BLOCKv CTO Gunther Thiel on the BLOCKv mission, new features, cyclers, brains, SDKs, and much more.

Gunther Thiel is the CTO and co-founder of BLOCKv. He’s driving the development, managing the engineering teams, and serving as chief architect of the platform. In the past, he’s worked at startups as well as large corporations. Below, he explains why these are exciting days for him at BLOCKv.

The upcoming BLOCKv release

Our upcoming release is super important to us since this is the first generally available release of the platform. We’re doing continuous integration, continuous development, and adding new features on a daily basis.

At the end of September, we’re opening it up to publishers, or vAtom creators, to onboard onto the platform. Until now, we have been in a more closed, controlled environment with a manual onboarding process. Now the developer portal will be a self-service environment, which is the true start of the mission here.

Defining the BLOCKv mission

We believe that having autonomous, self-aware, context-aware, dynamic digital objects in the form of non-fungible tokens are a new way to create value — digital value that can connect to the real world. A vAtom is the next step for NFTs. It can store data, compute, and run triggered by an interaction from a user, or triggered by itself — via what we call a brain, which will always run and compute. A vAtom also has a way to represent itself on mobile phones, in a VR, or in an AR environment. It can even recognize context and render differently on a mobile phone than it would in the VR environment or running on a smart TV.

We now have a platform where everything is there for you — an available infrastructure, with infinite storage, databases, event processing — whatever you need as a publisher to create this stuff.

And the process to create a vAtom can take a few seconds, or if it is more complex, a few weeks. But the good thing is once you’ve created a vAtom, it exists forever, it has ownership, and you can even add features later on. This is a new way of creating software and in doing so, reaching end consumers with a different level of granularity by focusing on objects rather than applications.

Making the platform available

We’re opening up the doors at the end of September. We have more than 100 developers already on the platform. Now we want to get the word out and reach more developers and publishers, whether they’re working independently or directly with brands or within digital firms, we want them to create vAtoms and realize there are no more constraints on the platform.

The best way to motivate developers is for them to see other happy developers out there. We need people saying, “Hey, I can develop in a much shorter time frame, with less money, have more fun, and use tools that I understand.”

We have been busy working on the next release of the platform, but we need to shift our attention to developer support — help new developers and publishers so they have a smooth journey when they use our platform.

Customers teach us about features, scalability, and security

We learned a lot from our early customers, who were the first users of the platform. We learned about additional features that were needed. And we learned how and why to improve our scalability.

To give an example, there is a project we’re doing in Mexico with a company named Meda. We’re working on a government project with them and realizing the platform may need to handle millions of transactions per second, which is a lot. There aren’t too many sites out there that deal with that level of traffic. Scalability has been a priority we have been working on from the beginning, but we’re learning we still need to improve based on what we’ve seen with our first customers. So we’ve have created new features which improve scalability.

By the way, the Meda project was surprising in other ways too. A lot of the first vAtoms created were very “fancy” in nature with 3D and movement, but this level of functionality is not applicable for the market in Mexico, where high-end smartphones are not widely available. So our partner created very simple vAtoms that are a huge success. They see engagement rates above 60%. That was, for me, a lesson on how simplistic vAtoms can have a significant impact.

On the security side, we discovered holes that needed to be fixed. For example, we have a feature where you can drop a vAtom on a 2D map, and once it’s on the map, people can pick it up. That’s the idea. But some smart people just used the APIs to look for vAtoms that had been dropped and would then pick up those vAtoms, despite not being close to them physically. So we added security barriers to make sure that people cannot just pick up vAtoms randomly all over the world. That’s a different security layer we’ve improved upon, in addition to securing our hardware and infrastructure.

When it comes to features, we’ve added the capability to, not only drop vAtoms on a 2D map, but also on a streaming map. We see them as wormholes from the real world into virtual environments. For example with our High Fidelity partnership, we now can locate a vAtom, not only via coordinates in the classic way, but also locations within virtual worlds.

So for the next release of the platform we added new features, we improved scalability, and we worked on security. And a lot of that was based on lessons learned from the first publishers on the platform.

The Cycler’s Framework Alpha is here

We have a new paradigm which we call the Cycler’s Framework. At the moment, BLOCKv is a centralized platform. Everything is run in our data centers and in our cloud. We are a centralized system, and now we want to decentralize the platform completely. We see this process as a multi-year journey starting now.

We will turn our microservice architecture, which was synchronous, into an asynchronous lambda server-less architecture. This is the prerequisite to moving towards the Cycler’s Framework. We are going to distribute requests and route requests to whoever provides the infrastructure. And we will provide a “core layer” to make sure that no malicious responses come back and that we achieve a quorum across multiple replies. Additionally, we will reward the cycler who produced the valid results with VEEs.

(We’re going to invite people to be cyclers soon. Contact us if you’d like to be considered.)

Brain powered vAtoms

Today, all the vAtoms which are created are kind of reactive, meaning they can do what they’re coded to do and then do something when they are asked. They are reactive. With a brain framework, each vAtom can have its own brain, which as a real brain is always on — it does not need to be triggered, it just runs. For example, we have tested flying drones that fly over the map and navigate themselves without a user asking them to do so. Those objects can truly become alive on a decentralized platform.

Improvements on our viewers and the SDKs

We’ve also worked a lot on the front-end, like our SDKs and our viewers, adding features like a better way of quickly implementing 3D on phones.

Another improvement is, what we call, a native face code framework. Currently, our customers create their own. But in our viewers, we’ve added face codes, which run optimized on platforms, i.e., iOS or Android. There are native face codes for images, for videos, and for 3D. But now we’ve opened up our SDKs so developers can trade their own native faces with their respective environments and make them loadable.

Defining a new category

I believe that BLOCKv is defining a new class of virtual digital objects, which is fun. It’s also entrepreneurial and can be very rewarding. The challenge is whenever you do a new category, the amount of evangelism, education, and entrepreneurial thinking you need is pretty high.

I believe customer engagement will be the first significant use case for BLOCKv. It’s very obvious. You have a direct channel to the end consumer, but in a fun, dignified, and value-rich way for the consumer. Whether it’s games or IOT integration or something else, there’s so much you can do with these programmable objects to create incremental value. And this is a significant advantage when you compare that to other forms of engagement, which cost a lot to develop and rarely provide value.

Building a sustainable model

The idea is that both the technology we develop and VEE as a utility token, allow for an organism, an economic one, to exist without anyone monitoring, making it self-sustained. The more vAtoms that are being created and the more VEE that is used, the more interest there will be for cyclers to provide their infrastructure to earn money. And we believe over time will lead to a self-sustaining ecosystem.

It’s worth noting: We’ve got a very serious team, very experienced with a proven track record. And we are executing on our mission. I think we know and understand what we need to do. We’ve been working on it very hard, we’re up for the next steps, and we’re in it for the long haul.