Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi: Fileverse – Ep. 531

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Fred an and today I'm speaking with Andreas and VJ the two co-founders of filee file verse is um a super interesting project that leverages in existing infrastructure that kind of lets you use it as an um onchain Google Docs sort of like product but we'll hear all about this in in just a second um before we talk um with Andreas and VJ um we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week this episode is brought to you by nosis nosis builds decentralized

infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem with a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like safe cow swap or nosis chain nosis combines needs-driven development with deep technical expertise this year marks the launch of gsis pay the world's first decentralized payment network with theosis card you can spend self- custody crypto at any Visa accepting Merchant around the world if you're an individual looking to live more onchain or a business looking to wh label the stack visit nosis pay.com there are lots of ways you can join the nosis journey drop in the nosis Dow governance form become a nosis

validator with a single gno token and lowcost Hardware or deploy your product on the evm compatible and highly decentralized nosis chain get started today at noses. cars one is one of the biggest node operators globally and help you stake your tokens on 45 plus networks like ethereum Cosmos celesia and dydx more than 100,000 delegators stake with corus one including institutions like bitgo and Ledger staking with with course one not only gets you the highest years but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually exclusive for institutions you

can stti directly to corus one's public note from your wallet set up a white label note or use the recently launched product Opus to stake up to 8,000 e in a single transaction you can even offer high yield staking to your own customers using their API your assets always remain in your customer so you can have complete Peace of Mind start sing today at chorus. one andrej I'm so happy to have you on epicenter this week same excited to hear hey Fred thank you for having us uh very happy to be uh to be here super cool tell me about yourselves um so who are you what's your

background what makes you get up in the morning and maybe I'd start with Andreas yeah yeah thanks um just one quick thing also we're honored to be here uh after the celebration of the 10 years uh of epicenter uh 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 that time yeah really crazy um uh 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 Kanye fish coin which is hilarious you see that CT hasn't evolved that much um so sorry uh back to the

question so yes I'm Andreas I'm one of the co-founders of of fers I am um I'm also a PhD student I'm finishing my PhD at the moment at the University of Oxford my focus there uh is specifically on human control of AI systems in uh attacking operation so uh what we call computer network exploitation uh and attack um it's something that uh I'm quite passionate about and yet uh I see it as you know secondary to a lot of the work that we do at ferse uh and in some sense quite complimentary as well so we always have

great conversations about that within the company um why do I wake up in the morning uh so I think what drives me is uh first of all as a proper Greek kid uh to to buy a house for my mother uh is the first answer and the the second answer is that um and I think this is something quite common in the in the team we are aggressively maybe naively um optimistic about the impact that we can have on the world um I hope it doesn't sound too to EA like but we we really want to have direct uh impact

on uh things that we consider very problematic for the way people communicate collaborate uh and live together so most of our work is dedicated to that cool I'll come back to that in a second kind of why you think these uh these areas are problematic but maybe for first VJ um what about you who are you uh yeah I am like mainly you can say that out of uh Andre and Constantin I fill in the take Gap and if you think about it uh 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 uh you know how can we make us connection between the users and the T like and how can we bridge the gap between uh those two things so uh that's the like General uh thing which excites me uh for either experimenting with different things for building different things and I like like in general to uh create small softwares or small things that uh 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 techy pitch so you're the tech co-founder VJ yeah but I also heard that um there's uh there's uh not just Andreas but there's also Constantine so there's three co-founders tell me about Constantine yeah um I I'll say the first part you can uh you can complete in VJ uh I think you can only hear good stuff from us about constant so he's the eldest one in the in the in the co-founder group he won't like that um he's someone that's been in crypto since around 2016 I think his uh his main specialty until FS was really doing product

marketing and getting a lot of non- crypto people to get interested in crypto he ran the most uh the most popular by by measure of audience uh crypto campaign in the world um so with the economic Times of India uh over 150 million readers and um and he's someone that right now at fathers makes sure makes sure that things happen you have VJ and us and and me who are you know uh going all over the place uh generating ideas every time that we talk and

Constantine takes all that canalizes it focuses it around clear objectives and make sure that you know both VJ and I know that you know we're we're we're developing something bigger than just uh side project that excite us uh we're developing something that has users that has people depending on it and uh yeah he he's really the the person that manages to organize the whole team which is also why he's the CEO at fers yeah every company kind of needs that sort of person otherwise things don't get done um how did how did you three

meet uh yeah so me and Constantine like we worked at a crypto company for like I think for four five years and that's how that's where we met and we uh understood that okay we are excited about uh common things and one of the thing like which Andes was saying about the crypto Campaign which got senet done like it was uh me and him like we were organizing uh that that thing and uh that's how me and Constantin met and uh like after that Constantin introduced me to Andreas and it has been like a crazy story maybe Andreas can add on the uh like the moment when we shared the POC

of file verse first as an anecdote yeah yeah it's uh it's very funny I'll I'll reveal something on the podcast but uh I met my I met Constantine through my mother because he's my brother he's uh he's my older brother and um we were back in Christmas at home in Greece and he tells me hey dude look at this and he opens up an email and it's an email from VJ VJ uh sends really like a pretty pretty straightforward POC on helping people just use

ipfs and things exploded uh 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 uh yeah um the rest is history super nice yeah one could say you and Constantino way back yeah 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 hour now so uh now it's going to be the second um so we started in officially we started the work um around April

2022 2022 yeah um but the the first uh uh PC by uh V J came during Christmas uh 2021 towards 2022 uh so yeah we we're closing our year and a half reaching two years now cool Andreas 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 at least this is kind of like what it sounded like what's the thing that you're taking issue with okay so there is definitely a strong relation with the issues that I'm

talking about and Ai and how we solve it at F so I'll just give you a um General picture and then we can maybe dive in deeper into what I mean but uh it's something that both VJ consentin and I noticed at the very beginning uh 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 um 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 blockchain uh and yet we're not leveraging them for something that is nonf financial but essential to the way that crypto evolves which is uh dissemination of public knowledge communication Etc so uh this is for the crypto specific but uh it's shocking that this is a case in crypto because we have those values in the uh crypto Community but but the problem is much more General the problem is global anyone who uses the internet abides by a

server client model uh this is something that people uh see as you know the status quo today on the internet but the internet did not used to look like this even 15 years ago uh I like to use that example that until 2010 a third of all internet traffic was peer-to-peer was purely bit torrent links being shared between individuals um 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 uh recovery of

their information they're dependent on you know an arbitrary decision made by some Google engineer in California that had a day and thus decided to delete customers data uh we're dependent on server going down uh uh every now and then at at AWS and my Roomba cleaner not working anymore because of it um so there are points of centralizations around servers usually based in the US uh which come with series of endemic issues including lack of privacy uh predatory models of mining your personal data selling it to

a 100 different data Brokers you have no idea even exist uh manipulation of your attention of your mood all those things so we want to take that away uh and redistribute it to to people do do you know which proportion of internet traffic um is peer to be at today it's a very good question uh I think it's so last time I check I need to remember the source as well it's my academic side I don't want to throw things without proper backing uh I don't remember exactly I think I read something like less than 8% um yeah something like that I can I

can specify it next time or online okay and um the three internet companies just for the record they are AWS Google and I assume Microsoft or who's the third one yes yes th those were the companies I was thinking about but you know you have some auxiliary uh actors uh that are maybe not at the same scale but are uh quickly closing in and capturing a lot of consumers into their PR predatory model yeah why do you think this consolidation of the market has happened so uh this is a great question I'll be I'll be honest even if it uh if

it sounds like uh it's something that would limit people from even looking at FS which is ux uh for me this is where it starts and ends uh this is something that's the main focus of our team at FS we want to improve the ux of people uh collaborating coordinating online um I think the reason why those companies uh reach that level of U wasi Monopoly is because they offered users the ability to abstract away a lot of the complexities uh that were involved in let's say email protocols Google comes in uh tells everyone hey pgp is cool

your email protocol uh using Thunderbird is is cool but uh 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 uh we automatically take care of the server give you guarantees even if you don't pay our servers so amazing ux they just made uh something that was revolutionary into something that is revolutionary and easy to adopt uh and we like to use that analogy FS because we're taking something that

is already revolutionary blockchains smart contracts but we're trying to make them into something revolutionary for everyone else in the world uh my grandparents included uh yeah yeah so I'm totally with you that user experience is is currently um not what it should be uh for web 3 products and uh we'll get into that in just a bit but kind of spell it out for us a bit more so kind of Google Google offers this amazing user experience so kind of like a fully um wide glove surface for kind of like um reading answering storing your emails H H how do they make a living off of this and clearly they they

are making um a very decent living a killing yeah uh they're making a killing that's for sure so um 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 uh and the thing that allowed them also that created the path dependency for them uh um around something that we consider predatory today so they made everything free at the beginning uh in order to ensure that they could get um they could establish the foundations for a new kind

of business model at the time you know beginning 2000s 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 uh 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 uh uh terms and condition

we'll make sure that uh we can use that data for our own purpose uh and specifically in order to make uh some money so uh Google created this big Market of data Brokers that buy people's personal dat data and that personal data doesn't have to be necessarily the content itself of whatever you sent via an email or stored on Google Drive it is also the metadata which arguably is so much more important uh I remember that quote by um by the uh by NSA operator that helped catch bin Landon which is that 95% of all the work that they needed was open source uh and on Google

uh and it just required them to piece things together so uh most of that data that you was talking about was location um address book was uh time of uh uh things being sent so all that is meta data they're taking that 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 uh do better identification of C categories of users in order to sell that data then to other companies again um it sounds okay maybe in principle doesn't to me uh but this creates a lot of uh endemic

issues I think in the US it's still so prominent in the EU you know we have the gdpr it reduced a bit uh the amount of uh predatory uh uh things that come from that model but in the US you can buy millions of people 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 uh on some website it's not okay 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 um using blockchains you could you could offer a service that kind of is not exploitative in that sense um and uh kind of uh doesn't sell your data that way um so I'm thinking of services like say proton mail or similar um why do you think they they don't have more traction than they than they

actually do do people not care so uh I'll start but I I see VJ 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 um kind of rejecting your premise specifically I think that more and more people care uh 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 her communication it started end to and encrypted it started with all the right values until it was bought by Facebook and now you know still end to encrypted

but there are a few things that uh ring people's uh yeah uh parano yeah uh same for proton mail amazing team um uh they do a lot of the right things uh I think and their user base has been growing uh 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 uh individuals and that category is growing Mass mbly um so I think it's uh it's growing and people are care more and more especially you

know everything everything is um to our advantage uh because you continue with the model we currently have leaks are going to continue to happen it's just about how big of a leak or a will happen for more people to take that radical step of okay I Bandon Facebook uh so uh on that side and then on the takech side I think most of those companies are uh so proton mail for example are doing uh um what I consider 95% of the correct choices uh but they're still server dependent uh I think their servers and are in Switzerland uh I remember a year

ago they received a uh warrant um forcing them to uh open up one of their server of course everything was into encrypted but it freaked out a lot of people a lot of their users I remember receiving the the email 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 I stop and I let VJ uh give you the the better explanation uh 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 uh in this case like let's say if you do a transaction on either nois 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 uh and that computation in this case uh signifies that you did a value transfer from one address to another uh for now with all the different things uh that we see uh 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 now this happens for finance uh now how does that happened for finances for example we go ahead and update token balances and all of these things that's how you have entire defy 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 uh like uh 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 okay now you can also go and check check

the access or check the document without me intervening in that process right uh so there are different other patterns that open up those patterns are for example you sent tokens to someone now you can never evoke access to that document this is one of the like uh key benefits that you get the other way is like you can have for example temporary permissions or time log permission that is uh visible on CH and everyone knows it's not just one server or one person controlling all of those uh 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 uh is

what we are enabling uh with the use of blockchain and one uh like interesting thing which I'll uh say that would like I think uh highlight how interesting the work is and why it's like very crucial for the next step that we are taking by moving away from this kind of infrastructure is if you go to proton mail and you lose your keys you won't be able to gain access back to it back of 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 an example of the same work that safe did with recovery Hub to give you an example of um uh one of the EF uh work that me and Andreas were working on

uh for like allowing people to recover access to a Smart contract in a low uh like for a lowrisk uh in a lowrisk method uh so it's all of these things that actually come together that won't be possible if we didn't use uh blockchain uh 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 of blockchain is that you can't lose your keys I I I get back to that in in in just the second so there's a very obvious kind of um question here right

so storing data on blockchain is notoriously expensive so kind of how do we make that work with uh with F fireb Beauty of content addressing we're not storing the the whole file itself yeah we we're storing the uh the content hash uh onto the blockchain which is just a pointer to a file uh and that pointer comes with some properties of self-certification which we consider uh crucial for what we're building especially for public data so you want to be able to see and have that um 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 uh uh key and that data generated uh hash that anyone can verify and can verify that no future or no new edits or um changes happen on that data so those properties are quite important this is what we use blockchain for we're making making sure that those hashers are stored on chain uh available for anyone and and this is what VJ meant with uh not losing your keys uh you can

store it in for example a smart contract and make sure that that smart contract is being controlled by multiple people maybe just one person but with multiple series of key pairs uh and you know with some rules that are publicly viewable by anyone and triggerable by anyone so this is something that we're um that VJ and I are working on uh uh for the for the ethereum foundation we have a mechanism for example that let's say that uh Andreas and freder decided that um the there are too many scientific

Publications that disappear every year from the internet and this is important loss for Humanity so so uh we decided to put a lot of that data on ipfs or rwe and store those hashes on the blockchain to make sure that it's always available to everyone Andress and feder might disappear uh 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 uh they store the hashes of that content and through which they pay for the storage of that content is recoverable by a public

Community um 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 a weave remind remind us um how they make sure that the data actually stays around okay uh so in the the way that we have done uh right now in terms of uh in the in the way that we have uh structured our like structure our nodes or the way that we allow people to uh

host their data right so what we do is we have a storage node let's say and that storage node does pinning for that person uh in this in case of file words 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 uh 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 uh like that storage service pins that data there is a concept called pinning in ipfs uh which keeps that data on those notes right the beauty of this concept

of pinning and uh 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 uh for example things that can work on top of uh uh like can do the transfer from one system to another uh without worrying about if data gets uh clogged or like lost in the middle right uh so to give an example of that how that looks like uh 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 starts spinning it for

that uh 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 uh actually start doing the pinning for your own self and all your own smart contract okay 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 um not all the nodes that kind of because not all the notes do all the data I think this is kind of like the crucial difference to kind of like blockchains right so basically you have you every note kind of stores a subset of the data so kind of how do I make sure that uh my document um doesn't get dropped um 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 mainly Financial incentive it's cool because it really allows for a self- sovereign type of uh um uh experience uh uh of the of the internet and data storage and management because you can uh pick in pick and choose or mix and match different uh 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 uh uh Financial incentive for a network that

is specified for long-term user uh um storage like R weave so instead of going the ipfs route you might want to have better permanent guarantees and uh pay up front something that is so much cheaper than doing the same activity on Google Drive so on rwh for example uh after 5 years 4 years. five of storage on the rwe uh network uh you are 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 free 4.5 years equivalent to Google Drive on R

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 uh what we like to call Community computers you get a formal proof that you can query that you can you know ensure every day that it's there that your data is stored on a specific Hardware somewhere in the world um that proof is undeniable unbreakable and unspoof uh 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 picture of uh a naked butt on it uh little do they know that this naked butt is your newborn baby you took a picture it's on your uh Google Drive and now you're not allowed to use a service and you all your data is deleted um I I use that example because it happened a year and a half ago uh with someone using Google Drive um yeah so yeah that that cryptographic proof plus a a 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 um are there some deeper underlying causes I will point at the fact that uh there hasn't been much change in the pricing of data storage uh in those quasi monopolies for one reason they're quasi monopolies they do not need to abide by market uh demand conditions Dynamics uh meaning there isn't a race between different providers like there

is in different file Co file coin nodes competing with each other to either provide the best service in terms of ux or provide better pricing uh for their users here when you know that you're the only person that people or the only company that people people will knock at the door off in order to get a certain service why are you going to uh 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 hner

and local one so it should it it seems like if if any one of them were to kind of Break um the price barrier here they would all have to follow at some point right um so I 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 uh this is not a fact this is a a reasoning uh educated reasoning um so a us compared to Google Drive are focusing on different types of markets different types of users um AWS has a uh quasi majority I think they have 66% of

all uh uh server usage uh and uh and uh data storage but this is much more for businesses for Developers for ML Engineers Etc Google Drive and the Google servers uh have uh and same for Microsoft Office have uh direct to Consumer Focus uh with their data storage and their servers and they're basically just uh those two together are uh 2/3 of the market for um for data storage for consumers so yes there are other players uh they're fighting for a much smaller uh

chunk of the pie uh and usually they're they're focusing on a part of the pie that is much more specialized so it's part of the pie for uh consumers that are very focused on privacy preservation or guarantees um so they allow themselves to have a different pricing uh 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 audien's needs uh but if you were to take all that market together put them all uh under one big category a system

where you have millions of nodes millions of providers competing with each other uh to meet the needs of their users meaning either pricing or ux or privacy guarantees you would have different Dynamic is my uh my uh interpretation and uh different pricing models here because you have quasi monopolies even though there are a few competitors those competitors are not uh fighting those quasi monopolies on pricing they're fighting them on some uh marginal improvements that are very important for a certain subset uh of users this is how I see it I I want 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 um people are not just coming for storage they're coming for the usage of a app or uh a feature a Google doc a Google sheet and those companies have created an ecosystem where everything that is your essential need when you uh when you're uh online or you're doing activities online relates back to their uh storage space so competitors that might emerge would need

to also compete on the full stack of features and tools so it explains part of it but uh 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 um you guys um are leveraging smart contracts um to kind of point at um existing file storage protocols um 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 R weave document yeah um how how do you go about that uh yeah so the interesting part in that is basically there are two types of things uh when the data is at rest uh rest being uh that rest State being for example like uh okay 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 chap right uh before that we use a peer-to-peer database

called gun and uh 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 uh between the peers that are connecting to file verse and actually help share the bandwidth or the updates with all the other peers to reduce the latency in in general uh so uh basically there are two types of systems one system is onchain storage and other is offchain storage the offchain 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 uh on chain with the fingerprint uh method okay um and then you also alluded to the fact that kind of I can share it with whoever I want for however long I want H how do you how do you implement that kind of um is it on the smart contract basis or is it on um the file storage um system uh so uh basically there are two three different cases of permissioning as we uh imple as we had implemented uh one of them is like you have a document now you want to sh share

it with someone you generated the keys related to the document post it on chain shared the uh thing with other person uh that happening either through nft or through contract is something uh that uh we can say that abstracted out for the sake of the simple discussion right and then we have uh the other way which is like you want to have the revokable access meaning you give access to someone and then you want to revoke it after some time uh in that case like we have some uh 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 uh here so it's sort of an utx so approach like unspin 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 uh like implementing and using uh and are possible because of the smart contract and us being able to trust someone for uh being able to share the access or evoke the access without it being done through one of our servers okay so if you look at um the product as it is today maybe this this is a question for Andreas um what um what does it offer me um how can I work

on it how can how can I collaborate using it and how does that compare to Google Docs for instance okay so um I like to think of it more as a Google workspace as a whole uh so inside of it you have Google Docs you have Google Drive sheets Etc why because this is really the suit of tools that we're trying to provide so today you arrive on file verse right now we're uh permission based so your address needs to to have certain characteristics uh and it's for us to better manage our our initial uh 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 uh account in two clicks those clicks what do they do very similar flow to safe the safe multisig you deploy a smart contract that smart contract will serve as uh your repository of um of content hashes and we'll be doing access permissioning for anyone that you give access to your files to and what type of access once you've done those two clicks and deployed the smart contract for free uh there is a dashboard that opens up in front of you uh a UI that UI is not stored on our uh server only you can

access it through any public ipfs Gateway so you never need to interact with uh with file verse ever again from the moment you've deployed that smart contract you have a UI that allows you to upload files store them publicly or uh privately if it's private you can choose token gating you can choose uh anyone with the link or you can say uh uh any of those 10,000 addresses in my CSV can access my file Etc basic storage uh and permissioning you have also a bunch of plugins and this is probably the most exciting thing that FS is doing um 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 you know uh the internet archive I have metamask I have a bunch of other s um grammarly Etc uh and we want to do that for your Works Space for your collaboration space so instead of having a Google workspace or a notion that is limited to whatever new feature the developers uh have decided they should push on the users here you have um a store let's say where you can drag and drop new plugins today the

plugins are developed internally but we're already starting to see people uh propose new plugins uh for that dashboard so a lawyer versus uh freder uh versus a meme Lord like me uh will want to have a different workspace and different tools uh to create uh be productive Etc so right now you have a whiteboard uh anyone who uses excal draw would love that feature on FS it's just like excal dra you can invite people on it as well to collaborate live with you uh and the difference is that you can create as many whiteboards as you want whereas for excal Dra there is a limit

of five different pages that you open here you can as many as you want with groups without groups Etc uh you have also a d decentralized docs um uh plugin so it acts like Google uh docs uh you have mostly the same ux with a few differences like you can talk gate or uh people joining you and uh that are editing your file uh 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 D Pages centralized Pages uh you you'll see the pattern um that act like a notion so you

click on that plugin and you open up a blank page that has exactly the same uh characteristics as you have today on otion you can create tables tables within tables you can do cord uh uh coding or a code markdown um you can embed images videos tweets uh 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 uh or knowledge base or if and this is where interestingly enough most of the companies that came to us uh saying hey we would like to use

ferse because we want to use a decentralized version of everything that we use uh they've been very interesting in the interested in the pages specifically for documentation uh governance and uh knowledge bases why because they they realize that if notion goes down tomorrow or uh 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 um so this is where we intervene and this is what most actually Enterprise let's call it clients have come to us uh to

address okay and how do they pay for this I mean do they pay for the onchain storage directly and how do they pay for your services because you're kind of just um you're just an interface to the those um services so what's your business model as fers uh great question um a few things one is we don't want to reinvent the wheel uh we're not going to go into this with hey uh we're pricing it according to the number of words you write um we're going with something that is quite similar to existing models so it's either based on storage uh storage space or based

on specific features that you might want to get like uh and this is me already giving some secret details of what's coming soon but uh let's say you want to have a local llm uh help you either generate images or uh synthesize a report for you or help you write something um those are special features that you would need to unlock by either paying or Etc right now though FS is uh in allow lless mode and everything is free so uh we want to make sure that the the first iteration of favs 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 7,000 unique addresses that are recurrently using FS at the moment those individuals are for us the opportunity to nail the ux so we're not pushing a business model onto them uh 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 uh through alternative uh paths for example instead

of having your data replicated on three nodes and that managed or pay to favs directly you do that yourself on R weave through the same UI and through the the contract that you deployed or you want to you really like pinata or the ipfs uh uh ecosystem you use pinata uh 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 um so yeah this is the customizability even on the business model side and we think that we're going going to be attracting a lot of people that do indeed want to

have those options and you know an ecosystem of plugin where they know it's not the fers team that created this new this new plug but it's someone else and I can pay that developer uh 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 uh I think we're halfway there uh I think already and this is this is probably my my favorite success story uh with

fers uh which is that um at my University Department uh a lot of people if not the majority are quite skeptical about the value of blockchains uh and anything crypto Associated and I presented our uh our product to them without mentioning anything 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 uh then I said I dropped the b word and they were like ah yes but you're burning the planet by uh by using those docks um so uh what what's really I think our our um 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 uh your ID uh 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 toilet per day uh you need to do all those things that are quite ridiculous that are uh 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 uh 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 uh that's not okay

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 uh create a dock share something with someone uh that's it it's daily activity these 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 okay so there are a few things uh the first iteration of favs it was just you can think of it as an alternative to we transfer you would uh arrive You' upload a file you would share it

immediately no wallet needed your identifier is basically just uh your browser things happen client uh uh client side and that's it today with uh the current version of uh of uh fers it is wallet based but you have options to go without a wallet um that are coming very soon it's the work that we're doing uh uh in parallel also uh uh for the ethereum foundation and it's the famous social login um so social login is something that happens on your browser level on client side uh uh you you can so depending on the on the path

that we take you'd be able to for example use your email as your identifier or use let's say an existing key pair your pgp key pair in order to associate a wallet with in efficient and nonong setup seat 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 two three phone numbers of your friends or yourself or your family uh they will now become the Guardians of uh the access to your data and uh to all that in case you either lose it or you just want fast log in so there are a few paths uh and one that

already exists today is but it does require a bit of a setup you can create file vers file ver smart contract via the safe multisig today via safe multis so the safe user interface and uh thankfully safe shipped also social logins so now you can you know with with an email login directly onto fers if you go through the safe uh UI cool perfect so unfortunately we almost at time I need to wrap up but what's coming for Fs in in in this new year yeah uh great question thanks for asking uh there are a few really exciting things that are coming

including uh things focused around uh U ux so we want people to be able to log in finally just in one click uh and without having necessarily to go through the mental exercise of creating a wallet Etc so this is coming uh we have better recovery mechanisms that are coming uh we have something that is core to something we've been uh we've been focusing a lot of our efforts on which is customizability of data storage even more than there is uh today uh there is also a lot of new plugins coming in um I just want to me

to uh mention in passing that VJ is the create co-creator and organizing of she builds uh which is the uh biggest um non-mail focused uh hackathon event and and an organization in India um and we have not only a lot of participants that are learning what web 3 is all about but um we've had a lot of people already uh start proposing new plugins and ways for them to monetize their plugins via Fabs so this is going to be very exciting because you're you're seeing really the seeds of fers becoming something that is not just

VJ Constantine Andreas and the team but something that is that has been completely reopt reappropriated by anyone who wants it uh and go into into a full community play so those are a few things I'm excited about uh VJ probably has a maybe different things uh yeah so one uh 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 uh like uh that's that's a very interesting and unique uh problem that we have just because our storage is

decentralized right and this problem has been solved by multiple providers for example filecoin uh RV and different other players in the ecosystem already uh 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 file words let's say Network one network 2 Network 3 and users can pick uh between these three networks instead of you know us giving them an option that okay 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 uh like a fingerprint that is stored on chain right and you get uh 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 uh and I think that's something that's very unique as well super cool guys so for people who want to build on file ver or just try it out um H how how does one get whitelisted to kind of use this um right now it's direct communication with us um there are a few things that you can already do in order to get access for example if you have a safe multisig you're automatically allow

listed and you can deploy your your file ver um but if you want to try it out we have recurrent campaigns that pop up every now and then uh or you can really just DM FS directly uh we're usually very open uh uh to that or any one of the the the people working on uh on FS uh and this is both for users that want to try something non-financial in crypto or show uh during the holidays to their family hey you don't need money or speculation to use something in crypto uh and for teams that want to build on ferse using f verse destroy f verse whatever they want they can either go

directly on GitHub they can go on radical or they can again uh message us we're constantly uh uh talking with different teams so we're happy to see that type of uh those types of interactions perfect thank you guys it's been a real pleasure F thank you thanks for all the great questions also for uh uh putting your finger where uh where uh you know the the real discussion can happen and things might be a bit wly it's always a pleasure and yeah hope we we can return maybe in a year to show how much progress has been

made