Building the Transparency Economy with Benjamin Diggles from Constellation Network
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: Building the Transparency Economy with Benjamin Diggles from Constellation Network
This 61-minute episode of the “Edge of Show” features an in-depth discussion with Benjamin Diggles, Co-founder of Constellation Network, focusing on the critical role of verifiable digital evidence in restoring trust across industries, particularly in the age of AI proliferation. The conversation charts Constellation’s journey from early government contracts to launching commercial products aimed at creating a “trillion-dollar transparency economy.”
1. Focus Area: Blockchain Infrastructure, Digital Evidence, Enterprise Adoption, Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN), and the intersection of AI, Crypto, and Blockchain.
2. Key Technical Insights:
- Digital Evidence Product Launch: Constellation has productized its technology, born from years of federal government work, into “Digital Evidence,” an API service designed to provide immutable proof/audit trails for real-world data and transactions.
- Constellation Builder Program: This new, free, open-source initiative allows developers (even non-coders using AI tools) to easily put streaming data onto the Constellation blockchain via an API, effectively offering a “roll your own” blockchain environment on their platform.
- Scalable Big Data Focus: Constellation positions itself as a scalable big data blockchain, contrasting with the limitations of networks like Bitcoin for complex enterprise applications.
3. Market/Investment Angle:
- Trust Deficit as Opportunity: The current low level of public and enterprise trust (exacerbated by AI hallucinations and data misuse by large tech firms) creates an ideal market entry point for blockchain solutions offering immutable transparency.
- Enterprise Readiness: Demand from Fortune 500 companies for embedding blockchain practices into workflows has rapidly accelerated, shifting from initial curiosity to urgent implementation planning.
- Micro-services Economy: The future sweet spot lies in the convergence of AI and blockchain, enabling secure, auditable micro-payments, micro-services, and micro-investments, exemplified by use cases like rewarding customers interacting with AI help desks.
4. Notable Companies/People:
- Constellation Network: Founded in 2017, focused on building usable, unstoppable blockchain infrastructure.
- Federal Government/DOD: Constellation has been contracting with the Department of Defense and other agencies since 2019, validating their technology as secure and scalable.
- Dave Burn (CPO): Credited as the “mind child” behind the new Builder program.
- Other L1s: Diggles expressed support for Hedera, Avalanche, and Polygon, emphasizing that “there’s not one blockchain to rule them all.”
- Base Ecosystem: Constellation is actively collaborating within the Coinbase Base ecosystem.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion:
- The work with federal agencies established Constellation’s infrastructure as DOD approved, suggesting a strong foundation for compliance and handling sensitive data, which is crucial for enterprise adoption.
- The focus on immutable logging inherently sets organizations up for better compliance on the “defense” side of future regulatory scrutiny.
6. Future Implications:
- The industry is moving toward a necessary overlay of trust provided by blockchain technology, especially as AI systems become more critical in decision-making.
- The long-term vision involves tokenizing community efforts and rewarding positive user behavior via micro-incentives, moving beyond purely speculative crypto use cases.
- The conversation suggests a maturation where blockchain adoption will mirror the slow but inevitable transition seen with cloud computing adoption.
7. Target Audience: Blockchain infrastructure developers, enterprise technology leaders, Web3 strategists, and investors tracking real-world utility and enterprise blockchain adoption.
Comprehensive Narrative Summary:
Benjamin Diggles framed Constellation Network as the “biggest blockchain project you’ve never heard of,” emphasizing their six-year history of building mission-critical infrastructure for the US federal government, which validated their technology’s security and scalability. This government validation paved the way for the commercial launch of Digital Evidence, a product designed to restore trust in an era plagued by misinformation and AI hallucinations.
Diggles argues that the current global trust deficit—affecting consumers viewing digital media and enterprises relying on AI inputs—makes blockchain’s core promise of immutability more valuable than ever. This demand is driving Fortune 500 companies to actively seek blockchain integration.
To facilitate this adoption, Constellation launched the Builder Program, offering a free, open-source API service allowing anyone to easily place data on-chain without writing complex code, even leveraging AI tools for setup. This is positioned as a low-friction entry point for developers to understand the value of an immutable audit trail.
Zooming out, Diggles detailed his ultimate vision: the cross-section of AI, Crypto, and Blockchain. He sees this convergence enabling a robust economy built on micro-services, where users interacting with AI-driven services (like customer support bots) can be instantly rewarded with fungible currency for beneficial actions, all logged securely via Digital Evidence.
Finally, Diggles adopted a pragmatic view on the broader crypto ecosystem, supporting interoperability between L1s and viewing meme coins as a necessary, albeit messy, early stage of tokenizing community efforts. He highlighted that beneath the speculation, projects with genuine community missions (like the “Christ is King” partnership) represent the evolved, valuable future of community tokens.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"Well, if they blow through one of those lights and hit somebody, they're now in litigation, 'he said, she said' ambulance-chaser type of energy. But with us, we have admissible data in court that shows at that latitude, longitude, this time, that day, 'Sorry, pal,' that light was red. It was what it says it is, and the case gets thrown out."
"These things are powerful beasts. That said, since so much information goes through these, we thought, 'Let's do a standardized integration.' So, folks can get that cryptographic security of communications, that digital evidence, those provable guarantees from the source of which everything takes place."
"So again, I think there's this massive cross-section between AI, blockchain, and crypto that's taking place, and if it can land directly on some of this depreciating hardware that's sitting out there..."
"We put a note on these things, right? We said, 'Okay, let's put a Constellation light node that we can put on this device.' So that those that deploy the device, they get a Door token in their wallet every time validated foot traffic is on our network."
"And so, if you fractionalize the pipes using blockchain for those micro-services, and you fractionalize the pipes of money using the fractionalization of cryptocurrency, I can send you 0.000001 Bitcoin. You open up a whole world of investment that allows the tokenization of these assets that are largely locked right now."
"What's in it for the government? How can the government take advantage of real-world asset tokenization? Well, I mean, the government is sitting on the largest asset pool in the world: the United States government. I mean, just look at BLM, the Bureau of Land Management. The amount of land, and now they're starting to sell that stuff off—that's a huge tokenization opportunity in my opinion."