10/25/22 Discord AMA Summary
Summary of Discord audio AMA, October 25th, 2022.
Space and Time participants:
Nate Holiday, CEO and Co-Founder
Spencer Reeves, Creative Director
Thank you to all of the community members who attended!
[Session begins]
Introduction
Spencer: We're so happy to have you all here. Our community has just absolutely exploded post-SmartCon. My name is Spencer Reeves. I'm the Creative Director here at Space and Time. I've had the pleasure of interacting with many of you here. For all you new faces, welcome! And I'll just pass off the mic to Nate.
Nate: Thanks, Spencer. I’m really excited for this AMA. I've been looking forward to it all week. And as Spencer said, we're really excited about the community. We're excited that you're here, we're excited that we're building this together. There are a lot of exciting things that we're working on that we want to start involving the community in as we continue to move forward. I think you'll see from us that we're engaging more and more on Discord as well. My name is Nate Holiday, CEO and Co-Founder of Space and Time, and I'm really looking forward to spending the next hour answering questions and making sure that you have as much access and insight to the project and what we're building as a company and to the employees and the founders here at the company as well. We want to have a very open and transparent engagement with you as we continue to build this.
AMA
How did the Space and Time project come about in general? What's the story? How was the main team formed?
Nate: I'll take that. Space and Time is a decentralized data warehouse that's natively built for Web3. And Scott and I, we have tremendous experience in data warehousing. If you think about databases and data warehousing, we both spent significant time at Teradata as executives. And Teradata has built one of the leading, foremost data warehouses in the industry. It's been around for 40 years, and there was a whole cloud transformation as well. Teradata started to port their data warehouse to the cloud and you started to see other types of cloud providers spin up around Snowflake and Databricks and various types of cloud providers.
The issue with Web2 databases and data warehouses is, number one, they're extremely centralized. And if you think about cloud services, you're even magnifying the centralization of databases and data warehouses, as everything is moving to a small number of major cloud providers. And part of this is really good: if you're looking to build a new business, there are a lot of cloud services that make it really easy to build a new business, to get started early. But there are also a lot of issues with centralized databases in the world. And as the world moves to decentralization, and as the world moves from a borderless integration between different businesses, we firmly believe that the decentralization of databases and data warehouses is the new frontier, is the next frontier.
My entry to Web3 was through Chainlink. As a strategic advisor to Chainlink, I started working with the team around go-to-market, around data strategy, around strategic initiatives. And one of the things that became wildly apparent to me was that the decentralized applications that were being built were all being built on the constructs of Web2 that we helped create: these centralized databases, these large cloud service providers. The few were controlling a mass amount of data for the many. And if you're building decentralized applications, we should have decentralized databases and data warehouses to support that, to bring privacy back to internet constituents, to ensure that you have full control of your data, but also to ensure that as you think about the applications that are being built, that they can be trusted and verified.
You look at the DeFi applications in the world today that are being built, and I think all of us know that in the news week by week, you continue to hear about hacks, you continue to hear about information people get that they shouldn't have access to, that there are inside jobs that are occurring. So there is a known problem with these centralized databases. If you're building a decentralized application, you need to ensure that it's secure, you need to ensure that it's widely distributed and you need to make sure that the actual data that you're providing to the end users, to the application, to the DeFi projects, that the actual users can trust it. And so we see a huge opportunity for us to work on building the next generation of databases, the next generation of software.
If you think about just from a database transformation perspective, you could put it in a very easy slide that says that two decades ago it was on-premise databases and data warehousing, you had the Oracles of the world and Teradatas of the world. Now you have, currently being built, the cloud databases, you have the various types of cloud servers and databases that are powering the world today. And in the future, we're building the future, the next generation of database technology and data warehousing, which is decentralized. And so we're really excited to power this journey and to build.
For those who aren’t highly technically literate, can you explain Space and Time in simpler terms?
Nate: Yeah, it's a great question, and we get this all the time. Even the concept of a data warehouse is a complicated one to most people in the world. And the way that I think about it is that data warehouses allow tables to be joined together at scale to do analytics and modeling and power business processes. So in simpler terms, databases and data warehouses, I use them in different terms because they do different things in the industry. But in general, to someone that doesn't understand databases and data warehouses, if you go to ebay.com and or you go to your favorite shopping site, they're running different types of recommendation engines to determine what you may like, what you may like to look at, what you may like to buy. Those recommendation engines are using data about you and people like you and lookalike models to determine what they should show you based on how you interact in the web.
Data warehouses are also used to power businesses. Just from a closing of books perspective, if you want to go and run a business today, and let's say you're a publicly traded company and you want to be able to close the books maybe every week, every month, for sure every month if you're publicly traded, but even every day, it takes the power of a database and a data warehouse to be able to determine what the costs and the revenue are for that day, for that week, for that month, for that quarter, to be able to determine where your business is at. And obviously, the more insight that you have on your revenue and your cost, the easier it is to change as you're building your business to ensure that as you go to close a month, as you go to close a quarter, that you have more control over the results of that, which will give greater confidence to the market and greater confidence to investors.
And so these are just two examples as we think about use cases. Another one that I like is in gaming. If you've ever downloaded a game and you go through this onboarding process, is that process easy? Is that process difficult? Where in that process does somebody drop out because you asked for information that was too confidential, that they didn't want to give you, or you had too many steps to go through? And so helping a gaming company, for example, determine when you're onboarding a customer, what does that look like? It's a really good use case to have data power that application to ensure that you can engage with customers and onboard them in a way that reduces the friction of onboarding in that game. And then also just playing a video game. If you think about who's in your social network, how are you engaging with them, all of these things are run with databases and data warehouses on the backend to power this kind of social engagement or this human engagement that we have, through technical devices and through the internet. So we're powering that in order for there to be less friction in the world as you engage with one another through various technologies.
We hear a lot about Proof of SQL. Can you explain a little more about it, about what role it plays in Space and Time, and about why it’s so novel?
Nate: Absolutely. Proof of SQL is visionary, and it's going to change the market, and we're extremely bullish on Proof of SQL. And here's why. If you think about all the business processes I just talked about, those are all being run today on centralized databases, and powered by centralized data warehouses. And today the world just trusts that the people who own the servers, the people who own the software and the database and the actual companies that are running on those servers and on that software and on that database, are going to do no harm. We kind of just trust that it's this fair and honest system, when in reality, companies each day optimize the way they engage to benefit their user engagement, to benefit revenue, to lower cost. And that's fair; they have the ability to improve their business using data over a period of time.
But if you think about decentralized applications, now all of a sudden you need to ensure that you can trust where your money's going. You know, is it fair the way that you're interacting with that application? If you're playing a video game, if you're using a DeFi protocol, are the cards stacked against you or not? And so what's really exciting about what we're building is that as the centralized process that everyone just assumes is fair today moves to smart contracts over the next one, two, three, four, five, 10, 20 years, the exciting part is that those smart contracts are going be automated such that there's no human engagement and interaction. And what's exciting about that is with Proof of SQL, we can make delivering data to a smart contract verifiable and tamperproof so that you as a user can trust it. So you can say, as this was being run, was there anything that tampered with the data? Was any data added? Was any data deleted? Did they change the way that the query was run from previous times, such that maybe the output would be different or the cards would be stacked a little bit differently?
And so the exciting part that we have around Proof of SQL is that smart contracts can now query an entire data warehouse, and what's being queried from that data warehouse is many times larger than what can be done today. So that means the use cases for tamperproof analytics, for tamperproof use cases, grows, right? Because for anything that you can do in a data warehouse, now you can have tamperproof, verifiable, trustless results that are delivered to a smart contract. So now you can start to take that business logic, or the automation, and you can move it to a smart contract that can be trusted.
And the exciting part about that is that it shifts the power dynamics. It says that if you want to engage in the new world of Web3 applications, you should use Proof of SQL because it proves to the smart contract that what you're doing is fair and honest. And it also proves to the smart contract that something hasn't been tampered with. And if you think about it, a user loves it because it's transparent, it's tamperproof. A business loves it also because, think about it, it's fair and transparent. If I was the CEO of a DeFi protocol today that was powering hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars on-chain and I was running that all in a centralized database, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Because I also, as a CEO of a company, want have confidence that if I'm powering hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm not going to wake up the next day to an internal hack or to an external hack, as a result of which now I have to go determine how best to serve our customer needs because a hundred million dollars has been stolen.
And so both sides as we move forward are going to love the ability to have tamperproof analytics that power smart contracts.
Are you building a product designed to be used only with other Web3 projects, or also to replace existing data storages and processing solutions for Web2? If the latter, what will attract major corporations to switch to Space and Time over the solutions they use today?
Nate: Another great question. The Web3 world of applications is massive and it's growing at a very fast rate. Space and Time is a native Web3 decentralized data warehouse that's going to power the industry moving forward. We're building it for that. And so our focus as we think to bring on our alpha customers, beta customers, and finally go through production launch is that we're bringing on empowering the Web3 world as applications are being built. That being said, over the next few years you're going to start to see the lines of Web3 and Web2 merge together. There are already Web2 companies, very large companies by the way, that are calling us up and saying, “Hey, we understand that we need to start interacting with blockchain data and we're not sure how to do it because we have all of these Web2 databases that are centralized. We have all of these engineers that are database and data warehousing experts, we've trained them all in SQL, and we don't really know how to think about taking all this blockchain data from disparate blockchains.”
Because they see a world where blockchain data is being generated, and there are going to be multiple blockchains that they're going to have to interact with. And they're looking at that, saying, “We're going to bring all this data off-chain into our enterprise data architecture, and we're not sure where that fits.” And the exciting part about Space and Time that they like is that they view this as an on-ramp, that we index the data, we put it in relational data stores, we make it available for them, it's in a data warehouse construct that they know and understand, and now it's driving SQL language. So now they can start to bridge together their ERP systems, legacy data warehouses that are in the cloud or on premise, and they can start to bridge together their data architecture in a single environment.
And the other thing that's really powerful from a business-to-business construct and Web2, if you think about it, is this notion of, for example, let's say that Mike and Spencer and I all go to a concert, and we're sitting there and we love the concert, we're having a great time. If you think about the businesses that power that concert, there are tens or hundreds of businesses that power that concert. There's parking, there's food, there's shirts, there's ticket sales. There are all these people that are sitting there that are providing services for us, but really we just kind of buy the ticket, food gets delivered to our seat or we go and get food, and we engage in this concert. Well, the backend system of that concert is very complicated today. The settlement of that concert is very complicated today. And they have to take what that user did and what they bought and how they participated in a concert, and they have to decide how they split up all of that revenue to all the different businesses that participated.
And today, that process takes weeks or months to determine how to split that all out. You think about what powers the next generation of how a consumer engages with a business that in turn requires payment to many different businesses. The blockchain use case and the data warehousing use case of what's facing Space and Time is building sits right in the middle of that. And that's pretty powerful because most businesses operate in this fashion. So now you're starting to bridge Web2 and Web3 holistically.
The closed alpha is coming up. How can people participate?
Nate: We're targeting the end of the year for the launch of our closed alpha. We do want participation within our closed alpha. And if you're interested in participating and have a project that requires data and you want to be able to interact with that data, please reach out to Mike, reach out to Spencer, reach out to our team. It is closed because we want to make sure that we have the right use cases within DeFi and gaming that we're testing within Web3, we want to make sure that you have the right resources and support, and we want to make sure that you have everything that you need from an alpha perspective. But it is kind of focused on a business use case. So if you have a business use case that you're working on, if you're working on a project and you want to kick the tires of the alpha project that we're launching, reach out and we'd love to engage with you.
Let’s change gears a bit for a moment. Spencer, we recently released our first Space and Time NFT. What can you tell us about future releases?
Spencer: First of all, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the amazing response that we got from the first Space and Time NFT drop. I know it was a bit of a guerilla marketing tactic, and we kind of just dropped it out of nowhere. That was kind of our idea in the first place. We kind of just wanted to make it fair, for everyone to get an equal chance at getting one. Omar Aqil was the artist. I saw some of you guys giving him love on Twitter. I really appreciate that. He actually reached out to me and was just overwhelmed with the support that you guys gave to him and all the compliments he received. So I just wanted to extend his thanks back out to the community.
In terms of future plans of Space and Time community NFTs, we do have five in total in the collection. We've already released one, and we plan on releasing four more at undisclosed future dates as well. We're adjusting some capabilities of the smart contract right now. As soon as we get those finalized, we'll be pushing more NFTs out to the community for you guys. We're just so excited that all of you guys are here so early, and that's the purpose of this kind of initiative by us, to really reward you guys for being here, being so active in our community. Everyone who's been shouting us out on Twitter, it does not go unnoticed! We look at all of those and we really appreciate the absolute outpour of support, and we're excited to release more in the future. In terms of adding some utility to these community NFTs, right now they do not have utility. Like we said, they're just for you guys to wear as a badge of honor for being an early supporter of the project. But we definitely look forward to the future in adding some Space and Time utility to NFTs as well.
What are the plans for testnet? Will anyone be able to participate? Are there any plans to incentivize participation?
Nate: We’re aiming for a May timeframe for testnet. It’s going to be open. An exciting thing about what we're building is that we are creating Space and Time to have clean indexed data from the major blockchains, which means if you go to our website during testnet and you run a query, you're going to actually have that blockchain data indexed on the major chains, ready to go. So even if you're not running a business, even if you're not sitting there saying, “Hey, I don't have an ERP system to connect, I'm not building a video game, so I can't connect Unreal Engine 5, I don't need to merge my on- and off-chain data in an environment at scale,” you could still go to Space and Time and start to look through the blockchain data and run analytics to gain more insight independent of having off-chain data to bring together. And it's a really powerful thing, because now you can start looking at, for example, simple questions that you have, like major holders of certain coins across chains or the ability to look at liquidity pools across chains. So there are going to be really powerful things that you can start to do because the blockchain data from the major chains is going to be indexed for you to start running queries on.
And that'll be open and that'll be available for you to go kick the tires on and participate in the testnet and beta. So the exciting thing that we look at is we want to make that data readily available to you. We want to make it easy to use. And so we're going to store the blockchain data for you. It's not like you have to create a new instance where you're storing data and paying for that data that's being stored. We want to have that indexed data readily available for you. So as you log into Space and Time and you want to run a query just on blockchain data, even if you don't have off-chain data, that it's readily available for you and you can go ahead and run that data and run those analytics and you don't have to figure out how to pay for just the indexing of data. It should just be there and ready to go. So we're pretty excited, and absolutely we welcome everyone to join testnet and our beta as we launch it in May.
When Space and Time enters mainnet, will anybody be able to operate a node or will doing so be restricted to those with special privileges?
Nate: We want as many people as possible who are interested in running nodes to do so. If you think about it, data warehousing is clusters of nodes. And so as we go to market and as we build node operators, the difference is if you run large scale analytics, we run them on clusters of nodes. So three or more from a cluster perspective. So it's a little bit different than “I have a laptop sitting here and it's not being used and I'm just going to spin it up,” but we do want as many people to participate and as many businesses to participate in node operations as possible. We're working with some of the large providers of servers and compute to think through different options as well as how we can make it possible for somebody that may not have access to servers or clusters of nodes to participate in node operations as well.
So we’re still in the early stages of planning, but I'm a firm believer that if you want to participate in a utility, even if you don't have a big warehouse or a bunch of servers laying around, you as a person should be able to participate in that ecosystem and that economy. If you think about rentals for homes, AirBnBs, for example, if you think about wind mules or oil rigs, you want to be able to, in a sense, participate in the economy of possibly owning a portion of an oil rig or an actual oil rig without having to know how to operate the oil rig, without having to go drill the actual oil and get the oil out and sell it to the commodities market. So we're thinking about that the same way because obviously operating a cluster of servers is complex, and so we're thinking about how we can ensure that people can participate as a node operator or as a partial node operator in the economy of Space and Time. So that's something we are working on.
What are the future funding plans for the project? Does the current funding runway extend into mainnet, or will there be future funding rounds?
Nate: We're incredibly honored and grateful for the funding and the support that we have from the investor community. There are no plans currently to raise more funding prior to our testnet. As we think about moving forward into mainnet, we have plenty of funding to launch us into mainnet. So we're going to look at the market as we prepare for mainnet and we prepare for production go-live to determine what's best for the operations of the business. But thankfully we've been successful in having the support of the investment community in what's been a very tough market for many. We've been able to grow our investment community and to have their support. So we're grateful for that. But the simple answer is that we have plenty of money to run through mainnet. We don't have plans to raise any more money this year. Our production go-live is targeted in the fall, September/October. We'll just look at the market conditions, we'll look at what we want to accomplish from a production go-live perspective and a mainnet launch and determine what's best for the company. But currently there are no plans.
At the last AMA session, a question was asked about EVM-compatible networks, and Scott answered that in addition to Ethereum, there are plans to support Solana and Flow. Are there also plans to launch SxT alongside Aptos and Near in the future?
Nate: Great question. When you think about full production go-live in fall of next year, we see a world where the major blockchains that people are operating applications and business on should be readily available for free, indexed clean with the relational data store in Space and Time. And so it's not a question of “if,” it's more a question of “when.” We talked about Solana, I think you look at Mysten Labs and Sui, right? The team is currently working on working with them on indexing that data. So you look at Near, you look at Aptos, you look at Flow. To me it's not a question of if we're going to do it, it's just the timing and priority of what makes most sense to work through the indexing of that data and make sure that it's available. But we absolutely want to have the major chains indexed, readily available for you to run queries on as a commodity, as something that’s there and ready to use for free.
Space and Time took part in the recent funding round of Kwil. It seems like Kwil would be a direct competitor to Space and Time. What were the reasons behind Space and Time investing in the project?
Nate: We absolutely love the team at Kwil. What the team at Kwil is building is needed in the industry. And I would just take a step back first and think about the different use cases that are required in using data in the industry for SQL. There are many different use cases that are required to power various types of businesses and various types of analytics. And if you think about SQL solutions in Web2, they're very vast and different. There are different reasons why you would run, for example, a Snowflake data warehouse versus a MySQL. There are different reasons why you would operate within a database versus a data warehouse. We don't believe that it's a winner-take-all market. And if you think about Web3, I think there are going to be a lot of different awesome, successful projects and we believe Kwil's going to be one of them.
So when you think about how you want to run various types of analytics and the different use cases for those analytics, you would have different solutions for various types of simple SQL queries, for example. It’s very different from Proof of SQL, large-scale enterprise analytics, the indexing of all the major chains. And so we're bullish on what Kwil's building, absolutely, they're awesome. We love the team and we think that there are many different reasons why you would use various types of databases in the market in different types of use cases. So we definitely don't believe it's a winner-take-all market, and we're excited at what they're building at Kwil. In a sense, the question is if you're building a project, why not just use Space and Time for everything? And although you could, there are certain use cases where it might make more sense to, if you're on Arweave, for example, and you need to run quick analytics, it might make sense to spin up Kwil and run some SQL analytics within the Arweave community. So we're excited at what they're building and we believe that there's room for many people to participate and win in the SQL market.
What advantages does Space and Time have in terms of data storage security compared to Web2 storage providers? What does Space and Time do to protect user data?
Nate: I don't want to get too technical. But if you think about a decentralized network, there are specific benefits around data security versus a centralized network. If you have all your data sitting in a central database, obviously, from a data security perspective, it becomes easier to hack, it becomes easier to get to the information holistically and be a bad actor from that standpoint. Although Space and Time is an open source project and we want it to be, and we're encouraging everyone to share data and interact with each other around the data, we also have end-to-end encryption, which means if you so choose and as you're participating with Space and Time, you can determine whether the data needs to be encrypted at rest and in flight of the query. So that provides a really strong capability around data security because it'll always be encrypted. If you choose encryption—and, by the way, it's tailorable—you can determine what tables you want to encrypt, then that table is encrypted at rest and in flight. And we have some pretty unique technology and partnerships that we're working with specific to data encryption as well.
And then, obviously, I think that the generic kind of Web3 response thinks about the various types of known operators that we have and the incentives around node operators; there's value in making sure that the data and security of the node operators are participating in a positive way. The final piece I would just point out is Proof of SQL. So what's unique about Space and Time is that it has Proof of Storage and Proof of SQL of the data. So if you're running data in Space and Time, you have an extra level of security if you're using Proof of SQL to ensure that the data's not being tampered with. As data comes in, you have the extra level of security to ensure that the data's not being tampered with and that there's a Proof of Storage.
One of the exciting things about the indexing platform that Scott and team are building is that they're driving tamperproof insight on the actual index data coming into Space and Time as well. So there are many different areas where there’s a level of security around tamperproofing of the index data: Proof of SQL, the encryption of the data, the decentralization of the network, and also the node operations around the incentives of the participants. So there are many different areas where there are checks and balances from a data security standpoint, all of which are improvements over Web2 in that aspect.
Chainlink is a leading provider of oracles, both in the traditional market and in the crypto world, and Space and Time has partnered with Chainlink to enhance the timeliness and accuracy of the on-chain and off-chain databases. Can you tell us more about how Space and Time makes use of Chainlink’s network?
Nate: Chainlink is a phenomenal partner. They’re someone that we have built with from day one, we've even built pre-day one as we thought through the constructs of building a decentralized data warehouse and building this data ecosystem. I'd just say the first thing is that one of the reasons we're so excited and bullish around Web3 is the ability to collaborate on new standards of data for Web3. And being part of the Chainlink BUILD program is really exciting for us because we get to participate in a really forward-thinking data open standard construct for Web3 with someone that's a pioneer in what they're building. We don't have to go build the oracle constructs, because Chainlink is the leader in the decentralization of oracles.
And so what's exciting for us is that we get to participate and focus on the database, focus on the data warehousing to interact with the ecosystem that Chainlink is building. So we get to participate and we get to expand our data use cases without having to go build everything ourselves in areas where others have a competency much greater than ourselves. But I'll give you an example. So when you think about how we're going to use Chainlink’s oracles moving forward, we always talk about how you can query the data warehouse from a smart contract. The ability to do that is connected with Chainlink oracles, right? We always talk about how we need to be able to take the data in the data warehouse and write it back to a smart contract. The ability to do that, the enabling factor of that, to be able to put that back into a smart contract, is the requirement and need to work with Chainlink around their oracles. So if you look at the data flow between what's being queried from Space and Time from a data warehousing perspective, and also as analytics being run, what's being put back on-chain, Chainlink sits at the center of that. And so obviously I'm extremely bullish around Chainlink. I think what they're building as a team is always forward-thinking, and it's nice to have a partner that is focused on enabling us to go faster and enabling our technology to extend further. And so we're extremely excited to be working with them.
Where does Space and Time currently stand with regard to a potential future token launch? And what would a hypothetical Space and Time token model look like?
Nate: We get this question a lot, so I want to be very direct. We do not have plans at this time to launch a token. That being said, we believe that tokens are a fantastic mechanism, for example, for node operations. You heard me talk about the privacy and data privacy around Space and Time. Having people put up a bounty around node operations to be good actors is a really good use case around the tokenomics of a project. And it's a new economy. Look, if you sit down at a table with Spencer, myself, Scott, I think we see a world and we want a world where as we move to production state in fall of next year, and as we roll out our node operators, it makes sense at that point to launch a token. And it's something that I personally would love to do, it’s something that I know the other co-founders would love to do.
It's something that we're already working through, various types of tokenomics and models. If the market allows us and if we're able to, that we're thinking through. And there are a lot of cool things that you could do around the community around that, right? Let's say you create a new data model, you create a data pipeline, you create a new type of analytic report and you want to share that out with people and people start to use it and people start to engage with what you built, and it's a net positive asset to the overall community. There's really amazing things that you could do to grow the overall usage and pipeline in analytics and tools of Space and Time as a community using a token model as well. So it's a long answer. There are no plans to launch a token right now. It's not to say that we're not working on it, it's not to say that we don't want to launch a token. I think in a sense, a perfect timing of a token launch would be at a production mainnet launch towards the end of next year. But a lot of things have to fall in place for that to happen.
What have been the greatest development challenges so far?
Nate: I think most would assume Proof of SQL. If you think about the innovation around Proof of SQL, again, I'm extremely bullish on Proof of SQL. I think it's going to change the way that we're able to deliver data to a smart contract both on- and off-chain. But also probably a greater engineering challenge for the company is the hybrid transaction and analytic database, the actual database of Space and Time. A lot of people overlook what we're building from a technology perspective. In Web2 today, you have data warehouses, like you have Databricks, you have Teradata, you have Snowflake, so you have the data warehouses that run large-scale analytics. So if you want to ask very complex questions, you have a data warehouse for that answer. For example, a question like “how many people within the state of Texas between the ages of 18 and 22 would like a certain type of music genre?” Which is a very different question than a fast transactional question, which is, for example, “what did Nate purchase today?”
The transactional questions are asked in a database, and the analytic questions are asked in a data warehouse. And then if you want to bring those data sets together, you actually need ETL tools, which means you extract-transform-load from the database into the data warehouse so you can start to ask more complex questions. And so a Web2 company would have multiple data warehouses, multiple databases, and ETL tools to bring this all together. Space and Time has transactions and analytics in the same environment. And that hybrid transaction and analytic processing system is quite complex. Because Web2 has never solved that solution today. In Web2, you're buying multiple databases and tools. And so I think that the greater technological feat is actually the combination of the transaction and analytic processing in a single environment. And it works. And we're building it, and we're going to release it. And we're really excited, because Scott and I have spent 10 years around Web2 broken data architectures that have multiple databases cobbled together to try to bring both of these processes together in one. So that's probably a more challenging technology feat that we're accomplishing.
What makes Space and Time a unique project that will meet with success?
Nate: I love this question. Spencer, do you want to chime in?
Spencer: I'll give my two cents. The short answer is that I really think our team is a lot to account for here. I mean, we have one of the most hardworking, talented teams in the industry right now. Obviously we're doing some innovative stuff in the space by joining on-chain and off-chain data by providing tamperproof analytics to smart contracts, which is our main thing. But we have one of the hardest-working teams out there, some of the most talented cryptographers in this space, some of the most talented database engineers in this space, and we're working night and day on this project and everybody's really passionate here and we've got an amazing community, you guys, that's bringing us to light. I think you guys are the validation of this whole year of grinding that we've been doing, everything from conferences to just backend coding. So not sure if I answered it to a T technically there, but maybe I'll pass it off to you for just a quick wrap-up on that question, Nate.
Nate: Absolutely. I don't disagree. I think that our team is phenomenal. You look at the experts around the database, the cryptography, the data warehousing, and we have really good marketing, we have a really good go-to-market team as well. The team is focused on delivering the project and it's working around the clock. The other thing that I would add to that is that I think that Web3 from a business standpoint is going to win. If you're building a new application, I firmly believe that you're going to be building new applications in Web3 as a business. And I think the community of Web3 is going to continue to grow at a high rate of speed and that new applications will dominate the market. That's my belief. And that's why we're building what we're building native to Web3. Because, yes, we can go take all the Web2 business and do the hard work of rip-and-replacing it and moving it over to Web3 constructs. But I think that over a period of time, what you're going to see is that people who want to build businesses, people who want to participate in different projects, are going to want to participate in Web3 constructs. The economics are different, the economics are focused towards the community, and I think that over a period of time, the Web3 business constructs are going to prove to win. And when we deliver what we're building and we deliver it in the Web3 constructs for adoption, I think this creates this tidal wave of the ability to really grow the market holistically. And so we're really excited about the opportunity, because the market that's being built is really the next generation of business that's being built for the world, and we're going to sit right at the middle of that.
And it can't happen if the team isn't focused on delivering. That's going to be the inertia and the genesis around putting us in a position to be successful. But if you can't tell, I'm extremely, extremely bullish about the community because we're all here because we think that there's a better way to interact with each other. We think that there's a better way for our data to be used. We think that there's a better way for business to be constructed to power the many and not the few. So I think that the overall business principles of Web3 will continue to accelerate and continue to win in the marketplace over the next couple years and decades.
Conclusion
Spencer: Great. Folks, I think that's going to do it for this AMA today. Everyone, feel free to reach out to us! We want zero barrier to communication here. We want you guys to be talking with us. Please reach out to Mike and myself on Discord. Mike is amazing at communicating and making sure all your voices are heard. We want to make Discord AMAs a more regular thing. We've been traveling a lot lately, so it's been hard, but we're definitely going to make these a more regular thing. I just want to thank you guys all again for your support. I can't stress enough how early we are. We're not even a whole year in production here and we've got so much to look forward to in the future. So I'll wrap it up with that. Mike, thanks so much for putting this on and thanks for organizing everything. All right, guys, we'll catch you in the next one. Appreciate it.
Nate: Thanks, everyone!
[Session ends] 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
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