6/13/23 Discord AMA Summary

Summary of Discord audio AMA, June 13th, 2023.

Space and Time participants:

• Stephen Hilton, Head of Solutions

• Mike Post, Community Manager

Thank you to all of the community members who attended!

[Session begins]

Introduction [Note: Intro is paraphrased due to a disruption in the recording.] Mike: Welcome, all of our community members worldwide, to another AMA! We're so glad to have you here. Thank you to all of you for attending and to those of you who submitted questions, be that here on Discord or via Twitter. As always, I'd like to start out by thanking our Community Helpers - NFTerraX, Mystery Men, Leon, and S. Crypto - for everything you do to make this community what it is. I'd like to thank those of you who go above and beyond to contribute. Finally, I'd like to thank everyone for being a part of this great community that we've all built together. Many of you have been here with us for the long haul at this point. We're so grateful to have had your support and encouragement along this journey. It really means a great deal to us. Thank you!

Without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Stephen Hilton, Space and Time's Head of Solutions. Stephen: Happy to be here!

AMA Mike: We've gotten a few questions about Space and Time NFTs and the Chainlink Hackathon that I'm going to answer before Stephen gets started. First off, I'd like to say once again that we absolutely loved the content you all submitted in the last two NFT contests - especially in the recent DIY contest. The quality of the submissions was really incredible, and we're hoping to see more of it in future contests. The first question: Will there be more NFT contests in the future? Certainly! We’ve still got most of the V4s and the entire V5 edition of the Community NFT collection to work with. We conceived the Community series as a token of appreciation to the community, and we’ll continue to provide opportunities for community members to earn them as participation-based prizes. Will the Community NFTs have any utility? The SxT Community NFT series is intended solely as a token of appreciation to the community. They have no utility, and we gain no royalties from them. We do not plan to add any utility to the Community NFTs. Can you tell us about some of the submissions Space and Time received from the Chainlink Hackathon? The hackathon ended just a few days ago - we'll have some cool material to share with you about it on social media soon! And now, I'll hand it off to Stephen for the remainder of the AMA! Mike: Stephen, can you fill us in on where Space and Time stands right now? What’s happened since our last AMA? [Note: The first segment of the answer to this question, which was lost in the problematic section of the recording, was an explanation from Stephen about Infinite Precision; you can read the product announcement about Infinite Precision here: https://www.spaceandtime.io/blog/space-and-time-infinite-precision.] Stephen: ... Proof of SQL was always kind of like the next phase, once we got the database and a lot of the interoperability with the web part of the chain indexing and pushing out on chain, then of course, when you push out on chain, you need that Proof of SQL. We've had Proof of SQL working for quite a while; we've just been tuning it, and making sure that it's as fast as possible. We've got some really fantastic numbers there, I think we're doing like, honestly a million rows with 10 columns, in like two seconds, to be able to validate with Proof of SQL. So that's fantastic. And we've been really diving into AI. We had a booth at Consensus this year that we shared with another company called Shrapnel; they're a AAA video game. They had eight servers set up, so anyone could show up, and you could play their video game head-to-head against the other players. All of the telemetry coming off of those game servers is going up into Space and Time, and then coming down on our dashboards. And then one of the other demos we had was to be able to, basically, instead of writing SQL against this data, you could just use natural language. Instead of writing SQL, you could just say, for example, "Show me 100 Ethereum wallets with a balance greater than 100." We've trained OpenAI on our model so that we could just send that prompt to OpenAI along with the context of what's going on, and it will write the query because it understands our data model and then basically send the query back. The query actually gets executed on Space and Time, so none of the data gets transferred to open AI, just the prompt. Ultimately, it's a way that you can lower the bar - it expands the number of people who can get in and really start asking questions of blockchain data from people who know how to write SQL from data analysts to anybody who understands the core principles. So it expands the realm of who can actually interact with data. And honestly, even someone who knows SQL very well would probably like to use it, because it's a shortcut. You can just basically say, "I have this query, I kind of know what I want." You give it the prompt, and it writes it for you. So yeah, lots going on. That was probably a lot to shove into that one question there, Mike. But, you know, as always, we've got a big team and we're running hard into the future. So there's always a lot to talk about.

Mike: Definitely. Yeah, it's really exciting stuff. So one of the big things, of course, probably the biggest thing that's happened since our last AMA is that Space and Time entered beta at Consensus back in April. How has the transition to beta been progressing?

Stephen: Good, good. It's funny, I mentioned Consensus. And like you said, we went into beta there. We opened it up, and you could just go click on the button on our homepage and sign up for beta there. We had so many signups that by the second day, it had broken our signup mechanism that we had set up, because there was so much volume. Fortunately, we were able to collect all the emails that we didn't get into the primary system, and we were able to go get those out, and we were able to very quickly fix it. But that kind of gives you a sense of what we were expecting versus what we got, which is a fantastic problem to have. We're working to get everybody in; we had to kind of bundle people into cohorts and get them in as we get them in because we want to make sure everyone has a good experience as they enter the system. But yeah, otherwise, we're still rolling out a lot of things. The biggest thing, really, from going from controlled release to beta is that we added a lot of core capabilities during controlled release and now we've kind of finished that phase, so now it's about maturing them, and then adding more peripheral functions and features. We couldn't be happier with the amount of positive feedback we've gotten and the amount of interest we've gotten.

Mike: Fantastic. It's definitely been an exciting step. I'm looking forward to seeing it ramp up. Could you tell us about Space and Time's current revenue model and how the platform is operating without a token?

Stephen: Sure, sure. So right now, we have a revenue model, which by the way, you can, you can see firsthand, if you go out to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace; we're out there, you can go see us, you can sign up for it if you're so inclined. We start at about $700 a month. And that's a flat rate contract, so it's like all you can eat. It's part of a decentralized network, it basically has no rate limits, nothing like that. 700 bucks a month, off you go. That's insanely cheap for companies. For retail, sometimes that's a little daunting, and so we're also working in the next maybe month and a half, maybe two months, maybe a little sooner, we're working hard to get to our cost per compute model. And that's just a way of saying that if you use a little bit of compute, then you pay a little bit, and if you use a lot, you'll pay more. It's a way that retail users can get in and run, for example, maybe 100 queries a month, and pay a couple of bucks. That will open the door for a lot of not just retail users, but also a lot of early startups or people who are kind of exploring whether they want to do something in particular, you know, and they want to try out Space and Time. It'll open the doors to a whole new class of people who certainly are welcome to join Space and Time today, but we recognize that as insanely cheap as $700 a month is for data warehousing, sometimes that can be steep for someone who just wants to get in to kick the tires and play around a little bit. Yeah. And I didn't answer your second question, which is just how is that working? It's working well. What we have today works well. There's a class of people that we want to make sure that we're servicing also, you know, the retail and the angel startups. So we're going to tackle those in the next couple of months.

Mike: So, this is also a question that we get a lot, which makes sense given the current concerns and the current environments within Web3. We've all heard about the uncertainties, currently facing Web3, from economics, even starting last year with FTX, with SVB, funding drying up and so on. How does Space and Time stand in terms of financial security? And what measures are we taking to stay viable in the current market? Stephen: It's a good question. Fortunately, one of the things that we did, which was a tad unusual, but we all felt was a good move, was to make sure we had a CFO. Sometimes early startups don't have a CFO; they have sort of a simplified environment. In this case it was good because it meant that we had a very well managed financial backing; everything was very professionally done, all the risk was mitigated. It's unfortunate that we keep seeing disaster after disaster in Web3 from the sidelines, but we've not actually been hit by any of them. That's fortunate, but it's also because of good planning. Right. And so I think Craig Holiday, who's our CFO, deserves a lot of credit for the fact that we basically have been unscathed by all these different events over the last 18 months.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. It was a question we got a lot back around when FTX went belly-up as well. Fortunately, we had no exposure to FTX at all, unlike many projects. Moving on, what would you say differentiates Space and Time from the projects that are currently struggling to grow in what’s a difficult market right now? Stephen: Space and Time is really working to solve the kind of foundational data problem in a very broad way. I think it helps that we have a very broad appeal. Space and time is a decentralized data. A data warehouse is a big data platform. We're bringing big data into Web3 in a way that, really, we don't see a lot of, or really, in a relational sense, we don’t see at all. So you might have object stores: IPFS, and Filecoin, and others. That's cool. That's not us. Right? They can store big data, but they store files, not tables. Being able to have that niche of, you know, that big data play inside of Web3, it certainly means that we can check a lot of boxes. And the fact that we index all of the blockchain data, and we can push data out to smart contracts, and we have this cryptography to guarantee it, means that there's a lot of use cases that we can play: in DeFi, gaming, basically all of Web3, but also, a lot of Web2. We’ve gotten a lot of traction with Web2 companies, enterprises, that are looking to get into Web3. Data in Web3 is not easy to grapple with if you're not used to it. If you’re coming in from the outside, it can be somewhat intimidating. We have a data warehouse, and companies in Web2 have been running their business on data warehouses for the last 40 years. They can take any data analyst from anywhere in their organization, put them in front of Space and Time, and they know how to immediately add value. I think it’s one of those intersections that's really helped accelerate a lot of what we were aiming to do from a go to market perspective, but also what these other enterprises were expecting. They go hire Web3 experts, and so they know kind of what to expect. But usually there's one or two people who really know it, and then everyone else is just kind of along for the ride. They know that there's something there, but they're kind of dependent. But if we can say, “Look, here's a platform you put your whole company on, right?”, I mean, that just accelerated that whole workstream by two years. And so it's that kind of broad appeal to certainly Web3 but also Web2. That means that we’ve got a lot of prospects whereas maybe other companies who are very isolated in Web3 and are very niche in what they're trying to do, they just don't have that broad set of appeal.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. That ability, when it comes to Web2, to serve as that long-awaited seamless on-ramp from enterprises to leverage blockchain technology. Stephen: Yeah, the way I've said it before, it's kind of like if you think of a swimming pool, some people expect you just to jump right into the deep end. But Space and Time is more of an easy entry: you can kind of just wade in. From a Web2 perspective, you can kind of just wade in. If you want to go jump in the deep end, we have a deep end as well. But it means that people can get in and go as deep as they feel comfortable. And then, you know, splash around there. Not to compare our enterprise customers to little children.

Mike: Moving on, is Space and Time concerned about the current regulatory uncertainties, in particular with the US SEC? Has there been any impact upon Space and Time so far from that? Stephen: Not directly, but we're watching it like everyone is. We all like certainty. Certainty means confidence and confidence means growth, for our customers. We've not had any direct impact yet. Sometimes that's hard to tell, though, be don't have years and years of trended sales to go back and look and say, “Oh, you know, there's a dip here, not because of anything that's directly affecting us, but because our customers or the industry we're in is shrinking a little bit, and that means there's a contraction overall.” But given where we are, and entering the market, and there's a lot of excitement, and we have a lot of people really interested, I think we're good. In fact, really, the interest is still beyond what we're capable of delivering, right? We don't want to just suck in everybody who's interested and then give people a bad experience. We want to make sure that we're bringing along the purpose, and that we're making sure everyone has a good customer experience. The only other impact I would say that the kind of regulatory uncertainties are having is on the token consideration. But you know, we're still in kind of a wait and see mode.

Mike: Yeah. And in the meantime, we got a great revenue model to work with. So let's move on to some questions that we’ve received about the platform. First off, can you briefly explain the role of decentralized databases in Web3?

Stephen: I mentioned before that Web3 data can be difficult to work with. And so we see blockchain data as table stakes for whatever data foundation you're going to put in place to really accelerate the work of Web3 startups. Or Web2 skunkworks who are looking to get into Web3. If we just did a decentralized data warehouse, it would be interesting, but besides decentralized, what differentiates it from something that's not decentralized? There's other decentralized databases out there. The fact that we are interoperable blockchain in a very direct way, so we ingest all of the data from blockchains and make it freely available to anyone on the platform, means that rather than having to start with doing an RPC provider, or going in defining, sub graphs, and then once you get the sub graph right, or you get the node provider set up, and now you're exporting from the node provider, or the RPC endpoint, and then you have to load it into a database. Typically, that's what happens. So you'll need an ETL engine and a transformation, and it's either in the database or it's in an ETL engine outside the database, and then you want to wrap it API layers. All of that is a fair amount of work. If you have talented engineers, you're talking, I don't know, three, four or five months worth of work to get all of that set up and done and tested. Whereas in three or four or five hours, you could sign up for a Space and Time account and basically have yourself at that same point. The question was what's the role of decentralized data warehouse; to me, it's accelerating, it's getting time to market and making teams more efficient, not having to reinvent the same wheel over and over, or in this case, the same, you know, loading and database and decentralized database and ETL, and API, okay, that's four or five wheels right there that you can just roll into one thing. You have to have the data; that's table stakes. But it becomes the ease of development, which means speed to market, which means competitive advantage, which means more money for people building on Web3. We all like more money.

Mike: Just abstracting away the complexity, getting rid of all these point solutions. And, yeah, for sure, ease of use, and privacy, data ownership and all that comes with being in the Web3 space. You don't have to entrust it to a centralized data warehouse where all sorts of bad things can happen.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I talked about security. I can talk for a long time about the security. We partnered with Sotero to do end to end encryption. And, of course, decentralization. It's sometimes funny: we work with customers, and they sometimes forget that we're decentralized. And they'll ask us to do things or help them with things. And it's like, “I really would love to, but I don't have your private keys. I actually don't have access to your data.” Right. So of course, we always try to help our customers, but it speaks to the level of security that this is not something that even we can go in and play around with your data. Right? This is cryptographically secure.

Mike: Yeah. Speaking of decentralization, another question about that: what's the difference between decentralized database and decentralized storage?

Stephen: I would say use case. Decentralized storage, IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, things like that, you know, the corollary in cloud would be Web3, or Azure Blob Storage, or using your own computer. That’s the hard drive, and it just stores whatever you put on it. The difference is that it's not always the most efficient way to go get one particular piece of data off of that hard drive or that SSD. Databases are built for both data ingest and very rapid or low latency queries. So fast in, fast out. The tradeoff there is structure. It’s a relational database; you have to give it structure, you have to say this is a string, and this is a number. And you cannot insert strings into where numbers go. That's not allowed. So having that structure is a tradeoff for that very low latency, that quick aggregation of analytic queries. Whereas you know, object store; you want to store a picture of your cat, then you can store a picture of your cat. So it's just a different use case.

Mike: So, more on the subject of decentralization. What are the steps that Space and Time is going to take to achieve true decentralization? And how will security be preserved in the process?

Stephen: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about security. And like I mentioned, there's multiple layers of cryptography, every user has a public-private key pair, which I think everyone's used to. Every table has a public-private key pair. That's a little unusual, right? So tables have key pairs, users have key pairs. And then we use this cryptography called biscuits. You can go to http://biscuitsec.org and read all about biscuits. It's been out there for a while. That's what we use to tie the two together. And so we have very strong cryptographic authentication and authorization. And then we have end-to-end encryption across all of it. And then we're also talking to a number of different providers of confidential compute, a way to wrap everything within that container inside and basically make it a black box to the node operators, so they can't even see the compute that's going on. And we have Proof of SQL, which means they can't tamper with the data. What was the other part of the question?

Mike: The steps we’re going to take to achieve decentralization.

Stephen: Right. I went off on my little security tangent. Security is important. I like that tangent! So, decentralization. We're working on bringing node operators on right now. Right now, today, we're the only node operator in town. All of the architecture of the software is written to be decentralized. We're bringing on the first few node operators, helping them get stood up, working with them on, you know, how there's a lot of logistics, right? Like when there's an update that needs to go, what guarantees do we have that all the node operators are going to push that? And so, we're really working on that. The goal is, by the end of the year-ish, maybe early next year, to basically have us be a minority of the network. But it'll still be permissioned, which means that if you're a node operator, and you want to work with us, you have to come to us and we will work with you on a one-on-one basis to get you stood up and all that. We’re working so that next year, we’ll start moving towards being a permissionless decentralized network, which just means, obviously, that you don't have to ask anyone's permission! You can just go get some servers, or some computers, and you can stand them up in your basement or your garage or wherever you put those. And as long as you configure the software right, you can join the network and contribute. So yeah, that's that's the goal. Obviously, you know, there's some things that we also have to figure out. We talked about tokens, how we're going to incentivize the network, things like that. We have a lot of it figured out. But there's still some parts of it that we need to work through. But that's kind of the high level roadmap on decentralization.

Mike: What is Space and Time doing in the Web3 space that nobody else does?

Stephen: Quite a few things. As I mentioned before, I don't think there's anyone else doing the intersection of Web3 and big data, being able to process large amounts of data in one shot and ad hoc. We also have, of course, Proof of SQL. We have the interoperability with Blockchain, which other other organizations do as well, to a lesser degree, maybe, but we're the only ones that have the Proof of SQL cryptography. And that's a really big differentiator, because it means that you can take a query and you can push the results of that query to a smart contract, or a smart contract can make a call into Space and Time, and get the query results, as well as a cryptographic proof that says this has not been tampered with. And that opens the door for all sorts of cool use cases. So yeah, we do have kind of a large Venn diagram. But there's definitely certain areas that nobody else is doing right now: Proof of SQL, big data. When we index the blockchain, and we index all of it, and you don’t need to go looking. The challenge of doing analytics is that you don't always know what you're aiming for. And so to kind of go in and say, I need this thing here, I need this number, it sometimes takes some iteration to get there. And so if you have to go through and have a subgraph defined every time, and you don't get it quite right, you have to go back and have it done again. And there's a lot of use cases that work well if you know exactly what you want. But there’s what we call architecting for the unknown: you don't know what you're always aiming for when you're doing these kinds of analytics. You're doing exploratory work. And then, of course, we also have that HTAP, hybrid transactional and analytic processing, which means that we have a row-based in memory, data processing tier, and then we have an NVMe or SSD, columnar based big data platform so we can service that low latency request alongside those big analytic queries. And again, that's a differentiator. I know there's other databases in Web3, and some are even decentralized, a few. But I don't think there are any that can get to our scale and size and still can do those low latency returns, because we have that in-memory cache.

Mike: For sure. A lot of things that make Space and Time very unique. So let's move on to something that actually Scott spoke about on Product Day back at Consensus, which is AI. How important is AI in the long-term development plans of Space and Time? Will we be using it for database support?

Stephen: We're going to use it for queries. As I mentioned at Consensus, as part of our beta, in Space and Time studio, you can go and you can write queries, or you can just write natural language and AI will write the query for you. Later, we're going to continue to expand that activity into more support-type features. Most of it first is going to be retail or consumer facing, the things that will have the biggest impact for people who are using Space and Time. Later on, if there are things that we can use AI for, like proactive optimization or going through and doing different kinds of data cleansing activities, we’ll spin that up, but first it's going to be everything consumer-facing.

Mike: What new features can we expect to see implemented in the near future? Stephen: New features. Proof of SQL; we're just bringing on our first beta customers there, so that's coming soon. We're working with Chainlink on Chainlink Functions. That opens up the door for new ways to interact with smart contracts using Space and Time. And so you'll see more and more ways to interoperate data back into the chain or from requests on-chain into Space and Time. You'll see more core product additions and refinements. I talked about the infinite precision data type, right? More things like that. More usability features; I think I talked about cost per compute. I think that's going to be a big one; it’ll help expand the reach of Space and Time. And if we start looking farther off into the future, you start talking about other types of proofs. And I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about here. So I'm gonna be a little cagey for a second. But we have Proof of SQL, which allows us to prove that a query that ran on that particular data set has not been tampered with, either the data or the query. In the future, there'll be other mechanisms like that, but farther upstream in the data pipeline. So more cryptographic work, more Zk work, to try and make it so that the entire end-to-end experience can be validated.

Mike: For sure. All right, awesome. So let's move on to another subject on which we've gotten a lot of questions. It's been six weeks since beta launch. And it kind of seems like the beta population has been slowly increasing. When would you say more people may be able to access the beta?

Stephen: Yeah, we're working through the cohorts right now. We've kind of broken people up into phases. And so if you’ve signed up and you haven't gotten notification yet, hang tight, we will promise we're going to get to you. We will get through everyone, I promise. We've just had such overwhelming demand. We didn't want to have people come on and have a bad experience. So we broke him into cohorts, so that's just continuing. Every week we bring on another one. You'll get an email, it'll point you to a URL to give you some lightweight instructions, and then off you go. It's pretty easy.

Mike: For people who want to participate in the beta, but are not developers, how can they take part?

Stephen: There's no requirement to be a developer. Like I said before, we're trying to make it so anyone can ask a question in Web3. So if you're interested in the beta, go out to spaceandtime.io. And in the upper right hand corner, there's a button that says “Join the beta.” And you click on that, and then you just plug in your email, and a short description of what your what your project is, or why you're interested. And then it gets queued up in the list. And we'll get through it all.

Mike: What about participation in a node testnet?

Stephen: Like running a test net node? I'd say, for this year, if you do node operations for a living and you're interested, reach out to Mike on Discord. I think, Mike, isn't there a channel for node operations? Mike: Yeah, there's a channel where we are just going to be keeping people updated on what's going on.

Stephen: Yeah, so I'd say go join that channel. If you want to, if you're more casual about it, you don't do it for a living, you're welcome to join the permissioned phase. So it's going to be a little bit but again, we believe in doing things the right way. So we appreciate your patience as we get through.

Mike: We’ve spoken a lot about Space and Time’s utility to enterprises. Will it cater equally to individual developers as well?

Stephen: Yeah. And I think at this point, I'm starting to repeat myself, but I'll do it anyway. Like I said, to date, the only mechanism we had to do contracts was that fixed contract, that fixed rate, basically joined the decentralized network, and it's all you can eat. But that has more enterprise-size pricing to it. As we get into individuals, or retail members, that cost for compute model will really come to the rescue, because it means that if you want to run $5 worth of queries in a month, that's easy. If you're, for example, you’re in your project’s early days, it's you and two other friends, and you're going to do a startup. And rather than do all of that other infrastructure I talked about earlier, you sign up for Space and Time, using cost per compute, and you go out, you run some queries, maybe it's $10 the first month, maybe it's $100 the second month as your usage increases. And then at some point, it's going to make sense for you to jump over and get a more fixed rate, because it'll help budgeting and it’ll help keep the costs down over the long term. It's definitely something that we're focused on, making sure that we address all the different areas that are coming anywhere from a couple of people in a garage, trying to write the next big thing, all the way up to the biggest enterprises. And we’ve found a lot of really good interest from very large financial institutions. You know, sometimes they're talking about specific projects, sometimes they just have a skunkworks operation that they want to get in and operate pretty easily. And so we need to be able to operate on both ends of the spectrum, and you never know, those three people in the garage might be the next big thing, in 10 years. And so we want them to start building on us.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Apple got started in a garage.

Stephen: Exactly. I'm in California, Bay Area, Silicon Valley. So this is where all the garages are. HP and Google and everyone else.

Mike: Yeah, they've grown a little bit larger than the garages. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Trillion dollar garages.

Stephen: Most garages out here are more expensive than corporate headquarters somewhere else!

Mike: When Space and Time fully launches, or even as we get deeper into beta, what applications is it going to have to individuals who aren’t developers? Dashboards, for example, and analytics?

Stephen: Yeah. That’s the Space and Time Studio. It has a query editor, you can do your analytics right there. It has dashboards, you can build dashboards, you can build visualizations and share dashboards with other people. Space and Time Studio is very individual focused and does not require a lot of technical skill to go use. So it's really aimed at people who are interested, but maybe are not developers, that they can go out and they can do whatever analytics they want.

Mike: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the community getting its hands on that! I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it as well. I love data. I know a lot of you in the community do as well. Yeah, it's gonna be really exciting.

Stephen: Go to our website and click the sign up for the beta, we'll get you in the list!

Mike: What can you tell us about Space and Time’s new partnerships? And why are those important?

Stephen: Like I said, we've had a number of large organizations that have reached out that we've started partnering with. I should keep it a little general, before I start rattling off names, but I would say we have a pretty good mix of really large Web2 organizations. We have a mix of, we'll say, kind of in the middle organizations that are data centric. They do things like mine out ownership for things like tax documentation, but their customers are very large enterprises. They're kind of halfway in between Web2 and Web3. Right. And then we have, you know, by volume, most of our partners are Web3 startups. I think when you look at the look at the full mix of who we we work with, I think about 40% of them are games, Web3 games or game tech, GameFi, I think about 30% are DeFi, kind of that generalized decentralized finance, and then about 30% are of some kind of IoT, some, or kind of other infrastructure projects. That's kind of the high level breakout of the partners, I will say that we're seeing more and more sophisticated use cases emerge. When we first started, everyone was kind of getting in there getting their feet wet. And they were using us for things, but it was more like kicking the tires and seeing what they could do. Now we're seeing the emergence of actually using Space and Time for fairly sophisticated workloads, like game telemetry being loaded into Space and Time, and then aggregated, and then having the result of that joined with an NFT table to determine whether an attribute or achievement should be minted on chain, things like that.

Mike: What about some of the partnerships that we've announced since consensus, for example?

Stephen: Shrapnel and Wildcard are two of the biggest Web3 games right now. And they've been great partners, they've been a lot of fun to work with, we actually did two different conferences with Shrapnel, for example. And Wildcard is really, really, using our platform in probably the one of the most sophisticated ways out of all our partners. There’s Lendvest, Primex, and a bunch of other DeFis. I feel like I'm missing about two or three games.

Mike: For me, it's been super exciting. Seeing all the partnerships that have come in that we've announced, just seeing the network grow so much, it has really just been fantastic. And it's just really exciting for the future. So you mentioned that we have a lot of partnerships on both the Web3 level and on the Web2 level. Does Space and Time focus more on partnerships in Web2 or Web3 or both equally?

Stephen: Both equally. I mean, we recognize that we are Web3 native, we just happen to be a really good conduit, that zero-entry part of the pool for Web2 players, and that’s borne itself out in the amount of interest we have from that space. But like I said, we want to be servicing everyone from the couple people in their garage, running a couple queries a month, all the way up to the largest enterprises on the planet. So we have broad ambitions.

Mike: Definitely. About conferences, we were at Consensus last. What's the next live conference that we're going to be attending?

Stephen: The next one I know we're going to be at is SmartCon in Barcelona.

Mike: Yeah, SmartCon is always a big one. It definitely was last year. So just a couple more questions here, just to wrap up because we're getting close to time. First, you've already spoken about this actually a fair amount, but just to give a summary: what's next for Space and Time in the coming months?

Stephen: Oh, man, what's next? Getting Proof of SQL out into general use. Expanding the number and breadth of partnerships. Hopefully, next time I do one of these I can talk all about the Web2 things that are coming. Working with our node operator friends to be able to start getting to be a minority of the network. There'll be more exciting, more peripheral things popping up, like we have the SDKs done. And right now we're working to get them integrated into their respective distribution channels. So for example, to go out and, if you're a Python person, install the Space and Time SDK. Things like that, along with more demos and starter kits, so that when we have people who get into Space and Time for the first time, not just the studio, the dapp, but actually get into APIs and connecting with JDBC drivers and doing real analytics. And using it for, I should say, doing real application use cases, we have some starter kits that you can just plug in, because we see patterns already, games tend to do kind of one set of activities, and DeFi tends to do one set of analytics, and there's certainly a lot of variation in there. But there's kind of a central core to that. And so if we could set up an example that says, here's basically how you might want to consider doing this and just get people up and running, again, Space Time is a lot of an accelerator to get you that quick time to market. We can accelerate that even faster by giving kind of free starter kits. Cost per compute. I'm excited about that. I’m probably unnaturally excited about that cost per compute, because I really think that's where we start picking up a lot of the retail users in the community and they can get involved in a new way. And it really opens the door to a very large segment. That's been, I don't wanna say underserved, but again, it's one thing to sign up for $700 a month, if you’ve been funded for $5 million. It's another thing if you're just playing around. So getting that going is going to be fantastic. And then like I said, we're expanding our cryptography into new areas. And I'm to end that there. But you know, hopefully in the next four or five months, we'll be able to make some big announcements about that expanded Zk sphere. Oh, and also, we're open-sourcing some of our cryptography as well. And so you'll see that coming. And that's actually fairly soon. Like, I think inside the month, there'll be some announcements on some of the open sourcing that we're doing. So there's, oh, man, there's always a lot going on. You know, no lack of things that are coming. Some of them are big. I think all of them are big, but some of them are going to be game changing. Like I think the cost per compute and some of this cryptography stuff is going to be game changing.

Conclusion

Mike: Awesome. So we've reached the end here. Again, thank you to everybody who submitted questions, Stephen, it's been a pleasure to have you on.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. I loved it. Thanks so much for hosting, Mike, and thanks everyone for attending.

Mike: Absolutely. And, folks, like I said before, we're just ecstatic to have you with us. Really, your support and your encouragement means a great deal. And anytime you have feedback, questions, anything, my DMs are always open. Please reach out. I always love to talk to you. And don't be shy. So that'll be it for this AMA, folks. Thanks again for attending, and we will see you in the next one. Thank you.

[Session ends]

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