4/25/24 Discord AMA Summary
Summary of Discord audio AMA, April 25, 2024.
Space and Time participants:
Nate Holiday, CEO and Co-Founder
Catherine Daly, Head of Product Marketing
Mike Post, Community Manager
Thank you to all of the community members who attended! [Session begins] Mike Post: Welcome back, everybody, to another Space and Time AMA. I have the pleasure of being joined today by CEO and Co- Founder Nate Holiday and Head of Marketing Catherine Daly. I'm Mike, and I've had the pleasure of meeting, getting to know and interacting with a lot of you over the last, wow, almost more than a year and a half at this point. And I know I say this every time, but we're just all immensely grateful for our community, for all of you, regardless of how long you've been with us, and of course especially to those of you who have been with us from the beginning, those of you who have really put efforts into supporting us in what we're doing here. We just can't thank you enough. As always, I also want to single out our Community Helpers: S. Crypto, NFTerraX, Mystery Men, and Leon. Thank you for all the work you guys do to help make this community what it is. Thanks also to everybody who submitted questions. Looks like Nate is having some technical difficulties. Cat, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself for those in the audience who aren't familiar with you yet?
Catherine Daly: Hey, community, what's up? I'm Cat. I'm the Head of Marketing at Space and Time. I'm super excited to welcome all of you guys. We're really excited to have another AMA here in Q2. You guys have been so awesome throughout this year, and it's been so much fun getting to engage with you in so many different ways. We're excited to answer your questions. We really appreciate the questions that you submitted, and I'm looking forward to diving into it.
Mike: I'm going to start with some questions for Cat while we try to get Nate up and running. So let's talk about the roadmap a little bit. Cat, can you share anything about Space and Time's marketing strategy as the project works toward launching the network?
Cat: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking. Again, if you guys are just joining, we're super excited to have you here. We love seeing the engagement from the community. We love doing these AMAs. And I know this is something everyone's been looking forward to. So I'm super excited to kick it off and answer all of your amazing questions that you submitted. On the marketing strategy side, our complete focus this year, especially, is going to be on building community. I say this all the time on my personal Twitter and Discord interactions with you guys, but nothing is more important than our community. And I think you guys our Space and Time's biggest strength, the biggest strength of the project. So we're really excited to continue partnering with other projects, particularly in the AI space, to tap into their communities and invite them to share our mission. We're excited to introduce some new community programming, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the AMA. We're going to do more dashboard contests with our blockchain partners. And we're focused on scaling out our marketing team as well to make sure that this is really a chief focus for us throughout the year. So, exciting things on the community front! We really appreciate the support and partnership of all of you guys in that effort.
Mike: Speaking of marketing, Cat, we've been announcing some great partnerships lately: zkSync, Nimble, and Allora. Can you tell us a little bit about these?
Cat: Yeah, absolutely. So, like I said, we're focused on partnering with other communities in the AI space, particularly to sort of tap into what they're building and then how they can partner with Space and Time. Two of the ones we have announced recently are Allora and Nimble, which are two AI networks building in the crypto/AI space. And we've worked with ChainML for a really long time. They're a leader in that space. And it's going to be a big focus for us. I think AI/blockchain is really, really hot right now. And Space and Time is really uniquely positioned to serve as the data layer for both AI and blockchain. So we're working with several AI focused Web3 projects, more to announce soon, and we're excited about providing ZK-proven blockchain data, data warehouse services, and analytics tools to all of these projects building decentralized AI networks. It's a use case we're really excited about, so we're really excited about what these projects are building. We're excited to see the AI/blockchain space continue to expand and go mainstream. And we're excited to serve as the ZK-proven data layer for those projects as it does.
Mike: Awesome. And it looks like Nate has solved his technical difficulties. Nate, how about you introduce yourself to anybody in the audience who hasn't met you yet?
Nate Holiday: It's been a few months since I've done an AMA! I'm grateful to everyone for joining today. As Cat mentioned earlier on, community is everything to us. And as we continue to grow this protocol and the project over the next decade, etc, we're going to lean heavily into the community to make sure that we're providing a decentralized network, we're providing verifiable data to the world to power the applications of the future. I'm Nate, Co-Founder and CEO of Space and Time. We've been at this now for over three years in earnest, really four years from inception. So this is exciting for us as we roll out a lot of features that are new and exciting to the industry. But this is something that we've been at for a long time. As for me, here's a brief background history! I spent 10 years at Teradata. Teradata is the inventor of the data warehouse, which is large, parallel data scaling for most large enterprises, within the US but also all over the world. And I'm also a strategic advisor at Chainlink and at Bain and Company as well. I'm looking forward to spending the hour with you and talking about where we're moving, and where we're headed at Space and Time.
Mike: Speaking about where we're headed, what is Space and Time's current focus in Q2? And what's next on the roadmap for the rest of the year?
Nate: We're really bullish on what's ahead for the rest of the year. But let me just go over a couple of things that we're really excited that we've delivered, and that we're continuing to progress. If you haven't tried Space and Time Studio, we urge you to go out and try it. Space and Time studio is going to continue to progress to ensure that we have maturity and enterprise-grade capabilities within the studio. If you've tried a query editor and you've tried an application from a database solution previously, you're going to quickly realize that Space and Time Studio is a new and innovative way to interact with data. You don't have to write your own SQL anymore. You can put common natural language prompts in there to understand what's happening onchain. We pre-populate seven or eight of the largest chains from history to date. We also have near-realtime indexing of these major blockchains as well. We're talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, zkSync, Polygon, Aptos, Sui, Sei, you name it. So by signing into Space and Time Studio, you get all of this data at your fingertips as gift-with-purchase. There are no additional charges for using this data, which a lot of institutions pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for just to have that data. You know that you can start to search various types of tables. And we put them in relational tables so you can visualize the data as well. There are the capabilities to interact with the various types of APIs and Python scripts. And then, of course, we have our chat function. From a GPT perspective, we work with Microsoft and OpenAI around ChatGPT, so you have your chatbot interactions as well. So that's one area of a user experience that really is defining the market. You're starting to see more and more in the industry start to use the solutions that were invented at Space and Time are being rolled out to the market.
The second one is you're going to see continued progress around Proof of SQL. ZK today in the industry is unusable. And let me tell you why it's unusable. Number one is that if you don't have verifiable indexing into your database, then you can't really do ZK on top. You can't do zero knowledge proofs around queries if you can't even trust the data that's in your database today or in a data warehouse. Space and Time has verifiable indexing. So the data coming into Space and Time is verified across multiple blockchains, and across multiple RPC providers. Number two is that if you're going to do ZK, you need to be able to return a query and a proof within block time, basically within nine seconds. If you return a proof in 15 minutes, it becomes unusable, because again, if you can't trust the data on the underlying data set, and you also can't return a proof within block time, how does a smart contract actually use that? Proof of SQL can deliver up to a million-plus rows in under nine seconds. It can deliver 100,000 rows in under a second. Anything else on the market that we've seen, the fastest is maybe 100 rows in 10 minutes or 15 minutes. And so you're going to see continued improvement across the functions of SQL that are verifying the proofs and in the speed of Proof of SQL. And again, this is enterprise ready-to-use. We build Proof of SQL for the largest banks in the world that use us, our customers, but also protocols that want to build the fastest DeFi projects, the most robust gaming functions, and so on. So you're going to continue to see progress there. We expect testnet in July, and we expect a mainnet at the end of the year.
One of the functions that makes Proof of SQL so fast is Blitzar, which is an open-source GPU acceleration framework. There are a lot of different types of GPU acceleration frameworks on the market. Blitzar is built from the ground up, we just open sourced it in Apache Two. You can check it out on GitHub. A ton of contributors out there are working on Blitzar. We run Proof of SQL on Blitzar because we believe it's the best GPU acceleration framework in the market. And we invite others to build their ZK technology on top of and their proofs on top of Blitzar as well, because it's open source in the market. I already mentioned that we're going to testnet in the summer. And we're going to mainnet before the end of the year. And then we're going to continue to decentralize the overall project on a continuous spectrum for years to come. And that's really exciting for us, because everything that you've seen that's being built is going to start to be delivered in a mainnet function before the end of the year.
Mike: Awesome. That's really exciting news! So you talked a bit about Space and Time studio early on. For anybody who's not familiar with the app, you can check it out at http://app.spaceandtime.ai. And you mentioned the blockchain indexing. How does the team prioritize and select which chains to index next? For example, do community requests influence the decision-making process? And which chains do we have coming on the horizon?
Nate: It's basically three inputs, prioritized in this order: community-driven input, developer engagement, and then customer requests. I'll give you an example. We're working on Arbitrum right now. It was a huge request from the community and a large request from developers. So Arbitrum got put to the top of the list. And we'll continue to prioritize chains based on community input and developer engagement. Mike: Let's move on to some product and ecosystem questions. We received a question about cloud integration. What can you tell us about that?
Nate: We have, for example, some customers that require a cloud deployment within their ecosystem based on the various types of enterprise security needs. So we have one-click deployment in Azure for the Microsoft ecosystem. We have one-click deployment in Google as well. It's pretty exciting. We're embedding blockchain data that I talked about previously into these various cloud instances as well. So we're building it directly into, for example, Azure for their customers for data sharing across their ecosystem. We expect that the indexing becomes a foundation of the blockchain indexing for that cloud service across all of their stack. Instead of them having to sign into Space and Time and use the indexing services, it becomes available to anyone in the data sharing environment within Azure. So we're really excited about that.
We're also thrilled to work with major cloud players to verify queries in enterprise databases with Proof of SQL. We announced last year that we're building out Proof of SQL integrated directly into BigQuery. We're working on Proof of SQL integration directly with Microsoft Fabric. I think the important thing to realize here is that Proof of SQL is a protocol. And if in the future, every database query has to be verified, there's only two ways that that happens. Number one is everyone migrates their data to Space and Time. Now, what's interesting about migrations is that they take a long time, right? 20% of the workload in the world today runs on a cloud. Even though cloud is consuming the world, 80% of our workload is actually not in the cloud today. And the cloud has been around for 20 years. Proof of SQL is different, because we can actually take Proof of SQL and embed it directly into a database. We're doing a project right now with an enterprise customer where we're actually embedding Proof of SQL into Amazon Redshift. So, they don't actually have to migrate all of their data. But we still consume the transactions. And we still have the verify transactions that generate revenue onchain or with Space and Time directly in a database, even though we're still running Proof of SQL in that database.
So that is a huge advantage to us. Because we don't have to go migrate all the world's data over a period of decades to Space and Time, but we instead can actually move the protocol of Proof of SQL directly into any database to verify those queries. I've already talked about the Big Query integration with Google, and it's all over the web if you want to read about it. And then node operation as a service in the future. As we move to testnet and mainnet, there are a lot of cloud providers that enable node operation as a service as well. We're going to have node operators as the overall protocol decentralizes, and there's going to be ability and capabilities to work with cloud providers as well, if you so choose to be a node operator in the cloud.
Mike: Everything we're doing at Space and Time, is also applicable to enterprise Web2 use cases as well as Web3 users. What are some of the enterprise use cases we're seeing built on Space and Time?
Nate: We're seeing a lot of various types of enterprise use cases. We're seeing large organizations that are using it for blockchain forensic and analytics. We're seeing FinTech companies using it around AI integration with the database stack, we're seeing Proof of SQL integrated directly into their gaming functions, if you're if you're if you're a large enterprise game company out there. We're seeing very large traditional banks like US Bank that's working with us to build various types of, of, of Web3 protocols and, and transaction layers. And so really across the spectrum of enterprise use cases, we're seeing gaming grow, we're seeing FinTech grow and DeFi grow. We're seeing forensic and analytics grow. And we're seeing a lot of institutions that are starting to build better trade applications. And they're also starting to build better Web3 protocols directly on top of Space and Time. So it's really exciting for us.
Mike: Absolutely. Here's a question for Cat: what are some untapped opportunities you see for Space and Time in the Web3 space?
Cat: Yeah, I alluded to this earlier in the AMA, but I think Space and Time has an incredible product market fit in the AI blockchain space, and we are tapping into it today. But I think we're still so early. I don't think people have quite yet understood how valuable blockchain technology is going to be in verifying the integrity of AIs' training and use, but that's coming. That's definitely going to come, so when it does, we'll be ready, we'll already be established as the data layer for all of the many use cases that stem from that, with all the notable players in the space building on or with Space and Time. That's the future we envision. And it's a super exciting outlook for the project. And of course, lots of opportunity in DeFi which we've tapped into, lots of opportunity in Web3 gaming which we've tapped into, and we're going to continue building in those spaces, but the one I'm most excited about is definitely the AI/blockchain space.
Nate: You're starting to see some weird messaging from the industry, even legitimate institutional messaging from large organizations around what's AI and crypto, really? What's AI and blockchain? What's at the intersection of it? I even saw yesterday a very prevalent investor in Web3 say that AI and blockchain is nonsense. We're really so early at the intersection of AI and blockchain. It's a place where we're extremely bullish. Let me give you two examples of why. Today, you have all of these large language models that are feeding data into this. We're doing a proof of concept right now, a use case with Microsoft and Ernst and Young and others, that is building the inference in the proof of source that the data feeding an LLM for an enterprise can't be spoofed. And that it can control in a sense data drift across the large language model, and so AI hallucination will be kind of less impactful. How do you audit, for example, what's happening within an enterprise if you're required to do audits across an LLM if data sources can be spoofed? Without Space and Time, I'm not sure you can. Without the ability to prove data isn't being manipulated or spoofed from source, it's going to be a real challenge. The second example is AI agents. AI agents are prevalent, they're going to grow. Just like smart contracts can't trust a central source of data, AI agents also can't. Could you imagine, for example, giving an AI agent access to your bank account or your credit cards to charge at will various types of tasks that it's working on without having a verification process? The answer is no. Right? Well, in the coming years, AI agents are going to be transacting all across the world. And it's either going to be in a tamperproof way that's visible to you as a consumer, and as a community at large, or it's going to be in a black box behind the scenes. I don't know anybody in their right mind that says, hey, let's let this AI have full access to the banking capabilities and just run amok. You're going to want that in a verified, controllable process. And just like smart contracts, can't trust a centralized database that can be manipulated, AI agents also are not going to be trusted if they're using a centralized database that can be manipulated. And so we're extremely bullish on both fronts. And the intersection is verified data within transactions, but also across the ecosystem as well. So, those are two areas where we're extremely bullish.
Mike: You both mentioned node operations. That's something a lot of community members have been interested in becoming involved in. Cat, are there any details about when onboarding will begin? And what would the technical requirements be?
Cat: We are so excited to onboard community node operators. I think that's probably the thing I'm most excited about for this year: putting Space and Time directly in the hands of the community. As Nate mentioned earlier, our rough roadmap right now is to enter testnet sometime mid summer, mainnet in the months following with decentralization being a continuous focus throughout. So you can expect more details around the requirements in the next couple of months. There are some technical requirements listed in version one of our whitepaper. So if you haven't read that, definitely check it out. But one thing I will say is we're really focused on making it super easy for community members to participate in the Space and Time network with minimal hardware. So there'll be different types of nodes that you can run in Space and Time. And one of those types, we're working on getting it so lightweight that you could even just simply run it on your MacBook. So that's going to make the barrier for entry really, really low, so we can allow as many community members to participate as want to, and really drive the decentralization of Space and Time. So we're really excited about that. And you can expect more details around the requirements of that in the next few months.
Mike: I'm looking forward to that too! Nate, I'm going to bring you on to a question here that we get a lot: when token?
Nate: We believe that a powerful driver to decentralizing the network is security, and security for Space and Time through a native digital asset is going to be super important in the future. We mentioned that testnet is coming this summer and mainnet a few months after that. Decentralization will be part of that and node operations will be part of that moving forward. And it's not just node operations for the large node operators that can run very large servers in a data center. It's going to be the capability to participate with your laptop. And so we're pretty excited. Now, a digital asset, a token that would be native to Space and Time, makes a lot of sense, because you need to secure the network, and you need to ensure that the network runs decentralized all over the world. So we're excited about this year, I think our roadmap is really, really clear that we have a testnet coming in mid summer, and then a few months after we're going to have a mainnet. And we need to make sure that people are incentivized to participate in the network. I don't know an exact date, and I can't promise an exact date. But we're extremely excited about this year and the roadmap that I just laid out.
Mike: Another question we received asked about what the team looks like right now, in terms of how many engineers Space and Time is employing and if there are plans to continue growing the team as Space and Time does move toward mainnet.
Nate: We have 30 plus engineers, and in my perspective, we have the best marketing team. It's small, but it's mighty. We're growing the marketing team. So if you have an interest in Space and Time, we have few openings as well across marketing and business development. We're going to continue to grow our engineering team and our marketing team. As we continue to build out community, you're going to see a huge focus on just community development as we work toward mainnet. And so it's a pretty exciting year for us to continue to grow the team.
Cat: I'll jump in really quickly. We have these open roles posted on our website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And I would love nothing more than for community members that have been engaging with Space and Time since the beginning to apply for those roles! No one is going to be better at a marketing job than people who are really, really passionate about the Space and Time community. And that is all of the people here. So go check it out. If it aligns with your skill, send an application and DM me if you apply, so I can flag it. We would love to see some of that from the community.
Mike: That would be fantastic. For sure. I'd love to see that. Let's move on to some actual community-related questions. Cat, when is the V5 NFT going to be minted? And how will they be distributed?
Cat: Great question. I am super excited to announce that our V5 NFTs are going live today. This is the final edition in our Community collection. And I mean, what a journey it's been. We've really loved the enthusiasm that you all have shown towards the NFTs. We've loved the art and the dashboards that you've built to earn them. And we're so excited to distribute this final version to the community as we approach these new exciting milestones for the project and the network. So we're going to be raffling out five of them to those of you attending this AMA, and we look forward to sharing more soon about different ways that you can earn your own V5. Nate: Just to echo Cat's words, when we started the NFTs back in September of 2022, we had no idea how excited everyone would be about these. We're super excited that V5 is launching today. I want to note again that it's all in appreciation to the community for all that they've done and for all they continue to do. They cost no money. There's no gas cost to acquire them. We're just so grateful for everyone and for everything they continue to do.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Cat, we've also been asked if large-scale community events, like the previous Do It Yourself contests that we've held, will be showing up in the future.
Cat: Yeah, absolutely. We love the DIY events, we love the dashboard contests, we love getting to reward you not only for being part of this Space and Time community, but for really leaning into it and showing off your skills and creativity. I have a lot of friends in the Web3 space that are also running marketing or communities for other projects. And the number one thing I hear when I talk to them is like, Man, you guys have the most engaged community of all time! It's one thing to have a ton of Twitter followers and a ton of discord members, and anyone can buy Twitter followers, but to have a community that's actually leaning in and actually engaging, and not only spreading the word about Space and Time, but using Space and Time and really leaning into the project, and the values and the community that we've built here is incredible! And it's really what Web3 is all about. So I can't tell you how grateful we are for your support and your engagement through these contests and through all the other activities.
I think the dashboard contests in particular are so fun. They're my favorite. Because if you guys remember, if you were around when we first released the Space and Time studio, some of you were like, This is awesome, but I don't know any SQL, I don't know how to write queries, so how am I supposed to use this and build dashboards? And over the months through Houston and AI dashboarding tools, you guys have become data analysts! I'm in the same boat. I'd never written a SQL query in my life. But I write the natural language queries all the time, I build my own dashboards all the time. And we have just been so blown away by what you've been creating on the Space and Time studio, the dashboards you've created for zkSync, Abyss World, and other other partners as well. And there's more coming soon! We're working with our blockchain partners to put out more dashboard contests to reward you in more ways for creating with the blockchain data that Space and Time provides. So we're excited to share more about that soon, and we can't wait to see what you make.
Mike: I'll echo what Cat said: I've just been amazed by the creativity our community has shown in these recent dashboard contests, and in all the NFT contests that have come before as well. You all put in so much effort into what you do for the content you produce for Space and Time, and we couldn't be more grateful. Cat, in terms of community involvement, we've been running the community point system for a while now. How do you see the current point system evolving? Will we see more onchain activities in the future as part of Galxe or any other platform?
Cat: Great question. I want to first shout out how awesome it's been to see all of your engagement through the points system. When we launched it, I really had no idea how much it would be a driver of community in Space and Time. And we love seeing everything that you guys create! The translations that you do on Twitter, the blogs that you write, the guides that you write, the dashboards that you build, it's so awesome. And it's really invaluable for growing our community, for spreading the message of Space and Time, and we're so grateful for your engagement there. We are working on some really exciting new ways to reward points for interacting with the Space and Time network as it goes live throughout the year. I mentioned that they're going to be these really lightweight nodes that community members can run easily with minimal hardware. And I can't share too many details just yet, but we've got some cool stuff cooking with points around that. And then we're also working on creating a community points table/tracker within Space and Time itself so that we can incorporate different platforms such as Galxe, for example, which I know a lot of you guys have said you wanted to see added, and have a single source of truth secure inan immutable table in Space and Time. So you can earn points on Zealy, you can earn points onchain through Galxe or other platforms. And it's all tracked in Space and Time where no one can mess with it. So we see that as the most beneficial way for the community, because then you can earn points in so many different ways, and have it tracked all in one place in a really comprehensive and easily visible way. But we also see it as the most secure and trustless way to do it, because then you're not having to trust the Zealy platform or the Galxe platform. It's all in Space and Time in a secured, transparent, immutable table. And then lastly, of course, we're excited to introduce some new rewards for points ahead of testnet. So stay tuned for that.
Mike: Speaking of community involvement, do we have plans to introduce an advocate program in the near future?
Cat: Yes, we do! We are super excited to open up applications for the first cohort of Space and Time Community Advocates. This will be partially gated by points to ensure that community members who have really engaged with the project are applying. We encourage everyone to apply. Because community advocates are going to serve as the voice of the community, like the bridge between the rest of Web3 and Space and Time. So we're really, really excited to launch this program, we're excited to share more details in the coming days and weeks. We're going to open up that application and explain more about what the program's going to look like over the next couple of weeks. We worked really closely with the Chainlink team to model the program after what they're doing with their community advocates. And we think it'll be a huge step forward in building and scaling our community, which, as we've said, is really a chief goal for us this year. We love you guys. We love your engagement. Some of you guys are like really, really rock stars in engaging with Space and Time. I mean, all of you are rock stars. But some of you really go above and beyond. And I think this is going to be an awesome way to let those real rock stars shine, and give you the tools that you need to evangelize the Space and Time community and bring others in on this really cool thing that we're building. Mike: Let's circle back to the NFTs. Are there any plans to add utility to them? It's a question we get a lot.
Cat: Yeah, that's a great question. The answer to that is no. It's very, very important to note the community NFTs do not and will not have utility in the Space and Time network. Like the community points, they're simply a way to reward and measure the engagement of individual community members. So while they do have value in the secondary market, Space and Time doesn't receive royalties on them or have any control over the pricing on OpenSea. We give them away for free to our community. That said, we have seen things like our partner project Abyssworld dropping some Abyssworld token to NFT holders. So you never know what holding a Space and Time community NFT will result in. But utility is not one of those things. We just want to be super clear about that. And speaking of NFTs I just got word from our engineering team that the V5s are officially minted. So you can go check out nft.spaceandtime.io and check out the new art of the V5s. We're super excited to give away a few of them to attendees of the AMA.
Nate: I just want to jump in as well and just say to the community again, thank you for all that you do. In a decentralized network like Space and Time, community is the driver around the education, the advocacy. I'm really excited that the advocate program is kicking off. As Cat said, get involved in the community, continue to do what you're doing. It's gated a bit by points because we want to make sure that as you advocate for Space and Time that you've been involved in the community and that you've been supporting it for a while and are educated around what we're building. We're super excited about the V5s launching. It's been a fun project that we've done and this is the final version within the Community NFT collection. I was really excited to see Abyssworld drop their AWT tokens directly for all Space and Time NFT holders on the Polygon network. Really excited to see how it evolves. And as you give these things to the community, and as the community continues to, to drive the market, you're going to continue to see more and more things like this occur because it's community driven. It's not being driven from a central organization that has control over it. We're really excited to see where this goes as well. So just to wrap up on the community section, as Cat mentioned, just thank you for all that you've done and all you continue to do. Mike: Absolutely. Community is everything. We love our community. And finally, one last question on the community side of things: Cat, could you tell us a little bit about what kind of benefits we envision for the points system?
Cat: Yes, exciting stuff here. For sure. We're working towards some options for Space and Time swag for points holders, We're planning to start rolling that out very soon. I know you guys want the shirts, the hats. So we're really stoked about that. We also have some ideas around exclusive programming for points holders, certain things you can only access if you're at a certain level. So the advocate program is one of those things, we're going to make it as inclusive as possible. But as Nate mentioned, we do want to make sure that the people who are out there advocating for Space and Time are people who have actually been engaging with the project. So that's one of the benefits of points that you'll see soon. And then of course, the main purpose of the points is to track your overall engagement with the community so that we can include you in the future success of Space and Time throughout this year and as we launch and decentralize our network and beyond. So, exciting stuff coming.
Nate: A large portion of the network goes to, ultimately, supporting and incentivizing and advancing and growing the community. So as Cat mentioned, as this continues to grow, as we go through testnet and mainnet, there are a lot of capabilities to ensure that the community continues to thrive, continues to build, and has every educational and incentive resource out there to grow. And, and so we're going to continue to drive that through the network. So we're really excited about it.
Mike: For sure. We're all super excited to see this community go to the next level as the project keeps moving forward. Nate, you've been building Space and Time for a long time. What are some of the key lessons you've learned as a founder throughout your journey of building and scaling the project?
Nate: Look, building a decentralized data network is really, really hard. This isn't an API on top of some database that already existed and we white label it, and we pretend we built a data network. Space and Time is built from the ground up. Proof of SQL is novel cryptography, which we patented many years ago. We just got a patent around proof of vector search, novel cryptography that the world has never seen that we're going to be releasing. We built the database from the ground up on a transaction and analytic engine in a single cluster. This is not a white labeling of a Snowflake or a Databricks or anyone else that you see in the industry. They continue just to build the database and API framework, but just white label the database underneath. No, ours is built in the Apache community from the ground up. One lesson is that it's hard, and no matter what you do, it's going to be hard. And don't do it unless you love the team you work with and you love your co-founders. Scott and I have been great friends for many, many years. We worked together for 10 years. And if you're going to go out and build a company, you have to trust those that you work with. Cat is a phenomenal marketer. She's even a better person. Mike is fabulous. He's managing our overall discord and our community. You need people that you can trust as a founder if you're building out a new project. I'm fortunate to have an amazing team of people that are really good at what they do, but even better people that I can trust and I don't have to ever worry about intentions. So that would be one. Combining with that is that ideas are plentiful. I've met lots of people with lots of ideas. And in my life, execution is really, really hard. We had worked with Microsoft in 2022, before people even knew what ChatGPT was. And the idea was natural language query processing with AI. Nowadays, you see it all over the industry. But how do you do that in a way that's intuitive to a user who doesn't even know what SQL is or is scared of SQL or has never written SQL? And so how do you visualize the tables? How do you have real time feedback? What the product team and Scott and the engineering team did to bring that to life is the real hard work. It wasn't the idea of let's generate SQL using AI. It's the work of making that intuitive. It feels like magic, even though there's years and years of hard work around it. And then I think the third one that I would mention is especially in Web3, we don't really get caught up in the bull/bear. And we see a lot of projects that do. And you can burn a lot of money, and you can waste a lot of resources, trying to keep up with the narrative. Because at the end of the day, what we're building is a multi-year journey. And it's not like within two months, you can go build this new magic thing just because the narrative shifted in Web3 and crypto on the X platform or whatever platform you follow. So if you're going to do it, be passionate about it, trust the people that you're doing it with, expect it to be a multi year journey that's hard, and don't chase narratives. Have conviction in what you're building, and stick to it.
Mike: Let's move on to our final question of the day. Cat and Nate, what are your favorite projects currently building in AI/crypto that are not Space and Time?
Cat: Great question! We just announced partnerships with Allora and Nimble. I'm super excited about those two projects, Allora particularly. A lot of their team has worked with Chainlink and others in the past, so they're really seasoned vets in the Web3 space. And they have a really cool vision around how blockchain technology and decentralized technology can be used for AI. And we're really excited to have them building on Space and Time. I think io.net is another cool one. I really love their community. So those are the ones I'd say Nate: I'm about Space and Time first! At the intersection of AI and crypto or blockchain is Space and Time. It's going to continue to grow. But I realize that's not the question. When Mike told me this question was coming, I said, Well, of course, it's Space and Time. But if you look at what we're building, you can look at the partners that we build with. Microsoft, Chainlink, zkSync, and others are partners that we dig deep and we build integrated solutions with. So when we announce these partnerships, we're serious about these partnerships. And Cat already mentioned a couple as well. I think ChainML is an AI project that sits at the intersection of AI and crypto, which I'm really excited about. If you haven't haven't learned about ChainML, go out and go out and research it. Their GitHub continues to grow at a very fast rate. And it's all organic right now. So it's really exciting to see ChainML continue to grow. We've embedded chain ml as a partner into our chat bot, Houston. So that's one that I'm extremely excited about. I've known Ron Bodkin, ChainML's CEO, for many, many years. And when it comes to AI, I'm not sure that there is more of an expert in the field of artificial intelligence in crypto than Ron. He's truly an expert at what he's building and the company's building. The other one is Render. I think community and digital assets and art is such an important part of the future of not just crypto but in any business. And so Render is something that's very exciting as well for me and it's something that I follow closely. Obviously I just want to be very clear that I'm not advocating any type of an investment in any type of protocol. But these are projects that I'm pretty excited about in terms of what they're building from a technology standpoint.
Conclusion
Mike: We're just about at the end of the time we have. Any closing words?
Cat: I just want to say that we've made some exciting announcements around community and the roadmap for our network this year and community is going to be more important than ever, I can't stress that enough. You guys are the agents of the growth of Space and Time's community. And we're excited to bring on the advocates, we're excited to introduce new rewards with NFTs and points and things like that. And we're excited to introduce even more as we decentralized our network. So thank you, again, for your continued engagement. We're super excited about what we have going this year. And, of course, Mike, myself, and Nate are always available for questions that you have. We love engaging with you on Discord on Twitter. So keep at it! This is our year, this is the year of Space and Time.
Nate: We're grateful for everything that the community continues to do. And like Cat said, this is an exciting year! This is a year in which we're leaning even more heavily into building the community. But we're also leaning heavily into the testnet and mainnet of Space and Time and all the things that that entails. It's an exciting culmination of the hard work over the last many years. I do realize that the community members have been here for years, and we have a point system now, and we have NFTs that have come out, and everyone's waiting for a decentralized network that that's being that's being powered by node operators and the incentives and digital assets are there to support it. I'll just say what I said earlier: it's really, really hard to build what we've built, and it's taken many years. That becomes a moat. It becomes very difficult for others to compete with us in the market, because they just haven't built a Web3-native data network from the ground up. And they're not going to build it, either. It takes too long, and it's very hard. So in a world where everything is flashy, and you want everything today, and you want something that you've been waiting for for a couple years right now, I would just say that as we look back on this in the years to come, we want we want everyone to win as Space and Time continues to win in the market. I remember when Facebook first launched their IPO. And I remember thinking, my goodness, all the value was derived from Facebook after its IPO, and it's a multi billion dollar project, and it's not going to go up anymore. And how wrong was I, because I didn't truly grasp the power of a social network and a community and what that meant. So if you're just joining today, you're not late. If you've been here a couple years, this is a year that's going to be very exciting for you, and your efforts are going to be recognized. And I would just say that this is still just the start. It truly is a world that we see where every query in every database should be verified and not manipulated. And it should be common sense to those that want to get in on a verified network. So if you're a large CTO running a huge enterprise, or if you're someone that wants to build a new DeFi application, running a verified process in-database that can't be manipulated is common sense. And common sense, to me, always wins at the end of the day. And so it's something we're extremely bullish on.
So again, thank you for all that you've done. This year is going to be an exciting year, and we want to grow this community as much as we can. So we look forward to your feedback on ways that we can do it. We look forward to those that want to join the advocate program. We look forward to interacting with you at various types of conferences or online interactions like this and Twitter spaces and others moving forward as well. I would just say we take your feedback very seriously. We take your comments very seriously, and we look as much as possible to serve as a servant leadership mindset to serve the community, ultimately. This year, we are turning over the protocol to the decentralized network, to the community. So it's going to be exciting to participate in the community as an individual with you as well. And I look forward to it.
Mike: Absolutely. Like Nate said, if you have any feedback, any ideas, or just want to get in touch and chat, really anything, please reach out to me. I always love hearing from you. It's been wonderful getting to know so many of you whom I've gotten to get to speak with over the course of the last year and a half, and your feedback on what you'd like to see and what you think we could be doing better is very, very appreciated. So please never be hesitant to get in touch with me! That'll be it for the AMA today. Thank you, Cat. Thank you, Nate. And once again, thank you all so much for being part of the community. Thank you for being here today. And I look forward to chatting with you soon.
[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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