Ben Jorgensen has over a decade of experience in business leadership, entrepreneurship, and investment. Before leading Constellation, he advised and consulted more than 20 companies, ranging from startups to mid-market firms, on product, marketing, sales, and fundraising strategies. He was the founding CEO of Klick Push, an ad tech company that enabled Fortune 500 brands to integrate dynamic content and music into digital advertising. The company was recognised as Ad Tech NYC’s Best Emerging Ad Tech Company in 2014 and achieved a multi-million dollar exit in 2015. Beyond tech, Ben is an owner and operator of A5 Meats, a Japanese Wagyu company, and a partner in the upscale restaurant Gozu. He holds B.A.s in Economics, Anthropology, and Political Science from the University of Arizona.
With a diverse background from ad tech to hospitality, what drew you to blockchain technology and what problems were you eager to explore when founding Constellation?
As an entrepreneur, I evaluate opportunities based on several factors: the upside potential, alignment with my personal ethos, where I can make an impact, and the quality of the team I’ll be working with.
At the end of the day, and when an endeavor works out, you are going to be like family to the people you are working with, so it is important that you zero in who the team you will be working with and understanding their strengths and weaknesses (as well as yours) so that clear communication and respect is built at the foundation.
What truly captivated me about Constellation was how crypto communities function differently from traditional social media users.
Crypto communities actively participate by evangelizing the technology, trading tokens, and providing valuable feedback.
There are multiple personas and bring different value adds to an ecosystem. In social media, users are mostly consumers and partially content contributors; conversely, in crypto, even the passive observer is actively participating when they speculate.
Blockchain is more than just a technology business—it’s a hybrid of social, technical, and economic activities engaging multiple stakeholders. Blockchain infrastructure specifically presents a complex system with unique governance and evangelism challenges.
I was seeking something complex that would challenge my sense of being, leadership skills, and intellect - Constellation perfectly fit that criteria (and then some). I hadn’t even anticipated the regulatory challenges that would follow.
Nearly seven years later, I’m meeting with the White House Crypto Council as they work to legitimize our industry while simultaneously building new technology standards being adopted by the US Department of Defense.
This has truly been the ultimate entrepreneurial challenge and dream.
Constellation describes itself as an infinitely scalable and feeless network. What key technological innovations enable this scalability?
Interestingly, I’m working to shift our messaging away from technical features like “low fees” and “infinite scalability.” Such language suggests that maybe our industry is still in research mode. While creating a cheaper and more scalable solution is always good, we might be over indexing on improving infrastructure and as an industry we should instead be focused on productizing solutions that cater to different problems that blockchain can fix.
I want both our $DAG community and our core company to focus on VALUE. If Constellation is a utility chain and token, what value does that utility provide? The industry needs to mature beyond discussing the “how” of low fees and scalability to address the “why” and express the actual value the technology delivers.
That said, and for the sake of the interview, I can comment on our scalability and feeless network where we have implemented several key innovations to bring value to our partners. First, let’s address the feeless network aspect which is really addressing the problem of decentralized token economies not being accommodating to traditional lines of services that stack on top of cloud storage.
If you’re building tokenomics solely for the web3 developer, high transaction fees aren’t a major concern because the risk-to-reward ratio overshadows transaction costs. However, since Constellation aims to work with both web3 and traditional industries, we needed to make transaction fees negligible, and not volatile, to avoid deterring adoption and being more price conscious for traditional paths of digital service procurement.
We made our network as low-cost as possible (retaining minimal fees for network security) and structured our application layer, metagraphs, to allow flexible fee structures that can integrate with any business model. This has ultimately opened our doors up to a $50M+ pipeline of opportunities on both commercial and federal fronts. This is really a solid start in just over a year and not easy to do for a new and innovative piece of technology.
From a technical scale perspective, we designed our application layer to be customizable so that an application could process or validate a firehose of data or validate cryptocurrency transactions.
We leveraged a directed acyclic graph database where each metagraph operates as its own network, scaling in a non-linear fashion, while simultaneously using our base layer, Hypergraph, for added security of the “state” of those applications. This means pre-validation happens within the metagraph, not directly on the base layer of Constellation, where each metagraph has the flexibility to scale.
Each application can customize consensus to validate its own logic, implement appropriate fee structures, and deploy nodes for community building and decentralization without being limited by the base network. This allows any business logic with any volume of data to use blockchain without the constraints of the base layer while still benefiting from its security.
With the Hypergraph Transfer Protocol (HGTP) often compared to HTTP for Web3, what makes this comparison relevant, and how does HGTP change how blockchain networks operate?
From a simple perspective, HTTP is a communications protocol and HGTP is Hypergraph transfer protocol, a decentralized base layer network and protocol. While the Constellation network and chain itself isn’t a communications protocol like TCP/IP, it can be used to build secure communications and verifiable data protocols because our architecture allows for the development of custom logic to accommodate any use case.
It’s like having an SSL certificate built into the protocol from the ground up. In theory, someone could use our infrastructure to build a communications protocol and communicate with other applications or metagraphs within our ecosystem.
Over the next month, we’ll be launching a feature enabling metagraphs (custom networks) to transfer currency between each other, which could be expanded into a broader communications layer.
Constellation has positioned itself as a solution for enterprise blockchain adoption. What industries or sectors do you see benefiting most?
One key advantage of Constellation’s decentralized infrastructure is the ability to build custom networks that integrate specific logic or APIs. Customization and flexibility is essential for enterprise customers as their needs and use cases are far more expansive than a small business and often don’t fit into forced frameworks that many other decentralized networks market. Ultimately this aspect has led us to be within the top 1% of government awarded funds for blockchain research and development and six years working with the US Department of Defense.
A more specific example of flexibility is our ability to modify metagraphs to accommodate new logic. For example, we’re exploring a marketing technology, called El Paca, that validates hashtags and posts on X.com and YoutTube while distributing rewards for approved content. What makes this novel is the programmatic and decentralized validation of an external API’s—essentially creating a source of truth and the ability to trigger event based reward distribution. Additionally, and unlike traditional smart contracts, we can modify the metagraph to add new sources of truth and adjust marketing campaigns. For example, if we wanted to tweak the campaign to reward users in crypto for posting about Pepsi, we could easily adjust the metagraph and drive deeper engagement. We are actually currently exploring some cross-chain engagement with the Base ecosystem and a few meme tokens built on Base.
Another key component of enterprise adoption is our ability to scale up or scale down based on the applications demands for validation tasks. Over the past year we launched the Dor Network, a metagraph that validates IoT data from physical hardware (thermal sensor Dor devices (www.getdor.com), with approximately 3,000 devices globally deployed in brick-and-mortar retailers. This represents blockchain being used at scale, and driving real value back to the customer and by many prominent brands.
When we talk about enterprise adoption, we’re thinking about productizing infrastructure into a solution while being consumable and easily deployable. Enterprise-ready technology means you can integrate with any external database or API to create a custom decentralized network. Many L1 blockchains require businesses to use their frameworks and adapt to their models, which doesn’t work for enterprises with established systems who don’t want to rework their entire business or technology stack. Enterprise customers want products with clear value - no one just buys infrastructure features - they buy products that solve problems.
Please follow us on X.com @Conste11ation as we will be launching some new enterprise products in the coming weeks.
Can you elaborate on how Constellation’s “generative economic system” philosophy impacts network design?
The generative aspect of Constellation’s economics relates to the ecosystem’s ability to produce new economic value and create a cycle of expansion and innovation. It is easier to explain generative economics through the lens of metagraphs, applications built on Constellation, and through delegated staking- a feature we are launching in the next couple of weeks. In a couple of weeks, users that have $DAG, our native currency, and our Stargazer Wallet (Google Chrome extension) will be able to lock up $DAG and receive extra $DAG for helping further secure our network. Delegated staking will allow people to participate in network rewards, without any code, simply by locking up $DAG in validator nodes that are a part of our base layer network, and/or metagraphs/projects built on Constellation.
In practice, let’s consider the Dor metagraph, which uses custom consensus to validate foot traffic data from over 3,000 retailers via physical thermal sensors. Nodes on this custom network validate the logic (data from the hardware sensor) and receive rewards for doing so—essentially “mining” data. The Dor metagraph operates like a Layer 1 network, and pays $DAG to secure or validate the state of that network to the base layer network-Hypergraph. The entire community can see on a block explorer how much data is being validated by Dor.
As a result, community members might stake $DAG into the Dor metagraph to help reduce fees that are incurred by Dor. Additionally, Dor might decide to share network rewards or their own currency, $Dor, to further incentivize people to lock up DAG. Dor then sees increased total value locked, their network fees are reduced, and stakers and Dor receive additional rewards for locking up $DAG.
The key takeaway is that the network doesn’t just stake $DAG to earn more $DAG—stakers can support applications participating in the Constellation ecosystem to help builders continue innovating. As new metagraphs emerge, the network grows and creates new opportunities for staking $DAG. Metagraphs will need to become increasingly attractive and competitive, offering additional incentives to receive staked $DAG from holders. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of expansion and innovation.
Please follow us on X.com @Conste11ation for product updates around delegated staking and our DEX called PacaSwap.