Ken Anderson’s college degree was in business administration, specifically in management information systems, and he also programmed a lot as a teenager. He joined the military as a non-commissioned officer where he served for eight years which gave him plenty of experience in managing people and just ‘getting things done’ as he says. The result is one the top CTOs in the blockchain world, creating a seasoned architect for technology.
“I discovered early on that software programming could improve most things. In an early job with insurance, I created a database of risk issues which meant the sales people did not have to ask the same questions repeatedly. I understood that programming could solve a lot of problems.”
The intersection of business and computers led him to getting an early position as a CTO, which he felt at the time might be premature, but under the guidance of a great mentor he quickly learned on the job what it meant to be a CTO. The end result was fast tracked him into a very competent CTO. Following that experience, he founded LaunchBadge, a software engineering company, partnering with tech genius Ryan Leckey. This honed his software architecture skills and his love of real-world cases.
Subsequently Anderson spent three years at Hedera as lead developer advocate getting deep into the consensus algorithm weeds. It was in this role that he met his Tashi co-founder Bobby Bhatia. Bhatia was one of the first Hedera ambassadors and they would spend hours talking on the phone and formed a deep friendship. Bhatia and Jay McCarthy, the third co-founder, were both based in Singapore and invited Anderson to come and visit to talk about Tashi. It was a hit and Anderson joined the team.
The deep dive looked at the different voting algorithms in existence from Hedera, to Lamport timestamps and other (a)synchronous byzantine fault tolerance algorithms. From this research they extrapolated their own consensus algorithm in Tashi.
“The Tashi consensus algorithm has some similarity with other BFT algorithms, including a two-phase consensus protocol with a gossip and virtual voting functions. In the Tashi consensus algorithm, you don’t need to count votes however, as each node independently ends up calculating the same thing.
“This fundamentally allows multiple parties to interact with each other, without having to trust each other or use a middleman, and guarantees the logic will be encapsulated in whatever application they are all running.”
The Tashi consensus algorithm or engine as it is named, has many uses, the first of which is gaming. The Tashi team has built an SDK for the unity gaming engine which allows games to be played without hosts or even servers.
There are other uses too, notably in building message queues that can be shared across different companies or applications.
“This is very helpful when working with the Internet of Things (IoT) which basically lives on message queues. We’ve built a mesh network that sits on top of our consensus layer that allows for peer to peer messages to be kept in sync.
The Tashi consensus engine fixes the problem of moving gamers from Web2 to Web3. Web3 aficionados point to features such as owning digital assets or playing to earn but given the grinding nature of Web3 blockchains, many gamers have no interest in migrating. Traditional gamers want to have fun, enjoy great graphics and have fast response times.
Anderson remembers an original Web3 game called Blockwars where players had to win land and then fight your neighbours. It was based on smart contracts but once a player made a move, they typically had to wait six minutes or more to find out if they were successful or not.
“It was a good proof of concept but was never going to replace traditional games. It did however ensure a fair state or a consistent state between the game players. The quest was to use technology to preserve the fair state but at speed.”
With the Tashi consensus engine, every time a player presses a button, it gets consensus from every player to agree to the move and commits that move to everyone’s computer.
“That might sound like a slow experience but we’ve managed to get that finality down to approximately 30 milliseconds and most gaming is okay with that delay. So, we managed to build an engine that fixes latency to 30 milliseconds – or less, while including 1000s of transactions a second. This is how Web3 enters the gaming space.”
The Tashi team is talking to all the big game development companies in the world and they are excited but Web2 takes time to commit. Anderson sees the big push coming from Web3 developers who tend to be more innovative and faster to market.
“Now allowing asset ownership and transfers of assets across platforms make sense – we are adding value to the gaming sector not slowing it down.”
There are other players trying to take on this space but some of them have been mired in the Proof of Work and Proof of Stake world.
“If you want to retain the security level that Web3 promises and the performance that Web2 expects, there is no one out there coming close to Tashi.”
This is a play that is close to Anderson’s heart as a hard-core gamer. He is not alone with many of the developers also sharing his love – and understanding – of gaming.
So, while game demands are the driving function into the gaming space, it doesn’t stop there. Tashi is tapping into the unused computer resources sitting on people’s desks. The team has built in a compensation model that rewards community players for resources they are not using in their computers. In the coming days of potential GPU shortages this is even more attractive to publishers. Or when looking at the upcoming heavy AI and machine learning demands, an ability to tap into underutilized resources is also very attractive.
Tashi is talking to lots of potential partners across the gaming sector, and is already supporting a Twitch-lookalike player in Indonesia with more than 5 million users.
“They built their successful business on Web2, but we are migrating them to Web3 to allow for things like sharing advertising revenue between creators and fans, giving the most popular streamers not only ad revenue but also fan revenue. It also allows them to give fans a reward in the form of a token which is redeemable for watching.
“This is important for us – to add Web3 functionality to Web2 applications without latency or degradation of transaction volume.”
To find out more about the services offered, technology developed and upcoming news, join the Tashi discord channel, or meet them at one of the many conferences the team will be attending.
