it um he probably isn't something really really important
um really urgent as Ishiki mentioned at the beginning sorry I mentioned at the beginning. Sorry, I mentioned at the beginning. Yeah, I'm sorry.
He messaged me earlier that it's still in the meeting.
But we can...
These things happen.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course, these things happen, Ishiki.
Like, no stress, you know, no pressure.
It's not the first time that happens.
Unfortunately, these kind of unforeseen situations,
they just can't happen.
But thank you for joining us today Ishiki thank you for
you know dealing with the questions with your expertise and yeah for you know today
you were not the translator today you were the one doing the speech right and yeah it's been a
real pleasure hearing not just what you're building a qstream but you
how you think you know and operate as a team before we go i we typically like in the anchor
partner spotlights to give the final word to the guest so in this case it will be only you but
anything you would like to share with the listeners, a call to action or an advice or a quote that you really like,
or even just where to follow along?
Okay.
First of all, thanks very much for inviting me.
We should definitely do this again.
Thanks for everyone that tuned in to listen I hope you know you
have a bit more overview of you know the whole encryption problem and how things
actually work at the encryption level in crypto and in general yeah for everybody
being here for the first time or that haven't heard about qstream before
you know feel free to join our community uh we have a very active discord that's where we are
all the time answering questions and interacting we will have a you know promotional uh let's say uh node
giveaway you can get more details about that on our discord and our twitter
nice yeah thanks again for for the invite and uh hope to hear you soon next time yeah thank you so much again um ishiki
you know for joining us today for your time i know we are a little bit even more over the 60
minutes mark i hope that i'm not messing up your calendar today and yeah to everyone listening stay
tuned we will have a part two of this episode with qstream
next time we will make sure we have adrian with us as well and yeah um i'm kind of really
expecting about it i you know like like a shiki said in my mind adrian will be this very serious you know um scientist um yeah so i'm really looking
forward to to him you know sharing some means maybe and then talking about anecdotes when
while at the same time explaining quantum technology right and also talking a little
bit about himself um we have more partner spoilers coming soon so
yeah until next time thank you very much ishiki again multi mask right thank you see you next time
see you bye bye everyone thank you so much thanks everyone have a nice day
