← CRYPTO 101
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. We're excited to have everyone back here and man, we have another killer episode in the heat of this fantastic market cycle that we're in. If you can't tell, I got a little bit of, of extra pep in my step today, but how can you not when the market is performing the way that it is right now? We're not just talking about prices, we're talking about overall adoption and really any kind of performance metric that you can look at. Crypto market is just absolutely booming. So we're hyped up and of course we're going to have another awesome interview. We got Phil Mataris, he's the founder of Rio with us here today. Phil, welcome. And it's good to have you.
- [00:51]
A
Yeah, it's great to be here, Brendan. Looking forward to chat with you guys.
- [00:54]
B
Absolutely. Well, man, today we get to talk about permanent cloud networks and solutions. Along those lines. It's a really fascinating title. You know, we've had a lot of people on lately and they want to talk about the ETS and they want to talk about tokenization and stable coins. And so this is a nice mix up from that where we get back to the core of how blockchain is being used in different ways. So we're really excited for it. Before we even kick this off, can you just walk us through a little bit about yourself and what got you interested and involved in this space in the first place?
- [01:28]
A
Yeah, happy to. So, you know, my background has always been in computers and IT specifically. You know, I was an enterprise architect for a big four, you know, audit an accounting firm, you know, doing all kinds of things in the cloud on premises, building all kinds of, you know, off the shelf systems or custom. Did a lot of stuff with Microsoft. And yeah, I had kind of discovered Ethereum and bitcoin maybe in 2017, I saw that there was this Ethereum, Microsoft alliance or foundation or something and I was like, oh, that's, that's pretty interesting. And because, you know, is dealing with a lot of infrastructure was kind of, you know, one of my focus areas. I was like, hey, maybe I should take part in this, you know, world computer and get my hands on it. And you know, so I mined Ethereum for a while. I went down that, that rabbit hole. You know, I started on the utility side. I. Yeah, of course, like you, you said before on the financial aspects, you know, I went down that side too and you know, had a lot of fun, made a lot of mistakes. Right. But ultimately this Concept of, you know, distributed, permissionless, open technology really, you know, scratched so many itches. You know, I had grown up obviously most of my life on the Internet, being a millennial, and I'd seen so many technologies change, so many things come and go, links die, things go away. And this concept of a world computer really was super interesting to me. And that ultimately led me to finding Arwe, which was really this blockchain built for storing data. And that again, grew on me and really changed my whole. My whole perspective on networks and on storage and keeping things for really, really long periods of time and just flipping this whole model of subscribing for something and kind of renting your data to owning it and just paying one time. So, yeah, it's been quite a journey to ultimately get where I am now, but kind of, yeah, all kind of shifted when I really discovered blockchain and of left that previous career. And I think it was 2020 when I founded Permanent Data Solutions, which is now the company that's building the protocols and the infrastructure for this decentralized network we call rio.
- [03:49]
B
All right.
- [03:49]
C
Crypto 101 fam. After a long day of podcasting and trading these markets, you know, I need a good night's sleep. And comfort is personal for me. It's a mattress that's soft enough to sink into at the end of a long day, but supportive enough to keep my back happy in the morning. That's exactly what I get with the Avocado Green Mattress Eco organic mattress. It's their most affordable certified organic mattress without compromise. Medium, firm, with a plush organic latex and up to 1,379 individually wrapped coils that reduce motion transfer and keep your spine aligned. Every night I get world class back support. That feels just as good getting in as it does getting out, which we all know as we get older. Getting out of bed sometimes is the hardest part of the day. If you don't get a good night's sleep and your back hurts. And guys, here's the kicker. Avocado owns their own springs, wool and latex supplies. So they cut out the middleman and pass on the savings to you. You get premium certified organic quality without the premium price tag. Head to avocado green mattress.com and save up to 20% on avocado certified organic mattress. That's avocado green mattress.com for 20% off. Avocado dream of better.
- [05:00]
B
So, you know, you touched on this a little bit, but going back to like, the core mission, like, what would you say the core Mission of Rio is.
- [05:09]
A
Yeah. So, you know, the core mission that I started with way back, you know, again, when I quit my job was really to take this concept of permanent storage, you know, this kind of magical thing that Arweave Network provides. Take this permanent storage and get it into the hands of everyone. And that was like, I don't know how that just, that, that struck me like early on it was like, this is what I wanted to do. And I started that mission with a retail app called R Drive, which is this web3 Dropbox that's just super easy to use. Intuitive leverages. This network Arweave, to just store anything, store any personal, public, private data. And through that journey, we really discovered that we needed to really go beyond just making an app to get permanent storage into the hands of everyone. And we saw some opportunities on the infrastructure side of Arweave, right? Arweave is really built to store data. It's a layer one blockchain. And we saw the needs for apps like to do more than just store data, right? It had to access it really fast. It had to use an index. So if you query to find the data, it had to, you know, the application and the assets itself needed a place to be hosted. So we saw the need to really build more on top of this storage layer. And that's where, you know, this mission of getting permanent storage into the hands of everyone really turned into making, you know, this permanent cloud network, right? A decentralized infrastructure layer that really makes it easy for anyone to store, access, verify, index, query, you know, name any data on Arweave, right? Any data that is immutable and persistent and replicated around this network. And again, Arweave, it works a little bit differently than other storage platforms, right? You pay once to store your data forever. So I'm not sure, Brendan, if you've heard of Arweave before or should I? Absolutely, you have, right? So it's simple model. You pay a bunch, you know, you pay more to, to own that storage, right? For 200 plus years, it goes into a protocolized endowment and it pays the miners to replicate that data. So we built this network on top of that fundamental primitive of permanent storage and it's like AWS or Google Cloud, right? Gives developers easy tools and services for doing all kinds of things, right? Uploading your data, you know, routing it, retrieving it, querying it. Rio does all those many of those same things, right? But instead of going through a single provider, single region, location, we have a decentralized network of independent gateways or Nodes instead of those big centralized hyperscalers. Right. So now this mission of getting permanent data storage into the hands of everyone now has expanded to networks of gateway operators who are, yeah, servicing, servicing this new web, really a web that we've been calling the Perma Web, because ultimately every piece of information can't be tampered with, can't be taken down and lives forever. And I think for me again, this mission of keeping things forever, building an Internet that doesn't forget really hits me to my core because I grew up seeing pages go away. Now we're seeing governments wiping data, we're seeing companies go away and that data becoming an asset. So this mission of permanent storage really expands to just a permanent web where it's securing knowledge identities, all these different things, moving them from centralized services to these kinds of decentralized networks. So I think it's a big mission and one's been five years in the making so far, but really excited and wake up every day. Really enjoying getting it out there.
- [09:10]
B
No, absolutely. You know, this idea of using blockchain for storage is definitely something that has been built upon over the last man, I want to say like decade, half a decade now especially. It's been growing and growing for a lot of the points that you mentioned. And I want to go through a bit of a lightning round so that the audience here can understand just at a very high level what some of those corporations core quick differences are and how blockchain is not only like different, especially like AR IO or Rio and how it's different, but how it's actually in a lot of ways like I think blockchain is just flat out superior. I'm sure you would probably be, you know, biasly agree with me. Maybe we're both biased in that sense, but let's go through a bit of a lightning round here. So let's talk about, well, let's make the first metric price. Right. How does price compare? You touched on this a little bit. You know, if you're going to go and use say Google Cloud, which I want to talk about here in a little bit for different reasons, they've had some issues here lately. But we're just going to talk, you know, you know, Dropbox, Google Cloud, something like that. How does price compare?
- [10:18]
A
So the pricing depends on what service you're, you're leveraging. Right. So I mentioned storage is one of the key primitives of, of Arweave and of the Rio network and one of the building blocks that you make all of your apps on top of. Right. Maybe for AWS it's like S3, right? S3 is that building block on AWS that AWS itself makes their services on top of as well as sells it to customers. So now there's no doubt that permanent storage is a premium product, right? You could go to, I think it's prices RDrive, IO or Arfes, AR IO and you basically pay per byte, right? So it's pay as you go and pay for the amount you want. It's probably around 20 or so dollars a gigabyte. That price is set by the arweave network of miners. So it's not driven by a central Oracle or a single team that's controlling that price. It's based on the market and the miners. And now that is securing that information for 200 plus years. And that's based on what's called the Krieger effect. Basically prices of hard drives are falling, right, for various different reasons. So as long as that continues to happen, paying into this endowment should pay for that storage for a very long period of time. So now, I don't know off the top of my head what that breaking point is. If you look at something like S3, there's so many different tiers with all different access levels. That's another big thing you have to consider. It's not just storing but accessing that data. The Rio network has a free tier of access for all data and we're working through more advanced tiers where sure, if you want to consume a lot, maybe there's an additional fee that has to be paid. But for that free level of access, yeah, if you Compare it to S3's glacier, which maybe you can only access that file once a year and it takes a long time, you might have a very long break even point. If you compare it to some of like the hottest tier storage, things that are very fast, maybe the break even point is, you know, seven, 10 years, maybe a little bit longer. What we found is pricing and that, you know, if you just compare those two things in a vacuum, pretty difficult because you do get immutability, provenance, distribution, resilience on that data. So it's, you know, there's a lot of things you get on the permanent side that you don't necessarily just get from something like S3. So that's, yeah, maybe price of storage specifically. There's also things like domain names. So you can buy a domain name on the Arweave name system, which is a name system that the REO network provides. You could buy, you know, a 12 character name for I think 10 or $15. That's very comparable to, you know, typical domain names that you see now. And the renewal fees are also, you know, very small in the order magnitude of a couple dollars. You can also permanently purchase a domain name. Something like that is not even possible on, you know, current domain registrars. So I think it's, yeah, comparing prices, you have to take into account some of the benefits that you get on the decentralized side because it is more of a premium and if you don't need those other things, it's maybe harder, harder sell right on price alone. I don't know if it wasn't so lightning, but.
- [13:57]
B
No, but I, I think it was all good content and that's, you know, that's the ultimate goal here. You know, next lightning, next lightning round question. What about security? You know, security of, you know, centralized cloud storage versus decentralized and what you're working on?
- [14:14]
A
Yeah, so I think there's a couple aspects of that. So one, what we're working on is a public blockchain, right. Arweave is public by default and that's to ensure, you know, the maximal spread of that, of that information. So when it comes to privacy or security around that, that has to be implemented on the client side. So if you are an organization that really needs a tight firewall around your data and services, using a public blockchain network is just inherently more difficult. Right. Without adding other things to manage your secrets or token gate assets. So that's a huge consideration. But another big consideration is once data is stored on this network, it can't be tampered with. Right. It can't be hijacked or taken away or crypto locked and held ransom for Bitcoin or something. So that's a really important security aspect that maybe you could achieve in traditional clouds with a whole lot of other measures to support that. Right. I know I used to work at a company that had a million security requirements to protect data versus if you store that data in a place that can't ever be changed, it might actually lessen some of your, your security overhead.
- [15:42]
B
You know, speaking of security, I know that that recent Google Cloud outage at the time of people listening this, it'll probably have been, you know, maybe a month or two ago. What does that reveal about our overdependence on centralized infrastructure?
- [15:58]
A
I mean, whether it's like an outage or like 23andMe thing where, where they were, you know, they were going bankrupt and their data was all for sale, you Know, these are like, for me they're like wake up calls. I feel like they should be wake up calls for other people, right? It's not gonna be the last one, it's not gonna be the last outage, right? They happen when Google Cloud goes down, when like hyperscaler goes down, entire businesses can grind to a halt, right? Whether the business themselves is using Google or maybe they're using some other service that's using Google or AWS that, you know, that the business could, you know, effectively stop doing business or end up spending more money, right? Data could disappear, websites can go offline, payments could fail, apps might stop working. So a lot of times fallbacks aren't really built in for that. Like because it's expensive. It's expensive to build an app to work across different clouds and have that, that level of resiliency. So everyone just trusts a single provider. So it really shows you like, yeah, these single providers can have really great uptime, but it shows how fragile these centralized clouds can really be. Right? There's convenience that's associated with it, but it's convenient until it's not. And when it breaks, it really breaks hard. So we don't just need better uptime, we need better resilience. We need infrastructure that can survive outages. We need apps that are built to be able to use that infrastructure to survive those outages. That outage might even be censorship, right? That's something that, that happens at a platform and individual level. And that's really exactly why decentralized networks, blockchains, right, networks like Rio are weave. It's exactly why we're built for. So it's, you know, sure, they could be a plan B, but we're really trying to make it like it should be. Your plan A for this kind of information where it really makes sense to store it.
- [18:00]
B
Yeah, it definitely is a bit of a wake up call. And you said businesses come and they grind to a hold off this stuff. We were impacted by this. We were having calls and talking to clients and customers in our community and everything. All of us came grinding to a hold because we were trying to use a number of these different platforms that were using Google Cloud. And all of us came to a halt and we're like, we can't do anything and we're kind of powerless, you know, we can't do anything to, to fix this. And everything does just come grinding to a halt. So it is a bit of a wake up call, you know. Yet despite of that, you, I've seen you say, you know, the biggest risk isn't necessarily downtime, but it's permanent data loss. Can you explain that a little bit further And I guess what that means.
- [18:48]
A
Yeah, so you know, downtime, outages, definitely a big risk. Yeah. But that's hopefully temporary, right? Hopefully the system comes back online. Yeah, once data is gone, it's gone forever, that kind of thing. So you know, this modern cloud model, it's not built for permanence. The Internet is not really built for permanence. Sure. Some stuff that you upload or pages might stay there for a really long time or people might download or. Yeah, famous people, they put content online. It's just people are going to download it and it's permanent for maybe that perspective. But the Internet, it's more built. These cloud providers are more built for recurring revenue. So if you stop paying your bill or if your storage provider changes their terms or has one of these catastrophic failures, you know, your data could be deleted and that's kind of normal. I think you normalize that a little in Web2 and I think it's again, it's okay for some pieces of information but I think the danger is that we're treating maybe impermanent storage like it's permanent. People might just assume that those mistakes, those accidents don't happen. But you look at things like, you know, I've seen so much link rot, right. Content loss, you know, link rot in general, it's. I really botch these stats all the time. Right. But it's like 30, 40% of the Internet now is really suffering from link rot. Not just web pages but like journals, legal documents. So it's like not just content loss but like reference, the loss of referencing or you know, almost mis attributed history. Right. So I think these are kind of, these downstream effects of you know, data just getting, getting delete, deleted. Right. Assuming the cloud is kind of this archive when it's can be in some cases, but it's not in others. So again our model, we try to flip that, you pay once and it's there forever. It can't be changed. It's just a different mindset. It's a commitment to storing that information, storing who uploaded it when. Right. These timestamps that also can't be changed and you get the provenance now also that can't be changed going back to that source. So it just goes beyond high availability and data permanence. But yeah, again downtime it can come back on. But these things you just don't get when you're kind of using this current non Permanent cloud model, you know, do.
- [21:24]
B
You think that permanent data storage is economically sustainable? I know we talked about pricing and how this works on the back end, but you know, I was just thinking about that question, like how does that fit in?
- [21:39]
A
Yeah, I mean it's a huge question. Right. And it's something that we try to ensure not just the permanent data storage is sustainable, but the other services at the Rio network provides. So when you look at the economics of storing the data and this is, I think one of the benefits about Arweave is that it's hyper focused on just that, storing and replicating data. It's not, you know, there's no smart contract platform or there's no permanent and you know, and there's some temporary storage thing. It's just laser focused on that. And like what I was seeing know, before the, you know, the core team for research, the team that developed the Arweave protocol tried to be really conservative with the fees, with the amount that you pay into that endowment. So as long as hard drive costs continue to come down, that sustainability aspect should continue to hold. Now if you were to look at the price of permanent storage now, you know, it's not like the price has just, oh, it's been up here and it's just continually going down. That's because the network, obviously Arweave Network launched eight years ago. Some of the protocol has changed. Miners are still, you know, still in adoption mode. So that's one important thing to keep in mind. And again, we tried to follow that similar model with the Rio Network and for example, purchasing a permanent RNS name. Right. We wanted to make sure that paying into the ARIA network protocol endowment covers the cost of resolving and serving that name for 200 plus years. We also have leasing models. Right. We also recognize that some users might not want the permanence. Right. They might not need it. We're looking at other ways for gateway operators to also earn fees for the access side. Right. For other, you know, indexing or querying services. Because again, apps, they do more than just storage or just domain names. So we want to make sure, you know, the system is completely sustainable from the perspective doesn't need a single centralized party to sustain it or subsidize it, so on and so forth. So we still have a ways to go to make sure all of those incentives are there. But yeah, that's, you know, we want to make this real. We're not, yeah, we're not trying to fall back to just needing hyperscalers to make the thing work in the Future.
- [24:15]
B
Yeah, no, for sure. What does the regulation for this space look like? You know, in different parts of crypto? You know, I know in the past Defi has been pretty harshly regulated. Now we're starting to see that free up. But on this side of the, the, the crypto scene, what does regulation look like? You know, is the US government strict on this? Can US companies openly use this stuff as their dedicated storage? Or is that something that might be, you know, I don't know, restricted at the moment?
- [24:47]
A
Yeah, we've talked to a lot of different teams, companies in different jurisdictions. Ultimately there's still so much gray area with all this. Right. Generally speaking, US companies can use permanent storage, whether that's protocols like Arweave or Rio, especially if it's public non sensitive content. For example, Meta was leveraging the REO network's uploading services back when they were using Instagram for their NFTs. So they were taking NFTs which might have contained PII, you know, pictures of people and upload them through our layer two, you know, it's called a bundling service through our layer two service to make sure you can, you know, upload things at scale and settle them on our week. So that was a very concrete case of the US, you know, Fortune, whatever company using our network. And there have been other examples of that specifically for NFTs or audit logs or other, you know, AI related data. But yeah, as long as it can be, or as long as the company wants to store it permanently, I think it, it fits. Now I think it's important to understand that it's, it's this double edged sword though, right? Like from a compliance perspective because you can't just delete something, it's permanent. No single person miner can, can delete it. So if law changes or if the customer requests it, right. There's limited things you can do on behalf of getting the network to delete it. So again, that could be a pro, but that could also be a con. Now from the perspective of moderating content, which you could see is the same as maybe deleting. If you can't access something, is that same as it being deleted? I don't know. But you know, the Arweave network and Rio network go by this democratic content moderation system. Basically each node in the network gets to choose what they want to store or what they want to serve. The incentives for both the Rio network and the Arweave network go against you in that case. Right? Arweave, you have to prove access, that you have access to any historical data. In order to get the incentive rns you need to the network is actually observing all of the RNS names that are out there. So if you're not serving a specific name because some reason, you won't get the reward for that day. So the incentives kind of don't have any moderation. They want everything to be permanent, but each node can decide. So if you are in a jurisdiction or if you are a company running your own, your own node or gateway, you cannot serve that data out to your user base. But they can always go to a different part of the network to still get that access. So in my view, I think maybe regulation will eventually catch up. They'll catch up to the laws, maybe around this they'll catch up to the value of this immutable tamper proof layer that can store records and all kinds of information. I think government agencies are already exploring blockchains, right, for audit trails and record keeping. So I think it's only a matter of time. Right? The trend is heading in our direction. We just, I just hope that there's thoughtful enough people who are making decisions and yeah, when compliance does come, it's something that we can actually meet and make entry out.
- [28:30]
C
I'm no tech genius, but I knew if I wanted my business to crush it, I needed a website. Now, thankfully, Bluehost made it easy. I customized, optimized and monetized everything exactly how I wanted with AI. In minutes, my site was up. I couldn't believe it. The search engine tools even helped me get more site visitors. Whatever your passion project is, you can set it up with Bluehost with their 30 day money back guarantee. What do you got to lose? Head to bluehost.com that's b l u e h o s t dot com to start.
- [28:59]
A
Now think about the app you've been wanting to build. Sell something you've created, run your community, manage your business, or launch your next idea. Now imagine it's live. Before Today's over, meet base 44. The fastest way to turn any idea into a fully functional app.
- [29:15]
B
No code, no waiting.
- [29:16]
A
Just describe what you want and watch it come together. Backend design and all in minutes. A real product ready to share. From idea to live app fast. Start building today@base44.com this is the story of the 1.
- [29:32]
D
As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickranger.com or just stop buying by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [30:00]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, you make a good point. You know, this is definitely a more permanent solution which can be a double edged sword. You know, this isn't one of those things where you're like, oh man, I tweeted that out in a fit of rage or I was a little bit overexcited or maybe I was angry and you know, you can't go back and edit it. You can't go back and take it down. Now granted, this is a little bit different with data storage and stuff like that, but the same concept still applies. You got to be a little bit more careful about, about what you're putting out there. Have you had any like. I don't know if funny is not the right word, but you know, maybe like funny or just crazy stories like that where people have come to you and been like, hey man, we, we messed up, we accidentally put the wrong thing out there.
- [30:46]
A
So probably the stories I could say here, Brendan, would maybe be different than the stories I could say, you know, if we were coffee or something. Let's maybe put it this way. There's been maybe some cases of, what is it, Digital rights, Millennium act, whatever, DMCA takedown requests. Someone uploaded a mobile game. So mobile game developer, because we are running arweave. Net, we're operating it as this community good for the whole ecosystem because we're running that, you know, we're operating one of the gateways. So you know, we, we get some of these requests. So as a, you know, this old mobile RPG game, I never heard of it, but I guess someone uploaded the file. So that was interesting. There's lots of like spam websites that people, you know, try to take advantage of, I guess networks like ours to upload a fake outlook.com to try to get your password email. So you know, those. That's always interesting to see the level that people go through to scam other people. There was a case when. Let's see if I could.
- [32:02]
B
Don't get yourself in trouble here.
- [32:03]
A
Let's see if I could summarize. There was a case where someone's trying to blackmail somebody else with some in game, in video game pictures or something. And it was like, seemed like some weird social thing and social media. So like, you know, it does happen, right? And again, we're Building systems to make sure this content moderation aspect is something that's feasible for gateway operators to do. So this is not the side of the business where I was like, oh yeah, I was excited to get into this, but you know, we're dealing with freedom on cyberspace. Right. So this is obviously going to come up when people really try to see how they can use it.
- [32:41]
B
Well, yeah, you know, and here's the thing. That kind of stuff, it's going to happen in centralized. They're going to, you know, maybe people hear that and they're like, oh my goodness, guys, you know, stuff's going to happen. Whether it's centralized, decentralized, there's always going to be scenarios. But you look at this and what it's able to do and there's so many pros in comparison to the cons. There's a lot of great stuff that goes into this. You know, speaking of great stuff and kind of being a little bit more forward looking, I did see that Rio is being increasingly used more frequently when it comes to AI companies. What role do you play in supporting those efforts? Because I think a lot of people look at it and they say, oh well, they need computational power and they might look at Render and they might look at Core Weave or Akash or some of those other players or maybe just like Nvidia. Right. Or amd. What role do you all play in the process of AI?
- [33:35]
A
Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that compute is a humongous part of it, of AI. And it's kind of, again, crazy to think that we ended up in this position where we're providing, in my opinion, where permanent storage can provide this really strong foundational layer for AI infrastructure. Right. And that was not something like, I quit my job in 2020 AI, we're calling it machine learning back then. Right, Right. So I did not envision that this would be such a strong use case. Right. Because AI systems are really, they're only as good as their training data and the context that they're getting. Right. So that means the integrity of that data, the provenance of it, the accessibility of it is like super important. We can train a bunch of stuff now. Right. If we lose that context or where the data was trained from, then it's kind of hard to know, like, well, these are just answers. Right. We don't know any of the history from it. So Rio supports AI builders, I think, a few different ways maybe. Right. Whether it's for storing immutable models themselves, immutable LLMs. I've used our drive myself to just upload all different LLMs like llama3 or quinn32b. You can upload 10, 20, 30 gig files, right? So it's easy to drop LLMs on there. It's easy to now be able to take your data sets and put them on there. And now you have, you know, this kind of audit proof training data set. Whether that's synthetic or real data, any of the outputs or the audit logs or decisions that the AI makes in that process could also be stored, right? And now you end up getting kind of this censorship resistant memory for your agents or their workflows. So seeing a lot of different teams, big and small leveraging it for really the long term storage of these high value data sets or model versions, knowing that they could retrieve it and then verify that it's the same data that was uploaded previously. With our gateway network with Rio you get fast multi source access to that data not just through one single spot. I think we have 5, 600 gateways that are on the network, all providing access to, you know, indexing, querying access to, to this data. So I think that's, you know, that's really critical now because we're living in this world where you know, the source can be manipulated. AIs, they're hallucinating already. So if we don't have dependable data, I think it's, it's going to be a crazier and crazier place. So I think we're not just supporting AI use cases, we're actively building for them, but we're also not, you know, we don't consider ourselves an AI company. We've yet to like make that full pivot. I think this is just one of the many really strong use cases. But yeah, certainly embracing it and certainly trying to educate people on why, you know, immutable provenance, you know, systems like ours is just really good for safe AI development.
- [36:47]
B
You know, well beyond this, where do you see the biggest need or maybe even the most use so far? Because there are so many different use cases. You know, when we just look at flat file storage we can see this used for, you know, like you said, sites, applications, AI, oracles, blockchain, data gaming, social platforms, the list goes on. I guess this is kind of a two sided question of where do you see the biggest need for this and what is actively using this the most?
- [37:21]
A
I mean you just hit like all the biggest, maybe like sectors. I think if you look at maybe the current biggest by, excuse me, by maybe by volume in terms of like number of pieces of information uploaded. I would say it's more on the defi an Oracle's space. We have teams like Redstone that they're an Oracle for smart contracts and other defi platforms. They're settling billions of data items month over month. And then teams are leveraging this information in their smart contracts or in their systems, whether it's for pricing or other Oracle data. We have teams like Kive, they're like an archival platform that are taking other blockchains and archiving different parts of the chain or states that that chain can no longer support and fund. Right. It's more expensive for a given chain to maintain that entire history than to take, you know, a portion of it and have that settle onto arweave. So I think kind of that defi Oracle space, there's, you know, by volume I think there's, there's a lot of, of that, you know, certainly, you know, from a maybe creative work publishing, NFT aspect, I think that was always one of the earliest, bigger use cases that really stuck since I don't know, 20, really 20 20, 20, 21. Once NFTs really became a thing, permanent storage became a really critical component. Because you figure if you're an artist, if you're creating a, you know, an NFT, now you're saving that on S3 or Cloudflare and you sell all of your art and then you stop paying that bill for it. You know, now you, you've rugged your users or they can no longer access that. So really for that's been one of maybe I don't think it's gonna be the biggest use case. I don't know. You know, Brendan, your thoughts on NFTs in general, but for me being you know, musician, creative, I really love providing that place for the individual to leverage permanent storage. It goes back to the original mission, getting into the hands of everyone, getting into the hands of teams and companies is great, but I think it's really something that the individual can use for their creative work, their memories, their documentation, music to blogs to photography. I think creators want archives that can't be taken down or rebranded or go away. So that's I think a big thing for me. And we have tens of thousands of individual users leveraging the platform month over month. Yeah. Trying to think maybe the other kind of really good need again maybe going back to the individual. But it's not made for just your files. You can host sites and apps. So decentralized front ends. Maybe that's even just looking at web3 how many times do we see important web3 front ends getting taken down or people losing access to them? Those can also be stored in a resilient way and accessed through these hundreds of Rio gateways. So I think there's a really strong need for brands to have permanent sites pages, not just the data. But yeah, this is one of the things, man, it's hard. It could be used for so many things. Right. So how do you pick, how do you pick the best one?
- [40:53]
B
You're picking a favorite child, right? No, but. No but it really is fascinating and we love to see blockchain used in so many different ways. Was there anything that we missed here? Maybe any just general thoughts on this space moving forward? We've had an exciting year so far. Hopefully we have an equally as exciting one going into the second half of this year.
- [41:17]
A
And yeah, I mean like we started the call. It's definitely exciting to see, you know, some of the movements happening now, you know, in the market. I would hope, you know, as being someone who started in 2017, seen different cycles. I hope, you know, this time around people don't just follow the price, they follow like the principles. You know, we, I hope we start looking at the utilities that are provided by these different networks beyond just the typical financial ones. For me, crypto isn't about tokens or charts. I know that those are both really exciting things but it's about building systems that are better for people, that are fairer, more resilient, user owned, better than what we had before. So yeah, I hope people keep those things in mind as we get really excited at seeing Bitcoin keep going to new highs and all that stuff. And I think if we try to anchor ourselves to these questions of what happens if this protocol disappears or who's in control or what values are being brought into this software. As long as we keep thinking about those questions, then maybe we'll avoid some of these hype cycles that in my opinion don't really help the industry as much and maybe, yeah, find more projects that matter in the long term. So yeah, maybe. Hopefully people keep that in mind as we continue to see things move in the right direction.
- [42:53]
B
Certainly. Well, Phil, we appreciate you coming on here, talking to all the good people out there. Where can people follow not only what you're doing, but, but what you're doing over at Rio as well.
- [43:07]
A
Yeah, I mean you could follow me at On X yelenarios V I L E N A R iOS I think we're at Rio network, but I think we've got some underscores like a R I O underscore network. Just go to our site AR IO as well. There's tons of stuff on there. If you're a dev docs, Arkansas IO join our Discord. Really, there's so many things you can build and we would love to hear from you so please reach out.
- [43:34]
B
Well, thank you so much for coming in here and we appreciate your time.
- [43:38]
A
Thank you Brandon. Enjoy the rest of your day.
- [43:50]
B
Think about the app you've been wanting to build, sell something you've created, run.
- [43:54]
C
Your community, manage your business, or launch your next idea. Now imagine it's live before today's over, meet base 44, the fastest way to turn any idea into a fully functional app. No code, no waiting. Just describe what you want and watch it come together. Backend design and all in minutes. A real product ready to share.
- [44:15]
A
From idea to live app.
- [44:16]
C
Fast Start building today@base44.com this is the.
- [44:21]
A
Story of the one as head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming, and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support his venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [44:51]
D
This is the story of the One As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs, and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and ready, running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.