On Phore/Graphene CEO Mike Trisko’s Background and Experience in Crypto:

This is part of the AMA with Mike which took place on the Graphene Telegram.

Mike- My career before joining crypto was a long line, I’m about 50 now so I’ve been working for a long time. I worked in tech consulting for most of that time, and most of that was spent working for big professional services firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte.

I had clients that were mostly fortune 500 companies, working on a variety of different types of projects across software development, IT infrastructure, etc. Pretty much everything across the board the last 10 years or so that I was in consulting.

I also did M&A (mergers and acquisitions) work so that was really a mix of everything, because it was really the process of integrating two big companies together or tearing two companies apart, and so it was a rapid transformation of all of it, including all the business processes, all the systems, all the applications, everything all at one time.

So, you could say I’ve had a pretty broad background in terms of technology and I also did a startup in the middle there for a little while. I was the co-founder of a Startup called Tectura, which was a SaaS (software as a service provider), although they didn’t even really have that term back then, because this was in 2004. I helped lead the technology team that built their flagship application, which was their construction payment management solution.

That was really the majority of their revenue as a company. They went on to do a successful IPO and then were eventually acquired by Oracle for roughly $663 Million so it was a pretty successful venture. I bring that up partly because it is relevant, it was a payment related application. Frankly, if I were designing that application today, I might be using a blockchain like Graphene for it because a lot of it would tie in. There was a lot of escrow and trading payments for documents and things like that, and so I think frankly, it would fit very well with blockchain, maybe Oracle would do something like that with it at some point.

In terms of crypto, I got involved with the Phore project right around the time it launched. I wasn’t involved with it’s creation, I was just an investor at first, and then I joined the team as a contributor, just contributing code to it, and then eventually transitioned to being a full team member and finally became the CEO in 2019, leaving my previous full-time consulting job in the process. Since then I have been fully focused on Phore, Graphene and our other related projects.

In terms of Graphene, of course, that really grew out of Phore and was originally intended as part of the original Phore vision to be something where we would do what we called side chains, where you would have a smart contract blockchain that was branching off from the Phore blockchain, but it became apparent that it wasn’t really a fully thought through or secure solution and thought we should start over with a new blockchain, and we eventually decided to do that. So we started the project (called Synapse at the time) and that evolved into Graphene which you see today.

As Phore, and with the Synapse/Graphene architecture, once we really understood what we were building, we realized that it probably made sense to split it off as a separate project, because Phore by that time had been around several years and had kind of formed an identity around e-commerce and applications that were developing for the blockchain, it also has applications for other cryptocurrencies that we’re developing as well. So there’s kind of a different direction that Phore was heading compared to what we were building with Graphene.

Graphene really is this revolutionary platform. It has a very secure Staking protocol, Sharding technology, with super high Scalability. It has a lot of flexibility, which I frankly think is a bigger, distinguishing feature, you could have different types of shards, meaning you can optimize different shards, which are each their own blockchain, but they’re tied together in this ecosystem, and each one can be optimized for a different use case.

So for example, we’re going to be launching with a blockchain called the transfer shard, that would be kind of similar to what Phore does and also what Bitcoin does in terms of doing fast, secure transfers. Having some of the same types of features you’d expect with a cryptocurrency when you’re just using it as an exchange mechanism or a store of value. Then we’re going to be adding the smart contract shards, which would make it more like Ethereum in terms of what it can do in terms of being able to do all kinds of smart contracts, tokens, DeFi, all the different things that you can do with smart contracts, which is pretty extensive to begin with.

In addition to that though, there’s always trade offs that you make with these different things. Like the Bitcoin style blockchain is really optimized for security and transfers and smart contracts are obviously optimized to be able to provide all that functionality, but it’s a heavy process and there’s a lot of processing power.

There’s a lot of things going on that you have to optimize for that sort of use case. But with Graphene, you can also have other types of shards that might be optimized for things like a privacy shard, an identity shard, all sorts of different things that you could basically say, okay, if we need something with really big blocks or really small blocks or different block times or different consensus rules, we can design shards and add them to this ecosystem and they’re all tied together. So you can transfer, tokens across all these shards, use them as you need to, or want to for different purposes, and so it gives you a lot more flexibility than what you would have with just a single blockchain where you have to make some of those trade-off choices and just stick with them.