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The Digital Executive
Building the Forever Web: Decentralized Data Storage with Founder Philip Mataras | Ep 1035
00:16:53
In this episode of The Digital Executive, Philip Mataras, founder and CEO of AR.IO, discusses his journey from enterprise IT to blockchain entrepreneurship and how AR.IO is pioneering the future of decentralized, permanent cloud storage.
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Philip Matara. Philip Matara is the founder and CEO of Rio, the first permanent cloud network offering a groundbreaking suite of decentralized web services designed to transform how we store, share and manage data online. Under Philip's leadership, Rio has harnessed the unique capabilities of the Arweave permaweb, delivering an immutable, province driven and economically sustainable model for businesses and individuals seeking unparalleled reliability and security. Unlike traditional cloud infrastructure, Rio's approach combines decentralized storage, access, domain services and hosting solutions, empowering users with transparent fail proof and efficient data management capabilities. With a professional background steeped in emerging technologies, Philip has always been driven by a passion for innovation and a commitment to reshaping digital ecosystems for the better. His vision for a more open, trustworthy Internet has guided him to champion the immersed potential of blockchain based tools, open source collaboration and user centric design. Well, good afternoon Phil. Welcome to the show.
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A
Hey, good afternoon Brian. Pleasure to be here.
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B
Absolutely, brother. I appreciate you making the time and today we get to talk a little bit about blockchain anyway and the Rio network. So let me jump right into your first question, Phil, if you don't mind, could you share the journey that led you to found Rio Network and your vision for the company's role in the future of data storage?
- [01:40]
A
Yeah, I could definitely talk about my journey. It's been maybe, gosh, coming up to five years now being a founder and entrepreneur and you know, looking at my background, I was in enterprise it, working at a big four company doing enterprise architecture, solution architecture, a lot of things in the cloud and on premises and a lot of system design and infrastructure design. And maybe in gosh, I think it was 2017 or so, I had gotten the blockchain bug, you know, the decentralization bug went down the rabbit hole. It was Ethereum specifically that caught my eye, this concept of like a world computer. I was like, wow, that's, that's pretty cool. And you know, no one could control it and all of those properties of a blockchain. And in early 2018 I had discovered Arweave, which is a blockchain built for storing data permanently. And it had this concept of pay one store forever. And that's really what got me hooked. I was like, wow, that's you know, very different than every other kind of subscription based storage platform. So kind of the years went by. In 2020, you know, coronavirus hit and in those years between 2017 and 2020, I like, really went deep in the Arweave ecosystem. I became part of a dao. I, of course, learned more about Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, all of those things. And yeah, summer 2020 is when I was like, hey, time for change. Time to really become an entrepreneur. And I started with this idea or this app called R Drive, which was a very simple, easy to use Dropbox like app, but stored your data permanently on Arweave, whether public or private. So really simple to explain, like my mom could use it, which is very different than my career, right, which was difficult to understand, you know, enterprise IT stuff. So I really wanted to do something that was retail, consumer focused. And yeah, summer 2020 is when I quit my job and, you know, I was part of an incubator in the Arweave ecosystem and received some very small angel funding to continue to work on the app. And it was really in, maybe it was late 2021, the NFT craze had, you know, really taken off in that summer and Arweave had seen a huge explosion in growth and, and even though R Drive was successful and we were getting uptake in usage and deploying all kinds of new things there, we saw a bigger opportunity on the infrastructure side on Arweave. And that was because even though the Arweave network itself, the hard drive that's replicating the data around the world, even though that was decentralized and had a strong distribution of nodes, there was only one access point to get your data in and out. And we saw an opportunity there to basically take that single access point or that gateway and turn it into a decentralized network of cloud services that upload your data, download them, download it, cache it, provide an index, querying, a domain name system, you know, a lot of these things that you would typically see maybe in an aws. And, you know, that idea kind of turned into the Rio network. And yeah, it's been a long road. We just launched our mainnet a few weeks ago. So it's. It's been quite the journey over the last four years going from our drive to reo. And it kind of came back around and went from something that was like retail, easy to explain R Drive app to REO network cloud services. Definitely more technical, developer focused, but yeah, platform that could support the next generation of apps on the Internet. And yeah, really excited about it these days.
- [04:58]
B
That's awesome. Thank you, I appreciate that. And I love the backstory. Usually there's a backstory in the first Question. But your technology background probably influenced where you went. You got bit by that bug to get into web3 blockchain, which is awesome. But I really like the big idea, really, that single access point that you saw that there was definitely a need there and turn that into, you know, like you said, a full service of cloud services. So I appreciate that. And Phil, can you explain how Rio leverages Arweave's technology to provide decentralized permanent data storage and what advantages this offers to users?
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A
So I called Arweave before, like the hard drive. So it stores your data for incredibly long periods of time and you know, no one can censor or take that down. It doesn't require any other payments for it. Right. So all of our services are built on top of that kind of basic primitive. So for example, if you upload data through our network, we distribute it onto the Arweave network. Anything that we index is indexed off of the Arweave network. So that enables developers or apps like ArchDrive for that matter, to easily be able to find your data on this hard drive. We have a name system that allows you to purchase domain names for any of the data that exists on Arweave. If you've uploaded, whether it's, you know, something simple like a PDF or a movie or a full website or app, our name system can map a friendly name to that. Just like how you wouldn't go to an IP address in your browser. In this case you go to a friendly name like maybe Brian and it goes to your blog that's hosted on the REO network. And all of those names, that registry is stored permanently on Arweave. The registry of gateways in the network is stored permanently on Arweave. So whether it's the services that you as a developer could use, all kind of settles that data on Arweave immutably and permanently or the way that the network functions itself like the inner core protocols of the network also leverage Arweave. So it's very, very synergistic relationship. We're really focused on that permanent data storage and all the things around it. Right. And what advantages does that offer to users? Well, it offers that one time payment for really long term storage, really long term immutable storage that can't be changed, that has a timestamp of when you uploaded it. So it's not just maybe like a hash of data. Right. It's, you know, you uploaded it at this time. Right. And it's tamper proof and it has this record of data provenance back to you the uploader, right. Which is all goes back to your cryptographic signature. So it's. You don't get those kinds of properties with S3. And even if you did, that would be one company controlling that. Whereas Arweave is an open permissionless system. Rio network for that matter, also open source permissionless systems. So as a user, you get those things and you really get this concept of like a credible exit from any given application on the network. Right. Like our drive as an app could go away. R Drive the team, us the team building our drive, we could go away, but the ArDrive application is hosted on the Rio network. As long as Rio and Arweave are around, the ArDrive app will continue to be served. Users can still leverage the app. And let's say another app comes along, it could leverage all of that same data that's been stored through our drive. Right. Because it's on this. It's all stored on Arweave and surfaced through the Ario network. So applications can access that same. Let's call it like an immutable data lake. So users really are not locked into any given platform that's built on our network. So it gives some advantages to users. On top of the whole, yeah, you can't get deplatformed or censored. And I know that's maybe not applicable to every user. I'm not particularly worried about maybe getting deplatformed in certain places, but I know that is a thing that happens around the world. And yeah, decentralized networks in general offer those kinds of assurances to their users where they, they do, they can continue to have a voice and can continue to use the service. So yeah, kind of a lot of advantages that the network offers.
- [08:59]
B
Great, thank you, I appreciate that, Phil. I really love this. Obviously I'm in the blockchain space as well, but just for the edification here of our audience, really like the fact that everything's leveraged, indexed on Arweave, you've created that simple DNS for easy access for the end user. Doesn't matter if you're a developer or just, you know, your grandmother, for example. But truly immutable storage forever. And that's what really like about blockchain. So, Phil, the RNO token is integral to your network's ecosystem. Could you elaborate on its utility and how it incentivize participation within the Rio network?
- [09:34]
A
That's a really good question. You know, sometimes the token pieces are kind of hard to fully understand and you know, tokenomics is definitely a really difficult subject area. But we felt that our ecosystem did need a token as a unit of value for purchasing services on the network, for staking in the network and things like that. Right. So the REO token, considered a utility token. Right. There's no governance aspects, part of it. Now you can use it to purchase names in the name system, whether that's a lease or a permanent purchase where you can own forever. Those purchases go into what we call a protocol balance, which is then used to pay the gateway operators who are resolving those names, servicing them, serving the data, doing all of those things. So you buy a name, it doesn't go to a DAO or, or company, it goes to a protocol which then directly pays the people servicing the name. So it's different than maybe some other name systems out there. And that's the first service that we really launched with that has a payment, so probably more to come in that area. The network's doing a lot of different services. They all don't have direct payments in it now. But the name system was the first one we launched. So now gateways, to join the network, they do need to stake the REO token. I think it's a minimum stake of maybe 10,000 Rio tokens. And, you know, they can go beyond that stake, of course. And basically what that does is that elevates their position in the, what we call the Gateway Address Registry or the gar. So the more stake you have, the higher you are in the car and the better chance you have to participate in the observation and incentive protocols that happen basically every day. So every day a portion of that protocol balance gets distributed to the gateways who are basically doing a good job. So if you're online, if you are resolving names, then you have a chance of getting the reward for that day. There's also a delegated staking component too, right? Not every person wants to operate a gateway. So if you are a user with RIO tokens, you can delegate them to a gateway for a share in their rewards. And yeah, so these staking and kind of service fees are really the two main utilities of the token right now. And. And yeah, we hope that it incentivizes the name system. And again, there's. We have ideas, thoughts, whatever, for how to implement future incentives for some of those other services that the network's currently performing.
- [11:58]
B
Thank you, I appreciate that. That's really what I like about this is a lot of times people will, you know, build a token around that, you know, I know you built your RO token around your platform for staking, adding some value, obviously, incentivizing people to utilize and be rewarded for utilizing the system. So I appreciate that. And Phil, last question of the day. Looking ahead, what are your strategic priorities for REO in the next few years and how do you envision the evolution of decentralized permanent data storage?
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A
Huge question. Right. Every year I feel like my vision changes, especially two years ago compared to now. Stuff with AI. Right. Wasn't in the forefront. You know, maybe looking in the next year. You know, we definitely have, as I just mentioned, ideas on new kinds of incentives and new ways to use the token, whether that's for things around access or indexing or some of the other pieces of the network we want to improve, I should say we want to reduce the need to have to trust any particular gateway. So sure, there's incentives at play to ensure gateways are doing the right thing, but nodes really in any blockchain network could do the wrong thing. You want to make sure that you either have penalties or ways to verify that to ultimately protect users, I think is what we're trying to do. So, you know, we have, you know, this concept called the Wayfinder protocol, which both directs users to gateways so they don't have to know like which one to connect to, which domain name to use. All you should know is the transaction ID or that friendly name to get to your data. Right. The thought is we don't want any single reliance to any single location. So that would mean again, if your name is Brian, you shouldn't have to go to Brian, Arkansas IO or Brian Permagate IO Brian, Arkansas xyz. Just put in your browser, Brian. Right. And this protocol routes you to the most performant gateway and does other verification of what's being served. Right. And now this goes back to. There's a hack recently of, I think it was one of the exchanges and basically I think the team signed some bad transactions because they went to a web app that had a hacked version. So we think tools like this and paired with the fact that on the REO network all of the data is immutable and hashed and can be verified, I think could really provide more protections for people on the web. We have other. Yeah. Thoughts around just adoption in general. Right. It's not necessarily all about building new technology versus using existing technology. So now that we've launched our mainnet, we're going to be trying to do things to inspire new developers, builders, teams to leverage our name system and in our network, et cetera, for building new applications and platforms. Because really the long term, long term Vision is to just create. I guess now this is more 3, 5. Who knows how many years to get here, Brian. But to create basically an Internet that doesn't forget a permanent web that is immutable, that has that every piece of content is timestamped and tamper proof and has this rich set of metadata underneath it that you can kind of map build these different graphs over time. And AI could leverage it to learn whether it's leveraging the data that's been uploaded or the LLMs that have been uploaded, or any of the other inferences related to AI. We see it as a place for users to maintain their free speech on the Internet. Right. Like you look at what's happening today, things are getting deleted, whether on purpose or by accident. And you know, we're losing history, we're losing part of our society. And if you go far back, you know, early 1900s, right. Like you see what happens when we really get to this point of, you know, serious destruction of information and what that could do. So we really see like our platform and decentralized technology in general as really being a way to create, in our case, a new Internet or a synergistic Internet that, yeah, preserves free speech, preserves data and ensures, yeah, your stuff just doesn't go away. So that's kind of, yeah, the grand scheme, I guess, or the. Where we see this maybe evolving on the real long term.
- [16:06]
B
Great, thank you, Phil. I appreciate that. And yeah, I think everybody acknowledges that there's just been a lot going on over multiple decades in not just our government, but across the world and having a permanent record, as they say. Right. But I like the fact that you're focusing on ensuring that we can create this forever web, as I like to call it, and not having to rely on any particular gateway, having a more secure way to access your data without that fear of being compromised as well. So I really appreciate it. Such a great conversation today, Phil, and it was really a pleasure having you on and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [16:42]
A
Definitely, Brian, thank you very much. Take care.
- [16:44]
B
Bye for now.