John Letey: KYVE – Decentralised and Accessible Data Storage #492

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Sebastian cuccio today we're speaking with John Ledet his co-founder at kive uh kive is a protocol that helps developers store retrieve and validate data on and off chain and we're going to be diving deep into kive today understanding how it works it's interesting uh Place sort of sitting between Cosmos and our weave and also use cases and the product roadmap before we get started though I just wanna I just wanna Shield nebula's Summit here for a second because we did launch the website and it's really exciting member Summit is happening in Paris again this

year on July 24th and 25th right after ECC the website's live it's nebular.builders and early bird tickets are on sale for just 39 you get access to two days of probably one of the best interchained Builders conference in the world I would argue you know going hitting going towards that that number one spot for um for the the best interchange developer conference and we're really excited to have announced the venue uh which is this really cool business school in the center of Paris called Albert school so be sure to check it out and and get your tickets if you plan on being in Paris this summer again

website's nebular.builders and you guys were both there last year and hoping to see you guys there again this year for sure we're definitely sending quite a few team members down this year definitely yeah we really want to make this a developer conference I guess is what I'm trying to say here and um and we'll have lots of technical content and workshops but that's enough about that uh John tell us a bit about yourself and how you uh how you got to be here of course um so yes like as you know I'm John I'm the co-founder and CTO of kive um a good place to start is probably like how it got into crypto so you know um you know come from like more like an academic background doing a lot of

research actually was doing a lot of research in AI which like now is like a Hot Topic but I'm quite deep into crypto now so um but you know so like I came from like the academic side of things um got to crypto in 2019 I was doing an internship for london-based startup I actually kind of touched on data there a little bit because what we were doing there and again this is when Enterprise blockchains were like the thing uh and so basically we were building an Enterprise blockchain based off of ethereum uh that was dealing with file censor data at some point exactly so uh you know it's like my first interaction with smart contracts with ethereum with like data involved in the mix there it was loads of fun um kind of fell out of it though after

that you know like that was like my first interaction with crypto but when I really got like heads down to crypto I was actually during the Copa lockdown as like 2020 like start of it summer time-ish and kind of by chance fell onto our weave and just like discovered it and you know like what fascinated me about are we've actually is like right now everyone kind of just assumes the data is permanent right it's like when you have photos and whatnot on your phone you just like assume that it's permanent right but in reality it's actually not uh you know maybe you have like an iCloud backup or something like that again very web too but like in the end data is not actually permanent so it was kind of a cool realization for me I was like actually this is a very Niche problem that they're solving and like

like really fell in love with the concept of it um of course you know I'm a huge history nerd as well so that also kind of fascinated me about like permanently storing everything um so yeah so like joined the community I was actually one of like the first like um you know Community developers like really just like building lots of random cool stuff in our weave um yeah so fell into our weave in 2020 played around with a lot of different things there um so if you don't know there's like an erc20 like token standard on top of our weave um and so I created uh the first ever decentralized trading platform for that again loads of random cool stuff uh and then yeah uh throughout all that process

of working on projects um I met my co-founder Fabian who you guys have talked to before um and then um through that you know we worked on loads of different sides projects hackathons and different things and then that's actually kind of how we came across the idea fukive is because um polka dot and R weave at the start of 2021 um put together this bounty uh and it was basically like Hey listen you know right now we have a problem where there's not a lot of full notes in our Network and by the way this isn't just a problem for polka dot it's a problem for a lot of blockchains because fall nodes are actually not incentivized in like proof of State networks in general and so polka dot was like Hey listen like it would be great if we could kind

of decentralize access to like a full node and like the data that the full node has um and so polka dot you know created a grant on bitcoin with our weave and um me and Fabian style and we're like hey that's really cool you know we can like archive all of polka dots data from a full node onto our weave so you know like one weekend and a simple script later uh you know we went to Sam who's the CEO of are we've I was like hey Sam listen like we have this and he's like wow okay that's really cool you know we talked to polka dot they were happy with it and then Sam was like oh by the way you know when polka dot did this they weren't actually the only blockchain that wanted to do that um and so through that we got connected

to um you know everyone from Avalanche and Solana to near and even um The Interchange foundation with Cosmos um we got connected like everywhere and then we kind of saw the need for a tool that permanently sorts like full node information um but then of course you know we saw the fundamental like trust problem there where basically it's like if it's really just like a script that we're providing to the foundations of these blockchains the trust the like the fundamental Trust restrictions are still there basically and so we said okay we can take this one step further right instead of just permanently storing copies of this full node and blockchain Ledger information how about we also then decentralize it and make it trustless and so that's kind

of when the idea for Kai was born and then like two and a half years later we've just launched our Cosmos layer one which is really cool yeah like I guess there is a lot to dive into there I think especially maybe we can already start there but I guess kive already started out initially on our weave then I think you move to a moon beam uh until like finally like launching your own Cosmos mainnet and again congrats to the recent launch I think you know what would be very interesting for many people is probably you know like you're one of the projects that has done this migration and it seems like a lot of people are doing this migration either in that direction or maybe like from App chain to Smart contract I guess I've seen that last but

um probably more like going from Smart contract to like app chain and I guess would be interesting to hear your your reasons of why how you chose to do that and what what it gets you uh as a kind of protocol for sure yeah so I would actually be very very curious to hear people's reasons for going from an app chain to a Smart contract that's got to be very interesting reason anyways so yeah so like you said we went from a smart contract um from our weave to Moonbeam which for anyone that doesn't know that's um basically evmos on polkadot it's evm but on substrate um and then yeah after that uh we then migrated over to our own like Cosmos app chain uh yeah basically fundamentally

the main reasons for that is that smart contracts are great right like they they they they definitely have their purpose and like daps are amazing but what we realized is that we were just not scalable enough like they were just not scalable enough for us because like when thinking about kive right we're building a full decentralized Network right and you know smart contracts can only go so far they're great for you know building um amms and they're great for doing nfts and tokens and whatnot right but when you're trying to build a full scalable network with actually like a validator set it gets a little bit complicated especially in the ebm space where you had to like constantly and I mean constantly optimize for gas

um it was like we were really really like having a hard time thinking about okay this is how we like store validator sets and rewards and everything like that but then okay that's one way of doing it and then how do we optimize it so that it doesn't cost a fortune um but then even like that the problem is that um you're sharing block space because it's like and like fundamentally the way that like ethereum gas models work is basically you know the more contract calls and interactions on the network not just with your contract but in general the more expensive that it gets and so you know we saw it's like an nft launched or something like that you know cost of running a node would go from like a reasonable price because we optimized it to something like crazy high and ridiculous

and so it's like those main two reasons which is just like scalability and then also just like cost efficiency and like sharing block space where like the two main reasons why we decided to kind of look into app chains um so we were of course looking into a few other app chains kind of acting ecosystems if you will so like you know Avalanche has its subnets um you know a lot of other app change ecosystems so now kind of Spun up since we're looking into this um but in the end honestly the smoothest process was actually um just cosmics and you know at the time it was called starport and now it's called the ignite CLI um but we were actually like the entire Tech team went to East Denver 2022 and you know we had done a lot in Cosmos

before that so we were already very familiar with it and then we're like Hey listen what happens if we just use ignite and just try it out right and so you know we were like sitting at East Denver um like in a wee work sometimes as well and we're just like okay let's just do this it took us about like five days in total uh like of conversion and what not to get like an internal devnet up and running so like five days to convert from solidity smart contract which we had worked worked on for like a year uh to like completely over to a Cosmos app chain um and it was really cool to see of course you know then taking devnet that you spun up in five days to some something a little bit more concrete with the validator sets definitely took some time but and lots of learnings uh

but no it was it was like loads of fun um and that's kind of the reasons why we switched what does uh the ignite CLI you know as as a sort of like non-developer but you know someone who's fairly technical I guess what what it is about what is it about the ignite CLI that just makes that process of porting over an ethereum smart contract to essentially an app chain easy can you can you talk about you know your experience in doing that more specifically about like of course um yeah so like with the like the latest release of the cosmos SDK and with the cosmos SDK Eden release um coming up in a year or so I don't actually know the timeline there

um but like they're definitely removing a lot of the need like the boilerplate code that you need when running a Cosmos app chain the problems that like when we did this a year ago there was still a heavy need to have all that boilerplate code around and so you know you know developers just coming into the ecosystem they don't fully know their ways like in and outs of all the different things that you need to like fully run a cosmos action right and so what the ignite CLI does is it basically takes all that boilerplate code that you may or may not know that you need to have right as you're just like starting in Cosmos it takes all that boilerplate code and generates it for you and so it's like makes it really easy to say okay listen this is what I want my state of my blockchain to look

like it's going to have these values uh and then it kind of just generates a boilerplate for you from there um long term of course if you want to like actually run a chain of production definitely you know you need to remove a lot of that boilerplate code and really understand the fundamentals of like what's going on which is what we did after the fact uh but like what was really like fantastic and what made the switch so easy is the fact that they just handled all the kind of the cosmos nitty-gritty details for us without us needing to like fully learn it and then that allowed us to really easily then say okay this is our core logic let's just only focus on the core logic and ignite will handle all the cosmos logic and then after we focus on our CoreLogic we're like okay now let's

dive deep into the cosmos land and see what's up um so yeah cool yeah I mean that's that's something that I've also heard from from other people I guess is like the okay the concept of CK does have like a lot of boilerplate code that is necessary to launch a chain but that the ignite CLI it allows you to you know forego having to write a lot of that code I guess a lot of people now are also maybe going like an even simpler route which is building things directly in cosmosm um you're not like you know even foregoing the college was SDK to to some extent like you know with initiatives like the cause of Muslim SDK and I think it's only going to get

easier to start up a cosmic app chain in in the future as as these tools become more and more um yeah more more mature and and easier to leverage for sure yeah I mean like using Cosmos and smart contracts for a lot of your logic is actually really smart I would say like Mars is probably the latest project that has done this where basically they took all they basically just took a boilerplate cosmos SDK app chain and then they said okay cool this is like all the stuff that we need and then they just put it directly into a smart contract which is really nice and like yeah like you said the cosmosome SDK that Larry from the Mars team is working on that's also some really cool stuff I think that there's actually like a lot of cool joint stuff that you can

do there to kind of optimize everything yeah so let's maybe just take a bit of a step back here because we do want to talk about Hive and and before we do so since uh we we've never actually done an episode with kive on on uh on epicenter uh although I've interviewed Fabian on the interop and Felix has interviewed you on the course one podcast I I do think that for our listeners here it bears reminding uh people who don't know about Kai of what it is and what problem you're solving um at a high level and and then we can dive into some of this other um stuff we want to talk about which is you know are we even Cosmos in some of

the use cases I think you know for listeners who really want to dive deeper into kive um probably that won't be the the sort of arch of this episode but uh you should definitely listen to my episode with Fabian on the interop or Felix's episode with you on uh on the course of my podcast those are both great uh great resources if you want to sort of like start at the ground level but yeah go ahead John okay perfect um yes so uh just to clarify you want me to kind of like talk about like what kive exactly does yeah yeah just a at a high level sort of explaining you know what what it is what problem you're solving and the different components um and we can we can talk about some of

the the other aspects we wanted to discuss today so um yeah you can really think of Kai it's building a massive decentralized data link now that's like a lot of buzzwords um but basically what it means is we've connected uh to a lot of major L ones and l2s um you know kind of like I mentioned we've been working since our like very beginning with you know like polka dots Lana near Cosmos um Avalanche like you name it a lot of major l1s and l2s and what we do is we've actually built this proof of stake Network that can um connect to all these different blockchains and then parse information from them so this could be as simple as really just block and transaction information it could be

Ledger information like account balances and whatnot or unlike the more complex side this could be things like evm traces um you know logs from Smart contracts Etc and what happens is that this validator set then independently each one of the validators goes and connects to the blockchain and then they fetch information from it um do some sort of transformation if needed on top of that data and then what they do is they use our consensus layer which is tenderman comment bft based um and then they basically say okay listen like I have this piece of data did you guys also get that same piece of data if they did then what happens is then of course that data is then validated and then it's then automatically pushed to a storage

Network like our weave basically what that allows you to have is then that allows you to have one single Network which is kind which has access to a lot of data from a lot of different networks that's automatically completely trustless because it's already been validated and it's stored forever due to our weave that's really cool because then you can build like a lot of things cross chain also it helps a lot um even like in kind of like the more traditional aspects where basically I mean Felix we can kind of talking to you briefly about like an accounting tool right or basically um you know you can use this on-chain data that not a lot of nodes or RPC endpoints might necessarily have um to then really easily fetch you know

data that you need on the accounting side of things there's a lot of different use cases which I think we'll get into later but yeah fundamentally we're building a massive decentralized data link yeah I think what's really interesting there right is that you have these sort of two roles like the protocol layer and like the validator layer I think and can you maybe write you mentioned the storage pools can you sort of walk through a flow of someone maybe like actually the entire life cycle actually someone uploading some data and then do they retrieve it with kive again or do I have to go directly to our weave uh how how would I use this

of course so um we can kind of start at the base layer so we actually have two layers in our Network and this is of course until vote extensions is a thing in Cosmos um but basically for now we have two layers so we have kind of the normal tendermint Cosmos layer that everyone's kind of familiar with where you have this validator set uses delegated approval stake tendermint kind of manages that all for us reaches consensus on the state of our Network that's what we call our consensus layer the name's pretty obvious I would say and then what's on top of the consensus layer is actually something we like to call the protocol layer it's actually a separate validator says um and this is actually just to kind of keep everything a little bit more efficient instead of building everything

directly into the tenement validators themselves but the protocol layer really manages data part of kive so like you mentioned we have something that we like to call storage or data pools I always like to give the example of actually you can think of it like liquidity pools on osmosis for example where each liquidity pool manages a pair of tokens very similarly a storage pool or data pool on kive manages a specific data stream um so that just keeps it a lot easier because some data streams can be more computationally expensive or anything like that just kind of like a separation of interest there where basically you can have a data pool for Solana data you could have a data pool for uniswap smart

contract events anything like that the way like now kind of zooming in directly into um like a specific storage pool the way that it works is it's a round robin approach very similar to tenement actually where a validator gets randomly selected um we call this validator actually the uploader um so this is normally in other proof of stake networks called like a block proposer but in this case we're not actually proposing a block we're uploading data so that's why we call it the uploader uh the uploader's job is basically uh to kind of propose the piece of data that they think is valid so they go off talk to the blockchain let's just say for example Solana right so they go off to

Solana say Hey listen Solana I want blocks 10 to 100 something like that right it's a lot bigger snapshots than that of course and so basically what happens is the uploader fetches a snapshot of blocks from Solana and then it proposes it to this validator set on the protocol layer and then and then basically they say Hey listen I have blocks uh you know one to one hundred of Solana are these blocks correct and so then each of the other validators there are not the uploader in this case they then go off independently using their own connections to Solana and validates to make sure that you know blocks one to 100 are actually correct if they do then you know there's a voting process again very similar to

tendermen and proof of stake in general um there's a voting process and then if you know more than you know 67 of you know the validators voted yes then the piece of data is actually correct once the piece of data is correct then of course uh it's then uploaded and like pushed off to our weave uh we're going to be onboarding a lot of other Storage Solutions soon as well so it's not just our weave that we support we kind of have a a cool little wrapper around any storage layer so you can really easily integrate to ipfs or file coin or storage or you know Greenfield which is like the new binance one for example yeah exactly that's kind of like the life cycle of the data being validated on the

retrieval side uh we kind of offer a few retrieval products um of course you know you independently can just directly kind of talk to Kai and Kai will say Hey listen if you want this piece of data it's in this are weave transaction ID and then you can then go and fetch it from R weave and do all that fun stuff yourself um but we kind of offer two products uh right now one is kind of a more B2B product to more Enterprise product where basically we automatically kind of do all that internal fetching for you where basically all you need to do um and it's powered by air byte by the way which is actually quite cool it's a really easy way to kind of connect a data stream to any web to data infrastructure so this could be mongodb

it could be something more complex like a Kafka queue or snowflake or anything like that um but basically it's a service that we provide where basically you just say Hey listen this is how I want the data um and it's like an ETL Pipeline and then we will automatically give the data back to you of course like a little bit more like on chain b2c customer product that we're going to be offering soon is actually our Oracle which will be really cool because it's powered by IBC cool yeah what what so what is the um how do you leverage IBC here and like I guess I'm you know I'd like to maybe transition a little bit here into you know how are we or sorry how Clive connects Cosmos to our weave

so yeah how do you leverage RBC and you know maybe describe how kive sort of sits in between Cosmos and our weave in some way yeah for sure um so kind of we kind of say action more like on top of them right because you have our weave's mainnet and then you have like of course our consensus layer and then our protocol layer kind of like sits on top of both of them and then connects to both of them individually yeah so like there's no like we didn't create an IBC clients between our weave and uh between are we even our Cosmos chain that's that that'll actually be incredibly interesting because RV was proof of work um so that would be fundamentally

incredibly interesting to create an IBC client between the two of them but anyways that's like for maybe type 2.0 or something crazy like that anyways so uh the way that it works right now is like I kind of mentioned before that uploader has the job of you know not only kind of like pushing the data to our weave but also reaching consensus on that piece of data uh using our tendermint uh blockchain and so it's kind of like a connection between the two of them where basically the uploader first uploads that piece of data to our weave and then the validators then reach consensus on that piece of data and then if that data is incorrect then basically the kive network will then like store Hey listen this rweave transaction hash or you know this ipfs CID is actually

validated and is correct and this is the metadata for it and that's kind of how we connect to R we even do that on like the IBC side of things um that's kind of more going into like our Oracle product which will leverage IBC to basically be able to you just send a token like for payment um like you just send like Hive tokens or any governance enabled fee payment method and then you basically just do an IBC transfer and then utilizing the memo field of that IBC transfer you can basically initiate a query for any data that kaipe is archived so you could basically say Hey listen I'm going to pay you know one kive again not be real numbers here but like I'm just gonna pay

one five and then I would like to fetch you know Solana blocks one to a thousand for example and then uh what would then happen is that would be sent by IBC and then of course kive has that piece of data so then using interchange queries it would just send the response back and then you could now have completely trustless Solana blocks on your Cosmos chain and then you can do whatever you want with that um but yeah so that's kind of how we leverage IBC and then also that's how we kind of connect to our weave as well can you maybe expand a bit in terms of you said basically the proposer uploads the data and then the validators have to sort of validate if it's correct does

that mean like all the validators have to sort of download that state of that chain or that that program or whatever it is so yes like at the end of the day it's really up to the validator to decide how they actually connect to the network itself right because fundamentally if they receive invalid data then of course they're going to be proposing with like invalid data and then of course they're subject to a slashing and like it's a major slashing and so it's kind of we've left it up to the validators so basically like we expect a certain RPC endpoint for certain different networks but fundamentally how the validators

actually connect so that is up to them right so you know a lot of the times and this is what we encourage of course is you know running your own node in that Network right just for like Optimum security but of course you know if you want to go for like the more hosted coinbase cloud or block Daemon approach like that's also okay like we don't like put like an exact architecture requirement on it um but at the end of the day it's really up to the validator to decide like what risk they're willing to take here um the like the important thing though is like we make sure to like double check to make sure like where the data is from and so like if everyone's just using like infra for example as like an RPC endpoint then of course that's going to be problematic and so we have checks

in place to make sure that it is from many different data sources um but yeah of course like how the validator actually connects to the network they can either run their own node they can use an RBC provider or something like that could you leverage and uh you know and have you thought about encouraging uh folks to leverage a decentralized RPC provider like like lava for instance I think there's some other ones like Gateway for example um yeah pocket I mean oh sorry yeah Pockets so yeah I I I just abbreviate it um no like yeah I think of course there's definitely some like cool collaborations to be down there actually like lob is definitely very interesting

because there are also based in Cosmos so I wonder if there could actually be like a little bit more Synergy there because of course they're based in Cosmos so IBC kind of connects us all right um so like haven't directly thought about it to be honest it was just like we just kind of settled on this architecture for now we wanted to get mainnet out as soon as possible but of course going forward this is definitely something that we want to look into right because it's like if we can even decentralize the RPC side of this it would be perfect world right and so like yeah we've done everything that we can to decentralize on our side but of course definitely further collaborations are definitely we're open for that okay cool I want to talk about our weave a little bit um like I I have a I have a

close friend who who you might know who's they're building a cord oh yeah and and uh you know he he he he shells RV to me like all the time and I kind of get it but I I still I also kind of don't get it or I don't really get you know how economically how it works like with how the economic works um how the smart contracts work and and so yeah I'd like to I'd like you to maybe settle once and for all for me how how are we smart contracts work uh because they're fundamentally different from you know another former smart contract and and what I've understood is that are we've

smart contracts are executed off chain and settled on chain and so I've got about that far um but yeah it just sort of breaks my brain yeah so are we smart contracts are definitely something interesting to wrap around and I to be honest I don't exactly call them smart contracts because and we can get into why later but let me first kind of touch it briefly on like what RV is and how it works um so it's a proof of work blockchain um been around since 2018 lots of uh you know projects use it it's really big in like the NXT space especially because you know if you don't pay your ipfs loan well sorry everything's gone right um so there was like a massive adoption you know they partnered with meta for

example um they're also partnered like on the more on-chain side of things with um um and I'm blanking now just as I was about to say it but like the main like Solana nft Marketplace stuff like that um on metaplex there we go and so basically the way that it works is it's not actually a blockchain it's a block weave which is really cool because what happens is every single piece of data that is mined into our weave what happens is that there's basically a pointer back to a previous data item that has previously been uploaded to are we so basically every single block points to a previous block which is why it's a block of weave which is actually quite cool because that ensures that

there's always like some access to some historical piece of data on our Leaf right so if you are the current Miner of a block in R weave if you don't have access to the randomly selected piece of data then you can produce the block and then it moves on to the next person right so basically encourages the entire network to have as much of the data as possible the way that the incentive model actually works is quite interesting so you know it's proof of work so there's just a fundamental block payout per block I don't exactly remember what that is it's something I think that there's a having mechanism in place Etc um but what's really cool is the transaction fees um are calculated with this really cool

equation which uses and I quote this because it's not really Moore's law but it's like a similar concept of Moore's law where basically it calculates how much it's going to cost to store this piece of data so let's say that you're archiving like one gigabyte right so it are we basically the network calculates how much it's going to cost for the next 200 years to store one gigabyte um and then basically what happens is that at that 200 year mark there's like a slow Decay curve that happens which basically says over time ssds and hdds should be getting better and better and better and there should be like a significant cost reduction

where basically after 200 years or so give or take that data should be fundamentally free to store um and so basically what happens is on our week you pay for 200 years of storage up front and that's what your transaction fee is like transaction costs to store your piece of data and then what happens is that actually doesn't get paid out to the validators or sorry not validators the miners in the network but that actually then gets put into a block reward pool I forget the exact name for it but what's cool about that is then basically you have this like almost like a community pool in Cosmos right you just have like this treasury of like an insane amount of R weave that's just like sitting there locked

and what's cool is the network automatically calculates if the current level of data on the network if it's actually like like the block payout like the normal approval work block payout if that's not enough incentives for the miners to automatically cover the cost of storing all the data and if it's not covering all the costs then it automatically does a distribution of that massive Treasury um which is really cool because then over time you know let's say for example one year storage costs goes up by a lot then automatically that would then incentivize the valid like the miners still in the network or if it gets cheaper than vice versa right um so that's kind of like fundamentally

how are we Works in a nutshell and I can clarify anything else if that was too complicated okay smart contracts though and I don't know what to call them right so smart weave is like the official name for it like you mentioned they're not um like there's no execution on the Chain so in you know in the case of slana you know Cosmos and even and you know the Solana VM like basically every single normal smart contract platform the way the way that it works is you deploy the code on chain and then you interact with the code with the transaction and then that transaction has a result that changes the state of that code and all that happens on the Chain the way that smartweave works is

fundamentally different to that what happens is you deploy the code and so you basically have this you know contract ID if you will and then what you do is you just interact with it by just sending transactions but those transactions are literally just like normal r-week transactions there's nothing special about them except for like the tags in place so like you can then tell that it's a smartweave transaction but if you ever want to access the state of the smart contract it's not stored on chain um what what needs to happen is off chain you then need to basically create this execution environment where basically you fetch the code and then from Genesis you need to replay all the transactions

this is actually one of the reasons why we switched away from smartweave um because of course you know having to maintain almost like a caching layer off chain for your smart contract is actually quite intensive and completely centralized uh there is definitely some things going on now in our weave that like are trying to solve this problem making it a little bit more decentralized but fundamentally if you have off-chain computation of states there's not a whole lot that you can do there um which is like kind of the main reason why we kind of switch away from that and we went to the evm based smart contract um again and like that's not like throwing any shape and smart we've just

like explaining how it works which is just like off chain um execution yeah I think like fundamentally are we was a really great layer zero where basically you can just throw any piece of data that you want onto our weave and it handles out really well I think smart contracts does have a little bit of time that it needs to like grow into like a fully developed ecosystem right makes sense so you're basically saying right like are we still very useful as like this data storage layer but essentially with the smart weave it's it's sort of trying to also compete I guess on the smart contract level but that my life exactly like yeah it's like like like for me are we might be trying to do a little bit too much with a smart contracts right it's like they've really and they like they've done a really

really really good job with dealing with a data side of this right um but like and like that's why I said they're a great layer zero you can really throw whatever data you want at are we and it's like a perfect economic model that's great um but yeah like fundamentally it just like smart contracts on top of it treating it more like a layer one layer two like model not quite there yet um when when someone describes sort of Are We smart contracts to me it sounds you know we were talking earlier about you know our previous uh our previous uh Enterprise blockchain building days it sounds very similar to something we were trying to build back then um which uh which is you know this this sort of you

know off-chain execution on chain settlement but there's not even really settlement with smartweave that's the thing yeah or like whatever I mean whatever you want to call it like on-chain notarization I guess um yeah and then the the other aspect about our weave that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around is like the economics of you know you're talking about um this this storage like this on-chain storage and yeah sure I guess we can assume we should assume that storage costs go down over time I think that's you know a safe assumption to make um there is one thing about our weave that I find a little bit

weird is like this this inability to delete things like yeah like I can kind of step in there like like fundamentally that was the first thing that I thought about when I thought of R was like yeah this this is great if there are only good people in the world there's also lots of bad people in the world too like this is obviously something that could go terribly wrong so like the thing is is that actually built into each our weave node um there's actually kind of like a blacklist that you can put in or like a block list now um that has been renamed um there's a block list that you can put in where basically pieces of data or content that you know is like in fact vulnerable or malicious or you know

illegal um treading lightly here uh what you can do is you can then like inside your R weave node just choose not to store that piece of data and what's actually really cool is that if more than 51 of the network has a specific transaction blocked then well actually it's dropped from consensus assuming it's not encrypted exactly assuming that it's not encrypted right and so there is a way to delete data right where basically the majority of the network does not have the piece of data right um but yeah of course that does imply that it has to be encrypted oh sorry it has to be decrypted and a lot of things have to apply there I think they're actually trying to spin up like a Dao to

manage this a little bit um but yeah yeah I was also wondering like do you is it actually clear like who runs the roof Network who are like the can you like Trace back how who produced how many nodes and sort of see how much control there is from certain entities or something like that like I guess how you have voting power and proof of stake sort of to be honest I don't actually know so you can like check who the peers are in like but but like that's more like the active peers in the network right so like if like that's like and maybe this is just like not a problem but like definitely like a design flaw improve of work or basically there's like no way of like who's actually the validator set right

now right so I actually don't know I think like so of course you can check who's the miner of every single block of course that would take a long time but you can and you can kind of go back and see like what has been like what data has been produced where but yeah improval work there is really no way of like checking who's in the current set if you will which does actually stop a little bit because I would actually also be security a little bit better too right I think it's one of the core kind of benefits of football sake right that you have slashing that you can go back and like destroy stake of someone in versus like proof work where you can't burn down the server Farm um so like I've heard that comparison that's comparing like Bitcoin and I

guess it also applies to our wave to a certain degree here um but yeah that's that's a nice Excursion um I guess we can we can take it back a bit to I mean you already also mentioned right like Hive can use other data store Solutions so that's I think also like very cool right it's very uh abstracted there and I think that's very useful um but maybe we can also talk about you know now you have the I I saw on the website like something on the roadmap like Kaif version two can you maybe expand a bit like what what else is is coming there of course um so I guess like yeah the main thing involved there is actually the Oracle so this like IPC enabled data querying with

that quite a lot of stuff actually comes with it on like the optimization of the protocol layer um so you know like I mentioned at the very beginning we have two layers when support extensions are released we're definitely going to look into kind of combining those two layers because right now there is a little bit of a fight between the two validator sets right because it's like whichever or validator set has the biggest apy right like talking about like just like delegators for this pure sake of earning rewards right of course there's going to be like a little bit of a stake fight going on there if you will um and so of course you know we're looking into Solutions like superfood staking and whatnot um but long term of course combining

those two validator sets um is definitely something on the roadmap for sure and that's kind of fundamentally what goes along with Kai 2.0 another thing as well is like uh right now the Oracle is only allowed to like query what we store directly on our chain right which is more like a summary of what's stored on are we so let's say for example that we've you know done a massive snapshot of like 10 000 blocks of Cosmos right what happens is that all of that data is stored on our weave but we only store like the headers or the hashes of each block on our chain right and that's just strictly because like we're not builds like are we if we can't handle a lot of data right and so basically what the Oracle can currently

query for right now um and this is going to be released soon um is basically just like the headers and whatnot of the data but like long term we really want to make sure that like what will happen is you can just do an oracle request and then our Network handles all the going off talking to our weave indexing the data and giving you a really nice response also well kind of tied into Kai 2.0 there of course there's like a lot of other stuff that I probably can't talk about but that's like what I'm really excited about for sure um and like yeah it's actually mostly tied around kind of like bringing the querying process on chain with the oracle right maybe also I guess we sort of went into it a bit but I'm I'm sort of

wondering what if if there's a mismatch like it's between the data provided or like there's no consensus and then there is there is a slashing you said is there like some dispute mechanism if that like sort of was actually the right data or um how do you like sort of settle that yeah so the way that it works is you have the uploader there um you know of course you know proposing a chunk of data if the uploader has okay now this is now getting into like now how proof stake Works which is basically each validator will then say okay is that correct if

more than 51 of the validators say yes this is the correct piece of data then that data goes through what happens which is actually quite interesting is all the validators that didn't say that that data is correct we basically put them on like a watch list if you will well basically we we give them like a point and after a certain number of points they actually do get slashed so if those validators that are actually voting in the minority if they keep voting in the minority for a while then there will be a slashing event there but um there's not really a dispute mechanism after the fact just because we want instant finality to go along with tendermint or basically a piece of data

while it's reaching consensus is still undecided but once consensus is reached it's finalized and that's when you know that the data is valid or invalid so there's not a dispute mechanism in place but basically we do have mechanisms where basically the majority is what is actually happening and like that's what reaches consensus and then the minority we always keep our eye on the minority to make sure that that doesn't get out of hand or out of control right right that's cool so it's sort of like a multi-round game that you're playing in seconds okay yeah cool so let's get into use cases here I mean you know I think there's a lot of use cases and we already touched a little bit on on some but yeah maybe describe you know which are the the ones that

you're most excited about and maybe also which are the least obvious ones that people um should be thinking about or you know um yeah for sure um let's do it so um yeah so I mean I've kind of already touched on like our ETL pipeline which is like kind of the more uh you know Enterprise focused solution that we provide that this is going to be more for like you know indexing partners and you know accounting tools and whatnot people that really want access to like large amounts of historical information of course you have the Oracle which is like one chain and that you know can be you know I mean on-chain Oracle information is like powerful and like smart contracts down to like the core layer of

blockchains too kind of the unexpected use case uh because that kind of ties into the Oracle a little bit is we're actually partnered with say um so like say Network and Cosmos and it's actually quite interesting because they want to use us to fetch like weather information and like sporting information and okay for people that don't know what say is it's basically trying to create a market around anything uh and so what we've done at kive is we've made ourselves so General that we don't actually need to store like like we don't only need to store blockchain data we can also store web 2 Data as long as it's a way of validating

it so basically meaning it has to be deterministic data right it can't be changing every other minute um so for example like weather is a good example like okay like a weather not predictable weather but like you know historical weather you know and stuff like that um that's of course you know we can handle and what say wants to use us for is basically they want to fetch information like that kind of a little bit information that you wouldn't have actually expected and then they want to create a betting market around that which is you know cool right like definitely something I wouldn't have expected but you know it's cool nonetheless um of course you know like more of the expected use cases that I'm quite excited about

um is you know we're working with quite a few validators um like course one for example um and what we're doing right now is we're coming up with really uh like clean way of syncing a tenderment node and not just tender nodes but like other nodes from all the networks as well syncing a tenderman node using kaif's data which is really cool because right now if you want to sync a node improve the stake you have to either use this trusted snapshot and you kind of have to just trust whoever gave that snapshot to you that is actually correct or you can sync from Genesis which is like a multi-day to multi-week process depending on how like old the network is

and so yeah so because we have all this data already stored historically it's really easy to then just like connect a tender node directly to kive and then sync directly from there and not just tendermen but also like near and other networks as well um that's kind of the use case I'm most excited about because that's like the initial use case that I started Hive with which was basically like this exact thing and so kind of seeing it come to fruition Now is really exciting um yeah so I I wonder if this address is also another issue so the statesync uh use case when I talked to Babylon they were saying they they also kind of blew my mind and and pointed to the fact that in the a lot of

Cosmos chains there has to be this kind of canonical you know checkpoint where validators have to have to agree on like what is the the most the the sort of state that everybody agrees is valid and in a lot of I don't remember where but like somewhere in some Cosmos documentation it says that people should agree on this on this state like on off chain channels like Twitter or or Whatsapp it's like so much yeah yeah so this is like social consensus and so with with Babylon um what they what they allow is basically to you know create um a hash of State at some point and

like notarize that on the Bitcoin blockchain or sort of committed to the Bitcoin blockchain and then the way they describe it is that like it would eliminate this this social consensus need but also uh potentially eliminate the need for uh long unbonding periods for staking for for staking uh for steak basically you know but for delegators to unstake because we we know that there's social consensus around like State being valid up until this point this this kive also address the same uh problem and could it also reduce unbonding periods for staking in the same way that say Babylon is you know sort of trying to

to add as a feature interesting actually yeah because I've looked like I've I've talked to the Babylon team many times and exactly the same thing you know social consensus this is why you should never ever ever ever ever ever have a voting period in Cosmos longer than the unbonding period uh because then massive problems happen same thing why um there should be a like a clear ratio between IBC trust periods and the unbonding period like there's a lot of like numbers that you should really not play around with that much in Cosmos and it's yeah it's hidden somewhere in the documentation that's like yeah like worst case just reach social consensus right which is like cool guys but no

um and so it's like yeah I don't actually know so like I never really thought about it in that way it depends because right so we are technically anchoring data of these chains on our weave but it kind of boils down to fundamentally the the market cap or like the security level of the Anchor Point right so kind of babylon's value add there is a basically Bitcoin well it's Bitcoin right it's like it's the biggest market cap in crypto period right so although yes we are an anchor I think fundamentally anchoring on are we

are we has a smaller market cap than I eat like osmosis for example or something like that right so like yes although we could definitely be an anchor it's kind of missing that little period there which is just like you know the the the the actual like the market cap comparison is not actually quite there what could be interesting though is like creating a storage backend for kive where basically we go off and talk to bitcoin that could be something cool right or basically you know like again we don't want to make competitors here just to be clear uh but just like thinking out loud like I think that there would actually be a way that we could then you know instead of going off and talking to are we like I mentioned we can talk to a lot of different layers uh we could then go off and talk to

bitcoin and then we could then be an anchor on bitcoin similar to Babylon interesting use case haven't thought about it yet but very cool right I guess the difference also with Babylon you will probably only see if your state is sort of correct right you just check the header if it like matches but you can't actually get the data from the Bitcoin Network right you would still someone has to send it what we would do is we would first validate the entire state of the blockchain we could then push the headers to bitcoin and still store the rest of the blockchain like the rest of the full data on our leave we could kind of do a

mix that would actually be really cool then right because you have like the anchoring and security side of things on bitcoin but then you can still access the validated data on our weave okay cool right new use case exactly yeah we figured it out here on epicenter perfect um any any other uh any other use cases that you're you're particularly interested in or or bullish on or would like to see people build using kive not off the top of my head I'm sure there are I'm sure that I'm missing some for sure I think that like the use cases that I mentioned for sure are definitely kind of the main ones that were you know really excited about of course you know we're

starting our grants program soon so hey if you have a cool idea send us a message go build it yeah exactly all right well let's talk about the roadmap a little bit and um you know that that grants program is something maybe we can touch on a little bit but um yeah what are the plans for for cry 2.0 and um and also I don't think you guys have a listed token yet right so like a more imminent roadmap um is right now of course actually if you go right now and you look at our Network we actually only have the consensus layer live and we just did this to basically reach enough like Security on the consensus layer making sure that it's actually very stable before then launching our protocol there

so right now we're not validating any data in mainnet of course in both of our test Nets were actively validating data but on the mainnet we're not validating data just yet so like first thing on a roadmap is kind of launching the protocol layer with our first storage pool um can't say which one just yet but will be very exciting um that should be coming out definitely in the next month for sure so that's like the first thing on the roadmap second thing of course is also the like the listing on dex's Sexes um so that's going to be very exciting uh yeah kind of going long like more long term of course definitely getting our Oracle product out that's going to be super exciting we're definitely hoping to launch an oracle MVP as soon as possible um like you mentioned then kind of kive

2.0 maybe like a little bit of a revamp there like I talked about earlier with like combining the two layers together stuff like that we just kind of have to see where we're at that point um that's kind of like the roadmap for now at least and then of course you know alongside all that the grants and uh the bug Bounty program or stuff that we're you know actively talking about now inside of the foundation um and so yeah very excited to kind of see that all come to fruition as soon as possible because yeah kind of giving back to the community doing a lot of like sub Dow initiatives um and then also like seeing the community just kind of build lots of use cases that we might have never seen before

um yeah that's the roadmap right thanks so much John I think um yeah we learned a lot about Kaif and especially also arwif today and I think yeah very exciting use cases you're tackling you can see already that yeah many many areas are like actually touched on upon this like even in the blockchain data world but I'm sure there's like a lot like if you if you step beyond that like the say use case I think it's going to be like some really exciting things if this all works the way I think it does so um yeah super excited and maybe before we wrap up I guess like a final question could be like you know where where do you people find more about out

more about kive and like maybe the grants program can you share a little bit how people can get in touch with you and then get involved of course um so like for now there's not a lot of stuff around the program just yet because we're still working on all the internal details and whatnot um but of course you know um easiest way is just you know like our email is like on our website you know websites.network you can reach us there by email telegram Discord pretty much everything to be honest we have there um we're launching The Forum soon actually and that's could be like another way that you can reach out to us um yeah sorry nothing on the roadmap The Forum um which of course we need we're going to be doing a lot of stuff around like

our governance process and stuff like that that's probably the best way to reach out to us is just like going to the website and using your favorite social network to get a hold of us great well thanks so much for coming out it's been a fascinating conversation thank you so much