12/9/22 Discord AMA Summary
Summary of Discord audio AMA, December 9th, 2022.
Space and Time participants:
Scott Dykstra, CTO and Co-Founder
Spencer Reeves, Creative Director
Mike Post, Community Manager
Thank you to all of the community members who attended!
[Session begins]
Introduction
Mike: Scott, for those who don't or who weren't around for your last AMA, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself?
Scott: Absolutely. I'm Co-Founder and CTO of Space and Time. My background: I spent about a decade in the data warehousing industry, centralizing the world's data from the Fortune 500 into cloud-based, monolithic, centralized data warehouses, everything that's the antithesis of Web3. And I was fortunate enough to meet Nate Holiday and become very close friends with him over the years, and he thankfully pulled me into Web3 a couple years ago from the miserable corporate enterprise of centralizing the world's data. And I got a chance to start looking at Web3 architectures, looking at decentralized networks like Chainlink, and was really impressed by what they'd built. And I realized that this is a much better way to do business. This solves so many of the frustrations with the Internet's constituents around data privacy, users owning their own data and not letting large corporations sell their data for profit. This solves challenges around data sharing and different organizations and DAOs and businesses and users sharing data with each other in a way that creates a good economy.
And I also realized that this space is just so fun. And so now we're working on a truly decentralized model for data warehousing. And it's not just about queries and analytics, it's also about sharing data on the blockchain. That's my background. I've been spending the last couple years working on ZK proofs, building a novel ZK proof for queries, a way for a database to actually prove the work that it does to a smart contract, a way for a decentralized database node to actually say, "Hey, here's my query result, but here's a proof, a ZK proof, that I've done this work accurately and in an tamperproof way." And we just got a awarded a patent from the United States Patent Office for this research. So call me a database builder, call me half a cryptographer. Great to meet you guys.
Mike: Spencer, why don't you give us, for those who haven't met you yet, a little bit of background on you as well.
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. So I met Scott kind of through working on past projects. I come from traditional marketing. I've been super involved in crypto for probably about five years now. I started out as a trader in crypto and kind of just moved into more of a creator content and a Web3 kind of marketing standpoint. So it's been super fun kind of getting Space and Time off the ground. I mean, it's been an absolute joy. I mean, seeing the community grow alongside our internal team as well has been absolutely insane. I'm looking at the numbers still just kind of climb on the side here, and it's great. It's really fun because we're coming close to a year mark here at the end of the year, and I just remember having five to ten people in these spaces and now we're climbing past 500. So I'm super excited.
Mike: And my name is Mike. I'm the Community Manager and I have the pleasure and the privilege of interacting with you guys on a daily basis. Really gotten to know a lot of you over the last few months, and it's been great and I'm looking forward to continuing to build this community alongside you. Just before we start, I want to give a special shout out to our Community Helpers, S.Crypto, NFTerraX, Leon, and Mystery Men. Thank you guys so much for all the work you do to help make this community what it is. All right, so with that, let's get started.
AMA
Mike: So, first question: Scott, for those of who are kind of new to the community, why don't you explain to us, what is Space and Time? Just bring it all together.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. And we'd love feedback from the community on how we define this message further and really make it clear what is Space and Time. Because Space and Time is difficult to explain, I'll admit that. Space and Time is a decentralized data warehouse. What does that mean? What that means is we're building a query engine that can be operated and owned by the community, user-operated nodes with ZK proofs embedded in it so that it can send query results to smart contracts. It's a data warehousing platform that indexes real-time data from the blockchain, captures always up-to-date, real-time data from major blockchains and makes that available for querying, joins that data with off-chain data, but most importantly allows the query results against that data to be sent to smart contracts on major chains, which opens up a whole new set of use cases for smart contracts and for Web3 in general. Space and Time is a Web3-native data warehouse.
Mike: Great. Let's move on to really what differentiates Space and Time from its competitors.
Scott: On a similar vein, this is another one for which we'd love feedback from the community on messaging. When you're building a complex kind of protocol like this, we do a lot of different things and we have a lot of messages to share and it gets difficult to boil that down to a single concise message. Spencer and I spent a lot of time thinking through this, like, Hey, how do we very clearly, in just a sentence or two, describe Space and Time and what differentiates us. But overall, protocols like TheGraph were really interesting because they created the first community-operated database node network, this community-operated network in which anybody could run their own node and start indexing data from the blockchain. Protocols like Dune Analytics were really interesting because they created the first kind of truly open-source, truly collaborative SQL engine. Dune Analytics allowed anybody to write SQL, share it with the world, get voted up and down, build dashboards on public data sets with public queries. Back to this story of the last decade that I spent in Web2, centralizing the world's databases into the cloud, no one ever shared queries. No enterprise would write queries and make that publicly available for others to collaborate on. They'd never share their data publicly for other organizations or individuals to actually collaborate on either.
From a differentiation standpoint, we just built a novel protocol that we got a patent on called Proof of SQL, which is a cryptographic proof of the query results that our database is generating. And then I think most protocols in Web3 in general are single-node operations. They can scale to maybe half a terabyte per node. You think about TheGraph, for example. It's a PostgreSQL-based database and you can scale to about half a terabyte. And so, if you want to index blockchain data, capture realtime data from the blockchain and query it, you're only going to be able to capture a small subset of major chains like Ethereum or Avalanche or Polygon or Binance, etc. Whereas Space and Time is building a cluster-scale data warehouse where user-operated nodes are actually user-operated clusters, clusters of three to, hell, even 300 nodes. That allows any given cluster to scale to tens of terabytes, someday probably hundreds of terabytes, pretty efficiently. And that means we can persist entire blockchains—relational, queryable copies of entire blockchains—on a Space and Time cluster. Imagine you've got this big cluster of compute that can hold Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Binance, Sui, all together on the same database cluster and ask really complex questions of user activity across all the protocols on those blockchains. It's not a matter of saying, "Hey, I care about these smart contracts and I want to ask questions about these smart contracts." It's like, "Hey, I can ask questions about anything on-chain."
So, to summarize: extreme scale, novel cryptographic proofs, and most importantly, tearing down the last decade of centralizing the world's data into private data warehouses controlled by major corporations.
Mike: Let's move on to the next question: who would benefit from using Space and Time? Who is the target customer?
Scott: Yeah, these are great questions. I can give you a one-sentence answer, but I'd love the community's help refining this and saying, "Hey Scott, your one-sentence answer could definitely be improved." Our customers are analysts that want to analyze blockchain data, query it make it available, and understand what's happening on-chain with deeper insight. Our customers are other DeFi, gaming, general Web3 protocols that need to connect off-chain data and on-chain data to their smart contracts. Anyone that needs to build more intelligent, next-generation DeFi protocols, next-generation financial instruments, on-chain gaming that wants to connect off-chain data and on-chain data and build new smart contracts that mint rewards to users based on their gaming activity, smart contracts that need to run queries. Our customers are protocol builders and data analysts.
Mike: Great. Let's move on to some questions about the future of the project. So, at this point, do you think that any of the project's major technical plans will change or is the technical roadmap at this point sort of set in stone?
Scott: Roadmaps always get scope-creeped; they always get things added to them. We have a set roadmap in terms of the near-term priorities, but of course the long-term priorities can get edited, and we're always adding new capabilities to the roadmap. Right now, in the near term, we're continuing to stabilize our database and improve performance. We're planning to bring on node operators at the end of Q1 and start beginning node operations. We're looking forward to a testnet for Proof of SQL sometime in Q2, early Q2. And I think the next couple of quarters are really about beginning to scale this out. We're really excited about new initiatives around artificial intelligence and ways that we can make it easier for our analysts to access and understand and process data with the help of AI assisting. And, of course, scaling out Proof of SQL against terabytes of data.
Mike: Spencer, this is one that I think would be in particular focused to you. What are our plans in 2023 to build a developer community around Space and Time?
Spencer: First and foremost, we want to get quality projects that are building on top of Space and Time, and a way in which we can start doing that is really focusing on building a developer community platform through channels like our Discord, through our Twitter, through all these socials that we're working on right now. And we really want to cultivate an open-source community that is contributing to our product. We also want to really lean into hackathons this year, remote and in-person, and just continue these close partnerships through marketing and really trying to integrate into some other projects as well.
Scott: And on the topic of hackathons, I'm really excited to see who in the community's going to just start reading our docs in a couple of months and just start building on Space and Time once we're out of our closed controlled release. We're pretty close. We're only months away from really making Space and Time data and the Space and Time compute available to builders like yourselves. You'll be able to hop on our docs, start querying Space and Time and start building stuff, whether that's formally in a hackathon or just informally on your own time, and send us some information about what you're building on Discord, "Check this out. I built this dapp on top of Space and Time using your blockchain data. I'm really proud of it." We'd love to showcase what you guys are building in Q1. It's going to be an absolute blast.
Spencer: Yeah. And to go along with that, as you guys know or notice right now our Discord community is also going to be cultivated in a developer direction once we do move into the new year. Super excited to make this platform a place for developers to communicate.
Mike: Another one for you, Spencer: what are some of the key conferences you see Space and Time having a presence at in 2023?
Spencer: We're going to hit the big ETH Foundation conferences. We're going to lead off the year with ETHDenver. We're really looking at GDC, tackling even some traditional gaming conferences. As you guys know, we really want to lean into GameFi. We're looking at Consensus. SmartCon again. We're toying with the idea of Korea Blockchain Week as well and then DevCon later in the year. So we've got a lot of conference plans this year and we're super excited for you guys to support us along that journey.
Mike: Let's move on to some tech questions. So Scott, you are the Proof of SQL master. Can you explain what Proof of SQL is, exactly? What role is it going to play in Space and Time, and why is it such a game changer?
Scott: Yeah, I would call myself a key part of the Proof of SQL project, but the real Proof of SQL master is Jay White, our Head of Research and Co-Founder.
In terms of Proof of SQL, we just got awarded a patent from the US Patent Office, and that's just really to protect us from extremely large corporations that are going to look at this technology and say, "Ooh, I want to copy that." And from a builder perspective, this will be open-sourced, available to the community to build on top of when the time's right, probably mid-year next year, more or less, give or take. We'll see. Proof of SQL is really exciting. It's exciting because a lot of investors, users, and other builders in Web3 told us we can't. They said, "Nah, you can't build a protocol that generates a ZK proof specifically to complex queries in a database. That will never scale. In fact, that's impossible, Scott." And we said, "Yeah, except we've already done it. We've already proven that it works."
It requires a lot of GPU compute. We're talking about a large cluster of GPU compute to generate these ZK proofs. And the thing is, these clusters that we're using to answer complex questions of data to run these queries already can leverage GPUs. And so we already have a network of large compute clusters all over the globe processing queries. Why not also generate ZK proofs on top of that compute? And so we've scaled out this protocol that allows smart contracts to request data about their own chain or data about off-chain data sets. What's crazy is that smart contracts, especially on the EVM, have such limited access to data even about their own chain. Smart contracts are really not that smart today. They can't ask complex questions. They can't even ask simple questions like, "Show me all wallets who have purchased at least three NFTs of this certain collection."
Today on the EVMs, smart contracts cannot answer something as simple as that. They would require Space and Time, and smart contracts can then ask Space and Time more complicated questions about data on their own chain, other chains, and off-chain data. So a smart contract on the EVM could say, "Hey, Space and Time, give me the implied volatility of AVAX token, of BNB," for example. And then a smart contract on Polygon could build a derivatives trading platform, an options trading platform, around that analytic insight. These are examples of how Proof of SQL can be used to connect off-chain data. From a gaming perspective, imagine a smart contract on Polygon or Avalanche that's querying Space and Time periodically and saying, "Hey, show me all wallets that have won this game in the last minute and why, what points did the wallet score, show me the wallets that represent gamers that have won the game in the last minute and I'm going to give them an additional reward and additional incentive on-chain for that activity." These are some examples of how Proof of SQL works.
Spencer: As we roll out Proof of SQL and even from you, coming from this heavy data warehousing background, I mean, this is going to become somewhat of a new standard, right? I mean, why wouldn't you want to use something like Proof of SQL when you're returning query statements? This is going to kind of change the standard in the space. So I guess if I had to ask you one more question, how do you see the data warehousing space moving forward given Proof of SQL is a little bit more mainstream?
Scott: Yeah, mainstream adoption's going to come as we scale this out further. I think a lot of protocols are going to be a little slow to initially adopt Proof of SQL, because they're not going to fully wrap their head around new use cases that can be built with it right away. As more and more protocols build new use cases, new gaming ideas, new ways to reward incentives to gamers on-chain, new financial instruments that power next gen DeFi protocols, new insurance use cases, new on-chain social networks and social media use cases, and then, of course, new lending and lending protocol use cases, as these different sub-verticals within Web3 begin building on Space and Time and telling their story of like, "Hey, we just powered this incredible new use case that we couldn't have done without Proof of SQL," that creates a bunch of content for other protocols to finally understand, "Oh, okay, that's what proof of Proof of SQL is. That's an interesting use case that another DeFi protocol built that gives me some ideas of how my DeFi protocol or my lending platform or my Web3 game can leverage this technology to do things that were never possible prior."
Today you could connect a database to a smart contract, and people are doing that, but they're doing it in a very tamperable, very centralized way. They're just simply putting an oracle network between a centralized database and a smart contract, and they're having their smart contract kick off an oracle job to grab data from that centralized database. There's nothing wrong with that from a data flow perspective, but the problem is that that can never secure hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of value on chain, because it's centralized and tamperable. So Proof of SQL just opens up a whole new set of use cases that people will begin to realize that they can build within their protocols.
Mike: Moving forward into the era of the trustless web. So when we're on the subject of tamperability—not exactly what you're talking about, but we know that data security breaches are a constant threat in today's world. What is Space and Time going to do to safeguard user data?
Scott: We have a bunch of layers of security built into Space and Time, and that's not just security from hackers and people attempting to breach a Space and Time cluster, but it's also ways for users to own their data and own their privacy and self-identify only when they want to, share data about themselves only when they want to, give protocols deeper access to information about themselves only when they want to. I think the last decade really shook the Internet's constituents a bit around data privacy when everyone realized what major social media companies were doing with their data and really just major enterprises in general and we need to return that privacy back to the internet's constituents. Space and Time has in-database encryption, so we encrypt data and transit and at rest. We have kind of a platform that allows users of protocols, the end user, the wallet holder, to opt into sharing data. And we're partnering with a number of other startups in this space that are working on data privacy. And then of course we have Proof of SQL, a novel ZK proof that to your point, Mike, enables the trustless web, enables trustless connectivity from smart contracts to our data warehouse so that if we're going to put data on chain, we can do so in a way that's trustless, decentralized, tamperproof, and most importantly verifiable on chain.
Mike: Absolutely. So, speaking of on-chain versus off-chain, could you explain how Space and Time joins on-chain and off-chain data and also how does it do so while still enabling such fast queries?
Scott: Yeah, that's the easy part. I mean we're just automatically capturing real time, always up to date, always accurate information from major chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance, Sui, et cetera. We capture that data, ingest it into Space and Time, load that data into Space and Time, and we do so in a tamperproof way. Then our builders, our devs, our protocol users, customers, and partners building on Space and Time, can load in their own data with familiar data warehousing tools using familiar interfaces that our popular in the database space. Like, they can load in Kafka Streams. There's REST APIs to load data in. There's JDBC connections to do SQL inserts. Just familiar normal, comfortable ways to load off-chain data into Space and Time. And for those protocols that want to actually load in tamperproof off-chain data, we sort of have an oracle network available for them to load in data through an oracle network.
In the same way that you traditionally use oracle networks to grab data feeds and connect them to your smart contract, you could use oracle networks to load in off-chain data in a tamperproof way into Space and Time. Keep in mind, once again, we're already collecting the on-chain data automatically, kind of as a service to our developers. Space and Time grabs the on-chain data in a tamperproof way, developers loading their own off-chain data optionally in a tamperproof way and then smart contract just kick off queries that join that those data sets together on join keys like wallet address, like transaction ID block, user ID, you name it.
Mike: Scott, you recently gave a talk at LA Blockchain Summit—and I encourage everybody to check it out; it's on the Space and Time YouTube channel—and your speech was all about extending smart contract capabilities and empowering smart contracts. Why is that so important for the world today?
Scott: Yeah, that was a really fun talk and if you guys want to learn more about the history of smart contracts and where we are today and where I anticipate we may be going over the next few years, go check out on YouTube the LA Blockchain presentation that we did.
I think the point of that discussion was just saying, look, today smart contracts kind of feel like a 1980s COBOL mainframe, a big mainframe computer that back in the day had enough gas, enough juice, enough power to enable the business logic of a bank, simple transaction handling. There was no analytics, it was very decision-based. If this happens, do this. Think about a mainframe that powered a bank back in the day. It's got enough power to enable the business logic of banking operations, but it certainly does not have enough computing power and storage to power a mature social network, to power energy use cases and parametric insurance use cases, and really complex financial instruments that enable new DeFi protocols, or under-collateralized loan decisioning.
So if we want to empower new financial instruments that have those capabilities, something like a mature social network on the blockchain, then we of course need to advance what smart contracts on the EVM are capable of. And so Space and Time does that by giving smart contracts their own query engine, allowing smart contracts to access terabytes of data in a tamperproof way. You could build your social network on Space and Time, tightly integrated with your smart contract on-chain, right? You're paying your content creators on Polygon, for example, but you're managing the terabytes of data generated daily by your network in Space and Time. You're rolling that data up to a smart contract the same way that a side chain rolls up transactions to Ethereum. Space and Time can roll up complex data, aggregations, complex questions of data, to a smart contract.
Mike: Let's move on to another question for you, Spencer. We've gotten quite a few questions from community members about the website. Now, Spencer, amongst his zillion other duties within the company, also heads up web development. Will you tell us about the new website, Spencer?
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. I'm just really excited to finally roll it out. Scott and I have been working on this for quite some time now, so it's definitely super, just super grateful that the community has responded to it the way that it has. I mean, from the beginning, Scott and I have been hyper obsessive over UX and UI, and we really just want to bring the highest quality design and user experience to all of our products, beyond our website also, to eventually a dapp that we will release in 2023, and just anything we really get our hands on, we hyper obsess over from a design perspective. I really wanted to bring a community and user thread to the website and really just drive any user activity to the Discord, to interacting with our product one day. It was overall a really fun project to work on and I'm so excited to keep building on top of it. It's funny, I'm looking at the website as kind of a platform for our community members to further engage with us and learn more about our product. We just updated our docs as well. Huge shout out to Stephen Hilton, Catherine Hickox, and the whole development team, who have been working day and night on updating our docs. I'm super excited for everything to roll out, and yeah, it's been a blast.
Mike: Let's move on to partnerships. So back at SmartCon, we announced Space and Time's partnership with Microsoft. Scott, how will Space and Time integrate with Microsoft?
Scott: Microsoft Azure's doing some really interesting things leading the charge around confidential compute. People don't realize what Azure's doing around confidential compute. First of all, Azure has one of the largest partnerships with NVIDIA, and they're really pushing GPU-accelerated operations on Azure. They're also really excited about Web3 and they're looking at the Web3 space and they're starting to partner with more and more protocols and they're starting to onboard products and capabilities to the Azure stack for Web3 developers. Most importantly, Azure's actually leading the charge on trusted execution environments, enclaves, confidential compute. Think of the Intel SGX chips that enable an enclave where computation is executed with attestations that prove that this computation, which is encrypted on the chip, is being done accurately in a tamperproof way. This is not technology that's brand new. It's technology's been around for a number of years, but it's really been pushed forward really in the last year by Web3.
The need for trusted execution environments and Intel enclaves and other enclaves from Intel competitors has grown immensely in the last year, driven by Web3 devs, driven by cryptographic proofs, driven by tamperproof computation and verifiable computation. We always joke that like 2023 is the year of SNARKs and STARKs, but honestly, 2022 was already the year of SNARKs and STARKs. So much buzz around zkEVM, ZK rollups, StarkNet—STARKs and SNARKs as verifiable computation. What I'm talking about is Azure is leading the charge in offering services where developers can build inside of enclaves, inside of these encrypted chips, with more familiar tools, easier tools to use. We're really excited about that. So by partnering with Microsoft and Azure specifically, it's like, we're not saying that Space and Time is going to run on Azure completely. We're saying that a lot of the Space and Time services can run on Azure and we're going to make it really easy for developers that want to use Azure to spin up Space and Time, connect it to other Azure services, and run it in secure, private enclaves. And, of course, leveraging the incredible partnership with NVIDIA as well around GPU execution on Azure. We're really proud of that partnership. We're proud of how much Microsoft is investing and getting involved with Space and Time, and they've been a good partner. It's not about bringing centralized systems to Web3, it's actually about running decentralized systems on top of really hyper-scaled compute in the cloud.
Mike: You mentioned NVIDIA. We recently announced a partnership with NVIDIA. So for us, why NVIDIA and what sort of support will NVIDIA provide to Space and Time?
Scott: The partnership with NVIDIA is around GPU acceleration, pushing that forward. Earlier in this AMA, we talked about how Proof of SQL runs on GPUs. We need a big GPU cluster to generate these ZK proofs, to generate these zero knowledge proofs that our query execution was done in an accurate way. And so our goal is get deeper and deeper embedded in the NVIDIA community and be at the forefront of GPU execution. They're helping us around query acceleration, they're helping us implement methods to accelerate our queries, make our queries run faster with GPUs, and they're of course helping us with go-to-market.
Mike: And then we come to another of our huge partnerships, and that is Chainlink. What benefits does being part of the Chainlink BUILD program provide to Space and Time?
Scott: Hell yeah, now it gets fun. We love Chainlink. I know a lot of the community found us through that Chainlink connection as well. We've become really tight with the Chainlink team over the last couple of years. I think Chainlink is probably from a partnership perspective the most important partner on the Web3 side right now. Obviously you want to leverage a mature, powerful and kind of incumbent oracle network when connecting tamperproof query results to smart contracts. At the end of the day, if we want to send data to a smart contract, we have to solve the oracle problem. Rather than just fully solving it ourselves. Why not partner with the best-in-class, Chainlink, to solve that oracle problem? Regardless of how we generate ZK proofs with Proof of SQL, regardless of what data we're sending to a smart contract, whether that's on-chain, off-chain, or both, we need an oracle network between the data warehouse and the smart contract to actually write that data to the chain or execute a transaction that hands that data to a smart contract. So Chainlink is the bridge between smart contracts and the Space and Time database. Now, of course, the future will be somewhat composable in terms of the services that we use, but our integration with Chainlink is let's make it really easy for developers to kick off Chainlink jobs that grab data from Space and Time in a tamperproof, trustless and fully decentralized way.
Spencer: I'll quickly add on that too. I mean, just being able to work closely with the Chainlink team, they have been so inviting and just so helpful to this whole process of ours. And not to mention everyone from the Chainlink community kind of spilling over to our community. We cannot thank you guys enough for all the support that you guys have given us. Discord, Twitter, just kind of all-encompassing, a really good experience with the Chainlink community.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. It's been great. So let's move on to a subject that all of us love, which is specific use cases. Scott, what would you say are the sort of new use cases that the Space and Time platform will enable?
Scott: Sure, yeah. Let's talk about different sub-verticals in Web3. You've got gaming, DeFi, parametric insurance, social networks. You have new use cases around industry, enterprise use cases where you have large financial institutions building loyalty programs on-chain. You have large financial institutions minting securities on-chain, like bonds, carbon credits, equities, ETFs. You have this kind of proliferation of energy use cases. I'm seeing Shell Oil building on Solana. Didn't expect that. We're starting to see enterprises adopt this space and build new use cases to tokenize assets and reward users and loyalty. From a Web3 startup perspective, of course, gaming and DeFi is going to be our bread and butter, and I'm really excited about it. A whole new set of use cases that we're going to enable for DeFi and gaming.
Let's start with DeFi. On the DeFi side, under-collateralized or non-collateralized loans on-chain will require a lot of off-chain computation to make decisions on who should get those loans given that they're not over-collateralized and what yield and what borrowing rate. DeFi protocols that want do more advanced derivatives trading. Right now we're kind of saturated with perpetual options on-chain, but the future, I believe, is going to be European-settled options on-chain. And to enable that, we really need to connect smart contracts with Space and Time. Space and Time needs to provide contracts with information about how to price those derivatives. Pricing derivatives in a European-settled options exchange is extremely complex and requires a lot of compute and input data that requires an off-chain, decentralized data warehouse. On the DeFi side, one last use case is that the protocols themselves are getting more intelligent. They're building more complex financial instruments that are powered by data.
However, smart contracts are not getting more intelligent. The EVM has not evolved much. And so as smart contract capabilities with the EVM stay stagnant yet DeFi developers are pushing the boundaries of what's possible, Space and Time comes alongside of smart contracts and supplements them with additional compute, additional data processing capabilities, to give some extra juice, some gas, to these smart contracts. On the gaming side, we're really excited about a bunch of new use cases around staking, like fans can stake on an eSports team and fans win when that team wins. New use cases around rewarding top players on-chain for their in-game activity. Gaming servers load tamperproof data to Space and Time, and smart contracts on-chain for that game query Space and Time and ask it questions about who recently won and why they won and what their score was and what incentives and rewards they should get airdropped on-chain.
If I win a big eSports tournament, I want to get some tokens. Well, how does a smart contract know who won that eSports tournament and why? It's not as simple as just connecting a gaming server directly to a smart contract through an oracle network. There needs to be a trustless intermediary, Space and Time, that sits between the gaming servers and the smart contract, that preps this data to be handed to a smart contract where additional business logic can be carried out on-chain to give, for example, somebody an NFT for getting 30 goals in Rocket League. Finally, on the insurance side, everybody talks about parametric insurance coming to blockchain, but where is it? Do you guys know it? Have you seen it? Where's our parametric insurance use cases? Really cool companies like dClimate are building foundational infrastructure to enable that; however, I'm not seeing the actual insurance providers using the blockchain yet.
Why, though? Well, because they need more foundational infrastructure. These insurance use cases require a ton of real-world data, real-world data from telemetry from cars, driving records, real-world telemetry from the weather to enable parametric insurance around weather, climate, and farming agriculture. They need real-world data from financial markets to hedge equities and build insurance and derivatives to ensure equities and hedge positions. They need real-world data from outside of the blockchain around shipping and transportation and logistics to ensure the supply chain. All of these use cases we all believe are coming. We know blockchain is perfect for enabling these. Blockchain creates a tamperproof audit trail where once that data is on chain, it can never be mutated, it can never be tampered with or manipulated. It's an audit trail that could power these really forward-thinking insurance use cases. But to get those insurance use cases set up, we need to get off-chain data from the supply chain, from transportation, from energy, from equities markets, from weather stations.
We need to get all that on-chain Space and Time acts as an intermediary to prep all that data, aggregate it, and put it on-chain through smart contracts. I know I've really gone into depth here on the use cases, but this just really excites me. Finally, social media. We know it's coming. Cool protocols like Lens, Hyperconnect, and a number of others are building tools for Web3 social. But where is our Web3 social network? We've got Farcaster, which I'm really excited about, but ultimately that's one social network that really is not growing at an incredible rate that we expect social networks to. And so besides Farcaster, where are our Web3 social networks? If we believe that content creators could get paid on-chain for the content they create and own their content in a more robust way, let's go build that.
Well, the challenge is that social networks generate a ton of data. I'm not talking about sensitive private data that corporations are going to sell about users. I'm talking about just, for example, who what viewed what content. Just the data about who viewed what content can generate terabytes a day. You can't put that kind of data volume on-chain. What needs to live on-chain is the aggregated information at the end of the day that says, "Scott viewed this set of content this many times." Or "Hey, this content creator had their video watched a million times today. Pay them out $10,000 of crypto on-chain." Aggregated information, higher-level information that creates a smaller data set, that can go on chain to reward content creators for the content they create. Everything else can live in Space and Time in a trustless, tamperproof data warehouse.
Mike: Yeah, social media is such a great Web3 use case that Space and Time is going to make possible. I know you weren't talking about entrusting user data, but finally we'll have Web3 social media networks in which you don't have to entrust your data to the likes of a Facebook, for example.
Spencer: For sure. Funny enough, I think social will probably bring some of the most users to Web3, but I think it'll be the slowest to adopt. I think the users will come probably a lot later than, say, GameFi or DeFi.
Mike: Let's talk about how Space and Time will affect the overall market in terms of costs. So how would you say the solution developed by Space and Time will affect the cost of certain services for Web3 businesses?
Scott: It's about gas. The EVM is expensive to put data on-chain. We did a bunch of research on Ethereum versus Polygon gas costs when writing data to the chain. Polygon gets a little more affordable, but even with Polygon, things start to really add up when you write a query result on-chain. For example, think about this use case of Web3 gaming where every minute, you want to tell a smart contract which gamers recently won the game and pay them out on-chain. If you have a game that has a couple million players, every minute you're going to be passing into your smart contract hundreds of wallet addresses or probably actually thousands or tens of thousands of wallet addresses. Even on Polygon, a much more affordable chain, your gas costs are going to be thousands of dollars a day to write that data to the chain.
And on Ethereum that would be literally millions of dollars a day. It'd be untenable. So Space and Time aggregates that data, creates a data warehouse that can sync that data, store, that data, and what can go on-chain is only the important things that are needed to enable those payouts, those rewards. All the extra information, like what I did in the game, where I went, how I won, what points I earned, and why, all of that can live in Space and Time, because it doesn't need to be secured by the blockchain. It can be secured by Space and Time. What goes on-chain is all the data that actually enables the incentive, the reward, the payout. So, from a cost-saving standpoint, it'll actually scale the blockchain. In the same way that Layer 2s and sidechains scale Ethereum, Space and Time scales Ethereum in terms of data. What people don't realize is you can't build any of these use cases without really complex data sets. You can't build games without terabytes of data. You can't build financial markets without terabytes of data. And you certainly can't build social networks. Unfortunately, you can't put terabytes of data on the blockchain. What you can put is important metadata, aggregations, and useful information that enables business logic. Everything else can go in Space and Time for two or three orders of magnitude cheaper storage.
Mike: So, a last few questions here. Number one, and this is a question that of course Scott, I'm sure you get even on a personal basis constantly. What are the project's plans with respect to a profit model and a token release?
Scott: We're going to get a bunch a bunch of folks from this community be like, "When token, Scott?" I love it, but we gotta wait for the right timing, and the market's kind of fickle, the market's kind of rough right now. Also, we need to mature our platform a little bit. We're not really ready for tokenized incentives quite yet. Of course we're building towards that. For now, as we bring on node operators, as we bring on user-operated nodes to enable the network, we're going to reward them in USDC, ETH, and LINK, depending on the node operator and depending on the use case. But overall, customers and developers and partners paying for Space and Time with USDC, ETH, and LINK is our intention. They're paying for the queries they're running in a very affordable, low cost way. They're essentially paying for the gas of the queries they're executing, but this is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper than on-chain gas. So developers build on Space and Time. They pay us in stablecoin or ETH or LINK for the work that the cluster does for them, the work that Space and Time does to execute queries for developers. And then we reward node operators in tokens as well, with the intention that when the time's right, we would likely drop a Space and Time token.
Mike: I think we've got time for one more here. And we've been asked this by a lot of community members with a lot of concern, and we really appreciate the concern. Definitely. How has the bear market affected Space and Time, if at all?
Scott: We've been really fortunate. We had no exposure to FTX and even most of our partners and backers didn't have exposure to FTX. We really came out unscathed. It's a hard time for everyone right now. We feel the pain. A lot of folks in our community are hurting, and a lot of folks are frustrated and they're wondering, is blockchain really going to be the thing that drives the future forward? I'm still incredibly optimistic. Nothing has changed in terms of Space and Time's roadmap, Space and Time's capital allocation, our treasury, and our ability to get this done. If anything, I think the bear market helps us quite a bit. You know, it removes all the noise. There was so much noise last year of startup after startup after startup building something data-related in Web3, and all that noise is being removed. It creates an opportunity for Space and Time to put a clear message out to the market that we're going to lead the charge in enabling the next wave of smart contracts. And when that next wave comes, it'll probably be going to come with a bull run, and we're all going to be part of that.
Conclusion
Mike: Absolutely. Looking forward to it. So, I think that'll be it for the AMA today. I want to thank everybody who submitted questions. I want to thank all of you who showed up to listen. I'm really blown away; I think we peaked at about 600 community members in here. I want to thank you, Scott and Spencer, for coming and answering questions. And Scott, you want take it away with a bit of a conclusion just to close this out here?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. I just really appreciate you guys joining. This has been an absolute blast. I'm overwhelmed and appreciative of the support. This community's freaking awesome. Show up, show out, send me some memes, keep doing what you guys are doing. It's been a real pleasure working with you guys. Keep submitting questions, we'll keep doing AMAs, we'll keep the community updated on our progress. 2023 is going to be an epic year. Space and Time is launching. Space and Time is taking over and offering a new service for developers to build the next generation of smart contracts. Let's do it together, team.
Mike: Definitely!
Spencer: Thanks so much, everybody, It's been an absolute blast today.
Mike: So long, everybody. We'll see you in the next AMA.
Scott: Thanks, guys!
[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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