Blockchain Based Infrastructure for Your Finances With Dan Edlebeck
As a connector of thought leaders and doers in the blockchain space, Dan Edlebeck builds diverse networks to achieve high-impact goals. With 10 years of experience in business development, marketing, and operations. He fosters strategic partnerships and grows virtual and in-person communities. Armed with technical knowledge and industry experience, he can speak to your dev team or your grandma about the value of your tech stack. Relentlessly entrepreneurial and optimistic, he leverages lean resources to drive impressive results. He has bee an ambitious vision to make the world a better place, harnessing the capabilities of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
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Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. He is a connector of thought leaders and doers in the blockchain space, and he helps to build diverse networks to achieve high-impact goals. With 10 years of experience in business development, marketing and operations, he fosters strategic partnerships and grows virtual and in-person communities. Armed with technical knowledge and industry expertise, you can speak to a diverse team of your grandma about the value of your tech stack, or your dev team, which we’re gonna learn about what that means. He is an entrepreneur, he’s from the great state of Wisconsin. He’s, you’ve seen the show, Silicon Valley, he looks like one of the cool guys on there anyway, so I’m gonna show with me, Dan Edlebeck. Dan, how are you doing?
Dan:
Brett, how’s it going?
Brett:
Great to get a chance to spend some time with you. You’re, you’re out of your bunker in Puerto Rico anyone who’s in Puerto Rico, who’s for, the ocean, the beach, or maybe even the taxes? Where a friend of how is Puerto Rico these days?
Dan:
It’s awesome. I don’t know if you can see my curly hair blowing a little bit. But there’s an ocean breeze literally coming through my window. It’s something like 85 degrees, they just have the ocean breeze taking care of the situation.
Brett:
Phenomenon versus Wisconsin in the perhaps the winters. That’s probably a stark difference there. But more on that layer. But in the meantime, would you get our give our listeners a little bit more about your story and your current focus?
Dan:
Thanks, Brett. I’m the CEO of Exidio. We’re a software development agency. We’re global, but we have a lot of our team in India. Our blockchain Development Agency is building tooling on blockchain-based networks, you might have heard of Bitcoin or Ethereum. Those are layer one blockchains. But they have certain limited capabilities. There’s a really interesting layer one blockchain called cosmos, and it’s focused on your and operability. Speaking from one blockchain to another blockchain having the ability to communicate and interact, and we have helped build on the cosmos blockchain our own native blockchain called the Sentinel Blockchain. What Sentinel is a peer-to-peer network for people to offer bandwidth to a marketplace and people to route their traffic through that bandwidth? You can kind of think of like the Tor network or just a VPN (Virtual Private Network). This peer-to-peer bandwidth network is the base layer framework. Then if you Brett wanted to start your own VPN company, and instead of running your own servers and managing them, you could leverage the Sentinel network that already exists, peer-to-peer bandwidth, and use that as your base layer infrastructure, and then be able to sell your VPN subscriptions to users in a decentralized and open-source manner. If you want to do that, you can hire my company in Exdio, and we can help you with the onboarding and the infrastructure and integration onto the network.
Brett:
We’re gonna dive into those technicalities and try to unpack that for our listeners and for myself, but and by the way, we’re also going to talk about how that applies to blockchain-based infrastructure for your finances, and how to protect and build things that aren’t going to be more let’s say hacker resistant, because the security of finances and transferring your funds is more important than ever, with all of the attacks. We’re going to touch on that here in a minute. But Dan, I want to take one other step back and I want you to take us back to the Wisconsin days, perhaps it’s high school, and your class, or even the university days and your younger self. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life, and this gives us to be given to us to be a blessing to others. Some people call them strength, some calm superpowers. But I’m curious, what are those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? How’s that help how you help and bless people today?
Dan:
I feel really blessed myself. Growing up in Wisconsin growing up with a family that I feel very close with, I feel very fortunate to have three amazing sisters, two amazing parents, and we also took in foster kids, and it was just a home full of love and full of acceptance and a follow of encouragement, and one thing that I always look up to my dad and I’m sitting here with my wife, and we’re talking about having a family one day and I really look up to my dad a lot and the way that he carries himself and the way that he connects with other people and the way that he was a father and I want to be a father like him one day, but I do believe that I’m trying my best to follow in his footsteps in steps in connecting with people and understanding what makes people tick. What what are people’s passions, listening to people and understanding who they are and kind of where they come from. I like that you’re kind of getting into my Wisconsin story. It’s that’s kind of how I always like to connect with people as well.I definitely think that I’m understanding us as humanity and taking the time to get to know one another is where I think my strengths lie, and I’m in a tech company, I’m not a tech leader. But I’m more of a people person and can galvanize and I can do the sales and the marketing and, and share the message.
Brett:
Connection, and it sounds like you got a good mentor and father, and your dad who helped to teach you about how to get to know and connect with people accept people encourage people. Is that a fair summary?
Dan:
Absolutely.
Brett:
Now let’s dive into blockchain-based infrastructure for your finances, and or unpack a little bit what you said in the very beginning about, about the practical application, and you might even go ABCs, like, what is VPN? Some people may not want a VPN is why is it needed and well, it’s kind of a challenge now, then how are you solving that with what you’re doing?
Dan:
VPN is a widely adopted consumer product. People that use social media networks, or use email, this is becoming an absolute product, especially as the world moves more online, and we were operating remotely, we need to have secure networking online, we’re able to need to be able to get access to censorship, censorship, resistant content, and VPNs are a means to do that, and so you’ve probably heard of Express VPN, or Nord VPN or tunnel bear. It’s a really big and booming industry, I believe in 2016, it was a little like $15 billion industry, and last year, across 30 billion in four years at a double then I think by 2027, it’s expected to be over $107 billion industry. It’s an incredibly exploding industry, but it has its own challenges. Use a VPN, to be able to route your traffic through someone else’s IP address.
I’m here in Puerto Rico, but maybe I want to get access to Netflix in the UK because it has a show that I don’t have here on Netflix, I can connect to someone else’s IP address in the UK, and be able to route my traffic through that IP address, and now I’m able to get access to that content, and it could be as something as mundane as access to Netflix content, or it could be something as important as access to Wikipedia, or more authoritarian regimes that don’t allow access to content, and that’s the purpose of VPN, and another purpose, the VPN is not when I’m writing my traffic through the UK IP address, my home internet service provider Comcast, or Verizon or at&t, they, they are not the ones that have the exit node, the exit information about my metadata, so they can’t be tracking on my internet usage and reselling it or doing whatever they want with that content. I think that’s really unique, and it’s really important, and so we’re seeing a huge uptick in growth and demand for VPS.
Brett:
Let’s go right into like, what, what’s the difference now? What, how would the blockchain infrastructure? How’s Exidio kind of transforming that or making that better?
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