How Crypto Fixes the Internet Monopoly | Neil Chatterjee, DAWN & Andrena

Transcript

[Music] so the part that where we like to stand out and seeing their ability Stand Out versus even 5G and even something like starlink is we all have cool point to multipoint coverage but what we have is point to multi-point multi- gigabit coverage and that is really kind of the big threshold here is we can do that at speeds that are exceeding that of existing home internet connection so you can distribute it very effectively throughout the market hey everyone we all know blockchain is changing the world but who's actually driving it I'm excited to invite you to the sixth edition of Meridian a web 3 conference hosted by the Stellar development foundation in London from October 15th through 17th get early bird tickets at meridian. stellar.org with code

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signature attack to learn more about Harpy click the link in the show notes or visit Harpy doio ire all right everyone welcome back to Empire um another app in the UN undiscovered founders series unofficial series that I would say we're doing um Santi and I both invested in uh andrina um they recently launched Dawn announced their $18 million raise led by I think it was dragonfly um Neil is a fantastic founder has a really long uh history of building things Princeton robotics dropped out to lead engineering at a startup developed this like close range uh mobile data sharing Hardware at Facebook uh and then built andrina and that has actually been

building a business for the last several years outside of crypto uh and realize crypto is kind of the solution that they've been kind of looking for to to unlock the next stage of the business so Neil I guess I should say welcome to Empire thanks for having me on board Yano and Santi really appreciate it and you know looking forward to the opportunity to talk so thanks again guys yeah let's do it okay let's not talk crypto let's pause on that let's talk uh Wireless isps and Wi-Fi how does this how does the system work how does the whole what is the supply chain of of of WiFi and isps and uh Enterprise Wi-Fi and and routers like tell us about how this whole system works yeah so it's

funny because I remember like you know as I've gone through the process of pitching what we've been doing it's been really cool to be able to explain this whole thing to people because it's kind of like this Hidden World of digital infrastructure that we don't many of us don't really know about right the entire world is just super connected we kind of take it for granted but behind the scenes if you can as you said begin to tease apart and understand the supply chain you get to see a really interesting landscape here uh crown castle was like really my first foray into this whole space and you know if you look in the TMT sector they're known for anything from Towers but they have a big fiber businesses well and so the university in town Princeton here they utilize crown castle and when I was

looking for a wholesale source of connectivity I found these guys I'm like oh what is this company doing and how does it work and it turns out that they have a business model of either just buying up little small Regional fiber companies that interconnect businesses but also building their own so their whole job is they will run fiber up and down major highways in a given region like the Northeast and find a way to interconnect them for other people like cell towers you know Enterprises but universities as well and the important bit is that that kind of brought me into the world of realizing that there's these kind of three tiers of Internet providers right crown castle is the second tier the third tier are these folks that are like andrina like Comcast like Verizon right our job is to

distribute internet within a given Market within a given region but then you have these wholesale guys who make a business just out of enabling the tier three guys and some bigger Enterprise customers tier one and you know everything that interconnects tier one is I would think a pretty magical place you know it's kind of nerdy thing to say but the point being is think about like subc Fiber Optic Cables right think about data centers and the interconnections between data centers those are really the guys that are the tier one type of folks that are bringing a whole bunch of capacity towards a given country for example and so that tier three approach of like some level of a global interconnect to a data center some level of a regional interconnect with a fiber provider and then a tier three folk that can

distribute it that's really the entire internet architecture as we know it um all the way you know connecting you know the entire world with this this type of model so it's been a pretty cool way to see where not only how it works and the technology behind it but also the various pricing models behind it and see the various history of how this data changes over time so I guess that's a that's my quick little bit of overview behind there you know subc Fiber Optic Cables data centers and local interconnects and then Regional providers like Andreina okay so the so I'm in New York so the regional providers are like Verizon and spectrum and things like that they get it from the tier 2 and the tier ones are the ones that are doing the the crazy technical work like laying the fibers and the undersea fibers and the data

centers and all that kind of stuff what is the problem with the market as it exists today so the biggest problem and I think this is one that we can kind of all relate with is that internet prices are high and there's not a lot of competition right you're in a scenario where like I remember when I first moved to Princeton even there is localized redlining so you know they're technically these providers are taking up markets and further subdividing them in a way where competition is just you know I don't want to I don't can't hard to say if it's directly artificially restricted but you're in a scenario where providers kind of like to take their own corners of this they don't necessarily want to overb build on each other and replicate the infrastructure because they're not know they're not going to be able to compete from a cost

perspective so I'd say the biggest problem is just yeah kind of I said earlier right prices are too high and there's not a lot of competition and ultimately it's not hard to understand why right like historically it's been very expensive to bring people internet right if you're in a scenario where I need to run a wi or several thousand miles like you know that's going to be a very expensive proposition here but I I think things are beginning to certainly change as we look across you know the world and the technology behind it um but yeah that's been kind of the core the core problem here and what we've seen the opportunity andrina right is building owners and residents that we work with are always looking for a cheaper better option and when you look at like The NPS of these guys like consumers aren't necessarily thrilled

with them it's a very you know a very monopolistic business with uh you know kind of streamlining you in trying to lock you in with long and unfair contracts uh I'd say you know internet providers are you know it's due for a shakeup and uh we've seen you know incredible companies like starlink go down the route of trying to change these sorts of models as well so it's clear that you know not only is the space looking need a revamp but there's people that are trying to find a cool way to go about doing it yeah that's a really good point on starlink one and I want to double click on this idea of like why hasn't it been tried before um and get your thoughts there because yeah so I I'd say you know the disrupting The Last Mile I think that's like if you kind of asked the folks in

like networking research ever since the '90s people have always been like aining on like what's the best way to do it right like we can see that from the cable TV days now to the internet days that monopolistic trend has always been there and has always been kind of pervasive right and so Wireless networking researchers and just you know all types of networking researchers I've been looking at like what are the ways in which we could find a way to disrupt this um and the best example for why this hasn't been possible or the way to change it hasn't really been around is to look at what is really the first attempt at demonstrating if something like this was possible Right the the kind of goal to keep everybody in mind here is the goal is let's team up to be able to build a new type of network that

is coste effective and not riant on a single provider right like that's the vision of what the the entire history of disruption for the space has been focused on and the first really cool attempt of that was a proof of concept and I think 2003 by MIT they did this project called roof net which essentially used 900 megahertz mesh repeaters across the rooftops from Boston and Cambridge to be able to provide connectivity and they demonstrated like hey you can create a municiple wide wireless mesh Network to provide internet connectivity to people across a huge landscape Santi to your point the biggest issue about this was always on performance you know they were using the same Spectrum in this scenario the 900 megaherz spectrum that helium was using on their iot Network so the

Spectrum has been around but the underlying technology is only able to do half a megabit per second right like I'm calling you on a on a gigabit per second you know you're being you're 2,000 times off from where you need to be with this underlying technology and so the easy kind of simple answer about like where we're going to now is we're evolving into a world where Wireless actually can compete against fiber right even like five six years ago when we first started andrina it wasn't always easy for wireless to compete against fiber because you didn't have the performance that you needed and I think you're seeing this this evolution of Technology whether it's stuff like starlink whether it's stuff like 5G or even the fixed Wireless that we deploy it's reaching higher and higher speeds and I think the timing is incredibly opportune to be

able to use those higher speeds the low capex with a really cool model of course to be able to disrupt this entire thing NE can you just you mentioned andrina a couple times um can you just introduce andrina a little bit more like what is the business model who are the buyers who are the sellers like what what problem are you solving here maybe let's just double click on andren a bit yeah so andrina is kind of how we got into this whole Space right like we started off by just teaming up with Princeton University and with the idea that like hey you guys have excess bandwidth with crown castle you guys have a bunch of cool rooftops let's interconnect these rooftops and provide cheap Internet to the people in the town and that was the you know the start right is kind of in

the neighborhood that I lived in the one thing that you know I could do to help so I I I tried to do everything that I could to to inter connect these towns and you know demonstrated that there was a viable model so we ended up building a business called andrina that took that model and really tried to put it on steroids right so we are a wireless and a fiber internet service provider and our goal is to really bring Internet to the Last Mile and by we do that by teaming up directly with the residents of a given area providing them internet service that starts at $30 or working directly with the building owners to build them a full property connectivity experience so our approach towards this is we're going to compete directly against Comcast we're going to compete directly against Verizon we're going to

build a better product that offers a more convenient internet experience and we're going to have a cheaper way of delivering internet to people that's been our entire Niche right we took the automation the better experience and the cheaper aspect and we've just been teaming up with building owners public housing authorities all across the country to be able to do this so you know we're providing internet to a little over 10,000 households right now across 10 different states uh and you know we work with a combination of both REITs single family homes housing authorities new construction Developers it's a whole bunch of of people that are interested in you know not only hey I want to get cheaper internet but I want to provide a better experience for my residents and this has been kind of the the the niche that we found ourselves in it's a big Niche but uh it's been a fun

one to tackle because we've been able to see firsthand that the demand is really there right the demand for cheap better internet is there uh so I think you know as we've gotten to you know multi-million in Revenue annually we've been able to really kind of demonstrate ourselves and get the conviction that hey if you could find a way to put this whole thing on and bring it to everyone like there's a huge opportunity here let's uh dissect the unit economics here like you talk about lower internet like how how cheaper is it um you also referen capex also coming down so uh yeah what do the unit economics look like for you guys yeah so the most important thing to consider here is like so to give you guys a base sense right depending on on how we work with the landlords we're typically in a scenario

where we can offer internet from 25 to $30 to a building right so and that's for you know high speed in terms of of what you're getting um when you say highp speed is like fiber optic or uh no it's comparable to fiber optic speed right so we we've done scenarios where you know in some properties when we work with the landlord we can give people a gigabit internet for $35 right so it's a really good opportunity to give people a the same speed at the top of the top that they're currently getting just at a much lower price and I think the unit economics is kind of tells the full story of this entire thing like if you want to understand the history of communications uh and how the world interconnects it all comes down to Unit E iics so to give you a good sense of it

right like right now my I'm at home calling you guys for my Verizon connection that Verizon connection I'm paying $128 per month for if you go back to a data center you know the tier one tier two type of guys and you buy that same amount of bandwidth that you're looking to get for a home gigabit connection it only costs you about 50 cents right so it's kind of Staggering to think that like hey I'm paying 128 bucks for something that's costing them 50 cents it's a 99 plus% gross margin product right the as you kind of look underneath the hood you begin to realize oh the reason that they're charging me $128 it because it's because it cost them thousands of dollars to bring that connection to my home right that's the whole capex piece of the side of equation right like if they're if they

have to pay anywhere from 2500 to $4,000 to bring that connection to my home which is kind of rough Verizon metrics here you can kind of see where in order to get a sensable payback on your entire infrastructure you have to be charging that much amount of money and so I say say kind of you know the way to think about fiber unit economics is like you're thinking like thousands of dollars per household as we think about the deployments that we do in terms of buildings we're paying on the order of magnitude of around $200 per unit and so if you can see if you're in a scenario where you're paying $200 per unit it can be much cheaper in terms of bringing internet to folks and that's really what Wireless is enabled is that by beaming internet directly to the user instead of going over the wires instead of it

costing us thousands of dollar it's only costing us around $200 and I think as we kind of look at really changing the space and allowing everybody in the world to participate with this technology that we've built that's kind of a reflection of the economics that we want to create here right we want to be in a scenario where it doesn't cost thousands of dollars to bring internet to a household it cost you know low hundreds of dollars to bring internet to a house yeah and and I wanted reemphasize what you just said the real reason why they are charging you 139 is because they at some point needed to front the capex to to build this grid which is you look at American Tower like all these different companies infrastructure companies have to in make huge investments in capex up front and then amortize that across their customer

base for x amount of years and they need to get you know the payback on that capex is like a key metric right that they're looking at correct yeah and if I could in one kind of like the only you know I guess the only financial or like you know economic Insight I can offer in the space that I found like an interesting pattern on is if you look at like TMT analysis like over of the history like the two major metrics that everybody's focused on is like what's the cost to cover a household so imagine just running fiber down your street or putting up a wireless transmitter right you're providing coverage in that scenario and then the second major cost is what's the cost to activate the household right like once the household or the user wants to sign up what's the incremental cost required associating

with doing that the biggest kind of abstraction I can give here is the pth 20 plus years has been defined by a history of Technologies where the cost to cover has been incredibly High and the cost to activate has been very low or medium right we are now seeing a massive transition with wireless where the cost to cover is insanely low and the cost to activate is at a similar price maybe a little bit higher but that's okay because you can create that big Network for really cheap but then that once you actually have the subscription it's going to be very low you know you're going to recoup that investment right and so that has been kind of whether you look at the two major successful Wireless Technologies

beyond what I think we're doing has been 5G and starlink right 5G and starlink are defined by that Financial characterization where you have a very low cost to cover and then an incremental higher cost when somebody signs up so but you know you're going to recoup your investment there and I think that sort of shift and Dynamics from that high cost to cover to low cost to cover and then even increas ining the cost to activate if required is the going to be the characterization of successful telecommunications companies going forward M for this might be a very basic question but what specifically about 5G and starlink uh has allowed to lower that cost to cover the biggest thing on the 5G side is like if you look

at like 5G home internet service it's really kind of like T-Mobile and Verizon that have been leading that space the reason why that they've been able to do that is because they've been able to use their existing infrastructure and their Wireless the spectrum that they got from from the FCC you know Verizon on the 3.7 gig and T-Mobile on the 2.5 gig they've been able to create a lot of coverage with that using their existing infrastructure so that's been kind of the no-brainer on their end they've been able to see hey we can create a lot of coverage doing our existing infrastructure thanks to Wireless in the case of starlink right it's costing them tens of billions of dollars to create that network but they get to cover a whole lot of households as a result of doing that so it's really kind of a

combination of like the Wireless to be able to create a lot of coverage the underlying modulation techniques to be able to support a lot of different endpoints in a good way uh but then being able to deploy in a model where you either have your infrastructure costs already covered or you're just creating so much coverage that it doesn't even matter and I think that's like a it's like a stark comparison when you consider that in the case of fiber you know if I run fiber down the street for providing 10 households that's like cost me $20,000 just to run fiber down the street and not do anything with it you know versus if I could take that $20,000 and make Wireless transmitters I could provide coverage for thousands of households with $20,000 if not even more yeah that's a good point like uh is it

fair to say that like in the case of 5G it's you had to have had that there was a huge cost to lay out that network uh now you're not factoring that in and just you're just sort of leveraging that that already exists in the case of starlink it's like you know putting satellites up has that that cost goes down over time but it has been historically prohibitively expensive um I lay that that question as a or or that statement as a comparison now to like what you're doing in andrina and I'd like to just shift a little bit of the conversation of your realization of like how does crypto play into all of this and that shift of capex because I think the shift of capex of who's fronting it

at some point is the key unlock but um yeah walk us through that kind of realization that you had yeah and that that what Santi just said is kind of going to be something that we come back to like the the point being is you know if you look at the where that so we have the history of like fiber and how expensive they are we have wireless which is bringing it even lower the major unlock that we've been able to kind of tap into here is by lavaging the end consumer and the household and anybody that wants to participate to help fractionalize that cost further right like that's how I think about it is you're taking an already lower cost and you're spreading it out across Last Mile making it easy for anybody to participate so to give you guys a little bit of an overview about what we do

right so what we go to the rooftops of data centers multif family apartment buildings commercial buildings and we use point to multi-point antennas to broadcast an area of coverage and this category is typically is technically called fixed Wireless and it's got a long history of you know companies going in the in the midwest where you don't have a lot of density renting space on top of TV towers to broadcast the signal right like the most famous company for that is one in the US called rise Broadband that technology that rise really kind of put a lot of demand into buying and and building out and all these vendors kind of following suit with them has only gotten stronger over the past 10 years and now we're leveraging the scenario where we at

andrina are able to deliver this coverage for only a couple hundred dollars right we're in a scenaria where a $400 $500 antenna can create point to multi-point multi gigabit coverage right I mean one node can talk to many and it can do that in a multi-gigabit threshold that's kind of the biggest Milestone from a technical perspective that brings makes andrina make sense but also what we're doing on Dawn makes sense right because the the biggest thing is you need to have a scalable way to grow this thing and if I can have one node talk to many rather than than the inverse of one node talking only to another node now you actually have a scalable Network where you can build where it's kind of feels like a miniature cell tower almost right like whenever you get a new phone

that signs up it's not like the Telecom company goes back to the cell tower to install new infrastructure they just have that work for whoever is in the vicinity and that ability to service people with that type of model is now what we're seeing in the fixed Wireless space but also in a multi-gigabit capacity so the part that where we like to stand out and seeing their ability Stand Out versus even 5G and even something like starlink is we all have cool point to multi-point coverage but what we have is point to multi-point multi- gigabit coverage and that is really kind of the big threshold here is we can do that at speeds that are exceeding that of existing home internet connection so you can distribute it very effectively throughout the market and STI go go ahead you had a question there

no my my brain was overloaded like that that last that two minutes if that's all you're going to listen to In This pod like that that to me was like the most dense but like the most important thing uh about what you're building there's like a lot there but I was just trying to like um go SL Neil I have a weird question which is did you see crypto like booming and you're like I have to get into this crypto thing let me kind of find how crypto could slot into our business or was it yeah how like how did you what was the aha moment for like oh my God crypto could actually solve this that's a that's a fun story because I when I before I started andrina like right as of starting andrina I knew crypto I wanted crypto to be a part of

this thing right this was in 2017 like I wrote like a hacker noon blog post about how people can team up using this incred incredible technology to be able to create Community powered networks with the trustus layer and blockchain right like there's a blog post on that from 2017 but I didn't end up going down that route because I thought the a the wireless technology wasn't good enough which is true and the entire Community wasn't mature enough to be able to build these sorts of infrastructure a couple of things really changed since then the biggest one has just been helium right like I originally was not like I was not sure that you could like a helium type model could ever exist but they demonstrated and then this entire deep in ecosystem demonstrated like hey you can get folks to help you build out this

network you can get retail to help you build a network of professional operators that are willing to go and deploy carrier grade infrastructure for you so yeah that's the that's the that's the article I'm glad I'm glad you found that one yeah this is this is the birth of andrina right it's I always wanted something like this to be to happen I just didn't feel like the technology was there at the time you know and you know I think the biggest thing that changed is yeah like I said the wireless technology got good enough to be able to scale to this level of performance helium proved me wrong and demonstrated that a community can really go out and build an incredibly Network um and then I guess the final piece of that is we figured out the real trustless layer

over it only the past year right like if you want to build a decentralized wireless network you need to have a trustless layer by which the nodes can interact with each other so I know we we're kind of jumping the gun here but let me at least give give the you know the listeners some level of an overview on this what we've ultimately realized is that we can take the technology that we've built at andrina put that into a consumer friendly form factor to allow anybody to grow networks with us and the vision that we have for that is called Dawn it stands for decentralized autonomous wireless networks and it really is just a protocol for providing decentralized broadband and leveraging this Hardware with the trustless layer on top of it so you know not to be too deep in the jargon there but the point

being is it allows people to share their excess bandwidth it doesn't matter whether you're a household or data center or an even internet provider like us it gives you a very efficient way to be able to share data center with people that you don't even know and people that can then further strengthen the network and reprop that down the road so Dawn being the protocol for a decentralized Broadband I think is under this Vision that I always like to preach here is our goal is just to do to internet what solar panels did to electricity the same way that consumers own their own infrastructure they get access to a very cheap resource and they get a non-speculative Roi on their investment in their household without even using tokens that's the kind of key of what

we're trying to bring to this year right in the case of solar you might get a five to six year payback period but if you look at the nuts and bolts of that Arbitrage right the 128 that I'm paying versus the 50 cents you can take that spread give it back to the individual household and people are now able to recoup their investment in six to 12 months rather than multiple year years and I I think as like that's kind of the world that we want to build right we want to build a world where you own your own internet infrastructure you're part of this decentralized cloud of other people that have excess Supply and you seamlessly talk to each other and grab data and sell data whenever you can and I think it's a it's a very interesting transformation here where it just moves

towards again less providers and more individual households that are contributing towards such a massive market right we're dealing with like an almost trillion dollar market here right so I think it's a very fun kind of project to be going going down and you know ever since the blockchain days of 2017 thanks for pulling that up again uh things have come a long way and the timing has been perfect to be able to execute on this okay there's a lot there but let's invert uh what does it mean for a customer so like you have a existing contract with W you know Verizon or AT&T you want to get set up and Dawn how do you do it so what it means is pretty straightforward right you are currently paying about $100 right on average for like a gigabit maybe a little bit less

maybe a little bit more like it technically goes all the way up to 140 can go as low as 70 80 bucks right the vision that we have here is people will own their own infrastructure so pay anywhere from you know $200 for a simple box all the way to an outdoor node can be even more but as a result you're going to get access to gigabit internet that is10 or $20 right that's the consumer bottom line here is we don't want people to pay $100 we want people to pay 10 to2 dollar per gigabit internet and the reason why that should be achievable is because you know that from this call that on the provider side they're only paying 50 cents the reason that they have to pay more than 50 Cent or they charge you more than 50 cents because they have to recoup the capex

but if you are owning that capex and it's only it's less than $1,000 dollar to own that right talk 200 plus dollars to own own one of those nodes you can be in a scenario where you are now getting internet for much much cheaper because you have already covered the capex piece and you own it as part of a carrier agnostic Network so it's not like you have a Verizon modem and you're locked into Verizon right you have something that can work with you across this decentralized network with any provider and that's the the real bottom line here is just cheaper internet prices if we take it to the next level and Santi just to be kind of quick on this one you can then use that same box to when you have excess bandwidth to be able to sell that to other people right so to give you

guys a good example here and how this can manifest here like my $128 Verizon connection we're recording this podcast and I'm using like 0.5% of that total apply right that it's it's insane right now this call is like at best like what five megabits per second so I have so much excess that I can use to be able to provide other people connectivity that there's just a great opportunity to be able to take that and make that a little bit more professional right like how many I've been in a scenario where I lived in an apartment I shared a Wi-Fi network with my neighbor right like there's a bunch of crazy things that can happen when you start sharing Wi-Fi networks with each other but why not make it a little bit more streamlined a little bit more robust with a level of guarantee in terms of the underlying

speeds year that you're getting and just find a way in which everybody can save in the entire process right like the real Crux here is yes you have the capex model on how we invert the capex model but the kind of ongoing nature of it is built on the fact that at the wholesale side internet is cheap and at the household side we tend to have a bunch of surplus and what we want to do is find a way to leverage that to build a new type of network that is fundamentally powered by the users uh if my math is correct the payback is less than a at most two months yeah some in some scenarios right we have some scenarios where the payback can be less than a month less than a mon yeah so it can be it can be pretty insane in terms of how

quickly you can recoup your investment uh by owning the internet infrastructure process here right we and there's depending on who like what type of coverage you want to create whether you just want to receive a connection from dawn whether you want to host an outdoor node and get a bunch of rewards for providing coverage in an area but that's been kind of like our guiding line here is like use internet Arbitrage to give people a sub one-year payback without even considering additional rewards above that and that in our mind is what we need to be a deepin project that is going to be getting Mass adoption right we don't want to just be something that appeals to web 3 audiences we want to be something that can be part of every single household right that's what we all want in web 3 we want to find figure

out a way by which our technology appeals to the mass audience and the pitch that I make to you guys all the listeners is what is going to be that one killer technology that brings it every household and my I bet is it's going to be something incredibly relatable something that people already use and something that saves people a whole bunch of money yeah I mean uh so absolutely agree there on um on the on the side of the buying the box so you're saying 200 bucks that would be for the outside like would be that' be for the indoor box yeah for the indoor and the outdoor would be a little bit more like 500 uh we're aiming well we're based on like what our underlying cost like we think we could get them to around a thousand

bucks for that type of scenario but that outdoor Buck would give you that thousand would give you the ability to Pro provide coverage for three to five miles so you get to really create a huge amount of coverage that way yeah yeah definitely and by the way on the math that I was doing is it cost you 200 you're saving 100 bucks per month so the payback is two months give or take now if you add on top of that the component of selling some of the unused bandwidth it can be low or as you said up to down to a month or even less depending on on how much you're selling um maybe two qu two questions well I want to go deeper into like uh the go to market and all that but maybe the

listener would be like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa how do you get access to to this thing like this box is allowing me to get access to like the big boys table uh is there a regulatory uh FCC kind of thing that you guys have had to deal with or is there a choke point here where someone might come and say no you can't access um you know yeah because we are gonna be yeah because we're going to be working directly with data centers to create these connections and Branch them off to the local market really internationally right the cool part I was looking at is like you know areas that don't have good Last Mile infrastructure they still have data centers and that was always the thing

that kind of blew my mind right as looking at like lima and Peru for example there's like quinex data centers all over the place so there's like kind of like this wholesale infrastructure to power the cloud that also has good connectivity so the point being is that's going to be kind of like the key Crux here is we're going to be working with retail to build their own mini networks but we're also going to be working with Enterprises and businesses to help meet somewhere in the middle and so that's been kind of our strategy for how do we make sure that not only do we have these localized networks of retail working together to share internet but then we make sure they're plugged in directly to an incredibly cheap source of connectivity okay yeah because what I was getting at is the reliability right you can have

the performance but you want also want the reliability so you would probably want to have a couple of these data centers in a particular cluster not if one goes down or one cancels your contract or whatever one it makes your life difficult it doesn't compromise the Rel the performance the reliability of the network right so say in a dense area like uh I don't know New York or where you are um you would want to have like how does that how would that work you'd have a couple of relationships with data centers and then the consumer network but how do you think about that like scaling it out to like the world I guess yeah the the most important piece of all that is as you kind of said is making sure that you have a topology on your Network that has

redundancy in multiple paths and so as we think about what the protocol is going to be doing here right the protocol is going to be incentivizing people to create wireless coverage but you know we know that you need more than just that as you kind of consider these points and stuff that we learned at andrina you want redundant paths you want you know in Wireless terminology or networking terminology what's called a ring right you need a ring of connectivity to form so that you have two paths towards every single source and so not only are is the protocol going to be incenting a level of wireless coverage to be created it's also going to be a be incentivizing redundant paths to be created and some of the IP that we have built allows us to leverage those redundant pads so to give you a sense of it like this outdoor

node that we're doing the the reason why it's able to be automated and so and cheap and be able to be part of a flexible network is because of that's the technology that we built at andrina and to give you guys a sense of what that is it's essentially a robotic antenna system we built a antenna inside of a pod that moves and the necessity of that is and you need to have a very directional antenna to get that multi- gigabit signal connection quality but the downside of that is you have to aim it you have to adjust it right people don't necessarily who are Wireless technicians don't know that stuff so you need to find a way to make it automated so people don't have to think about it but then Santi to your point you need to make sure that that stuff can actually

be readjusted so if a new opportunity for a new signal Source comes up it can automatically Point itself at that new signal source and that's been some of the IP that we've been bringing to the table to help automate this entire aspect of it and so making sure that the the nodes that are the sort of big focal points of connectivity here making sure that those users have an extra redundant path to the internet is part of what the protocol is going to be incentivizing here that's really cool was that Source inspiration like those solar panels that look like sunflowers that like just rotate that's really cool that's been that that that was an inspiration once I saw that starlink was doing it when they Point their dishes up to the sky it was a similar type of model right the there's there's kind of like a more

standard electrical engineering way of doing it without moving Parts it's just way too expensive uh this whole category is called beam forming but the point being is this is a very lowcost way to add similar types of automated functionality towards whatever radio or antenna you want utilize hey everyone Jason here just wanted to take a a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of blockchain the Stellar development foundation is hosting their sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London it's a 3-day event where the brightest Minds in web 3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to defi if you're a developer Builder policy maker or

business leader looking to make an impact in transforming Global Systems through blockchain this is your chance to join the conversation you'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code block Works pod for early bird pricing now let's get back to today's episode hey everyone Jason here I wanted to quickly talk about Kronos ZK evm a Next Generation zero knowledge layer 2 blockchain Network focused on scalability security and Innovation secured by ethereum it further expands the Kronos ecosystem using ZK sync Tech Kronos ZK evm has launched its Pioneer

program offering early users loyalty points for engaging with Kronos ZK evm and its daps join the first Quest by depositing cro in the Kronos ZK evm bridge to receive ZK cro and loyalty points at Main net launch and that's not all in addition toing ZK cro and loyalty points you could also win part of a $30,000 ZK cro giveaway by depositing in the bridge the more you deposit the better your chances of winning visit zkm drron dog bridge for more info now let's get back to Today's show this episode is brought to you by polygon polygon Labs is developing the next generation of open-source zero knowledge

Tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the agir that was a big mouthful so I'm going to tell you what it means in my in my words there's all these things popping up l2s and l3s and it's chaos right if you are building something you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity you can basically just build in the AG layer to tap into the liquidity of the AG layer and the users of the AG layer you get the users you get the liquidity it's the AG layer it's high it's by polygon Labs they've got the polygon Community grants program it was launched with 1 billion tokens Just For polygon Builders season 1 it's live right now it features 35

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iempire you want it to be even easier just click the link in the show notes let's shift a little bit into uh give us a little bit of context of like before like dawn like how much uh scale were you able to get and then with Dawn like how do you think about the next 12 months in terms of like adoption and network coverage and expansion yeah so you know I kind of I mentioned it like a little bit towards the building but of the be the beginning but we were're we're providing internet to a little bit over 10,000 households now uh across 10 different states in the US right like Texas Tennessee New Jersey New York Connecticut right like kind of Mid-Atlantic Florida Texas Tennessee has been kind of our footprint um and it's been good right

it's been good in the sense that we found a bunch of landlords and real estate partners that want to work with us a bunch of individuals that like working with with us on the Housing Authority side like we work with the New York housing authorities the Jersey City Housing Authority for example so we've seen you know great uplift from that but the kind of you know the kind of good and unfortunate thing about this is we're still Shackled by our ability to deploy Capital right like it doesn't matter if it takes me 10 times less Capital to deploy networks in Verizon I still need a whole bunch of capital to go do that right um and so I think what we've kind of learned is that by building up this technology our vision behind it is we just want everybody to have this technology right we want

everybody to be able to realize this cheaper source of connectivity that is more redundant more automated Etc and as we kind of think about the plans here the easiest nutshell is we just want to make it easy for people to build mini andras all across the world right it doesn't matter whether you're just trying to share internet with your neighbor and you guys are trying to S save on your internet bill it doesn't matter whether you have an a business that has excess data and you want to sell that excess connectivity to your neighborhood or maybe you're somebody that's a cloud provider or a validator of another crypto currency and you have a bare metal server at a data center maybe you want to be able to monetize that connection further so I think really we're aiming to be able to take this technology and use that internet

Arbitrage to bring it to people all across the world so that folks can really quickly build a network with us right that's like what I kind of said you we want to have these mini andinos all across the world and there's so many places where a technology like this can go a long way because either internet prices are too high they're not good enough or the last M infrastructure is not reliable enough so I think we're kind of looking at appealing at Urban markets but there's also a unique opportunity in rural markets it's just an absolutely huge footprint for us to be able to go after and I'm quite excited for it how do you think about the um transitioning more into the network economics of like selling back uh or selling unused Broadband um how do you think about that price um and I

guess that Marketplace emerging right yeah so a lot of that stuff in this dynamics of it is like our goal out from the from the foundation the protocol side is not only to create the rules by which people can exchange data and make sure that you guys can't lie about the amount of data you have right we've implemented a protocol with witness chain on our system called proof of back hall and proof of back hall is essentially just like a decentralized speed test and we'll come back to that you know in a bit but we've built all these rules by which people can exchange of it and our goal on top of that is to help with the price Discovery side of things right so we want to say if you're participating in this network here's what we think you should charge in your surrounding area based on what other

people charge as well so I could be in my scenario where it's like hey I'm getting 128 bucks for a Verizon connection or I'm getting you know a $30 connection from andrina whatever that is right yeah I'm in a scenario where I say these are the other options that are in the area buy this box you'll get your rewards for providing coverage and what we think you should do is sell your internet a little bit lower than the other options that are out there so that's somebody else's incentivized to go buy something a similar box and they can get access to that so it's it's no you know hard and fast rule because internet prices are different everywhere our goal is to help price Discovery with the ultimate goal of bringing internet prices down to the wholesale level right we want to find a way to continuously

take retail internet prices and slowly slowly slowly bring them down to the wholesale level yeah not exactly there because you still need to factor in that marginal capex but like certainly not 130 it could go down to like do you have like a price of like what the lowest barri would be like is it 10 is it like uh 20 30 40 10 10 bucks is probably like we we'll be like I know on our Network when you know andrina is going to be one of the early operators on this network we have three other internet providers that are going to be launching with this as well like we're going to be launching a $10 gigb internet plan like that's going to be on on the cards for us I'm almost incentivized to move back to New York um um that's awesome how do you uh

wait one one question on that Neil is do you see is it going to be more B2B or B Toc it's going to be a combination of both right it's it's Whoever has the ability to interconnect I think is going to go long way like B2B is going to be a really good way to create a lot of coverage like whether you're talking with building owners or even you know big you know node miners that are deploying a lot of stuff like look at how many people have created many micro businesses that have deploying helium nodes and other these types of nodes right like these types of guys are really good way to create a lot of coverage and you know we love working with them because of the ethic that they take towards this but then there's also the ability to work directly with

consumers right whether you want to install a dish on your balcony whether you want to install a dish in your home and get that from your neighbor there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice it and we just want to kind of allow everybody to participate and that's an important piece of this equation H how do you think about comp uh the go to market here because if you look at the top 10 ad Spenders in the US I think three or four of the top 10 ad Spenders in the entire Us by their marketing budget are Comcast Verizon um AT&T it's like it's it's the players that you will end up competing with right they're spending four five six billion dollars a year on advertising and customer acquisition so even if you have a $10 product a month and they're charging 50 they're also spending $6

billion dollar a year to you know to make up that difference so how do you think about the like customer acquisition game there yeah I mean I think ultimately it's it's it's going to be a challenge for many different directions but there's hopefully a pretty good playbook here like we've been able to see the wild success of helium and helium Mobile in terms of what they've been able to do uh I think we want to kind of follow some similar paths and take inspiration from hooks that have done it right but like crypto has a very captive audience of folks that believe in this underlying same vision that we have right like we all believe in this end state where the consumer is powering the infrastructure that we know like that's what deepin is and so we want to be in a scenario where people who are buying our box and able

to share internet with each other are then going to knock on their neighbors door and saying hey how would you feel if we split this internet bill or I give you excess internet for $30 so there's going to be incentives in a big referral program that allows people and incentivizes people to go and do that sort of model so I'd say what the way that we compensate for those massive budgets is through the community and making sure that the community is getting some real value out of this and there is more value to be gained by sharing it with your neighbors that's the kind of model that we're going to be focusing on here so This sounds too good to be true what what uh what could go wrong here like what are the biggest risks is it someone clamping down uh making this illegal uh you know

consumers not you know appreciating it how do you think about the risks of any uh I think the biggest risk towards this is it actually comes down to making sure that you are understanding the shape of your network really well and that's a hard technical problem like one of the things that's very challenging to validate and still trying to figure out the right way to go about doing this is like validating location if somebody says great I love Dawn I want to get involved in this Marketplace and get cheap internet they need to have confidence that what when they buy the hardware they're actually going to be able to get an internet connection and in a trustless network people can lie about where they're located people can lie about a lot of things and we that's really what we do on our back end as we

build these proofs right the kind of big proofs that we are have is proof of bandwidth proof of frequency and proof of location right location is one of those big ways where if somebody is claiming rewards for deploying in a given area but they're just not there you're going to get a bad consumer experience and that's really what we're trying to avoid about this the underlying technology works we think the economics are incredibly strong what we need to make sure is that it's a a very very very simple consumer onboarding experience and we want to make sure there's only good experiences with signing that up so that is really kind of like our top focus is we want to make sure that entire flow has been like buttoned down we know that there's no risk of somebody getting bad experience if somebody buys us we know they're

going to get a great internet experience and this is why we how we know that so it's I think it's a lot of projects that deepens can face in general is like how do you just validate quality of service as good and it's not because a technology can't support it it's because there's a lot of unknowns in a trustless environment and being able to mitigate those unknowns is I think a challenging problem but it's solvable and uh you know we're just uh we're just getting a grip on exactly how we want to solve that at scale do you have a free potentially a free writer problem here yeah I mean there's I think a lot of scenarios where a either people can either lie about where they they're locating they can be in a scenario where they're selling internet to themselves and getting some outsized rewards for

that so these are all types of dynamics that are very challenging to kind of snuff you know like filter out but it's as we kind of dig into like the the deeper networking technical aspects of how to do it it seems like there's ways to be able to to mitigate it I think the reason that we need to be cautious or any sort of deepen netork needs to be cautious about these sorts of problems is because you don't want to hand out rewards for people that are not providing value on the system uh I think luckily we are in a scenario where people are getting a non-speculative Roi by participating on the system so we the protocol doesn't need to emit as much to incentivize people which means that all of these problems are less exacerbated if that makes sense yeah yeah definitely

and and yeah how do you on the hardware side um and like Distributors like is this something that you'd be able to buy directly from you you know you go to Best Buy you go to you know on Amazon whatever like is it come are you GNA allow other people to develop their own Hardware uh or or you know you just kind of sell your own yeah so just to get started off with we're going to be selling these boxes and the reason why is because it's a combination of tech that hasn't existed in this kind of shape and form and to kind of walk you guys through what it is like think about it in terms of some level of wireless transmitter and some level of a software based router so that is a little bit of

a unique thing that we haven't seen in this combination working together so we're going to be starting this off but we're going to be open sourcing everything we're going to be open sourcing everything people can build their own boxes the underlying antenna and radio combination is agnostic in the system so you can go buy your own bring your own it doesn't really matter right all that matters is that you can connect with somebody else in your community so we're going to kind of have Partnerships with vendors that steers the community in One Direction but there's nothing that stops somebody from building their own box and doing whatever they would like on the hardware side of things it's I think it's a there's a lot of good solutions that are out there at least on the wireless antenna side of things that you need to be an interoperable platform

that can really work across the board and then you know the second piece of that is that software-based router is a one of one of my you know favorite Parts about all of this which is kind of talk about in a second but all of that code is going to be open sourced and it's essentially a cool way in which anybody can even run that on their you know I don't know if people will be able to run that on their laptop but uh they can certainly run that on like a desktop computer something that's already on and that can kind of replace your home Internet modem and router in a way that's pretty cool and the form factor is similar to a router like it's you know yeah the form factor is like a box that can fit in the size of my hand

right like that's this is kind of the the long-term vision of what we're pursuing here is like we want to build this box in your home that is kind of just a cloud internet Appliance right like and we can kind of talk a little bit more about that but the vision that I have for deepin is every household is going to have this little black box that just participates in every single deepin project it doesn't matter whether it's internet it doesn't matter whether it's gpus or storage you just have this little box that just sits there and like it's kind of like your fridge right it's an appliance it's a household appliance that participates in this new digital economy and this new digital infrastructure and that's why we've decided to essentially create that software router right by running a high performance routing application on a

generic purpose software router we can actually go a tangible step towards achieving that yeah uh last question and then I want to just open it up to what what you just said lastly which is just your broader vision for deepen which that last point was really interesting actually um on this cold start problem that networks have you know outside of higher density areas um how important is the token here and the token incentives in economics to like get that fix that cold star problem right incentivize people to buy the Box uh you know and take that leap of faith knowing that you know yeah so what I would say on that is like there are pro like if the I I always call the cold start problem and chicken and egg

problem but cold start is apt apt here I'd say we're very fortunate in the scenario that we don't have a cold start problem um there are other projects that do right and the way that I kind of think about a little bit more is like projects that need a lot of Supply to provide value to the consumers is the characterization of the cold star problem but we're in a scenario where all you need is one node with x's bandwidth and they can provide immediate value in their surrounding area and that is just because we're not dealing with a Mobility based application we're dealing with a fix based application and we're just lucky we're just lucky that this entire model doesn't need a massive amount of rewards to incentivize people to overcome that hurdle all you need is one person with extra bandwidth and they

can provide value to the consumer in the surrounding area so I'd say of any deepend project that's out there you know I can think of maybe a few that are on par uh we're one of the ones that has the lowest pressure to emit for those rewards to solve that cold star problem right the underlying Roi on the system in a non-speculative fashion and our mind should go a long way towards incentivizing that now don't me don't get me wrong rewards are all think are going to be part an a necessary part of every single project and they will be here but I'd like to think that that gives us a lot of comfort that we don't need to emit too much to actually grow this network to a very big scale yeah do have you modeled out like uh you have one particular node and then

as soon as you have two or three back to that point in redundancy uh and reliability and performance like you know that's like that that magic number that you need to have to you know make sure the consumer experience is really good at on par with uh their existing solution yeah two two is really that type of answer right the only thing that really kind of like messes with this and just hard to get around is like Regional power outages but as long as you have two separate sources of connectivity you are in a scenario where you have a very very flexible and reliable node right uh it tends to be multiple different sources to out to the greater internet so we've seen that's kind of the the way that we've looked at is we want people to have two sources of connectivity yeah well I know we've been talking for for

dawn for uh you know the broader most of the conversation I also just want to get your general thoughts on deep in and uh but is there anything around uh andrina Dawn that we haven't covered that you think we we should cover I think the the I guess that's final part before we get into that is you know as you guys have seen with our launch you know we've launched a Chrome extension validator uh all I'd want to do is just talk a little bit about that and say if you guys want to get involved with the network that's probably the easiest way to get started uh the validators will be at the top of the list for getting additional Hardware as we distributed down the road so uh you know we we definitely want folks to get involved and sign up there and earn

some rewards for providing their spare bandwith on the network so the idea behind it is we know that kind of what I mentioned to earlier on the proof of back call side right if you want to have a decentralized speed test you need people that are outside the network that are simultaneously probing and challenging people's speeds in the network and that's what the Chrome extension is right you download it it runs in the background and every now and then you're selected to go challenge another node and use your spare Banner with to make sure that those Downstream nodes are being honest so building this trust this layer is a very important first step for us so you know I hope the listeners join and uh Go download that Chrome extension share with your friends there's a referral code and all that kind of stuff so that's the definitely

the first way that I'd love for folks to get involved Neil will it slow down your computer at all or your browser no no because it's a very lightweight application the only thing that it does is every now and then you're selected to do a challenge and then you do you just use your Excess band towards doing that it's a very lightweight process that's running the background you know I I remember uh when my internet like I was living in San Francisco and I would I would do this there's these apps that you download on your phone and you could test the the speed like literally I would love like just calling Verizon be like you [ __ ] you're not giving me the speed that you're claim to give me it was just like I I would just do that constantly be like all right how

are they scre because you just know they're screwing you and you're like okay they're clearly not giving me the service that I'm paying for and Santi that's the the value prop of like why proof of back call is so powerful because we can Implement a decentralized SLA right if you're buying 500 megabits per second from me and I'm only giving you 250 megabits per second there is no arguing about the experience right so you can if you have a programmatic SLA you almost remove the role of what the service provider is doing oh God I yes folks if there's one reason why you this particular reason like I mean if it's not compelling enough like they're charging you 120 bucks and it's costing them 50 cents like you know that I mean if anyone ever to like if anyone's ever

been on the phone with Verizon this is the this is the pitch for it's like that's what I'm saying just ruins your day it really does yeah yeah um that's really cool Neil uh Yano anything else you want to ask on this point not on this point I I almost just wanted to like I mean s I thought you had really good like questions about just like how it all works and stuff but Neil I'm just reading your hacker noon post I was kind of skimming it as you guys were talking and it's like I mean you've been at this vision for like like several years now going on a decade like if what what is the world going to look like if you guys are successful like and like how will broadband and WiFi and all of that change if like if you guys are wildly

successful so the and this kind of comes back to santi's question for like deepin and all that stuff because we're pursuing I think a way in which internet is you know takes on a solar panel model where people don't have to think about it you just participate in this cloud and you even have software that is picking internet plans for you dynamically based on what's cheapest on a month-to-month basis and it's just automated it just solves your problems for you you have your decentralized SLA so you get your money back like this entire process of what we've learned at andrina is that you can automate the internet and that's the goal of what I want to have here I want to automate the internet I want to make it so that the Internet is just this background utility that operates and gives us the performance that it says it's going to

give us right at a fair price that's my goal here but to kind of go onto I guess the larger vision of what we're talking on the deepend side of stuff like the vision that I have for all of this is like I just want that what I said that little black box that sits in your home that just does the internet I want to take and when I say internet I don't just mean connectivity I mean cloud and all that kind of stuff right I want and this is I think what everybody in deepin wants we want to take the equity value that is found at data centers Cloud companies telecom companies and bring that Equity value to the household right that's the goal that we're all pursuing here and to your question you about what happens when Dawn is wildly successful on this our plan is to use affordable

internet as a trojan horse to get that black box into your home and now that that blackbox is in your home and is mining across every single deepend protocol that's out there you've taken a massive step towards actually achieving that Vision right where the Internet it's not powered by Amazon it's not powered by Google not powered by Microsoft not powered by Comcast not by Verizon it's powered by the household and I think affordable internet is kind of the first step that we can get behind towards achieving that because it's one of the few ones that actually is a better uh Source a better way to to actually save money and to make some money right it's a more efficient economic system to share internet this way and my hopes is that this entire

transition is what brings deep in Into the Future underlying under an entirely new technology framework here yeah not to mention that there's still a big part of the world that is dark right it's not covered and so you could actually again I I like in this to you said it earlier but I think of it as like how software as a service was incredibly powerful to shift what was incredibly high capex for every business and you shifted that cost and you advertised it into operating expense on a Perce basis on um per consumption basis and so that allowed startups to not have to pay hundreds you know millions of dollars to to pay for that capex and it was just a very

flexible shift in a business model that that enabled startups to have best-in-class software Solutions in their stack for like fractions and scale as they grew and I almost think that that's going to happen with deep in for infrastructure networks because if if you don't have aund million and and by the way that that's creates monopolies like American Tower and whatnot and then if you have a monopoly then degrades a service because they're complacent and I think now that is a total transformation um and it's not so much about crypto it's just like it's just a a shift of like transferring the the CICS to and distributing that to network participants exactly that's like I I'm as somebody who used to work at a SAS

company I'm kind of annoyed I didn't think of that analogy because that's a very good one but the underlying Point what you said is right right you fractionalize the cost and you make it more accessible to everybody in the process of doing that and I think those are kind of like even if we go back to the beginning of the conversation right the stuff that makes Wireless success company successful is that they change that Financial profile in a way that is more conducive towards scaling up early and creating a lot of growth later on right I think those those are definitely really really solid points here and I'm glad you brought that up yeah well what is um when can people get their hands on the box and uh you know uh like what are the next six 12 months look for you guys yeah the next six 12 months is we're

focusing on everything we need to take our Dev net towards main net right we've tested by pulling millions of dollars of our existing transactions on chain so making sure that we're ready to go live for for the mainnet is going to be a big Focus for us um we're going to be focusing on getting Hardware pre-sales out as well so that people can go ahead and and and get their spot in line to get one of these boxes but then also I mean the big thing that I love to work with anybody listening here is if you want to go start a little Network in your neighborhood like please hit me up like I love working with people to help them get internet set up wherever they are and we've already been talking with many folks that have worked heavily as you know with helium Miners and other

types of miners that are out there like there's a huge ecosystem of Partners that are getting behind this Vision one way or another and I'd love for you guys to reach out and we can talk about how we bring Dawn to your neighborhood uh maybe a basic question we should have asked this but you're built on salana we are built on salana that's correct yeah why the well the biggest reason is combination of a it makes my life easy right I was always looking at a scenario of like you know I don't want to deal with kind of like an L2 and all that kind of stuff so it was like from a raw engineering standpoint I felt like when you consider the CPS when you can consider the infrastructure Simplicity it made my life really easy to when we're thinking about protocol engineering on one side the second piece

of this is just because that's where deepin projects are and as we think about being that black box for a whole bunch of other deepins interop ability across deepen is going to be a very important piece of this equation so I'd say one it was the clear engineering trace for us two it allows us to participate in this greater ecosystem to help achieve that blackbox Vision so does that mean that you're going to give priority to uh Saga phone owners uh to buy the hardware haven't figured that piece out yet but we will let you guys know if that changes but that would be a cool way to go about doing it for sure and I think sand I guess one kind of like other point here is like I think part of the hope that we have here is like if you we would also like to see a

world where the average household like buy by buying this black box like what if it was powerful for them to become a salon of validator right like right now we're living in a world where the barrier to entry for validators is pretty high and people are just renting bare metal servers to do this but what if that black box could actually provide be an acting as a salot ofor right you'd get absolutely you'd make your super minority number start to look a whole lot better than what it currently is and I think that's a a cool part of the vision that we're also hoping to achieve so I think there's a could be there's GNA be a lot of fun Partnerships with salana down the road Integrations with salana down the road so I'm excited to absolutely like the household itself is like a great proof of humanity and proof

of like and you can use that for validation like clients like all these different things but you're right I I think for a deepen Network like the testing their reliability uh to make sure that you know CU you know there's going to be ways or people are going to try to game it right and so yeah I I think a lot of it perhaps that what you just said around like the sampling component of it making sure that the service is there is is super important because if that doesn't hold true then you know you're not going to want to give up Verizon or AT&T yeah and that's I I don't want to mean to get too off course but I think that's kind of like one of the big things that we've seen across a lot of of deepen projects right everybody can kind of create Supply using tokens one

way or another what we have seen that's been a little bit of a like causes demand to lag is that lack of reliability and certainty on around qos quality of service so by being able to give comfort and guarantee on quality of service is what you need to make something like this mainstream you know yeah Neil did you look at building on anything other than Sala we did look at you know at a couple of layer tws on on ethereum um and ultimately you know it was uh a lot of internal discussions between the team and we were trying to figure out which way we wanted to go uh but you know salana was very has been very align with us in terms of the underlying Vision that we hope to achieve here I if you were giving feedback to let's say someone from I

don't know who you looked at like a polygon or optimism or arbitrum like if one of them were listening to this and you could give them some candid feedback about how to win more deals with Founders what what would that feedback be uh you know I would say think about how the underlying Partnerships with your projects look like and think about how the mutual relationships between the companies can really you know make one plus one equals three and I think that has been one that I've always you know I'm being intentionally vague here so sorry about that but the point being is what's one that I've always really enjoyed working with the salana ecosystem is the entire Community is really behind it together in a way that I haven't seen other

communities be behind right the salonic community wants every single project in that project to succeed they want to demonstrate why salana is going to be the future for these l1s you know and I think that level of cohesion has been like it's it's just not anywhere else and so how do you go about creating that level of cohesion across your different projects I don't necessarily know the answer to that but I think that's my that's my biggest read on it what did it have any go scream integr screams integrated chain I mean it's just like you have a network where helium is already there you have more and more deepen projects there and that's those synergies are super strong and probably also that there's a the the vision is more centralized and and that's okay like you know there's there's a very clear

product Vision at the foundation whereas in ethereum it's it's much more fragmented and thus it's not a bad thing it's just like it's just been around for a while and and and maybe Sal salana at some point reaches that where you have multiple clients and you know it's just harder but right now it's very clear right you get a lot of attention and a lot of support from one organization and the projects building in salana that I haven't seen anywhere else I like I agree with Neil Neil was there anything that they could have done to get you like was there anything they could have done to get you to build there I would say or or maybe to ask it differently like did it did it have more to do with the techn like the tech and the tech stack or more to do with like the

community the other Founders there the like interest of the EOS in the ecosystem like what did it have more to do with I'd say the tech the tech was the first piece of stuff where I was just asking myself like in a black box if I didn't consider anything else what would I pick so that was like the first validation point the second validation point was on the community side of stuff right like the part that I can't like stress enough that I always feel about this is like we already have a hard enough uphill battle to bring web 3 into the web two household like you just need a unified front if you want to have any chance of actually making some significant penetration like it's already an uphill enough battle like we got to team up to be able to do this in

in a massive way yeah if you couldn't have built on salana is there one other one that you would have considered Yan just wants you to say another no no because like I think there's hundreds of hundreds of Founders not not like 10 Founders there's a 500 Founders making this decision right now I think it's a really it's one of the most important decisions you'll make unfortunately and it's a really really hard decision so I would say if you're building a deepin salana is the answer right there's no no doubt about that we did look at like some other chains uh early on in the process that are all building incredibly different things and I don't know if if they're like exactly the right deepin approach but they're doing incredible stuff like everything from Bara to Bass like there's a lot of cool stuff that's

out there you know I I it's for me I it's it's at a certain point it's just like choosing your type of database like I don't care if I want to use postgress or my SQL or all that kind of stuff I got to pick one that works that allows me to go to market effectively so I can focus on building so I I would say you know to your point Yano it is a really important choice the only thing I can talk about with any confidence is if you're a deep in protocol and if you're a deep in protocol salon Neil perhaps there a question do you think that that decision that you had to make goes away for the next cohort of Founders in five years where there's more interoperability between networks and you just don't have to think about it I would hope so right and and if we like

in a good example and it's hard for me to be able to confidently say what that interoperability looks like but I know that we're go we're already going to be start participating in this so like one of the things that we've been doing with our partnership with witness chain here is like leveraging the eth SEC base to have and and reinforce the validator system on our Network so I think like there's projects like that that are doing a really good incentive for people to be able to cross stake and i stuff like I think stuff like that is going to go a long way where as long as the L1 satisfies your technology requirements stuff like that is going to hopefully in the next five years begin to make it a little bit more operable so I'd like to think so I think stuff like cross you

know like like cross staking for validation I think is going to be an interesting way and another good group that's doing this is like parisel for example so there's a lot of people that are already tapping into this sort of stuff so I think the maturity of that ecosystem is really going to decide if if that's going to be the case awesome well Neil uh thanks for treating us with this conversation I you know hopefully I I learned a lot from how the internet actually gets you know works and how it gets to your house and allows for this type of stuff uh but yeah I think uh every listener here is going to now think that 120 to 50 cents it's crazy and that's that's the one to keep in mind right and if if you like I mean what really blows your mind is if you

get a tour of a data center so Santi when you're back in New York we'll go take a look at a data center together and you could see like there's like this one cabinet in the whole area that has like a bunch of fiber spaghetti wires coming in together where if you were to let a cat loosen there it would destroy 10% of the Eastern of the Eastern seaboards traffic right so there's a lot of cool stuff and fun nuances but yeah son your point 50 cents $128 you heard here first guys uh Neil thanks so much for coming on the Pod uh really and I think our listeners really enjoy it so thanks again thank you guys thanks for hearing me out thanks for listening thanks hey everyone big thanks for watching today's episode wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar development foundation's sixth annual

Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London this is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code block Works pod for early bird pricing [Music]