Hello and welcome everyone. We will just wait a few minutes until people come in and we will get started.
Let's see if this works. Does that work?
Yeah, we're working fantastic. So should we just wait like a minute or so so that more people can join? Absolutely.
So I guess we can start. So my name is Roland. I'm the CMO at Atomic Wallet and it's my honor today to host Flare with us.
and today from the flair site with us we have Hugo who is the co-founder and CEO of FLARE. Welcome. Hey Roland, great to meet you.
So as just as an introduction, perhaps you could just give a short intro. How did you get to crypto and what got you to start with Flare? Sure. So I was working at a fund working as a portfolio manager.
managing positions in essentially commodities derivatives. I got extremely bored of that and decided I wanted to go back to university and learn something new but related to my skillsets, ended up studying machine learning.
That's where I met my co-founders. I'd been introduced to crypto before I left finance, but I hadn't looked very deeply at it. It was really on my masters where I started looking extensively at crypto.
That's where I also met my co-founders. So both my co-founders have experience in things like distributed network and cryptography, Sean who is a fly CTO, is an electronic engineer, had built a blockchain for vehicle communications as a research project.
Nair Yushe, who's chief scientific officer at Flair. What's working in quantum computing but has a very solid understanding of cryptography? So what year was it that you first got introduced to crypto? Since it would have been about 2014 really.
So quite experienced. Relatively, relatively. And then we started Flair in late 2017 as a research. I guess as a research organization, myself looking at the financial matters and, you know,
the technical team, Sean and Nairi looking at things like consensus and you know there was just the initial transition from proof of work to the first proof of state networks really with ELA
or I suppose the first major proof of stake network and that sort of, you know, then that whole scaling narrative around initially proof of stake and then later around L2s, it's kind of sort of gone from there.
new exciting stuff. So as we got the introduction, I guess we can move on to a bit more of today's topic to understand more what flare is. So I would like to ask you, what is the problem that flare is looking to solve and makes it different from other layer ones
So I'd say broadly say that that problem is utility. And what do I mean by that? I guess I mean safe utility. So if you look at a layer one or a layer two, broadly though, they're not closed systems which are able to come to consensus.
census and update the ledger on what happens on that ledger, so directed by that ledger. And then people have basically made moves to try and create oracle systems that sit on top of those ledgers or interoperability systems, which again are sort of, they're not
not necessarily designed from first principles. And really what Flare has done is essentially said, how do we create a blockchain where interoperability is actually the core of the blockchain? So the acquisition of data from external to the blockchain, whether that
is from the internet or from another blockchain. And that's what Flare is. It's a layer one EVM-based smart contract platform that has native protocols to get data from external to the chain. And this is very radically different to an Oracle or a third party sort of over the top in top-ability