This is Epicenter episode 530 with guests Andrea Salvados and
Vijay Krishna Vanchi. Welcome to Epicenter, the show
which talks about the technologies, projects and
people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution.
I'm Frederica Ants and today I'm speaking with Andreas and Vijay,
the two Co founders of Fiverse. Fiverse is a super interesting
project that leverages in existing infrastructure that
kind of lets you use it as an on chain Google Docs sort of like
product. But we'll hear all about this in
in just a second. Before we talk with Andreas and
Vijay, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week.
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.1. Andreas and Vijay, I'm so happy
to have you on EPICENTER this week.
Same excited to hear. Hey Frederique, thank you for
having us. Very happy to be to be here.
Super cool. Tell me about yourselves.
So who are you? What's your background?
What makes you get up in the morning?
And maybe I'll start with Andreas.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks. Just one quick thing.
Also, we're honoured to be here after the celebration of the 10
years of epicentre. We watched the live stream
yesterday. It was very cool.
I can't believe it's been 10 years already.
I think I'm. I've been a listener since half
the time, Yeah. Really crazy.
Also, I was going back in the initial episodes and I saw that
even in 2014 you had you had an episode on Meme Coins with a
Canyon fish coin, which is hilarious.
You see that CT hasn't evolved that much.
So sorry, back to the question. So yes, I'm Andreas, I'm one of
the Co founders of of Favors. I am.
I'm also a PhD student. I'm finishing my PhD at the
moment at the University of Oxford.
My focus there is specifically on human control of AI systems
in hacking operation. So what we call computer network
exploitation and attack. It's something that I'm quite
passionate about and yet I see it as, you know secondary to a
lot of the work that we do at Favour's and in some sense quite
complimentary as well. So we always have great
conversations about that within the company.
Why do I wake up in the morning? So I think what drives me, is
first of all as a proper Greek kid to to buy a house for my
mother is the first answer. And the the second answer is
that. And I think this is something
quite common in the in the team, we are aggressively, maybe
naively optimistic about the impact that we can have on the
world. I hope it doesn't sound too EA
like, but we we really want to have direct impact on things
that we consider very problematic for the way people
communicate, collaborate and live together.
So most of our work is dedicated to that.
Could I come back to that in a second?
Kind of why you think these these areas are problematic?
But maybe for first, Vijay, what about you?
Who are you? Yeah, I am like mainly you can
say that out of Andres and Constantine, I fill in the tech
gap. And if you think about it from
the perspective of what do I associate with and what what is
it that excites me most. It's how can we use different
kind of technologies that exists like out there and how can we
make it fit into the users. Like you know, how can we make a
connection between the users and the tech like and how can we
bridge the gap between those two things.
So that's the like general thing which excites me for either
experimenting with different things, for building different
things and I like like in general to creates small
softwares or small things that increase either the interactions
or the efficiency in general for people that are doing things on
top of them. So yeah, I know it's sort of a
techie pitch. So you're the tech Co founder,
Vijay. Yeah, But I also heard that
there's there's not just Andreas, but there's also
Constantine. So there's three Co founders.
Tell me about Constantine. Yeah I'll I'll say the first
part you can you can complete in a VJI think you can only hear
good stuff from us about Constantine.
So he's the eldest one in the in the Co founder group.
He won't like that he's someone that's been in crypto since
around 2016. I think his his main specialty
until five of us was really doing product marketing and
getting a lot of non crypto people to get interested in
crypto. He ran the most, the most
popular by by measure of audience crypto campaign in the
world. So with The Economic Times of
India over 150 million readers and and he's someone that right
now at Favour's makes sure, makes sure that things happen.
You have Vijay and us and and me who are, you know going all over
the place generating ideas every time that we talk.
And Constantine takes all that canalizes it focuses it around
clear objectives and makes sure that you know both Vijay and I
know that you know we're we're, we're developing something
bigger than just a side project that excite us.
We're developing something that has users, that has people
depending on it. And yeah, he he's really the the
person that manages to organise the whole team, which is also
why he's the the CEO at of ours. Yeah, every company kind of
needs that sort of person. Otherwise things don't get done.
How did How did you 3 meet? Yeah.
So me and Constantine, like we worked at a crypto company for
like I think for four or five years and that's how that's
where we met. And we understood that, OK, we
are excited about common things. And one of the thing like which
and there's was saying about the the crypto campaign which
Constantine had done, like it was me and him, like we were
organizing that that thing and that's how me and Constantine
met. And like after that Constantine
introduced me to Andres and it has been like crazy story.
Maybe Andres can add on the like the moment when we shared the
POC of Fireworks first as an anecdote.
Yeah, yeah it's it's very funny. I'll, I'll reveal something on
the podcast. But I met my I met Constantine
through my mother because he's my brother.
He's he's my older brother and we were back in Christmas at
home in Greece and he tells me, hey dude, look at this and he
opens up an e-mail and it's an e-mail from VJVJ sends really
like pretty, pretty straightforward.
The POC on helping people just use APFS and things exploded.
Things exploded because we immediately thought of what we
could add with how we could develop it, how we could make it
in a proper product and then into a protocol.
And yeah, the rest is history. Super nice.
Yeah. One could say you and
Constantine go way back. Which Christmas was this, by the
way? Because it's Christmas again,
right? So how long?
How many Christmases have you worked on?
Five, Five hours now. So now it's going to be the
second. So we started in officially, we
started the work around April 2022, 2022, yeah, but the the
first POC by VJ came during Christmas 2021 towards 2022.
So yeah, we're we're closing our year and a half, reaching 2
years now. Cool.
And yes, you said earlier that despite the fact that you kind
of work in AI, kind of your largest concerns are not around
AI, they are around kind of how we collaborate or this this is
kind of like what it sounded like.
What's the thing that you're taking issue with?
OK. So there is definitely a strong
relation with the issues that I'm talking about and AI and how
we solve it at Fowler. So I'll just give you a a
general picture and then we can maybe dive in deeper into what I
mean. But it's something that both VJ,
Constantine and I noticed at the very beginning, before we even
started thinking actively about building something, which is
that there is a strong point of centralization.
The remaining point of centralization, if you want to
say it like that, in crypto, which is how people collaborate
and communicate with each other, we're a whole industry that is
ensuring that people can have computational and data integrity
in their financial transactions. We've built amazing what I like
to call community computers, those block chains, and yet
we're not leveraging them for something that is non financial,
but essential to the way that crypto evolves, which is
dissemination of public knowledge, communication, et
cetera. So this is for the crypto
specific, but it's shocking that this is a case in crypto,
because we have those values in the crypto community.
But the problem is much more general.
The problem is global. Anyone who uses the Internet
abides by a server client model. This is something that people
see as you know, the status quo today on the Internet.
But the Internet did not use to look like this even 50 years
ago. I like to use that example that
until 2010 a third of all Internet traffic was
peer-to-peer was purely BitTorrent links being shared
between individuals. And this is quite important
because we took a radical turn into something that is much more
centralized. And now the whole world depends
on three big companies for the storage of their data, the
recovery of their information. They're dependent on, you know,
an arbitrary decision made by some Google engineer in
California that had a bad day and thus decided to delete
customer's data. We're dependent on server going
down every now and then at at AWS and my Roomba cleaner are
not working anymore because of it.
So there are points of centralisations around servers,
usually based in the US, which come with a series of endemic
issues including lack of privacy, predatory models of
mining your personal data, selling it to 100 different data
brokers you have no idea even exist, manipulation of your
attention, of your mood, all those things.
So we want to take that away and redistribute it to to people.
Do do you know which proportion of Internet traffic is
peer-to-peer today? It's a very good question, I
think it's so last time I checked.
I need to remember the source as well, and it's my academic side.
I don't want to throw things without proper backing.
I don't remember exactly. I think I read something like
less than 8%. Yeah, something like that.
I can. I can specify it next time or
online. OK.
And the three Internet companies, just for the record,
they are AWS, Google, and I assume Microsoft was the third
one. Yes, yes.
Those were the companies I was thinking about.
But you know, you have some auxiliary actors that are maybe
not at the same scale but are quickly closing in and capturing
a lot of consumers into their predatory model.
Yeah. Why do you think this
consolidation of the market has happened?
So this is a great question. I'll be I'll be honest, even if
it if it sounds like it's something that would limit
people from even looking at Fowers, which is UX for me.
This is where it starts and ends.
This is something that's the main focus of our team at
Fowers. We want to improve the UX of
people collaborating, coordinating online.
I think the reason why those companies reach that level of
quasi monopoly is because they offered users the ability to
abstract away a lot of the complexities that were involved
in, let's say, e-mail protocols. Google comes in, tells everyone,
hey, PGP is cool, Your e-mail protocol using Thunderbird is is
cool, but you need to specify a million different things.
You need to be aware of spam. You need to be aware of all
those things. How about we take it all away
for you? We also give you a way to
recover your information that is not just dependent on you losing
your password or not. We automatically take care of
the server and give you guarantees even if you don't pay
our server. So amazing UXA, they just made
something that was revolutionary into something that is
revolutionary and easy to adopt. And we like to use that analogy
at fibers because we're taking something that is already
revolutionary. Block chains, smart contracts,
But we're trying to make them into something revolutionary for
everyone else in the world, my grandparents included.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
So I'm totally with you. That user experience is, is
currently not what it should be for web three products and we'll
get into that in just a bit, but kind of spell it out for us a
bit more. So kind of Google offers this
amazing user experience. So kind of like a fully wide
glove service for kind of like reading, answering, storing your
emails. How, how do they make a living
off of this? And clearly they they are making
a very decent living. A killing.
Yeah, they're making a killing, that's for sure.
So there are a few. There are a few things about
their business model I'll focus on.
The one that allowed them to have such an amazing UX and the
thing that allowed them also that created the past dependency
for them around something that we consider predatory today.
So they made everything free at the beginning in order to ensure
that they could get, they could establish the foundations for a
new kind of business model at the time, you know beginning
2000 around data. What Google realized because
they were building a search engine at the beginning is that
there is a lot of public and private data that is being that,
that is being sent around the the Internet and the private
data doesn't have much value associated to it at the moment.
So what they decided to do is we're going to take people's
private data, semi private data. We're going to tell them that
they can store as much as they want of it on our servers for
free, but in a very long and legally full terms and
condition. We'll make sure that we can use
that data for our own purpose and specifically in order to
make some money. So Google created this big
market of data brokers that buy people's personal data.
And that personal data doesn't have to be necessarily.
The content itself of whatever you sent via an e-mail or stored
on Google Drive. It is also the metadata which
arguably is so much more important.
I remember that quote by by the by NSA operator that helped
catch bin Laden, which is that 95% of all the work that they
needed was open source and on Google and it just required them
to piece things together. So most of that data that he was
talking about was location, address book was time of things
being sent. So all that is metadata.
They're taking the data, they're selling it to a market that they
created of data brokers that need that data in order to sell
a product, in order to do better identification of categories of
users in order to sell that data then to other companies.
Again, it sounds OK, maybe in principle doesn't to me, but
this creates a lot of endemic issues.
I think in the US it's still so prominent.
In the EU, you know, we have the GDPR.
It's reduced a bit the amount of predatory things that come from
that model. But in the US, you can buy
millions of people's cell phone data, you can track them around
the country, you can corroborate their interactions with other
data points and infer a million things from that.
And it's as easy as spending $150 on some website.
It's not OK. Yeah.
Sorry. You see, we get passionate, so
we we're going to use some big words, maybe like predatory.
Now I I clearly see why you think this is, this is super
important. I think there's a couple of
things that kind of I would kind of like to keep track of here.
So kind of one thing is kind of how could this be tackled
without blockchain and then kind of why did you decide to kind of
go the blockchain route, right? Because basically, even without
using blockchains, you could, you could offer a service that
kind of is not exploitative in that sense and kind of doesn't
sell your data that way. So I'm thinking of services
like, say ProtonMail or similar. Why do you think they, they
don't have more traction than they than they actually do.
Do people not care? So I'll start, but I I see Vijay
twitching a bit. So I know that he has a, he has
a big speech prepared for this. But I'll start by maybe
rejecting your premise, kind of rejecting your premise
specifically. I think that more and more
people care. You look at the Signal app user
base, it's been exploding for the past two years.
WhatsApp, which is that mega app that everybody uses for
communication, it started end to end encrypted.
It started with all the right values until it was bought by
Facebook and now you know, still end to end encrypted.
But there are a few things that ring people's, yeah, paranoia.
Same for ProtonMail, amazing team.
They do a lot of the right things I think and their user
base has been growing quite significantly for the past two
years. So there is really a movement
which we want to capture and that's our, you know, our first
audience after the crypto people.
It's the privacy conscious individuals and that category is
growing massively. So I think it's it's growing and
people are care more and more especially you know everything,
Everything is to our advantage because you continue with the
the model we currently have leaks are going to continue to
happen. It's just about how big of a
leak or fuck up will happen for more people to take that radical
step off. OK.
I abandoned Facebook. So on that side.
And then on the tech side, I think most of those companies
are so ProtonMail for example, are doing what I consider 95% of
the correct choices, but they're still server dependent.
I think their servers are in Switzerland.
I remember a year ago they received a warrant forcing them
to open up one of their server. Of course everything was end to
end encrypted, but it freaked out a lot of people, a lot of
their users. I remember receiving the e-mail
and this is something we want to remove.
We want to remove the server, we want to remove the need for a
server for authentication and authorization.
And this is where I stop, and I let Vijay give you the better
explanation. Yeah, so like one thing which
I've seen like blockchain do very well is basically like
there is one property in blockchain like that excited me
and the reason why I like find it very interesting that it can
be used in different places. One of those is like, it makes
it very easy for people like, for example, like you and me to
agree on things. Now what does that agree on
things mean in this case? Like let's say if you do a
transaction on either Nosys or Ethereum or any of these chains,
and you send a transaction hash, that's a cryptographic proof of
something that you did computationally right?
And that computation in this case signifies that you did a
value transfer from 1 address to another.
For now, with all the different things that we see, we can go
and verify it on ether scan, we can go and verify it on public
infrastructure or we can even run our own nodes to verify that
that thing actually happened or not right until all this happens
for finance. Now how does that happen for
finances for example, we go ahead and update token balances
and all of these things. That's how you have entire D5
and everything else happening on top of it.
But what we are doing is we're doing similar thing but for
data. Now imagine this like
cryptographic proof you were able to give for your own data
like first create for your own self and then second also share
it with other people saying that OK now you can also go and check
the access or check the document without me intervening in that
process, right. So there are different other
patterns that open up. Those patterns are for example,
you send tokens to someone. Now you can never revoke access
to that document. This is one of the like key
benefits that you get. The other way is like you can
have for example temporary permissions or time lock
permission that is visible on chain and everyone knows it's
not just one server or one person controlling all of those
things for everyone and so on and so forth.
So it's it's that base assumption and the things that
you can build on top of it is what we are enabling with the
use of blockchain. And one like interesting thing
which I'll say that would like I think highlight how interesting
the work is and why it's like very caution for the next step
that we are taking by moving away from this kind of
infrastructure is if you go to ProtonMail and you lose your
keys, you won't be able to gain access back to it, back off it,
right. But if you take a look at the
blockchain, it's a core premise that you should not be able to
lose your case. So to give you an example of the
same word that SAFE did with Recovery Hub, to give you an
example of one of the EF work that me and Andreas were working
on for like allowing people to recover access to a smart
contract in a low like for a low risk in a low risk method.
So it's all of these things that actually come together that
won't be possible if we didn't use blockchain to like leverage
as a like as an advantage in my opinion.
This is super interesting. I think this is the first time
I've heard someone say that kind of the advantage of blockchain
is that you can't lose your keys.
I I I get back to that in in in just a second.
So there's very obvious kind of question here, right?
So storing data on blockchain is notoriously expensive.
So kind of How do we make that work with with Fire Firebirds?
Beauty of content addressing. We're not storing the the whole
file itself. Yeah, we're storing the content
hash onto the blockchain, which is just a pointer to a file.
And that pointer comes with some properties of self
certification, which we consider crucial for what we're building,
especially for public data. So you want to be able to see
and have that data integrity prove that this information came
from that person. And we're absolutely sure of it
because we have a formal proof that VJ stamped that data with
his key and that data generated hash that anyone can verify and
can verify that no future or no new edits or changes happen on
that data. So those properties are quite
important. This is what we use blockchain
for. We're making sure that those
hashes are stored on chain available for anyone.
And this is what VJ meant with not losing your keys.
You can store it in, for example, a smart contract and
make sure that the smart contract is being controlled by
multiple people, maybe just one person but with multiple series
of key pairs and you know, with some rules that are publicly
viewable by anyone and triggerable by anyone.
So this is something that we're that Vijay and I are working on
for the for the Ethereum Foundation.
We have a mechanism for example that let's say that Andreas and
Frederique decided that the there are too many scientific
publications that disappear every year from the Internet and
this is important loss for humanity.
So we decided to put a lot of that data on IPFS or R with and
store those hashes on the blockchain to make sure that
it's always available to everyone.
Andreas and Frederique might disappear, but they want to make
sure that this public data, this public good remains available
and recoverable by someone else. So they make sure that on that
smart contract where they they, they store the hashes of that
content and through which they pay for the storage of that
content is recoverable by a public community.
So yeah, this is some of the work that we're doing and it's
not something that you can do with any centralized server.
That depends on you maintaining it.
I think in in that context it makes a lot of sense.
You already said that kind of like the actual data gets stored
elsewhere, namely on kind of protocols such as IPFS or are
weave reminder. Remind us how they make sure
that the data actually stays around.
OK. So in the, the way that we have
done right now in terms of in the in the way that we have
structured as like structured our nodes or the way that we
allow people to host their data, right.
So what we do is we have a storage node let's say and that
storage node does spinning for that person in this in case of
fireworks. This storage node is something
that we are running right now for all our users.
But later on what we have is like you can actually run it on
your local machine, you can run it on your own AWS instance, you
can run it on your like some cloud that you just hosted that
you're hosting in your home and so on and so forth.
So what it does it like that storage service pins that data.
There is a concept called pinning and IPFS which keeps
that data on those notes, right? The beauty of this concept of
pinning and like why this kind of thing actually makes sense,
is that anyone can come in and participate either in the
storage of those pins or can come up with, for example,
things that can work on top of, like can do the transfer from
one system to another without worrying about if data gets
clogged or like lost in the middle, right?
So to give you an example of that, how that looks like is
that you can have a IPFS hash that is pinned on one machine,
then you have another machine that pulls that data from that
machine and then start spinning it for that on on the different
machine, right? So you get right to exit from
one server which is let's say hosted by us, and then you can
actually start doing the pinning for your own self and all your
own smart contract. OK, but basically if I don't
want to host stuff myself, I just want to use IPFS as a
service. How do I make sure not all the
nodes that kind of because not all the nodes store the data.
I think this is kind of like the crucial difference to kind of
like blockchains, right? So basically you have you every
node kind of stores a subset of the data.
So kind of how do I make sure that my document doesn't get
dropped from the network by by way of kind of all nodes that
kind of used to store it, no longer storing it or no longer
being online? Yeah, it mainly financial
incentive. It's cool because it really
allows for a self sovereign type of experience of the Internet
and data storage and management because you can pick and choose
or mix and match different providers of data storage
according to your needs. So if you're someone that really
wants to ensure that your data will never disappear, you give a
200 year financial incentive for a network that is specified for
long term user storage like our Wave.
So instead of going the APFS route, you might want to have
better permanence guarantees and pay upfront something that is so
much cheaper than doing the same activity on Google Drive.
So on our Weave, for example, after five years, four years .5
of storage on the our Weave network, you're more cost
effective than storing that same data for 4.5 years on Google
Drive. And from there on it's free.
So you paid for a 4.5 years equivalent to a Google Drive on
our Weave and then you know that you have that data there for 200
years because of the incentive mechanisms of the network.
One last point about that, going back to what you said, how do I
know, how do I make sure this is another benefit of what we like
to call community computers? You get a formal proof that you
can query, that you can ensure every day that is there that
your data is stored on a specific hardware somewhere in
the world. That proof is undeniable,
unbreakable and unspoofable, which is very important for
someone that wants to ensure that their data is still up
there. So yeah, you have that proof
instead of a promise by a company saying yes.
So we have your data, but also according to section 7.3 of our
Terms of Conditions, we can drop that data if there is a picture
of a naked bot on it. Little do they know that this
naked bot is your newborn baby. You took a picture, it's on your
Google Drive and now you're not allowed to use a service and you
all your data is deleted. I I use that example because it
happened a year and a half ago with someone using Google Drive.
Yeah. So yeah, that that cryptographic
proof plus financial, an incentive system that works
pretty well. Why is it so much more expensive
to store things on Google? Is it just because they have an
insane profit margin, or are there some?
Are there some deeper underlying causes?
I will point at the fact that there hasn't been much change in
the pricing of data storage in those quasi monopolies for one
reason. They're quasi monopolies.
They do not need to abide by market demand conditions
dynamics, meaning there isn't a race between different providers
like there is in different Falcon Falcon nodes competing
with each other to either provide the best service in
terms of UX or provide better pricing for the users here.
When you know that you're the only person that the people, or
the only company that people will knock at the door of in
order to get a certain service, why are you going to, you know,
compete with yourself towards a more a cheaper or more efficient
or better UX? You're already there.
But there are quite a quite a few cloud service providers, so
it's not just Amazon or Google, it's also Microsoft and then
kind of like smaller ones like Hetzner and local ones.
So it should it it it seems like if if any one of them were to
kind of break the price barrier here, they would all have to
follow at some point, right? So I'm not.
I'm not sure why that's not happening if if if storage is
actually much much cheaper. Well, because they're all
focusing. So this is me going into this is
not the fact. This is reasoning, educated
reasoning. So AWS compared to Google Drive
are focusing on different types of markets, different types of
users. AWS has a quasi majority, I
think they have 66% of all server usage and and data
storage. But this is much more for
businesses, for developers, for ML engineers, etc.
Google Drive and the Google servers have N same for
Microsoft Office, have direct to Consumer Focus with their data
storage and their servers and they're basically just those two
together are 2/3 of the market for data storage for consumers.
So yes, there are other players, they're fighting for a much
smaller chunk of the pie and usually they're they're focusing
on a part of the pie that is much more specialised.
So it's a part of the pie for consumers that are very focused
on privacy, preservation or guarantees.
So they allow themselves to have a different pricing method
because they know that what they're providing is not just
better pricing but or not at all better pricing, but just better
UX or guarantees that meet their audiences needs.
But if you were to take all that market together, put them all on
the one big category, a system where you have millions of
nodes, millions of providers competing with each other to
meet the needs of their users, meaning either pricing or UX or
privacy guarantees, you would have different dynamic, is my my
interpretation and different pricing models here, because you
have quasi monopolies. Even though there are a few
competitors, those competitors are not fighting those quasi
monopolies on pricing. They're fighting them on some
marginal improvements that are very important for a certain
subset of users. This is how I see it I I want to
see. An efficient market person kind
of debate this because to me it sounds like like because it's
such a huge market, it's it should be an enormous business
opportunity to kind of just drive down the pricing here
there. There is also one important.
Element to that, which is people are not just coming for storage,
they're coming for the usage of an app or a feature, a Google
Doc, a Google Sheet. And those companies have created
an ecosystem where everything that is your essential needs
when you when you're online or you're doing activities online,
relates back to their storage space.
So competitors that might emerge would need to also compete on
the full stack of features and tools.
So it it explains part of it but I I hear the I hear the the
concern yeah I I think I think the full.
Stack explanation makes a lot of sense to me.
So you guys are leveraging smart contracts to kind of point at
existing file storage protocols. If you kind of look at what a
Google Doc does, it kind of gives you an infinite number of
points in time that you can go back to obviously kind of if you
need to store every one of them as kind of a pointer in a smart
contract that's expensive on kind of you know the the, the
smart contract fees. It's also expensive because you
need to store each one of those kind of as a separate IPFS or
are weave document. Yeah.
How, how do you go about that? Yeah, so the.
Interesting part in that is basically there are two types of
things when the data is at rest, rest being that rest state being
for example like OK I have finished, I'm finished with this
document, now I want to publish it or put it out there, share it
with the people that can actually take a look at it and
so on and so forth. That's when we put the data on
chain. Right before that we use a
peer-to-peer database called gun.
And what it does like it creates the cryptographic proof for all
those updates that are happening.
And then it makes sure that those updates get transferred
between the peers that are connecting to Fireworks and
actually help share the bandwidth or the updates with
all the other peers to reduce the latency in general.
So basically there are two types of systems.
One system is on chain storage, another is off chain storage.
The off chain storage is peer-to-peer and shared amongst
the clients that are connecting to the system, connecting to the
document and so on and so forth. And then there is another system
which is when you want to publish and push the things on
chain or share it with other people, that's when you push it
on chain with the fingerprint method.
OK and. Then you also alluded to the
fact that kind of I can share it with whoever I want for however
long I want. How do you, how do you implement
that kind of? Is it on the smart contract
basis or is it on the file storage system, so basically?
There are two three different cases of permissioning as we
implement as we had implemented. One of them is like you have a
document, now you want to share it with someone.
You generated the keys related to the document, pushed it on
chain, shared the thing with other person.
That happening either through NFT or through contract is
something that we can say that abstracted out for the sake of
the simple discussion, right? And then we have the other way
which is like you want to have the revocable access, meaning
you give access to someone and then you want to revoke it after
some time. In that case, like we have
something called, it's, it's still something that we are
working on or experimenting on. So I'm sharing a bit of a
forward thing here. So it's sort of an UTXO approach
like unspent transaction output approach.
And then you once the transaction is executed either
through a smart contract or through someone else, that's
when you lose access to the document or things like that.
So there are different paradigms that we are like implementing
and using and are possible because of the smart contract
and us being able to trust someone for being able to share
the access or revoke the access without it being done through
one of our servers. OK.
So if you look at. The product as it is today,
Maybe this? There's a question for Andreas.
What what does it offer me? How can I work on it?
How can how can I collaborate using it?
And how does that compare to Google Docs for instance?
OK, so. I like to think of it more as a
Google workspace as a whole. So inside of it, you have Google
Docs, you have Google Drive, Sheets, etcetera.
Why? Because this is really the suit
of tools that we're trying to provide.
So today you arrive on fibers, right now we're permission
based. So your address needs to have
certain characteristics and it's for us to better manage our
initial user base and core users, improve the UX and then
open it for the world to join. So if you have permissions, you
arrive, you create your account in two clicks.
Those clicks. What do they do?
Very similar flow to safe the safe.
Multi sync you deploy. Your smart contract.
That smart contract will serve as your repository of of content
hashes and will be doing access permissioning for anyone that
will give access to your files to and what type of access.
Once you've done those two clicks and deploy the smart
contract for free, there is a dashboard that opens up in front
of you UI. That UI is not stored on our
server only you can access it through any public IPFS gateway.
So you never need to interact with with Fileverse ever again.
From the moment you've deployed a small contract, you have AUI
that allows you to upload files, store them publicly or
privately. If it's private, you can choose
token gating, you can choose anyone with a link or you can
say any of those 10,000 addresses in my CSV can access
my file, et cetera. Basic storage and permissioning.
You have also a bunch of plug insurance and this is probably
the most exciting thing that Favis is doing.
We like to think, or we like to communicate the idea that you
can think of your workspace as something as customizable as
your browser. Today, a lot of people are
customizing their browser experience or their Internet
experience by adding extensions. I have the Internet Archive, I
have Metamask, I have a bunch of others, Grammarly, etc.
And we want to do that for your workspace, for your
collaboration space. So instead of having a Google
workspace or a notion that is limited to whatever new feature
the developers have decided they should push on other users, here
you have a store, let's say, where you can drag and drop new
plug insurance. Today the plug insurance are
developed internally, but we're already starting to see people
propose new plug insurance for the dashboard.
So lawyer versus Frederique versus a meme Lord like me will
want to have a different workspace and different tools to
create, be productive, etc. So right now you have a
whiteboard. Anyone who uses Xalidro would
love that feature on fibers. It's just like Xalidro.
You can invite people on it as well to collaborate live with
you and the difference is that you can create as many
whiteboards as you want. Whereas for eskalido there is a
limit of five different pages that you open.
Here you can as many as you want with groups, without groups etc.
You have also AD doc, decentralized docs plug in so it
acts like Google Docs. You have mostly the same UX with
a few differences like you can dock and gate or people joining
you in that are editing your file can retain their anonymity
or be represented through their wallet address or ENS.
And you have another that's our latest plugin which is called
Deep Pages. Centralized pages, you'll see
the pattern that act like a notion.
So you click on that plugin and you open up a blank page that
has exactly the same characteristics as you have
today. On notion, you can create
tables. Tables within tables You can do
cord coding or a code markdown. You can embed images, videos,
tweets. On that page you can put a cover
picture. You can customize it as much as
you want. So on that you can really do
anything from blog posting to having your internal database or
knowledge base or if. And this is where, interestingly
enough, most of the companies that came to us saying, hey, we
would like to use Fileverse because we want to use a
decentralized version of everything that we use.
They've been very interesting in deep interested in deep pages
specifically for documentation, governance and knowledge basis.
Why? Because they realize that if
notion goes down tomorrow or whatever other service they
might be using, like Gitbook. That's it.
There is 10 years of crypto knowledge, discussions,
interactions with a community that has disappeared forever.
So this is where we intervene and this is what most actually
enterprise, let's call it clients have come to us to
address. OK.
And how do they? Pay for this, I mean do they pay
for the on chain storage directly and how do they pay for
your services because you kind of just you're just an interface
to the those services. So what's your business model as
fireworks? Great question.
A few things. One is we don't want to reinvent
the wheel. We're not going to go into this
with, hey, we're pricing it according to the number of words
you write. We're going with something that
is quite similar to existing models.
So it's either based on storage, storage space or based on
specific features that you might want to get, like, and this is
me already giving some secret details of what's coming soon.
But let's say you want to have a local LLM help you either
generate images or synthesize a report for you or help you write
something. Those are special features that
you would need to unlock by either paying or etcetera.
Right now though, Favors is in allow list mode and everything
is free. So we want to make sure that the
the first iteration of Favors, what we're working on right now
is just something that blows everyone away in terms of UX.
And for that we decided to focus on there are over 7000 unique
addresses that are recurrently using Favors at the moment.
Those individuals are for us the opportunity to nail the UX.
So we're not pushing a business model onto them and we want to
ensure that even when we do and it is either storage based or
feature based payment, we want them to know that whatever
happens, they can continue using the service and paying through
alternative paths. For example, instead of having
your data replicated on three nodes and that managed or paid
to fibers directly, you do that yourself on R WIF through the
same UI and through the contract that you deployed or you want
to. You really like pinata or the
APFS ecosystem. You use pinata or you want to
store everything locally, perfect your smart contract and
the UI were made for you to customize your needs in terms of
storage and never be dependent on a team that might disappear
tomorrow. So yeah, this is the
customizability even on the business model side.
And we think that we're going to be attracting a lot of people
that do indeed want to have those options and you know, an
ecosystem of plug in where they know it's not the Fibers team
that created this new, this new plug in, but it's someone else.
And I can pay that developer myself.
Yeah, nice. And.
You said. Earlier that kind of you're.
Striving to kind of make the best UX possible, you you
actually said that you want your grandparents to use this.
Currently web free products are notoriously difficult to use.
How do you achieve that? Or do you think you're there
already? So I.
Think we're halfway there. I think already, and this is
this is probably my my favorite success story with flowers,
which is that at my university department a lot of people, if
not the majority, are quite sceptical about the value of
block chains and anything crypto associated.
And I presented our our product to them without mentioning
anything a blockchain about it, just, you know, talking about
data and computational integrity, recovery mechanisms,
group ownership and trustless interactions.
And people really liked it. And it was a version where you
didn't have to connect any wallet and people used it and
people really liked it. Then I said I dropped the B word
and they were like, yes, but you're burning the planet by by
using those logs. So what's?
What's really I think? Our our main contribution to the
crypto space is that we're pushing non financial
applications and those non financial applications have a
extremely low barrier to entry, even if we don't have the best
UI or UX at the moment. Why?
Because we removed a huge barrier, which was you need to
have a wallet. In that wallet you need to have
tokens. For you to have tokens you need
to go through a centralized exchange.
For you to use that centralized exchange, you need to give your
ID. You need to pass KYC, you need
to give the color of your cat. You need to tell them how many
times you go to the toilets per day.
You need to do all those things that are quite ridiculous, that
are that destroy any trace of privacy for anyone that starts
interacting with the crypto world like we we want to like
the space in general, wants to push self sovereignty, privacy
and ownership onto people. And yet, their first stop in
order to join our industry is through a centralized exchange,
is through buying tokens. That's not, that's not OK,
that's not going to be sustainable.
We want to have that one stop entry where you don't need
anything. You just need to want to create
a doc, share something with someone.
That's it. It's daily activities people
already have on the Internet. There's no reason why we
shouldn't be able to provide that with better guarantees of
privacy and ownership. How do you log in?
Then without a wallet, OK. So.
There are a few things. The first iteration of Fathers,
it was just. You can think of it as an
alternative to We transfer. You would arrive, you'd upload
the file, you would share it immediately.
No wallet needed. Your identifier is basically
just your browser. Things happen client, client
side and that's it today with the current version of of
Fathers. It is wallet based, but you have
options to go without a wallet that are coming very soon.
It's the work that we're doing in parallel also for the
Ethereum Foundation and it's the famous social login.
So social login is something that happens on your browser
level. On client side you can so
depending on the path that we take, you'd be able to for
example use your e-mail as your identifier or use let's say an
existing key pair, your PGP key pair in order to associate the
wallet to it in an efficient and non long setup, seed phrase blah
blah blah way. Or you can do something else,
which is This is what we call internally the Argent path which
is put 2-3 phone numbers of your friends or yourself or your
family. They will now become the
guardians of the access to your data and to all that in case you
either lose it or you just want to fast login.
So there are a few paths, and one that already exists today
is, but it does require. A bit of a.
Setup You can create file versus file with smart contract via the
Safe Multi sync today via Safe Multi sync, so the Safe user
interface and thankfully safe shipped.
Also social logins. So now you can you know with
with an e-mail login directly onto followers if you go through
the Safe UI. Cool.
Perfect. So.
Unfortunately we're almost that time I need to wrap up, but
what's coming for five hours in in in this new year, Yeah.
Great question. Thanks for asking.
There are a few really exciting things that are coming,
including things focused around UX.
So we want people to be able to log in finally just in one click
and without having necessarily to go through the mental
exercise of creating a wallet, etc.
So this is coming. We have better recovery
mechanisms that are coming. We have something that is core
to something we've been, we've been focusing a lot of our
efforts on which is customizability of data storage
even more than there is today and there is also a lot of new
plugins coming in. I just want to mess to mention
in passing that VJ is the Co creator and organizing of She
Builds which is the biggest non male focused hackathon event in
in an organization in India. And we have not only a lot of
participants that are learning what Web Three is all about, but
we've had a lot of people already start proposing new
plugins and ways for them to monetize their plugins via
fowers. So this is going to be very
exciting because you're you're seeing really the seeds of
fireworks becoming something that is not just VJ,
Constantine, Andreas and the team, but something that is that
has been. Completely.
Re adopted, re appropriated by anyone who wants it and go into
into a full community play. So those are a few things I'm
excited about. VJ probably has maybe different
things. Yeah, so one.
Key thing which would sort of like answer one question that
you were alluding to like how do you make sure that the IPFS
hashes that you have published on chain actually stay around.
So those are different kind of like that's that's a very
interesting and unique problem that we have just because our
storage is decentralized, right. And this problem has been solved
by multiple providers, for example File Coin RV and
different other players in the ecosystem already.
What we are thinking of is like how can we make use of these
different providers and then maybe ask them to come up with
the network that supports Fireworks, let's say network
one, Network 2, Network 3. And users can pick between these
three networks instead of, you know, us giving them an option
that OK, you go with one person or the other.
And the best part that you get is like you get right to exit
from network A to network B because of the data like
fingerprint that is stored on chain, right.
And you get this right to exit from any of the services that we
do just because of the way that we are making sure the data is
stored, making sure the data is shared and so on and so forth.
So yeah, that's a that's a very interesting work and I think
that's something that's very unique as well.
Super cool guys, so. For people who want to build on
fibers or just try it out, how How does one get whitelisted to
kind of use this? Right now it's.
Direct communication with us. There are a few things that you
can already do in order to get access.
For example, if you have a safe multi sig, you're automatically
allow listed and you can deploy your filers.
But if you want to try it out, we have recurrent campaigns that
pop up every now and then. Or you can really just DM fibers
directly. We're usually very open to that
or any one of the the the people working on on fibers.
And this is both for users that want to try something non
financial in crypto or show during the holidays to their
family. Hey, you don't need money or
speculation to use something in crypto.
And for teams that want to build on fireworks using fireworks,
destroy fireworks, whatever they want, they can either go
directly on GitHub, they can go on radical, or they can again
message us. We're constantly talking with
different teams, so we're happy to see that type of those types
of interactions. Perfect.
Thank you guys. It's been a real pleasure,
Hedereke. Thank you.
Thanks for all the great questions.
Also for putting your finger where where you know the the
real discussion can happen and things might be a bit wobbly.
It's always a pleasure and yeah, hope we we can return maybe in a
year to show how much progress has been made.
Thank you for joining us on this week's.
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