It’s Time For Crypto To Ditch AWS with Versatus

Transcript

if you find any bugs let us know you can post issues like why do you need lay I've used the other decentralized crypto where those fees coming from and we want to be the Bitcoin of cloud welcome to igen layer unlocked an interactive educational Journey Through the Igan lay ecosystem created by technical Founders and builders for the entire crypto Community a special thank you to our partners all Lair polymer authentic skate and lrange for helping to make this happen our goal is to raise the collective knowledge of the Igan lir AVS ecosystem and unpack the technical designs of the top teams in space welcome to Ian lay unlock welcome to Singapore we got two

Andrews in this one let's go ma'am when did you arrive uh I got in last night at no not last night the night before at like 10 p.m. yeah and then just stayed up till last night yeah jet lag is going to be something else yeah I got in this morning at 6:00 a.m. yeah you just got pull I think I'm just going to push through you have to and just crash you have to and might be fine yeah and then you get on schedule if you make it through the first day it's like way easier and then after that yeah yeah because then you're not up all night yeah yeah you're from Florida right I am yeah born and raised in Miami nice is are you a dolphins fan I'm not I'm a Steelers fan there's a story behind that that's a bummer man yeah yeah I'm a

Steelers fan we don't need to get too much into that but uh nice do you do you like to go fishing I do I don't have a lot of time for it anymore just too busy K yeah just too busy uh but fishing and golfing those were like growing up that was kind of like my Main Hobbies yeah nice how did you get into building veredes so you know my entire career I've been a software engineer most most of it focused on like machine learning um and AI like back in the day so like before it was cool yeah before yeah yeah so I did I pulled the reverse pivot right I went from AI into Krypto um my first startup was a a AI data extraction company um but I was always kind of like adjacent to crypto I was like paying attention very closely what was

happening in the space I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013 bought my first eth at the Ico was like very bullish on on ethereum um and basically like as I followed the space what I realized is that like blockchains are like this really really great tool for this really small subset of very important problems uh which is primarily like coordination um and then what I like to call like attribution of ownership so blockchains are fantastic that but there's all these other things on the web that don't necessarily fit into that box and you know I'm I'm very ideological um I believe in like the purpose of the space and so you I saw that there's like a lot of opportunity to kind of tackle a

bigger problem of kind of the rest of the web right so like Financial money all of that happens on chain but there's still a lot of stuff that happens offchain that powers a lot of the applications in the space and so we wanted to provide the same the same sort of core qualities that blockchains give to money to web applications mobile applications and and you know other uh web- based uh products interesting do you uh do you think versus is going to go to to uh the big leagues definitely I'm I'm so bullish on versus because I feel like we definitely need these like uh like people to

compete for like the best computer prices so right now if you see and also the user experience I I I've used like other I won't name that but I've used the other decentralized crypto uh ec2 equivalence and they have like it's so bad like I like they have their own front end you can't really sear into it is like so terrible um like I I like the the he's seen the demo I've seen the demo yeah yes demo is so bullish but um like overall like um like whates model like the pricing model is very optimal for like people to like like one of the greatest uh use case I'm seeing is like people can uh get a what stus instance run a e validator yeah and then like go

to buffer and like get like bunch of uh like they have DVDs so you can you can put some steak in things y for a very cheap like run validator so I yeah it's like a fraction of the cost of using like a centralized cloud provider yeah so like I think like the node oper and then on top of that you get like the resiliency of it being decentralized so use technique called AJ clustering which been around for a really long time but hasn't really been applied to this space um which basically guarantees like in the event of a failure of your instance it'll automatically reboot on a different machine um and then like developers can select their replication Factor so if you want three nodes in your cluster you want 10 nodes in your

cluster and then our protocol actually optimizes the geographic distribution so you know we'll have we'll have you know validators we'll have node operators that are all around the globe and we'll be able to allocate okay you'll have one instance in Europe one in East Asia one in North America one in South America there's also other benefits that come along with that like you know when you have users in those different places the number of hops that those users have to take to reach your application shrinks dramatically um whereas right now like technically speaking you could do this on AWS but you have to manage all of it yourself so nobody does and so then when you know us East Ohio goes down you know because whatever there's a storm or there's a Cyber attack or something

happens all of these applications are offline and the crazy thing is a lot of these things that are hosted are like they're critical components of our our daily lives so during the crowd strike outage which I'm sure you remember like seven weeks ago like obviously Airlines and all that but one of the untold stories of that was like there are major cities where their 911 operators their Emergency Services you couldn't contact them really yeah cuz they're all running their their um you know their phone routers through the cloud right and so people people died because you know this infrastructure we've built it you know I like to say we built it on a foundation of sand um it's all centralized there's single points of attack single points of

failure this is like really critical infrastructure um you know even like Department of Homeland Security uses AWS obviously like major most major applications uh around the globe use use AWS or Google Cloud um so building a more resilient foundation for the modern web I think is really really important and it's it's a fantastic use case for both igen lay say why do you need I layer yes so I think it's like a really really good question I which we get a lot like why not just build this as your own network or like build as a L1 so the capital expenditure if we want to think of like business terms of building this on our own would be massive for sure we would have to uh basically like inflate our token away you need a bootstrap consensus in Economic Security you need

a bootstrap security which like why would I trust you to be the the foundation that's not made of sand if you're running your own you know set of you know 50 nodes exactly you might as well use the most battle tested you know decentralized smart contract platform exactly and so for us you know using Igan layer allows us to not only tap into their node operator Network which a lot of them have a lot of excess compute so it helps us boot strap Supply yeah but also to tap into Economic Security component of it like our whole model is we we prove liveness so we prove the state of the instances and and that they're available so slashing would come in there if there's a like some downtime or or you know kind of unannounced downtime so in some case you're going to need to maintain your Hardware or

something like that you're going to have to go offline so we do it in Windows so you register to be available for that window okay and then you can if the next window you can opt out of if you need to like maintain your Hardware or whatever the case is or maybe like it's just not profitable right now for you to run the node you can you can back out um so it's not just like once you register you're locked in for forever and you may get slashed if you go offline you can yeah yeah there's there's flexibility there um but that then also allows us our slashing condition gets paid back to the people that are disadvantaged by that uh scenario occurring like the users right so it's like an SLA Insurance model where we can actually make sure that that in the event that we don't meet our

SLA you know it's not technically like an SLA the way it is what is an SLA a service level agreement like very common like child world so um well you save the people who Tred to call 911 but but you know right exactly exactly exactly no but the but the company that was affected by it correct the like the phone routing company who they also didn't have an SLA with the city right right they're going to lose business because of that right so now all of a sudden how did they get reimbursed they're losing business because of AWS like AWS will give them like some compute credits or something like that right like or or like they'll just beg them to stay like you're not going to go anywhere else because there's nobody nowhere else to go so we're offering an alter alternative but we're also

offering a better economic model for the users in the event that we're not able to to make good on our promises to you you get reimbursed for the disadvantage so that that and that the combination of those two things I think this is where like slashing comes in yeah um and the new slashing model that that Igan Lair released recently is like very relevant to us because we don't want to be in a position where we're having to share our Economic Security with other avss right right right you don't want like the like the contamination risk yeah yeah can I ask you a spicy question go for it I think infra is commoditized down heavily where there's not a lot of moat around this idea you know either I can Fork

your code or I can kind of do something very similar and then either just charge less or kind of like not charge at all this spes question is like how do you make money and how do you build a mode around this so our we are building this as like a decentralized protocol and so our like the labs organization we don't we don't make money right um the token holders do the stakers do the operators do 100% of the protocol fees that come into our Network go directly to those entities so that's one aspect of it and so the question is how much money do they actually need to make yeah and like where where those fees coming from and how do you a like you can't avoid them trending to zero if this if it's going to happen but how do you maximize without being like overly rent

seeking I think so yeah and hopefully they do approach zero because that means like all of our users are getting cheaper and cheaper infrastructure I don't think they ever reach zero but they they come close to it um margins will will approach zero as well yeah right now margins in the cloud compute world are about 45% net margins it's crazy that's a lot yeah like these companies print money there's only like four really big ones um but they just print money and so there's a there's a long time between now and when those margins approach zero when they start to approach zero I think like we're all probably better off for that but that that doesn't mean that that fees go to zero no uh there's still Hardware costs there's still electricity costs there's

still bandwidth costs that the providers have to to pay for and so anybody who's providing this service will will need to make some money so that they can pay for those Services um now in terms of it being commoditized yes and like we're completely open source even right now like all even though we haven't like actually launched yet all of our code is already open source you can go check out our GitHub you can read through it if you find any bugs let us know you can post issues like all so we're very Pro open source and and you know I think the moat frankly comes from distribution okay um the winner in this particular space decentralized cloud or whatever you want to like refer to it as yes maybe they have slightly better like product features uh but underneath the hood a lot of the technology we're using

has been around for a while um there are some innovations that we've made but a lot of the technology has been around for a while where our moot comes from is our ability to go out and acquire business and acquire you users who are developers in our our world um to actually come and use our platform so and I think a lot of the decentralized compute uh platforms today have not done a great job of distribution um I think that that's where we really we we we approach this from a different position we know who our customer is we know how what they're looking for what the USP that we're going to deliver to them is and we treat it more like a business even though we're not in the business of capturing those fees directly we're capturing them for our Network um we do approach it from you know a a

growth mindset also if you see like uh the nearest competitor like they they don't really have slas they they have like like I try to spin up a node and I get like multiple like bids let's say and like they have up like up time and it's like sometimes 90% And you get cheap but like I I want 100% up time dude like 99% also fine yeah I I actually uh start like I tell people like what we're building is an infinite uptime layer right so like that's the goal is we want to be the Bitcoin of cloud we don't ever want to go down and and that means like yeah it's not going to be for certain use cases it's not the right solution yeah if you're a highfrequency trading firm you need collocation with the exchange so you need your servers to be in the same

building as the exchange servers we're not the right use case for that that's fine we're not going to capture everything but for e-commerce we're a great solution for because you can actually serve from The Edge very close to your user and you can scale out your instances to This Global Network of compute and then on and then for things like gaming and like high graphic intensive use cases the closer you are the lower the latency is the less lag there is so there's certain use cases that we're really really good for um and just focusing on those and and being able to go and capture big players in those markets or capture growing players in the markets might might even be more important um but starting out small we have a lot of Partnerships with other crypto projects that have committed to building on us when we launch and then

moving into the small medium business the startup world you know sort of going after that that market that like versell and fly and some of those providers have have captured pretty well and then eventually we'll get to the bigger Enterprises where there's big bucks but I think we need to prove resiliency reliability uh we need to prove performance and and that's going to take a few years to do so last thing as we kind of wrap up is what's next on the on the agenda for the next couple months um you know we're in we're in October now it's uh you know it's almost the end of the year what uh what's coming so we we do have uh devet basically teed up to launch um we're we haven't decided on a date yet it's probably going to be

launched by the time this comes out possibly yeah so we're we're it's coming very very soon um that's going to be like those initial 50 uh partners that we've we've already discussed uh building on us and and you know we'll probably scale that up a little bit before we go public um at least so we can figure out out like what what does that experience look like and then uh a big part of what we need to do is is continue to acquire Supply and acquire Supply in strategic locations and and so doing a lot of Business Development with with node operators with data centers to go out and c and and make sure that we have the compute Supply so that we can scale um we're targeting a main net launch early next year so we'll probably be in in devet and then do a public test

net for a few months and then go to main net uh and then yeah obviously po launch at some point as well fantastic cool well thanks guys yeah thanks for having me it's been a pleasure fantastic thank you