ETHWarsaw 2023: Infra Panel - What are we building for? Infrastructure challenges and opportunities

okay let's uh let's make it happen right away okay so um hello everybody um we're going to start the infrastructure panel um um I hope you know me I'm Pina from efor so I'm going to be organizing that panel and moderating here um and just to add a bit of a backstory I've been in crypto for the last few years and I also had the pleasure to work at um ramp where I've been very directly exposed to uh working with multiple different products in the industry and um company have been providing uh them with the Fiat infrastructure so um I managed to explore a lot of the infrastructure um bits that we're missing from the current crypto landscape and this is U some of the learnings from from that time I want to pass into into into today's panel and I'm really happy to welcome uh my very good friends on the stage today um so let's start with a round of introduction so um on my left I have um Nick from Chronicle um Nick Chronicle is a still very very young project how do you feel in that new situation after after maker yeah uh so I think it's very exciting right uh so you know for those of you who don't know Chronicle is an oracle protocol uh we spun out of maker Dow uh a little over two years ago and we are launching later this month uh you know publicly to be usable by by everyone so uh no it's a it's very very very exciting time for us fingers crossed I heard you're going to make a splash def be massive cool and um then we have um Simon from from the graph Simon we talked today about uh when we first met um I was in Lisbon it helps to have shared telegram messages from um from many years ago um it's really awesome to have you here right now it's really awesome to have the graph here as well yeah thanks for having me great and then we have um PCH from uh ramp Network so uh I I know PCH and premc is building Theon Rams PCH really awesome to have you here really good to have ramp as well at the conference being one of the landmarks of Polish crypto scene thanks for having me cool and then uh uh last but not least Tom from stamp protocol uh Tom this is our first time uh meeting so I'm really excited to uh see how well we're going to be vibing on the panel um they're coming from stamp protocol build on top of rwe um which is in my mind uh doing the uh monetizing The Bookmark creation uh on ethereum which I actually really really really like thank you for having me on is it on is it on let's have a tech check if the mic is working it's a oh thank you for having me glad amazing cool so um I'm going to start with a conference anecdote saying as we're already on a um on a panel and on a conference um this year I went to Eve Denver that was my second time at uh ad Denver and I think I met a few friends from uh from just a crypto crypto community and every time we talked we uh one of the main motives in our conversation were this is just infrastructure there's nothing user facing being built on crypto um and it led me to a feeling that uh um it's really a bur Market it uh you know February was like um a very very deep bur market and after you know all the events that happened with FTX and so on and it's quite typical for bur markets to spin more infrastructure projects but we're already past that stage we've managed to recover at least partially from the blows from last year we're seeing more Capital coming towards crypto um so in that situation is it uh is it good to be uh to still remain um infrastructure Centric are we even focused on infrastructure anymore is is this shifting how do you feel about that and I want to start with Tom given that you're uh more um the infrastructure that you're building is for Content creators so it's a bit different because it's not for different product cost on crypto it's for um an effect um an actual end user so how do you feel about that perspective do you feel like we're more that we're shifting too much towards infrastructure that you know it's not good that most of the projects that were exhibiting at Denver were rollups and proofs and so on it was all pretty much the same yeah I I definitely agree I'd like to you know kind of see more in applications and more user facing pieces but um as these Technologies evolve you You' always have to kind of invest in infrastructure and infrastructure pieces because Technologies change uh now we have a world coin where uh you have the the orb and and so that's new and uh and from my P perception um where I work on the stamp protocol you know uh building uh infrastructure and then building protocols on top that can make it easier for developers to scale their products so my my focus is is really you know working tightly with infrastructure systems like R weave which is uh permanent persistent storage to enable these protocols to make it really easier for developers to implement um similar patterns and not have to reinvent the will yeah I think it's good to have common ground for applications like that but then a question that I have is okay but when is it enough to put infrastructure development on hold and focus more on on ux because just a few years ago it was we had to focus on infrastructure we had to do scalability because none of the applications were working because we had infrastructural is issues right now is it the same still yeah and from from my perspective in the r weave ecosystem um the infrastructure the core infrastructure um 2.6 released at eth Denver and um pretty much the founder Sam Williams said that the infrastructure is complete so uh most of the focus is on um you know building protocols and building applications so from from from my perspective um I I do think you reach a point where your your infrastructure is complete now you still can evolve but um for the most part uh I think I think you can reach a point where you get to a a a a complete state of features I think it's good to um understand what is the um sort of minimal viable product that LEDs us to keep on building and and and uh allows us to build more on top of that and um Nick you're um Chronicle has um spin off from um part of maker um and what I what I know about that is that it arose from a need to build the right kinds of oracles for for just for makeer protocol um and how do you see the future development of what your of Oracles in that context how far are oracles from being minimal viable product are they usable already or are they going to be usable only after you guys launch so so I think uh the like uh narrative around oracles is kind of always been pigeon hold in defi into this thing of like you know if I say Oracle what do you think of you think of like some smart contract that gives you a price right and uh it's really so much more than that right it's the ability to transport data you know from one blockchain to another blockchain right and have like blockchains be able to to talk to each other right or to power Bridges right to let tokens be transferred between Bridges or even to just bring in data from you know the the outside world right and so um in terms of like uh you know adoption like haven't we built enough infra like no I would argue that there's still so much more infrastructure to be built that's going to enable a bunch of new use cases um as an example for like something we're working on that I think is quite unique is uh real world assets have been I I think kind of a a very like trendy kind of bus word for the past last year but I think in terms of scale it hasn't like picked up until very recently right so uh I mentioned earlier right we work we're very closely partnered with maker Dow and you know maker Dow is actually the largest provider of credit to real world Assets in defi by a very large margin I believe it's like somewhere around like the $3 billion range and the total amount of credit extended in all of defi towards real world assets is probably around like 3.1 3.2 right so Maker Now is the majority like creditor like credit provider right to rail World assets um now there are still a lot of bottlenecks in that type of um area that I think infrastructure can solve right so in order to do a real world asset there is a kind of a complicated web of like legal structures that has to exist in the legal in the in the the real world right to kind of represent the interest the Creditor interest of the protocol that is providing this credit and uh you kind of need to collect all of this data from all of these different actors right like maybe a broker or a bank or a custodian or a trust or an auditor right and these are not cryptool literate people right um so you have to get this data that is maybe like you know in a spreadsheet sheet right and somehow right get this into a mechanism right that this data is automatically collected right automatically aggregated and automatically like pushed on chain right and some of it is proprietary data and can't be public and some of it can right but if you are able to do this which is something that's not automated today and it's just completely manual right um then you are able to kind of remove this bottleneck of uh that is kind of like stopping rwa from growing even further right because there's a very natural product Market fit here where traditional Finance like rates for credit are extremely high and in defi our rates for credit are extremely low because in defi the only thing that matters is what is the demand to speculate and right now nobody wants to speculate that number goes up right so um there is a mismatch right of credit available in D5 versus demand for cheap Credit in traditional finance and uh if we remove like the barriers to entry uh this can scale like an order of magnitude extremely quickly I think it's super important to add that infrastructure it's not just Tech infrastructure it's also the surroundings around the technology the legal framework around that um and um I said that a few times to to PCH and and my colleagues at ramp that ramp is doing like bleeding edge stuff when it comes to Legal work so prik how do you feel about that legal infrastructure around um developments in the last few years and no it's not your uh topic being on the product side but it very much affects what is possible um when it comes to building new new products just let me first uh let me say that for me everything starts and ends with users uh with their problems with their needs and the value that we can give them generate for them and everything in the middle like uh startups infrastructure price uh glamorous conferences financing uh financing grants Etc uh should be put in the context and should be uh viewed as a tool to deliver the value for the users um and coming back to you uh back to your question um it's a very good question the uh the legal Frameworks uh are definitely something that uh was missing uh for the wider adoption of the web free products for the especially for the uh on the B2 on B2 B2 Market where the uh for example uh uh traditional finance companies they were hesitant to enter it without having the enough of the regulatory superv super supervisory and they uh saw those markets as completely risky unregulated and that they don't know how to enter it and what to do with it uh from one hand you could say that it's getting better because we're getting more regulation uh but uh I think in this room we can all agree that this is not always what actually pushes the this uh ecosystem forward uh um and uh I think it's important to say that the one type of Regulation is not equal to another type of Regulation and some some countries uh are taking the more proactive and more uh knowledgeable uh approach and they discuss and consult and uh and trying to treat the EOS web free ecosystem as a partners and some of them are treating us as a um someone who maybe not exist so they're trying to regulate regulate us out uh or just trying or they are scared and due to political um forces they are trying to uh put a lot of the burden on us so that's the aspect of the uh regulatory aspect but I think you also asking about the how the infrastructure around the building the legal Frameworks for companies works and looks like uh and I think that what is interesting that this is critical for our existence uh but uh it the legal professionals were much later uh joined much later the community than developers uh and uh you can speculate why is that but definitely there is still a massive need for the good lawyers uh in the industry that understand the values that stand behind web free and also want to get to the same goals that we do it's quite surprising to me because when you look at the um when you look at it from first principle um legal part and uh like lawyers and and and developers they do think alike in terms of being you know following the protocol and being very much in the system and smart contracts are virtually contracts so it's uh uh they have a lot in common I think they should explore that more um but I want to wrap that up with um getting to getting to Simon Simon graph is sort of like the Google of um web free at the moment it's just like it's measuring um everything that can be measured and I think it's eternally going to be infrastructure it cannot be infrastructure Centric or user Centric it's just uh it just measures um uh everything that we can see on and on web free so um I think it has to stay on that INF structure side but there's an there's an opening towards being more um user focused and user friendly okay that's a very very interesting question um yeah for sure like the graph is an infrastructure protocol and um and as an infrastructure protocol it it it does like it provides value but in a very abstract way I would say like the value creation that the graph is providing is uh aimed towards um dep Developers and so it is it is in that space of like um the graph by itself cannot directly provide value at the moment to um you know to average average users who do not understand how to formulate the graph Quil query or something like that although there are people that are playing around with this idea of like buzzword again using machine learning or chat GPT so you can go maybe somewhere and say like oh I don't I want to compare the tvl from a versus maker da and then boom a graphical query will be created and then shows you that in a in a in a nice um chart actually there very hackerone projects for the hackers around here um that explored this already and it's something that's very cool um but that being said this application that I just described is something built on top of the graph um and I would say that I think that's actually okay and uh but like to your question from before like do we need more infrastructure do we need more uh kind of user user application my personal opinion is we kind of have uh a lot of infrastructure right now at our disposal um so for example for a very long time people always said like oh it's it's a very complicated experience to get into web 3 you need to have a wallet you need to hold your private key secure um you need to then then buy some eth or whatever tokens to pay for gas and so on so forth but like recently I saw like a lot of new um applications popping up that were very very smooth user experiences like this um on Layer Two with account abstraction uh there were pay masters you don't even need to pay for the transactions immediately um there was no need to make the private key secure or like the seat because like with account abstraction Twitter login stuff work kind of these smooth experiences I think we are now really at that tip where this is first time possible in the history of web 3 and so I'm very positive that um that more and more people will experiment with this and go more with that lens of this user focus of like how what was what would be a cool app that a user would like to use like average user powered by web 3 without exposing them to the complexities of web 3 um and that will be powered by the graph that will be powered by oracles that will be powered by RV to a certain degree or like and these all uh sit in there and I and I'm really looking forward to to play around with more of these apps or tabs That's What I Call this um sort of minimal viable State um that the situation where it's already relatively easy to use crypto at that point it's not it's still not easy I mean it's try just having like a a bakery sale at your company and ask people to pay $5 for a cake using crypto and you'll see that crypto is still not easy to easy to use but it's much easier than it had than it used to be 5 years ago and this is all because we focused a lot on that infrastructure we uh got the scalability to a whole new level um the frut on ethereum right now it's it's just uncomparable to what we've experienced um a few years ago right now we can build many more products many more complex Financial products on top of on top of crypto you have you're opening yourself to not just um Finance free but you're opening yourself to um creators to Gamers we're getting more and more new communities um brought into that just because that infrastructure it's much more welcoming this these days and um I want to skip one question and get to the cherry on top right away so the uh what can we build on top of what we have already and we're going to follow up with hackaton um tomorrow so all the good hackaton ideas let's try to drop them here if you had you know a magical one and you would like your product to be fully used utilized to the to the brim what would be the perfect product built on top of that even if you know some elements are still uh Missing uh even if you know not everything is figured out on the legal site would be the perfect utilization of what you guys have built I'm not pointing to a to a f person I'm I'm looking for a volunteer this time around it's not so easy coming up with use cases I I have an idea okay like I have I have a puff so um so uh there is this idea that that recently develops a little bit outside of the graph that includes actually oracles and also RV um and it goes into the direction of um so let's say let's say someone wants to create wants to build a risk protocol to ensure onchain for a festival if it rains or not right um so that's that's a heavy That's Heavy question Al like an oracle heavy question how does the blockchain know if it actually rained or not um and then the solution might be something like oh we have like very independent uh sensors in in that area like that are by run by independent people that they all upload like regularly all their data to RV about like what do they currently see and then there is a subgraph uh checking or downloading that data from RV and creating an aggregation on top of that and that can then compute like the likeliness if it rained or not and then store it f Oracle back on chain to feed into the the contract that finally decides if it rained or not and according to that I will distribute the money or not course so we're leaning towards um a mixture of um oracles lots of prediction markets there our building Finance on top of that and then refilling all of that cool that's good I think a lot of festivals could get that insurance I love how you asking us to fix 10 years problem on the spot on the stage uh there is a reason you have a speaking slot on infrastructure panel so um I think what's uh to just to set a stage I think it's what's important to understand is that a lot of those very nice use cases that we are looking uh to real to realize and to happen uh so for example crypto becoming the money so us paying of the digital assets uh interacting with interacting with this using this money with smart contract sending uh uh the crypto to one to each other uh and many others uh uh Solutions are use cases they require a very strong social graph on crypto so in in the sense that they require a network of users that all are already um on the chain and um the uh challenge there is that uh how to get those users on chain when there is no much value in using those uh Services because they offer only a Slimmer of value for them and the hardle that they need to uh jump over is very big uh and it's getting better now from every day uh so I think that the solutions that we should look for sry the use cases that are we should look for that will adopted are those that produce a lot of value for the user today without pre-existing network of users uh and uh uh that's hard uh and uh but I you know like I still I'm very much fascinated by the um use cases of defi uh because just let's think about the yell gener generation uh it offers something that is not possible um on the traditional markets uh and that it's something uh that for many people are not available today and uh what I mean by that is think about um so okay so let me let let me uh do this in full sentence so um in western words we are used to the good money and the uh high quality uh uh currency that is stable and the inflation is not high but in many uh countries that are outside of our uh our sphere uh in South America in um Eastern um Eastern Asia this is not true uh a lot of those governments are um uh using um are extorting money from their citizens and this causes and also impose Capital controls and that makes the uh very hard to get to the stable currency for them and uh what is what we seeing is that in those um uh in in in this for example South South America people gravitates toward crypto to get exposed to stable currency and this is the value that they get from day one without having the big network uh around around them I think that's the use case we can already see in uh remittance platforms um but still when you talk to a platform doing remittance when um you ask them hey what's your problem they're going to say there's no infrastructure to support what we're doing crypto is perfectly fit for that but something doesn't allow us to um uh withdraw money or something like that just because the infrastructure is still not there also because the infrastructure is built from here it's built with that Western um philosophy in mind so sometimes we're skipping uh over certain things over certain basic things to go to something more advanced because we take the basic things for granted and that's not always the the case sometimes that infrastr that infrastructure is just it's happening but maybe it's not always happening on the right um it's not happening in the right place maybe we need to refocus what we're doing somewhere else to bring more value in and then focus on some on on the things that you know we find like super interesting in the in the end I think that's one of the uh typical ways how this uh how we fail from time to time we build Tech to build Tech not for the users yeah that's that's what I what I meant with the infrastr uh being infrastructure Centric yeah so and I don't know how many are familiar with r weave but one of the primary use cases for R weave because it's permanent decentralized storage and you pay for the storage up front so you pay and you're guaranteed to have that data stored for at least 20 years and there's an endowment model which the cost of storage goes down over time so literally the math works out that you put data on R weave and it's stored forever um uh a common meme in the rwe community is the Library of Alexandria so being able to store knowledge and have a guarantee that it's not going to go away it's not going to burn down um is a very important use case and we have several applications that that do that but the the other side is to make it easier for anyone to put data on R we that there is no um controls that that that it is so simple to upload data um and uh we have several applications that that do that but um that's kind of a a core use case and and then the second one is uh what we call the Perma web and I'll be speaking about that but just a permanent internet so anything that you publish online or anything that you work with online if you use the Perma web it's not going to go away so good thing that we did not have it in the '90s because then you would have to see all my awful websites still today so but um but yeah those are things that that I think are um kind of unique and interesting to to R we I like two things that from from what you mentioned I like the fact that you mentioned um certainty and just having confidence and I think infrastructure is about providing you with that confidence the confidence that your um that your your data will remain on uh on the web that uh you will access you will have access to that data that you will be able to onboard yourself to to crypto and that you will be that the data that you pull from from there will be true um so all of that comes back to infrastructure and being that source of confidence in the in the space s source of confidence to build on top of that and the second thing that that CAU my attention was the per web and I read a bit about uh about that but that's a readymade use case already um and that's built on top of R weave um um on top of our we um Network and it's um I I marked that as um monetizing bookmarks but that's just my interpretation of that so we would love to hear a bit more about this uh sure so um R weave is kind of the storage system and then uh there's uh smart weave which is its contract system so the execution layer um warp um and Redstone are are building tools for that that have tools that work today and and then there's uh another component called uh bundler and bundler network uh allows to feed a large amount of data in at 50,000 transactions per second um so when you put all of those together along with a Gateway which is a gateway is a um operated node that basically distributes the data as uh web content so if you store text and you say that content is HTM the Gateway will render that HTML just like a traditional web server would you you put those together and now you have a full web 3 platform that you can publish your your data that users want to use and access you can publish the application source code that can be run and you can publish smart contracts that can execute um uh business rules on the platform and as a result we've built these protocols like the stamp protocol which allows you to stamp any content on R weave and we also have a universal data license so what's important with creators is when they put their content in web 3 that they identify the rights so so you have real world rights that are legally um enforcable and then uh finally we have what we call Atomic assets which are very similar to nfts where you can tokenize your data and trade using um an exchange a decentralized exchange so so we uh really the Perma web is very much as you said but but it but it is something we envision engaging the Creator economy so that they can put their data and have confidence that it's not going to go away and have confidence that there's proof of ownership and have confidence of the ability to trade and license in in a in a way that they have a little bit more control cool um accidentally there uh the way that you guys sitting is is is is quite fitting to um the type of products that you're building uh so Nick and and and um um Simon you're more building for Builders and shck and and Tom you're more building for users in the end um even though there are cases where uh it it goes a bit differently and I know that there are learnings to be taken from every sort of side of the um of the road here so when you're building for Builders you want um uh you want them to use that application in the right way to maximize the usage of your application when you're building for users you would wish that the builders who have created the tools that you're using to took your users into consideration and I don't think that there's a lot of platform to exchange uh feedback about that because I know that we've been uh had some cases we like oh damn is why is this build this way this is so developer Centric no one's going to understand that so I wanted to spend a bit more time trying to get to that Common Ground here trying to find some joint principles in um in good design behind infrastructure how can we build products so that they will um be as usable to as many people as possible I think one thing that we already started on um previously was that sometimes our focus is not placed correctly sometimes we're not focusing on the things that will have the biggest benefit to to um to like broad population um but I I'm sure there's more of of uh more of that and I want to sort of surprise put Simon on the stage to start with that um yeah I think the it's very important to to solve a problem and I think people very more often than not kind of Choke a little bit about us in general and say like oh these crypto people they they are still searching for a for a for a problem with their solution right um and it's kind of it might be a interesting critique that we should reflect on from time to time um because it's kind it's kind of true but on the other hand side I would say um this these crazy Innovations like the zero to one innovations that we saw with blockchain technology like let's say Bitcoin was not created in in this traditional way of like oh Satoshi went there and created a user research and then the made a group like so how do you so how do you want the financial system then and then maybe with a survey it it's very technology driven so I think that's kind of the tension and a little bit the problem so on one hand side like the te the techn the crazy technological innovations they are they're not they're not very user usage driven and then we we try to later on find that act actual usage whereas and then I think that kind of distracts a lot of people of like ah we don't need to talk to users we just creating this Innovative things things but on the other hand side I would say like out of 10,000 Innovations only one is that kind of a breakthrough as as blockchain technology by itself so and then for all the others like it's very very important to to listen to the users and it's regardless if the users are kind of like developers or the users are um I don't know another user group it's always the same like we need to listen to them understand their problem and then see how we can use our technology our infrastructure to solve their problems um and the graph kind of in my opinion made that very in a very good thing um I was not part of the team back then but kind of on the user side and we really had that problem of like oh we want to display data that's on the blockchain historic data we want to draw charts of token prices or tvl development or whatsoever and that was just not possible in a decentralized way and then the graph really solved that problem and that's why I think like that's that's very cool and I assume like for every um everybody that sits here right now can have like this one use case that it's it's really a great solution the protocol that that we are building the desire to over engineer uh in some cases is is strong in that Community but I think it's also good to look at the other end of the spectrum so all of the scammy projects are shouting that we're going to get you 1 million in a month and something it's the the the the other end of the spectrum it's just looking at the ultimate cons consumer value which is I want to get rich and totally ignoring the underlying teag at not really putting any parts of blockchain into that I don't think we talk about that part because we push them totally aside they're they're very much a separate part of uh blockchain Community to what we're building here but it's good to know that it's not it's not just you know the developers that are being overly um heal about their Tech is the other side is doing that that um theant is doing that um as well so um I I think it's not necessarily that like developers of infrastructure are like oblivious to you know all of these like Grand use cases it's more just the kind of sober acknowledgement right that uh well what are people willing to pay me for today so that we can like survive and uh you know how I mentioned right earlier right oracles get pigeon holes I have some amazing ideas of like real like problems that we can solve where oracles are like a critical component of this but then in defi someone just comes up and like hey I need a price Oracle for BTC and you're like and and I'm willing to pay you for it and you're just like oh well great cool we'll we'll definitely sell you that right so like on the on the more macro scale right like what are blockchains good at I mean there are credibly neutral platforms for Building Systems on top of where parties can interact with each other in a deterministic type of way and that lends itself really well to uh systems engineering right which maybe you kind of think more of as like infrastructure and the complexity of it right doesn't necessarily lend itself very well to like direct to Consumer um but I don't think that doesn't necessarily mean that we can't solve like those types of bigger problems I think it's just um benefiting real people with crypto where they don't even know that they're using crypto so like one of the things that I I think would have a profound impact on the world is right now we have all of these different Curren currencies and uh let's say you have some dollars or Euros in a bank account and you go on vacation and they have a different currency and now you want to spend some money right you're in Poland and you have zotti and uh uh now you know your credit card company or your bank is charging you some insane fees right which are percentages of the transaction right and like for an individual transaction you know maybe we don't notice it but when you think of all of the economic activity that happens in the world which is like trillions of dollars annually I mean this is just like uh these are just parasites right and there's no reason that like you really need this like I I think one of the things that blockchains lend themselves really well to is the uh globalized like accumulation of liquidity and right now we have like regionalized liquidity right where it's like oh the New York Stock Exchange has liquidity for like some set of stocks right the London Stock Exchange and you know we have in Shanghai we have another one right crypto is not like that crypto is just like you I'll pee into a pool I I'll pee into a pool you I'll pee into a pool we make like a little LP milkshake and it's a global like liquidity pool that anyone can access um when we can get people to the stage right where you know I I I think nosis pay is kind of or nois in general is going in this direction right like they have this uh nosis pay kind of product that they just released right and uh there's this stable coin right monium right which is a europc stable coin and uh you can have like say usdc or die in your nosis safe and like spend Euros on this uh nosis pay card right and in the back end right it's basically just going through an onchain liquidity pool right where you're getting the realtime exchange rate of monium Euro backed stable coins you know you know to usdc or to die right and avoiding this whole like Bank just charging you a 3% convenience fee thank you very much right and these these types of solving these problems like you know it's not necessarily very sexy like I I think it's like super cool right but it can have a profound impact on the world right uh especially when we start looking into like what the developing world is what kind of rates they're paying with respect remittances yeah right I very much like the topic of gnosis pay because for me this is a perfect case of a a use case that was enabled by the growth of infrastructure because if you look a few years back there was a company called monolith they did the exact same thing but they did that in a moment when ethereum was not scalable at all it was impossible to get money in and out the fees were tremendous not just on the on on the transactions but also on going in and out and right now a couple years later uh we can actually do the thing that was way too difficult to use a few years back so that's a massive success for infrastructure and I don't think it gets enough attention outside of the the the the community um but I think it's like a massive win for the for the infrastructure it's not just the work of diagnosis team it's everything else that contributed to the fact that right now we're much more scalable much cheaper much more efficient we know much more about how to deal with banks how to make the transactions work and it's just a different uh level at which we're operating at the moment so it's like a massive infrastructure win I still have a few more minutes before we uh go towards the question question round so um I just have one last question for you guys and let's make it a fun anecdote um so um there's a saying that you know bad infrastructure can kill a use case it I if it's not a saying I made it a saying um I would love for you to give me an anecdote from your uh bonus points if it's personal history of bad infrastructure that killed the use case something uh maybe some uh good and bad development from your from your team something that gave you some awesome learnings about how to build products in the future bonus points if it's from your teams doesn't have to be it can be like you know General crypto okay so uh challenge accepted uh we started Trump uh uh six years ago uh and we started rum with Shimon who's sitting there uh because uh we were trying to do another uh startup uh we working for someone else and we were trying to do a decentralized landing Network very sexy very interesting very fascinating uh stuff but it was was impossible because there was no un ramping services so we tried to so we started decided to build something to solve it so we started to build something that would uh let users access crypto by uh buying and selling uh crypto easily and uh we said yay so this is the very nice uh very nice problem to solve but let's just Sparkle it a bit and add uh to it more infrastructure work uh let's uh take a even more harder challenge than than just solving this one small problem and we we thought okay so maybe we can build an onra that is decentralized trustless open transparent uh uh uh like that we have many stakeholders that we that the fees are low uh that we rely on the new uh type of access to the traditional fin Financial system I think it also did um like it allowed uh liquidity providers to earn interest on top of that so basically it did back flips yes so we started to like oh so we have this uh we have this one single problem which is I want to get € 100 of crypto on my wallet uh to use it somewhere else and when we when we were thinking like okay so maybe we can just instead of solving this one problem because it's like too simple let's do it in all those other ways and uh I would say that I don't know if the right word is wasted but we spend on this two years of our of our life uh and trying to push into this direction trying to solve all those different issues uh and over conceptualize con conceptualized uh and buil too much infrastructure and it was impossible to maintain it worked but and it was something that was like very interesting achievement from the engineering standpoint uh but uh it was too hard to use for the users and it was too hard to maintain and we had uh raving reviews but just few of them um and uh it basically uh maybe not killed the use case but it uh very much slowed down of the of the of of the of our progress and uh we only like we started to have more Commercial Success only when we decided to scale down our Ambitions and focus on the only one problem that is actually uh out there which is how to move crypto from web money from Web Two to web three in easy and smart way I think it's a good example of um taking um a a different approach to something and then pivoting once it just makes more once it started to make more sense that that it's just one crucial part of a piece of infrastructure that is missing that needs to be delivered before all of uh those other problems are are solved um amazing uh thanks P bonus points for a personal story there um cool guys I think we still have um a bit of time for um for questions I can see absolutely nothing uh but if there are any questions I think Robert will um spot them in the background in the meantime guys any more stories from your uh past any more failed projects that turned into successes yeah I have one but it's a little bit uh it's a little bit a a very technical problem that we had like uh before before I joined crypto or web 3 um I tried to do traditional startup stuff and so I know for the engineers amongst us you you might remember this service is still around called Heroku um where to host web or like host the whole server and website stuff and it was very convenient back in the days um to just click and in a Marketplace to get different apis that power that powered in a modern website like authentification and um databases caching and storage layers and everything it's just there can click on and go into subscription with all of these providers which was very cool initially to kind of very quick start to ship um build on top of them but then like over the time it really became a headache pretty quickly because all of these centralized API providers they said oh we updated our API now a little bit we have this feature but we deprecate also these other features and so I had maybe 10 of these providers and all of them like and every week or month like they they started to make these updates and and at some point I was just like more less not shipping new features anymore but only just kind of investing so much time to keep my own stuff just just running because they were kind of um haunting me to do this um that was very a yeah this was a bad experience um that's why I really also like this idea of the Perma web or or also what the graph a little bit says of these Unstoppable applications or Unstoppable apis that like as soon as like a developer signs up to something like to have that guarantee that this thing just runs like also with with the blockchain um yeah so that's the learning go for open apis and uh open systems I think being able to um get to that point where you can provide unstoppables for your users is a massive massive achievement especially given slas and crypto are not a thing just yet ni do you have do you have a different standpoint on slas and crypto how do you approach that with the conic call so I I I think oracles is probably like the easiest one um in in this respect right because what happens if you choose the wrong Oracle well like oracles are kind of like the killes heal of your protocol like uh something happens to your Oracle like you just blow up like you you die um if you look at like half of the exploits that happen uh when like a protocol gets like drained it's usually some kind of like Oracle manipulation type of exploit right and like uh I remember in what was it like 2017 or 2018 right the uh people were like well why do I need to use like you know an oracle Oracle why don't I just use a DEX as an Oracle and everyone's like oh I'm just going to use Unis swap right and uh then you know you could just take out a flash loan manipulate the price on Unis Swap and then go and drain whatever protocol was using you know uh Unis swap as an oracle right and this is kind of what happened to uh to bzx actually like uh I think they were one of the first like major ones to get hit bzx was a lending protocol kind of very similar to uh to a and and compound um so I think they were like one of like the three big ones at the time there was like compound bzx and like another one from India called like newo or something that uh um and anyway so they they got like pwned by this exploit and then they like said the next day they're like okay we fixed the exploit and then the day after that they got hit by the same exploit all over again uh so that was interesting I think they're called like UK da uh now they did like a rename um but but you know I'm not trying to pick on them in particular right this is just like endemic right uh you know we saw the same thing happened with Rari Finance right Rari grew to be a quite substantial lender right um and a lot of their pools right were powered by you know Unis swap oracles which you know were easy to manipulate and uh uh now that we're on proof of stake right are even more easy to manipulate because uh you don't even need to uh you just need to wait until as a validator you propose two blocks back to back and now no one can even like front run you to like take your money that used as capital to manipulate the pool in the first place right the you as a validator you propose right what transactions are or are not included in the block so in one block you can you know totally unbalance the pool and in the next next block right you can like after you've done your exploit you can like rebalance it and get all of your money back um so yeah there's a there's definitely penalties to uh there's a proven history track record of penalties when it comes to choosing the wrong Oracle right and uh that that's reflective of like other pieces of infrastructure as well but I think oracles are like the easiest one to kind of like uh convey this this story in that case uh bad infrastructure can actually kill your product if you choose the the wrong wrong one it's just going to wipe you uh totally out of the stage Robert do we have we do okay go on um so simple question you can just give one word answer and I would like everyone of you to respond including Paulina which is one consumer grade app um that is almost an offense that it doesn't exist because the entire infrastructure uh for it to exist uh is already there and it is a no-brainer to build I think I think we had it remittances I think remittances are are ripe um especially because yeah money transfer now got much better much much easier um but I think the crucial part with remittances is um like when I would say when people receive money on chain then like the question that they say usually is like so how can I eat now with this thing that I have my phone and then um so that's where I think um entrepreneurship comes in um I heard of one guy that works in in I think in a Caribbean island or something like that and then they said like okay the big problem is like how to bring money from chain back into the meat space or meat world but and then they partnered up with uh supermarkets or like smaller markets so people literally can go there now with their phone and say like hey I have this QR code they scan the QR code and then there is cash in the in the supermarket like I was like wow okay this is super smart like you don't need to have a bank but you need to have a smartphone and supermarkets to just get your money I like the concept of of including also uh sort of like point of sale um devices there sometimes it's uh sometimes you're not going to go to a bank to withdraw cash you're not going to go to ATM but you can do that with someone who's going to be acting as the sort of point of sale and I think when you look at remittance you can actually relatively easily Implement that um um that as well and that could help with um just liquidity in the markets where local currencies are not that stable um but personally I would add to one killer app I would add something that um uh something kind of like FR Tech but not in the way that they did that because it's sort of kind it's it's kind of weird um but uh being able to monetize your your influence in a more decentralized way and make it more traceable and more um accountable so something like FR Tech when you can sort of keep score and so on um uh but maybe not as gambling looking as it as it is I think it's something that uh lend is effectively leaning towards um building social media on chain I think for for the current crowd that would be super useful and I think it would also give more account accountability like demand more accountability from current influencers who are very much unchecked and unchallenged and that's massive massive Market that we're sort of ignoring because it looks silly and that's something that could very much uh benefit from having that crypto component underneath that small scale Dynamic automated insurance for small use cases um there's a lot of risk especially when you travel uh around the world and think about something that revolute was trying to implement which was like automated medical insurance in every country that we are moving to and they uh discontinued the product product and this could be done if we have the enough infrastructure from uh from my perspective there's several but one that um resonates because we were kind of talking about it earlier is um so so rwe's permanent data uh there's 1.2 terabyte in growing tremendously but a search engine that is able to use the graph and use the indexes of R weave plus the stamp protocol to determine because stamps are human provable likes so you can use that as a kind of page rank so that you can get really good search results are really good machine learning AI results as well so a search engine for for web 3 I think we're good thanks everybody lots of good ideas for the Hacked done thank you so much for joining me on the panel and thanks everybody who tuned in on the on the audience and uh we'll see you around later