1/14/24 Discord AMA Summary

Summary of Discord audio AMA, January 12th, 2024.

Space and Time participants:

• Scott Dykstra, CTO and Co-Founder

• Catherine Daly, Head of Product Marketing

• Mike Post, Community Manager

Thank you to all of the community members who attended!

Mike: When will Space and Time begin onboarding validators? What technical challenges need to be overcome before validators can be onboarded?

Scott: I've seen a lot of questions on this! Space and Time today can't be run on a single node. You have to have multiple servers in a Kubernetes cluster. For those that are non-technical, that just means today, if you want to be a Space and Time node operator, you need four or five servers all wired together to get some serious compute power. And we started onboarding larger node operators, you know, Bitcoin miners, Ethereum miners, large node operation networks, that have that kind of hardware to contribute to our network. And of course, doing so we realized, hey, this isn't gonna work forever, this is not a good long-term approach for Space and Time; we have to enable community-operated nodes. I mean, that's the whole point of a community-operated zero-knowledge-powered database network for Web3.

So all throughout 2024, we're going to be working hard to make a single node, a single-server deployment of Space and Time, possible and easy to operate for the community. That’s looking like we’ll be able to enable community node operations, community-run Space and Time nodes, around Q4 of this year. And the only reason for that is that we have some hard work to do to take this massive, high performance, extreme-scale database cluster that we built for version one, and turn it into a lightweight, single-server node for version two by Q4. That's what we're working on. That's going to be the epic mainnet of Space and Time, hopefully later this year. And you can imagine what that epic main net would come along with later this year. So we'll be starting to contact community members that are interested and want to start running nodes in Q3, and onboarding them in Q4 is our tentative plan today. That's in addition to all the large node operators that we're onboarding at the moment at cluster scale.

Mike: In the event that Space and Time has not released a token when we begin onboarding node operators, how will node operators be compensated?

Scott: We've already kicked off our community points system. And obviously node operators will be earning a huge amount of points toward a future Space and Time token airdrop. But more importantly, node operators will be compensated in USDC and ETH. More specifically, USD and Lido StETH, for the short term, until we do have a Space and Time token as a utility token to power the network. Of course, we are building towards that aggressively. We don't know the timeline for that. And we do intend to drop a token at some point. And until then, node operators will be compensated in StETH and USDC as an interim.

Mike: The whitepaper mentioned that Space and Time is planning to gradually implement community governance (i.e. a DAO structure) to remove the need for the Space and Time team to manage the network. Can you share more about what that might look like?

Scott: The Space and Time Labs is planning on slowly kind of transitioning governance of this network to the community over time – to node operators, community members, points participants, and even those that just made some great art [laughs]. We want to remove Space and Time Labs from the custody chain of the network as fast as we can. And so throughout 2024, while we build a lighter-weight node that anybody can run, and anybody can participate as a node operator, we also want to just, you know, make the former a lot easier, too. So the idea is that node operators, token holders, and point holders will be included in a DAO governance process that we're building throughout the year, transitioning ownership of the network as much as we can. And this is going to be a multi-year process. It's not like we're going to be done with this transition by the end of the year. The idea is that Space and Time functionally feels like an L1 in the sense that you have a network of nodes around the globe that are talking directly to other L1s and L2s, and sending data and settling that data on Space and Time. And, ultimately, a DAO governance system means that network upgrades, and, more importantly, network scaling can be governed by a DAO. And that's what we're building towards.

Mike: How do we intend to keep the community more engaged and attract new users?

Cat: Scott touched on this a little bit in the last question, but I know I speak for the entire core team when I say there's nothing more important to us at Space and Time than community and nothing we find more valuable than our community. And that includes all of you. So thank you, again, so much for all of your engagement! We love our early supporters, especially those of you who have been here from the beginning, and as Scott has kind of already overviewed, the goal and the plan for Space and Time is to be both community operated, where community members can run nodes, and community owned, where community members are kind of driving the decision making. We don't know exactly what that looks like today -- you guys will be the first to know when we do -- but we are working right now to kind of build the rails to be able to measure community engagement in order to ensure that everyone who is participating now, especially those who have participated since the beginning, gets to share in the success of Space and Time in the future.

Scott: Well said, Cat! That's why Cat's our spokesperson.

Mike: Do we plan to include referral quests on Zealy in the future? What about other types of quests?

Cat: Maybe! We're certainly open to it. When it comes to specific quests that you guys want to see, I want to take the lead from the community on that. This is a community empowerment program, a community engagement program. So I want to hear what it is that you all want to see as quests. So drop us feedback -- there's a channel called points feedback in the points system section -- if you have ideas for quests or ideas for reward structures. We would love to hear them! If a referral task is something you want to see, if you have other ideas, drop them in there, and we'll do our best to implement them.

Mike: Will there be any rewards for early contributors to the Zealy quests? Some early contributors have been working on Zealy quizzes for six months. The points per quest have been high lately, making it easier for newer participants to earn points. Will there still be some sort of reward for early contributors?

Cat: That's a great question! And we've gotten a lot of that question lately. So, I want to be clear: we had a Zealy platform for Space and Time up until recently, but it was more focused on quizzes, like education around our docs and our blogs. And early contributors who have been here for the last year have had an opportunity to earn really small amounts of points for completing those quizzes. And some of you guys have been really awesome at doing that every week. And we love to see it. The reason that we launched our community point system -- which I see as different; we see that as a way to reward engagement not just with Space and Time content, but with community activities with the platform itself -- and the reason we chose to launch that on the Zealy platform was so that those points that early supporters accumulated from the smaller quiz tasks carried over.

So you kind of get a head start for being an early supporter. But I want you to know that none of the tiers or rewards are exclusive. So it's not like only the first 500 people to reach a certain level are going to get the rewards. It's going to be like, if you reach this level, you're eligible for rewards. So the only person you're in competition with on the point system is yourself . You just want to get as many points as you can, but it doesn't mean that because somebody got there faster than you that they're going to have a different reward or a better reward. So don't worry about that. I looked at our leaderboard yesterday; all of our top 100 participants and probably more -- I just didn't look past 100 -- are early supporters and are people who have been signed up Zealy for several months now. So early supporters definitely have a head start. But we also want to reward folks who are new to our community and who are engaging now. So we're trying to make it as equitable as possible. But like I said, any feedback you have, please drop it in that points feedback channel!

Mike: If Space and Time releases a token, will there be any community distribution?

Cat: So, the honest answer here is the community points, right? We launched that a week ago. And we have seen crazy, crazy growth in both our Discord community and Twitter engagement, on GitHub, across all platforms, new users, engagement of early supporters, it's been really, really awesome! So we of course intend to keep that point system around. And we're also planning to introduce new reward structures throughout. So, like, figuring out how we can reward you all in the interim, possibly with merch, possibly with community NFTs. Not exactly sure what that looks like, but we'll be announcing more throughout the year. But we also really want to start engaging the community with the Space and Time platform itself. And we've seen a lot of that come out of the point system, which has been awesome. A lot of community-built dashboards, a lot of people running natural-language queries and sharing the prompt and the resulting query that came with it. And it's been really great. So that's why you see some quests around, for example, translating docs, building dashboards, video tutorials, and so on, because we really want to empower the community to actually use Space and Time. One of the big appeals of Space and Time is that you don't have to be a developer, you don't have to be a data analyst. Anybody with no training can come off and build a Space and Time dashboard to analyze blockchain data, which I think will be really important, too, as we move into this bull run in 2024. You want to know what your favorite token price is doing. You want to know what the market looks like. And Space and Time is a really useful tool for that. So something we want to empower throughout the community. And I think this community points system is really going to help with that.

Mike: Do we plan to have a full advocate program in the future?

Cat: We do plan to have an advocate program! We're not sure what that looks like yet; you guys will be the first to know when we do figure that out. But it is absolutely something we are looking at and planning for. And just to, you know -- kind of spoiler alert -- it's going to be based on community engagement. So we're lurking, we see the NFT contest submissions you do, we see the points quests that you submit, and we're totally taking note of that. So it's going to be based on who's engaging and who's been an early supporter, but we're definitely excited to share more about that in the coming months.

Mike: Back to you, Scott: for simple queries, AI can write query statements very quickly – but for more complex queries, it may not always get the desired results. Is there anything you can say about how to improve the AI ​​experience for Space and Time?

Scott: We're doing more and more work in our chat bot to make a conversational discussion possible, where you kind of ask a natural language question that's converted into SQL. And maybe that prompt was really complex, and therefore the SQL generated didn't quite work perfectly. Well, of course, in our query editor, you can manually edit the SQL statement generated and fix it. And we're working on conversational AI in the chat bot where you can just have a conversation like you would in ChatGPT and let continued follow-on discussion with AI fix your SQL query for you when it's complex. But at the end of the day, we still are limited to the intelligence and the quality of inference of GPT-4. I do believe that the architecture we have set up is cutting edge. It's probably one of the most mature architectures available right now in the market for natural language to SQL, given that we partnered with Microsoft at the beginning of last year to build this out in collaboration with Microsoft, which we're really proud of.

And I think as GPT-4 becomes GPT-4.5 becomes GPT-5, you know, probably within a year, you're going to see the quality of complex SQL probably just skyrocket. So we're really excited. Things work pretty darn good now, but of course, you can find infinite ways to break GPT-4, or write a natural language prompt that's too complex for the AI to handle today. Ask me again in a year, when we have GPT-5. You'll probably be able to generate an 80-line SQL statement perfectly. And our architecture is conducive to that. We have an architecture that's agnostic to the LLM we're using. So it's going to be really exciting to see Space and Time grow up along with large language models.

And I can't give away too much alpha this early, but we're also doing even more challenging and exciting things with large language models and blockchain. Hint, hint. I've got a big engineering team working on an AI powered dapp design studio. It's going to take us through the year, but that’s also coming soon. I just want to hint that we're doing a lot more with AI and in collaboration with Microsoft within Web3, beyond just generating SQL queries for blockchain data. That was just step one. That was just to get us off the ground. Wait until step two of our AI roadmap drops!

Mike: Which chains is SxT looking at indexing next? Does SxT have goals around expanding its user base into different blockchain ecosystems?

Scott: Oh, absolutely. We're working on zkSync and Aptos right now. Those will be done soon; we're kind of on the final legs of both of those. We have a huge partnership with zkSync, and it's going to be awesome to work with them. We have great friends over in the zkSync ecosystem, and we have a huge partnership with them. And of course we're continuing to index more and more chains. Once we're done with zkSync and Aptos, the next change we tackle will be the A's: Arbitrum and Avalanche. We actually tackled Avalanche awhile ago, and then kind of turned it off because we focused in other areas. So now we're coming back to Avalanche to turn it back on, to turn the faucet of Avalanche data back on. So, Arbitrum and Avalanche are coming next. We also just got a grant from Arbitrum, and we're excited to work with them. And then beyond that, I can see Optimism, Base, some more zkEVMs. So hey, community, let me know in the chat if there's specific chain data you need and we don't have or you have a prioritized list of chains that we need to go support. Let me know! We've got a pretty large engineering team constantly adding more. We just launched Bitcoin! Thanks, Cat and Mike, for the announcement. Shout out to ETF! Shout out to Larry Fink, the new Michael Sayler. And we now support Bitcoin data just in time!

Mike: Some readers of the whitepaper are wondering if it indicates that storage and RPC nodes are managed by the Space and Time team, and thus centralized. Will these centralized services be the bottleneck?

Scott: This is a really good question. I think maybe I need to do a technical deep dive maybe via a whitepaper 2.0 and some detailed docs we include on the Space and Time docs page. But the short answer is absolutely not. The long answer is absolutely not, because of novel cryptography. What you've got to understand is with zero-knowledge cryptography, you don't necessarily have to have highly, highly, highly replicated storage decentralized across a massive number of node operators like Arweave, for example. I love Arweave, but you don't need that kind of architecture specifically within the realm of zero-knowledge. And here's why. As long as you can prove that you have a sufficient number of replications for any given data set – for example, Cat creates a table, and we can prove that we replicated Cat's tables five times across five different user-operated nodes in the network – we don't need to go replicate her dataset 100 times. That's overkill. Why? Because of zero-knowledge proofs.

As long as we have a sufficient number of replications of Cat's data, the server that serves that data is required to trustlessly and cryptographically prove that they have not tampered with that data. So from a tampering and a cryptographic trust standpoint, zero-knowledge proofs ensure that the data cannot be tampered with, even if there was just one single node operator called Space and Time Inc. running all the storage nodes in the whole network -- which we won't; we'll be adding community members to run the storage nodes, but even if we did, even if it was a truly centralized storage system underneath our node network, as long as there is sufficient liveness and sufficient replication to ensure that data never gets dropped, zero-knowledge proofs require the node operator to prove every data set they retrieve and every data set returned to a client. Those that are familiar with zero-knowledge will kind of nod to this or smile at this, right? With the advent of zero-knowledge proofs, you don't need a massive network of consensus of hundreds or thousands of nodes coming to consensus. Instead, you just have a sufficient number of nodes to ensure high availability, ensure replication, and all of those nodes must mathematically prove the data they return. I'm happy to go into way more detail on this. Maybe a Discord AMA isn't the right forum. I'll probably write some documentation and maybe include it in our whitepaper version two.

Mike: How do Space and Time’s visualization and dashboard tools differ from other platforms of the same type?

Scott: We're just trying to make it really easy. And by no means are we done; we have a long way to go. I mean, we're still in the very early days of Space and Time. And we've only really been building our UI for about a year. So we still have, I would argue, another year’s worth of UI development to go. Maybe those who have built dashboards can agree with me: our whole goal is to just try to make it as easy as possible, try to make it so easy to just write a natural language query, get back a SQL response, tab over to automatic visualizations, quickly edit a chart, save it and load it into a dashboard with a beautiful header image. And I had no idea how creative and how beautiful the dashboards created by this community would be. I see some familiar faces on this Discord AMA, folks that have submitted to me. Some just gorgeous dashboards like, Hey, make dashboards sexy again, make dashboards beautiful again. I'm loving it! We had no idea that people would use this as almost like an art tool to build the most beautiful, gorgeous dashboards possible. And now we're in sort of an arms race. Oh, there's azureblue, shout out to azureblue. Now we're in, like, an arms race to see who can make the most beautiful dashboard. What a blast! I'm having so much fun.

Finally, in summary, what makes Space and Time analytics different from really any other tool is that that's not even our business. That's not even our network. We're a zero-knowledge proving network to prove complex questions to smart contracts. That's what Space and Time is building. We're not trying to be yet another dashboarding tool. And still, we're having so much fun building the most advanced and the most futuristic and forward-thinking dashboard until that exists. So I really appreciate all the engagement from the community and all the creativity that I'm seeing from you guys!

Mike: One of the use cases highlighted in the whitepaper talks about how Proof of SQL can be used to build a zk-rollup. Can you explain this at a high level? Is SxT working with any partners to implement this?

Scott: Oh, interesting question. And this isn't the first time I've gotten that question. I actually got the same question from folks at zkSync.

Here's the idea: Proof of SQL cryptographically secures tables in Space and Time as well as query executions against those tables, meaning that what we're securing is proving that a table has not been tampered with, and that the immutability of the table has held. It's functionally doing the same thing as a zk-rollup ledger. The only difference is that we're not trying to prove every single transaction. Instead, we're trying to prove every single insert into the database, similar to how a zk-rollup proves the transaction. What that ultimately means is that you can use Space and Time's Proof of SQL technology to create tables in Space and Time that are defined as tamperproof, immutable ledgers. And if you can create a table in Space and Time that's a tamperproof, immutable ledger secured by Proof of SQL, you've essentially created an L2 ledger that you can bridge capital over to.

Now, the Space and Time team is working really hard to build a prototype of this, or a demo of this, or an open source implementation, a framework that we can hand to our developers, to our developer community, and say, Hey, don't just take Scott's word for it on an AMA; here's the actual reference implementation, where we're building this use case out, open-sourcing it, and handing it to the community, around the same time we plan to open source Proof of SQL itself. Maybe, like, late Q2 timeframe. So, to be very clear, there's going to be an entire reference implementation that we're planning to roll out in Q2, showing how to use Space and Time as a zk-rollup for your dapp. This is going to blow people away! It's going be very hard for people to wrap their head around how a database can be a zk-rollup. But what people have got to realize is that a zk-rollup is, at its core, a database! Most zk-rollups use RocksDB or a custom key value database at their core to manage a ledger that's just ZK-proven to make it tamperproof. How is that fundamentally too much different than what Space and Time is doing? The only difference is that we're using Proof of SQL to secure that rather than borrowing transaction verification kinds of code bases.

So I'll stop there. And that was a long explanation. But all we're simply saying is a table in Space and Time can be a financial ledger. And that financial ledger can be secured by Proof of SQL and rolled up to an L1. And we're building an example of this and plan to open-source it to the world in a few months.

Mike: Space and Time talks about verifiable AI as a use case, but there isn't much about this in the whitepaper. Can you explain what that use case is and why it’s important?

Scott: Oh, verifiable AI! Okay. So, this was an effort that Space and Time as a company was not thinking about, right? We're just focused on Web3, we're focused on blockchain, we're focused on enabling smart contracts on every major chain with query results that are cryptographically proven and trustless. However, in our partnership with Microsoft, as we started building out AI services in collaboration with them throughout the year, they really encouraged us to think about how blockchain technology or Web3 technology in general or just cryptography in general can be used to do responsible, secure, verifiable AI. Now, you might be asking yourself, what the heck does that mean? Well, it can really mean a lot of things. It's a massive initiative and a massive collaboration that we're trying to think through. We're really excited to be at the forefront of thinking through and starting to implement ways to use both Space and Time's technology as well as blockchain technology in general to cryptographically verify the training datasets that have been loaded into an LLM for training or to cryptographically verify the inference that comes out of an LLM after it's been trained, or to cryptographically verify that copyrighted IP hasn't been used to train, and do things like securing sensitive, personally identified information or securing copyrighted information from being loaded into an LLM.

And it's just this effort to say, like, Okay, we all know AI and blockchain is the ultimate sort of antithesis, and therefore, is going to be the most important sort of yin and yang over the next five years. We all know that the crazy generative AI world we're walking into where deep fakes and synthetic data, and fraudulent data gets generated and proliferated across the web, we know blockchain is the solution to start securing this and proving what is real versus what is fake, using the blockchain ledger as a tamperproof audit trail or provenance of, for example, is this image published a deep fake or is it real? Is this journalist article generated, or is this actual on-the-ground reporting? Is this whitepaper from Space and Time the actual whitepaper, or did a hacker just kind of regenerate it and include things they shouldn't? Is this transaction on-chain real, or is it coming from a bot? Now, we already see Worldcoin working on proof of personhood, and that'll be interesting for civil resistance in the age of AI. But what we're focused on more is proving that the model you've trained is doing what it's supposed to be doing. Why? Because someday, we're going to connect the models directly to smart contracts the same way we connect the SQL database directly to a smart contract, without breaking the trust model and the cryptographic security of the chain. That is the goal. And that is what we're building towards. And the day we can connect an LLM or a network of LLMs directly to smart contracts with cryptographic proof is the day we really start accelerating AI and blockchain. More to come. We'll have exciting news rolling out all throughout the year. But the overall goal of this effort is to use our technology to secure the data that trains an LLM or the outputs of the LLM itself.

Mike: The whitepaper talks about competitive moats. Can you explain what this means, and why it'll give SxT a competitive edge in the market?

Scott: Yeah, we talk a lot about garnering the moats of data warehousing, of databases, and of blockchains. Now, Web3 decentralized networks get more secure as more node operators onboard, generally speaking. The more people running Ethereum nodes, the more stakers you have, and therefore the more token economic security. You know, the more Bitcoin nodes join the network, obviously, the more hash power you have, and the more security. So the more nodes that join a Web3 network, the more security you have. Also, the more blockchains you index, the more of a moat you create around being the cross-chain connector -- connectooooooor, with, like, seven O's [laughs]. And so we garner all the network effects of growing the Space and Time database the same way an L1 grows their L1 chain. More node operators, more cryptoeconomic security, and, of course, more composable datasets on-chain and on Space and Time. On the flipside, what most people don't know is that data warehousing is a hugely data gravity-affected or data moats-affected business. When you build a data warehouse, your data warehouse is only as good as the third-party integrations available, the number of datasets you have, and, of course, the maturity of the database. So as developers build on top of databases, the more mature a database is and the more developers building on it, the more of a moat it has. It becomes harder and harder to sort of migrate to other databases. As you build your business on a certain database and you start to scale to terabytes, it becomes very difficult to migrate off of that to another service. And especially if you're enjoying the service you have and you're getting a great experience with your database service, there's no reason to migrate. It's expensive, cost-prohibitive, and it's time consuming. So we're just talking about the fact that we get the benefits of both worlds, we get the best of both worlds, the benefits of the network moats of data warehousing that sort of have data gravity that locks you in as a developer, but also the network moats of a decentralized L1 that's constantly adding more cryptoeconomic security via more node node operators, and, of course, more indexed data and more composable dapp datasets.

Mike: Space and Time can be very complicated for the technically untrained person! Could you describe in a few sentences the utility of Space and Time for the average user rather than for developers or enterprises?

Scott: There's going to be a lot more alpha on that, specifically, rolled out in the second half of 2024. To be fair, you guys are right. I mean, Space and Time is more geared toward developers today, right? We're not really a consumer-facing business. While we’re making it easier and easier for developers to use it, I have to admit that we have a long way to go. But we're working hard to make it easier to use for developers. Simultaneously, we're building something entirely new for consumers, for non-technical users. I can't really provide the details of that today. Maybe it's a little too early for that alpha. But I'll just say this: consumers don't want to write code. Consumers don't want to think of Space and Time as a database. What they want to think of Space and Time as is a no-code app design studio, where Space and Time is the backend for all apps, all dapps, in Web3.

We’re building something for non-technical users to be able to generate their own data-driven dapps on top of Space and Time and deploy them to a chain as well as deploy Space and Time as the backend automatically, to abstract all of this complexity away for a non-technical user. As you can imagine, that's a massive effort. And we only kicked off that effort really at the end of 2023. So it's going to take time to mature, it's going to take time to incubate, but stay tuned!

Mike: Are there plans to produce a technical manual and/or video tutorials for users? If so, will this be in English or in other languages?

Cat: Yeah, great question. We definitely do have plans to create more video tutorials and guides. There are a few peppered throughout our docs right now, so you can go check out docs.spaceandtime.io if you're curious about that. But it definitely is a priority for us. At the same time, we're a fairly small core team, at least on the go-to-market side. Most of our efforts focus towards engineering so we can keep building. So that's kind of where the community comes in, right? For example, you'll see some quests on our community points platform around translating docs pages, creating a step-by-step walkthrough for a dapp feature, creating a video tutorial, and so on. And we really want to empower the community, especially those who have been engaging with Space and Time for a long time now, to kind of create some of that content. You guys are part of Space and Time, too. It's not just the core team. So, yes, we totally want to spend more of our efforts in 2024 creating some of those materials, to make it easier for users to use Space and Time. But we want to see you guys do it, too. So if you have suggestions for quests that can be added to kind of encourage that within the community, let us know, because we'd love to see that.

Mike: Do we have any plans to launch grants for developers? For example, how about starting a campaign for developers to create new dapps on Space and Time?

Cat: Yeah, we would love to. Over the next few months, you'll see more and more developer-focused points quests rolled out. That's a really easy way we can get up and running with rewarding developers, specifically, for their contributions to and engagement with Space and Time. Right now, we're looking at our events strategy for 2024 and looking at different hackathons that we could participate in. So that would include bounties for people building on Space and Time. We're talking to various partners whom we could possibly work with to implement some sort of program like this. But right now, the points system is going to be the place to go. So again, I'm just going to plug it one last time: if you have feedback on quests that you'd like to see added, let us know in the points feedback channel, and we'll try to get them up!

Scott: One thing I just thought of given some of the posts in the in the AMA message channel: something that I would appreciate – maybe not today, but sometime soon – is we could start a points program that gives a significant amount of points to people who submit very, very clean bug reports about the dapp, with screenshots and kind of walkthroughs of where they got confused. Or it doesn't even have to be a bug; it could just be a confusion in the UX. Give me feedback on where you're getting stumped, on where you're getting confused. I want to make this user experience as easy and smooth as possible. And like I said, we have a long way to go. I'll admit, I'm not the best UX designer in the world. I'm primarily a database developer and a ZK cryptographer. But we have ambitions to make using the dapp incredibly easy. And I want to know where you guys get confused. So, Cat, what about a program where we give good rewards for very clean walkthroughs of where people get stumped?

Cat: Yeah, I love that idea! We can definitely do that.

Scott: I've seen some good screenshots already, and already gotten some good feedback, which I can't appreciate enough.

Mike: Some users would like to use Space and Time on their phones. Have we considered creating a mobile app?

Scott: I don't know if folks were listening about five minutes ago when I said, "Hey, some alpha for second half of 2024 is that we're building a non-technical user app for people that want to sort of generate their own little dapp on top of Space and Time without writing any code." That will probably roll out on the web first. And then we're going to build a cross-platform mobile app. To be honest, it's going to take a while. We're looking at 2025 sometime for the mobile app. 2024 mid-year for the web app, and then it'll take us another, I don't know, six months for the mobile app, at least. What you're going to have is like a mobile analytics suite and a mobile dapp developer suite. And we'll try to make it as remarkably easy to use and simple for non-technical users as we possibly can. We're excited.

I’m down to 3% battery. Who was it that caught out my phone battery at the beginning of this call? I'm on 3%, Mystery Men. We've got to make these last seven minutes count!

Mike: Scott, what do you think about the potential for a 2024 bull market and how this could impact Space and Time?

Scott: Everything I'm about to say is not financial advice! I am not the wizard of DeFi prices. I have just one man's humble opinion. Yes, I study the markets. Yes, we've got a lot of data that we look at. But by no means do I have, you know, a wizard's orb into the future of the markets. So, NFA: not financial advice. Here's what I see happening. Humbly. My very, very humble opinion. Okay, well, first we'll talk about crypto and then we'll talk about the market in general and where we see DeFi and Web3 going throughout the year. Okay, so, Bitcoin ETF obviously is pumping in the news. Thank goodness! All of our collective happiness, collective net worth, and collective euphoria is increased a little bit with this Bitcoin ETF news. What we're probably going to see is some pushback in the $55k range, maybe $52k range, with Bitcoin. As we start to cross $50k Bitcoin, we'll see some sell-offs. Institutional sellers will take profit, retail HODLers will take some profit. And that'll mean a correction, right? And we'll see a slight correction of coin prices. post-$50k, with Bitcoin. Once again, I could be very wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that we're moving straight to $100k!

But if we see those corrections, I don't think they're going to be massive corrections. For example Bitcoin could correct from $52k back down to $40k, as an example. It'll feel massive at the time, but when you zoom out at the big scope of things, when Bitcoin is someday at $150k, a drop from $52k Bitcoin to, for example, $45k Bitcoin won't be that big of a deal. So we'll see a slight correction, right? We'll see investors take profit. And then I imagine a lot of turbulence and chop, you know? Three months of people being unsure, and then some good news about the ETH ETF comes out, and then a continued bull run. Like, I can see a slight correction and then up only, but that up only will be very choppy. I imagine the picotop of the bull run being sometime in Q1 2025.

Once again, I hope I'm very, very wrong. I hope that the picotop of the bull run is, like, Q4 2025. But what could make me wrong is if institutions pour enough money in that it sustains a long and healthy bull run for a couple of years, via stable institutional market-making. That's something that's going to be unique to this cycle that, of course, we did not see in any prior cycles, is large institutional market-makers working hard to stabilize the price of Bitcoin and ETH, which means we might get lucky, we might see a very long, slow bull run, rather than a crazy hockey stick, six-month bull run and then an epic crash afterwards. We might get lucky and see a multi-year, beautiful, slow, up-only with institutional market-makers at the helm. Finally, regarding just the Web3 industry and what we expect to see: 2024 is definitely going to be the year of, like, ultra-giga re-staking times three, right? Like, people are going to take EigenLayers, you know, re-staked ETH, and so on, and dump that into a DeFi protocol to yield farm it, and then somehow pull that back up out to a liquid staking protocol. And, like, you can stake, you know, USDC on a Space and Time that's also re-staked with EigenLayer that's also liquid. It's going to get crazy, third-order derivatives of re-staking. And that's going to own a lot of the narrative. At the same time, AI and blockchain will start to own the narrative as people start to roll out cute little use cases that show the possibility of what's happening with AI agents transacting on-chain. As AI agents start to transact on-chain, people are going to be mind-blown. And they're going to see a huge opportunity here. And so by the end of 2024, we'll start to see a real narrative around AI and blockchain emerge. And a lot of the AI blockchain early players, I'm guessing, will pump.

Once again: not financial advice! I am not an expert. I am not a DeFi lord. I am not a VC. I have no idea. I'm just looking at the data and trying to make my best predictions. I imagine that AI tokens will pump by the end of the year as this narrative plays out. Finally, my last prediction is just around EIP-4844, proto-danksharding with Ethereum, will be, like, the impetus for a lot of hype around ETH. Early in the cycle we saw SOL pop. Solana got all the attention. With EIP-4844, Ethereum will get more attention, and Ethereum L2s will get cheaper, and a lot of new chains will mainnet mainly for EIP-4844. So you'll see yet another L2 pop up throughout the year; you'll see the AI and blockchain narrative become stronger; and of course triple-giga-ultra liquid re-staking. Stake-and-shaking, if you will, with fries and a burger!

Mike: Scott, where do you see Space and Time at the end of 2024? What are the most important next steps? What does the team need to accomplish before full production launch?

Scott: Proof of SQL should have a mainnet before the end of 2024. We should have a fully decentralized node operator network within a similar timeframe, with smaller, lightweight nodes that individuals can run rather than large node operators. We plan to have some serious DeFi rails already deployed to Ethereum and zkSync and maybe a number of other chains by the end of the year, a whole DeFi framework and ZK-rollup framework on top of Space and Time. So those are the three technology rollouts: the node network, the ZK-rollup framework, and the DeFi rails. And, of course, we'll improve the user experience with AI!

Mike: It looks like we're about at the end of our time! Any closing words?

Scott: I just have incredible appreciation for you all! I'm grateful for this community, and I'm so, so excited to see the dashboards you guys are creating!

Cat: I want to totally echo that! You guys have been awesome! Keep engaging, keep giving us feedback on the platform, the dapp, the community points system. We love hearing from you guys.

Scott: Talk soon, my friends! You all are the best!

Space and Time Links:

Website: http://spaceandtime.io

Twitter: http://twitter.com/spaceandtimeDB

Discord: http://discord.com/spaceandtimeDB

Telegram: http://t.me/spaceandtimeDB

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/space-and-time-db