9/8/22 Discord AMA Summary
Summary of Discord video AMA, September 8th, 2022.
Space and Time participants:
Scott Dykstra, Co-Founder & CTO
Spencer Reeves, Creative Director
Thank you to all of the community members who attended!
Special thanks to members who submitted questions: Mystery Men, vAnt, S. Crypto, Monkey Boy, Joe_, ylxb, joao1dao, whiteshrekk, BlueReturns, AHacTasia, NFTerraX, and Spark I xifeng.
[Session begins]
Introduction
Scott: Let’s take a minute to introduce ourselves. I’m Scott Dykstra, Co-Founder and CTO of Space and Time. We started this project about a year and a half ago, and we brought on Spencer as employee #1, our very first hire.
Spencer: That’s the rank, right? Employee #1?
Scott: That’s Master Chief right there!
Spencer: I’m Spartan-117. Hopefully you guys know me by now from the Discord. If you don’t, I’m Spencer Reeves, Creative Director and marketing guru. I’m joined by Mike Post; he’s the Community Manager. He does everything organizationally on Discord, so I know you guys know Mike.
AMA
Where is the team currently from? How many members is the team currently at?
Scott: 40 engineers, 50 people total. Our engineers are all over the US, plus a great team in India. Headquartered in the Los Angeles area. Newport Beach, to be specific.
When will the Space and Time test network go live?
Scott: We’re targeting early Q2 next year for testnet, and we’re targeting mainnet late next year. So early Q2 for testnet, toward the end of next year for mainnet. Those are our targets, and I’m going to try really hard to meet those targets.
I would like to know what kind of ideas Mr. Spencer Reeves, the Creative Director of Space and Time, has for the project in the future, such as community or partnerships
Spencer: We’ve been working pretty hard on the side on a Space and Time NFT drop, and we’re close to making that happen. We’re going to release them very guerrilla-style. There’ll only be a limited amount, and they’ll be rare.
We also have some huge announcements at SmartCon (Chainlink’s conference) at the end of September. We’re going to be mainstaging with Chainlink and Microsoft, and we’ve got some exciting things to say.
What was the inspiration for naming the project "Space and Time”?
Scott: It just comes from the database. We’re building a decentralized data warehouse, a massive database for Web3, a Web3-native data warehouse. Space is the amount of storage, the amount of space available to hold all of Web3’s data, and time it takes to run a query, which hopefully is very little, because we’re super fast!
How do you differentiate yourself from The Graph, Kyve, Ceramic, etc?
Scott: TheGraph is essentially RPC calls through the blockchain that mold the RPC blockchain data into a relational format stored into PostgreSQL, a Web2 database, and then served up for queries. I think TheGraph is awesome for pinning subgraphs quickly and finding subsets of the EVM that you need, but it’s not a data warehouse. You can’t run large-scale queries joining on-chain and off-chain data. DApp developers can’t store their own data inside TheGraph. TheGraph simply grabs data from the blockchains and makes it queryable. Space and Time does that as well, but at a much bigger scale, and it allows customers to join their own data within Space and Time. It’s a data warehouse where customers can build whatever they want.
Kyve is a data-archiving service. It archives the blockchain, the kind of history of the chain, to IPFS-based services.
Ceramic is much more like the database. Ceramic streams data into IPFS-based storage, or decentralized storage, I should say. We do similar work at enterprise scale. Space and Time is a data warehouse—it’s not a single-node database. It’s tens to hundreds of terabytes per cluster, and hundreds of clusters deployed around the world.
So, architecturally, Space and Time is very different from all three. And the use cases are different. Our use case is bringing the world’s business logic online, on the blockchain.
What difficulties did you face in developing this project and how did you overcome them?
Scott: We got over a lot of technical difficulties to get this far. Also, we ramped up a team in six months—we went from four people to forty in six months.
Spencer: Just before Scott gets into this, I think people tend to forget that, operationally, when you’re starting these businesses—just because we’re Web3 doesn’t make it any easier to ramp up a really effective and organized team, and that was one of those things we were so excited to do because it structuralizes the company from the bottom up. We made the foundation that really put our feet on solid ground. And we’re stoked to keep working on the architecture, for sure. But I’ll let Scott get into the technical side.
Scott: I think the hardest part was building Proof of SQL, which is a novel cryptographic proof to have the data warehouse actually prove the query results, create a SNARK cryptographic proof, of what the data warehouse does, and connect that back to the blockchain, so that smart contracts can actually run queries against Space and Time. That’s something no one does in Web3. That’s novel cryptographic technology that our team is incubating; we have about ten cryptographers on the team working on SNARK cryptography inside of the database. And the reason for that is that it allows Space and Time to become a data sidechain. It allows Space and Time to roll up data to the major EVM chains. If we can roll up data as a data sidechain, and if we can roll that up to Ethereum, for example, then we can connect massive volumes of off-chain data to smart contracts. Imagine that you can run a smart contract that says, “Show me the top ten liquidity pools by TVL on PancakeSwap.” Right now, surprisingly, you can’t do that from a smart contract. Building that cryptographic technology is really hard. It was a long journey.
Spencer: If you see our Space and Time team members on the server, feel free to hit them up in the channels. Mike is your go-to guy for DMs, but always feel free to say hi in the channels to the team members who are in the Discord!
In Web2, there are different data architectures: warehouses, lakes, mesh, etc. Does the same exist in Web3? Why did you go for data warehousing? Why bring that to Web3?
Scott: This is the best question I’ve ever gotten, so props to you! This is the world I’ve been in for the last decade—I’ve been building data warehouses and data lakes at scale for the Fortune 500. It’s gotten to a point where there’s so much competition and so many different players with marketing and PR, trying to build their own version of the data lake, the lakehouse, the data mesh, the data fabric, and ultimately it’s this architecture where you load massive volumes of data into cloud object storage, like Amazon S3, or Azure Blob Storage, and you consume that with a compute query engine that brings the compute to the storage itself, and the reason you do that is because you can save significantly on storage costs. You load data into S3, you bring your query engine in on top of it—your data lakehouse, or whatever they call it now—and you can consume that. The reason we’re going with data warehousing is because the Web3 paradigm is a lot different. We’re calling Space and Time a data warehouse today because, frankly, we’re not sure what to call it. It’s not a Web2 data warehouse. What it is is a hybrid transactional database and analytic data warehouse together in the same cluster. What we’ve built is a hybrid solution. Hybrid transactional and analytic platform together.
We’re calling it a data warehouse because of the scale. This is cluster-scale compute, big clusters of compute that can, like a data warehouse, crunch ten-table joins and hundreds of terabytes of data in a single query. But the architectures of Web2 are going to be dead in Web3. The reason is because the tools are much different. You have the blockchain, which is a database in its own right. The blockchain is a transactional database. It’s a transactional database with one single table, the distributed ledger, which is decentralized so many times and replicated across so many nodes and blockchains that it becomes tamper-proof via consensus. A blockchain is a one-table database, but a tamper-proof database. And we use that for transactions.
Space and Time is a data warehouse that sits next to the blockchain, and can store orders of magnitude more data, on-chain and off-chain data. So we have relational copies of the blockchain, Ethereum, for example, and we have customers’ off-chain data together in the data warehouse. What we really are building, and we’re actually thinking of changing our messaging around this a little bit—I’d love your opinions—is really a data sidechain. It’s really a sidechain that sits next to the EVM, sits next to Solana, next to Flow, you name the blockchain, and it processes all the off-chain data for those blockchains, and joins that off-chain data in with the major chains.
Spencer: A lot of what we’re doing right now isn’t technically available to the consumer or to the enterprise, so it is kind of like this gray area where we may have to not only come up with our own way to describe what we’re doing, but you know, who holds the keys to that? Are we allowed to say that? Who knows?
Scott: Yeah, we are! I think when we say “data sidechain,” people raise their eyebrows, and we say, “Oh, well, it’s a data warehouse!” And it is! Architecturally, we’re building data warehouses clusters that are deployed around the world in a decentralized network, but they roll up data to the major chains.
A strong community not only brings interesting ideas to the project but also attracts larger partners. So how is Space and Time planning to build its community?
Spencer: Great question. You nailed it: a large community does bring better ideas to the project and attracts large partners. So, to go along with that, as a company, you’ve got to ask yourself “What is the community for?” And Scott and I, since the beginning, we’ve always been about this sort of larger idea of community being attached to a product, and that’s exactly why: because we want as many ideas flooding in as we can, we want a lot of people using our product. How we can make this sort of technical challenge better through iterating on it via the users at the community. In terms of how we’re building this community: on the backend, Mike and I are tirelessly working on connecting with other large projects that we’ll name later. Also through this NFT project that we’re working on, through conferences, and so on. We just want you guys involved on every sort of level on the stage of what Space and Time is doing.
Scott: Yeah, NFT drops, we’ll be active on Discord, active on Twitter, we’ll do a lot of work with partners of ours to build around the Chainlink community, to build around other communities from Framework and DCG, we’re going to do a lot of work around some Twitter marketing, PR, and ultimately, a lot of it is building really cool projects on top of Space and Time. We’re incubating some really cool stuff: some AAA games, some of our own games, we’re incubating some surprisingly next-generation DeFi projects, and when people realize that this is all running and powered by Space and Time, I think that that going to stir up some real interest in the space. Community building is tough!
Spencer: It is, and I can’t stress enough how early you guys actually are to this. After SmartCon, we’ll be coming out with some really amazing announcements, so I’m hoping that our community growth is even more by that time, but I can’t stress how early you guys actually are. We’re stoked to have all of you guys here!
I know this question is probably annoying as you’re asked it a lot. But are there any advantages you could see in a token?
Scott: I think the biggest advantages of a token are: A) that it garners a bigger community; and B) that it allows one to incentivize a decentralized network much easier. Space and Time is a decentralized network of hundreds of data warehouse clusters around the world that are operated by the community, owned by the community, deployed by users. And a Space and Time token, as a utility token, would incentivize those clusters. Without that, we’d need to incentivize them with USDC, maybe ETH, maybe LINK. It would feel like using centralized incentivization in a decentralized network. Also, tokens are awesome! That’s kind of, like, the whole point of being in Web3. Why build something this complex, this well-backed, with this large of a team, a truly decentralized, truly trustless network, that doesn’t have a token?
Now, I say that, but also, the market is also a little fickle right now, so we’re in no hurry to drop a token.
What are the specific ways in which we can ensure that data is not tampered with?
Scott: Great question. We ensure that data ingested into Space and Time is cryptographically guaranteed via a consensus service. We ingest data redundantly, multiple times, into Space and Time, and come to consensus on it, the same way that Chainlink ingests data from multiple different data feeds and comes to consensus before writing the results of those data feeds to a smart contract or to the chain to create data feeds on-chain. So we can cryptographically guarantee the ingest of data into Space and Time. Then, we have Proof of Storage, where we can cryptographically prove that the data exists in Space and Time, and, finally, the majority of our work is Proof of SQL, which is a novel, brand-new, cryptographic proof that our team built for the database, for the data warehouse, to actually prove that query results are accurate, haven’t been tampered with, are cryptographically guaranteed on-chain. Proof of SQL generates a cryptographic proof, a SNARK, for SQL, which can then be proven to a smart contract. The SNARK for SQL can be sent to a smart contract. So, that proves query execution, that proves storage, and that proves that the data came from a viable source.
How could the community best support the project and add value at this point?
Spencer: Great question. I think first and foremost, spreading the word. At this early stage of the product, it’s so helpful when you guys spread the word on Twitter, get your friends in our Discord and Telegram. We’re trying to build these communities, we’re trying to bump these numbers up and get everyone aware of Space and Time so that we can really validate ourselves to future customers, to partners, and to you guys, the community. So that would be the best way to add value.
What do you see at this point of the project as Space and Time’s primary use cases in Web3? GameFi, DeFi?
Spencer: I’ll let the CTO [Scott] more fully answer the use-case question, but definitely GameFi. We are absolutely obsessed with Web3 gaming and with games in general. Scott and I have been gamers at heart for awhile, and we like to game a lot, so we want to have a big foot in GameFi. Having the ability to connect off-chain and on-chain data to a game is huge. It only can make a game better, especially in the blockchain world, so we’re extremely excited to tackle GameFi.
Scott: We’re partnered right now with a bunch of AAA blockchain games that are coming out near the end of the year or early next year, and they’re building on top of Space and Time as their data warehouse to power their in-game data and join their in-game data with all of their on-chain data. On the DeFi side, we’re working with a number of DeFi protocols, doing swaps, on-chain options like on-chain derivatives. And they’re using Space and Time to help decentralize their whole data stack, the data to power their DeFi protocols.
Hello, Team! You have successfully verified the seed funding round for $10M on July 28, 2022. When is the next round of funding planned?
Scott: Boy, do we have some good news for you! We’ve got some announcements coming at SmartCon, which is Chainlink’s conference at the end of the month. We’re going to be announcing some interesting, exciting things
Spencer: Like, big news, guys! I’m so excited for our community to grow. We’re going to get a lot of eyes on us. So please be ready around SmartCon to welcome so many new people to our community. We’ve got a big announcement coming out on September 28th, so when the new members of the community start showing up, please welcome them with open arms! All of you members of the community right now are like the core group. This is the first Discord livestream! You guys are the OGs—Scott and I will remember you forever.
Are other projects working with Space and Time right now?
Scott: Yeah! We were talking just a minute ago about DeFi and gaming projects that are basically already running on Space and Time. A bunch of AAA games and options-creating platforms. And we haven’t even launched yet! We haven’t even launched our alpha yet. We’re planning to launch our alpha around the end of the year, and we already have a number of DeFi and gaming projects running on us. We’ve got about a hundred projects lined up that want to start running on Space and Time in Q1.
Spencer: And we’ve got a full partners list and backed-by list on the website (http://www.spaceandtime.io), if you guys want to go deeper into who’s backing us and partnering with us right now.
Will Space and Time launch first for Ethereum or Polygon?
Scott: Both, actually! We are EVM-compatible, so we support any of the major EVM chains. So Space and Time supports Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and Binance, and we’ll soon support Solana and Flow.
Is this project going to stretch past Web3? What sort of applications will this have in the Web2 data space?
Scott: We’re talking to a bunch of Web2 enterprises that are moving into the Web3 space. This is super exciting! As much as I love DeFi, and as much as I love gaming, it gets me really hyped when I see Web2 enterprises move into the Web3 space, because that’s that the big boom. That’s the wave we’re all waiting for. We already saw the DeFi summer, we already saw the wave of DeFi, we already know the wave of gaming is coming, and we’re working with so many AAA blockchain games right now, AAA games that are about to launch, so I know that there’s a massive wave of gaming that’s coming in 2023, but what I have yet to see is a wave of enterprises. And Space and Time is positioned to actually bring those enterprises on the blockchain. So right now we’re talking to a number of Fortune 500 companies that want to use the blockchain but have a ton of data, and they need Space and Time as a trustless bridge to get their data out of their centralized systems and into their decentralized systems.
Conclusion
Scott: Thank you all for joining! We’ll do this again very soon! It’s been an absolute blast answering all of your questions.
Spencer: Also, we want to make sure that we’re accommodating as many people as possible for these events. We’ll try to do these at various times that’ll accommodate everyone in our community around the world.
Scott: We’ll do this again very soon! We’ll join you to answer a bunch more questions. We’ll get way more involved!
Spencer: Thanks so much for showing up! We really appreciate all of you guys joining. So excited to do this again! Any parting words, Scott?
Scott: Back the data sidechain!
Mike: I want to thank everyone who showed up! We’d really appreciate it if you’d check us out on Twitter, Telegram, and LinkedIn. All of the links are in the links channel on the server. We always love to hear from you, so if you ever have suggestions, ideas for future content, or anything of the sort, you can always post it in the suggestions channel or DM me directly. If you ever have any questions, don’t be shy about contacting me! I’m here to give you whatever info you’re looking for and to keep you plugged in with this amazing project that is Space and Time. Like Spencer and Scott said, we’re planning to do a lot more content like this. We want you guys to really have a window into what we’re doing in the project and to have the chance to talk with not only Scott and Spencer but other members of the project who are working on various aspects of it. So we’re planning to have a lot more content coming out! So, once again, thank you, and we’ll talk to you again soon!
Spencer: We’ll see you on the next one!
[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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