This is Epicenter episode 530 with guests Andrea Salvados and Vijay Krishna Vanchi. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Ants and today I'm speaking with Andreas and Vijay, the two Co founders of Fiverse. Fiverse is a super interesting project that leverages in existing infrastructure that kind of lets you use it as an on chain Google Docs sort of like
product. But we'll hear all about this in in just a second. Before we talk with Andreas and Vijay, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by Gnosis. Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem. With a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like Safe Cow Swap or Gnosis Chain, Gnosis combines Needs Driven development with deep technical
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Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete Peace of Mind. Start staking today at Chorus .1. Andreas and Vijay, I'm so happy to have you on EPICENTER this week. Same excited to hear. Hey Frederique, thank you for having us. Very happy to be to be here. Super cool. Tell me about yourselves. So who are you? What's your background? What makes you get up in the morning? And maybe I'll start with Andreas. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Just one quick thing.
Also, we're honoured to be here after the celebration of the 10 years of epicentre. We watched the live stream yesterday. It was very cool. I can't believe it's been 10 years already. I think I'm. I've been a listener since half the time, Yeah. Really crazy. Also, I was going back in the initial episodes and I saw that even in 2014 you had you had an episode on Meme Coins with a Canyon fish coin, which is hilarious. You see that CT hasn't evolved that much.
So sorry, back to the question. So yes, I'm Andreas, I'm one of the Co founders of of Favors. I am. I'm also a PhD student. I'm finishing my PhD at the moment at the University of Oxford. My focus there is specifically on human control of AI systems in hacking operation. So what we call computer network exploitation and attack. It's something that I'm quite passionate about and yet I see it as, you know secondary to a lot of the work that we do at Favour's and in some sense quite
complimentary as well. So we always have great conversations about that within the company. Why do I wake up in the morning? So I think what drives me, is first of all as a proper Greek kid to to buy a house for my mother is the first answer. And the the second answer is that. And I think this is something quite common in the in the team, we are aggressively, maybe naively optimistic about the impact that we can have on the
world. I hope it doesn't sound too EA like, but we we really want to have direct impact on things that we consider very problematic for the way people communicate, collaborate and live together. So most of our work is dedicated to that. Could I come back to that in a second? Kind of why you think these these areas are problematic? But maybe for first, Vijay, what about you? Who are you? Yeah, I am like mainly you can say that out of Andres and Constantine, I fill in the tech
gap. And if you think about it from the perspective of what do I associate with and what what is it that excites me most. It's how can we use different kind of technologies that exists like out there and how can we make it fit into the users. Like you know, how can we make a connection between the users and the tech like and how can we bridge the gap between those two things.
So that's the like general thing which excites me for either experimenting with different things, for building different things and I like like in general to creates small softwares or small things that increase either the interactions or the efficiency in general for people that are doing things on top of them. So yeah, I know it's sort of a
techie pitch. So you're the tech Co founder, Vijay. Yeah, But I also heard that there's there's not just Andreas, but there's also Constantine. So there's three Co founders. Tell me about Constantine. Yeah I'll I'll say the first part you can you can complete in a VJI think you can only hear good stuff from us about Constantine. So he's the eldest one in the in the Co founder group.
He won't like that he's someone that's been in crypto since around 2016. I think his his main specialty until five of us was really doing product marketing and getting a lot of non crypto people to get interested in crypto. He ran the most, the most popular by by measure of audience crypto campaign in the world. So with The Economic Times of India over 150 million readers and and he's someone that right now at Favour's makes sure, makes sure that things happen.
You have Vijay and us and and me who are, you know going all over the place generating ideas every time that we talk. And Constantine takes all that canalizes it focuses it around clear objectives and makes sure that you know both Vijay and I know that you know we're we're, we're developing something bigger than just a side project that excite us.
We're developing something that has users, that has people depending on it. And yeah, he he's really the the person that manages to organise the whole team, which is also why he's the the CEO at of ours. Yeah, every company kind of needs that sort of person. Otherwise things don't get done. How did How did you 3 meet? Yeah. So me and Constantine, like we worked at a crypto company for like I think for four or five years and that's how that's where we met. And we understood that, OK, we
are excited about common things. And one of the thing like which and there's was saying about the the crypto campaign which Constantine had done, like it was me and him, like we were organizing that that thing and that's how me and Constantine met. And like after that Constantine introduced me to Andres and it has been like crazy story. Maybe Andres can add on the like the moment when we shared the POC of Fireworks first as an anecdote.
Yeah, yeah it's it's very funny. I'll, I'll reveal something on the podcast. But I met my I met Constantine through my mother because he's my brother. He's he's my older brother and we were back in Christmas at home in Greece and he tells me, hey dude, look at this and he opens up an e-mail and it's an e-mail from VJVJ sends really like pretty, pretty straightforward. The POC on helping people just use APFS and things exploded.
Things exploded because we immediately thought of what we could add with how we could develop it, how we could make it in a proper product and then into a protocol. And yeah, the rest is history. Super nice. Yeah. One could say you and Constantine go way back. Which Christmas was this, by the way? Because it's Christmas again, right? So how long? How many Christmases have you worked on? Five, Five hours now. So now it's going to be the
second. So we started in officially, we started the work around April 2022, 2022, yeah, but the the first POC by VJ came during Christmas 2021 towards 2022. So yeah, we're we're closing our year and a half, reaching 2 years now. Cool. And yes, you said earlier that despite the fact that you kind of work in AI, kind of your largest concerns are not around AI, they are around kind of how we collaborate or this this is kind of like what it sounded like.
What's the thing that you're taking issue with? OK. So there is definitely a strong relation with the issues that I'm talking about and AI and how we solve it at Fowler. So I'll just give you a a general picture and then we can maybe dive in deeper into what I mean. But it's something that both VJ, Constantine and I noticed at the very beginning, before we even started thinking actively about building something, which is that there is a strong point of centralization.
The remaining point of centralization, if you want to say it like that, in crypto, which is how people collaborate and communicate with each other, we're a whole industry that is ensuring that people can have computational and data integrity
in their financial transactions. We've built amazing what I like to call community computers, those block chains, and yet we're not leveraging them for something that is non financial, but essential to the way that crypto evolves, which is dissemination of public knowledge, communication, et cetera. So this is for the crypto specific, but it's shocking that this is a case in crypto, because we have those values in the crypto community. But the problem is much more general.
The problem is global. Anyone who uses the Internet abides by a server client model. This is something that people see as you know, the status quo today on the Internet. But the Internet did not use to look like this even 50 years ago. I like to use that example that until 2010 a third of all Internet traffic was peer-to-peer was purely BitTorrent links being shared between individuals. And this is quite important because we took a radical turn into something that is much more
centralized. And now the whole world depends on three big companies for the storage of their data, the recovery of their information. They're dependent on, you know, an arbitrary decision made by some Google engineer in California that had a bad day and thus decided to delete customer's data. We're dependent on server going down every now and then at at AWS and my Roomba cleaner are not working anymore because of it.
So there are points of centralisations around servers, usually based in the US, which come with a series of endemic issues including lack of privacy, predatory models of mining your personal data, selling it to 100 different data brokers you have no idea even exist, manipulation of your attention, of your mood, all those things. So we want to take that away and redistribute it to to people. Do do you know which proportion of Internet traffic is
peer-to-peer today? It's a very good question, I think it's so last time I checked. I need to remember the source as well, and it's my academic side. I don't want to throw things without proper backing. I don't remember exactly. I think I read something like less than 8%. Yeah, something like that. I can. I can specify it next time or online. OK. And the three Internet companies, just for the record, they are AWS, Google, and I assume Microsoft was the third one. Yes, yes.
Those were the companies I was thinking about. But you know, you have some auxiliary actors that are maybe not at the same scale but are quickly closing in and capturing a lot of consumers into their predatory model. Yeah. Why do you think this consolidation of the market has happened? So this is a great question. I'll be I'll be honest, even if it if it sounds like it's something that would limit people from even looking at Fowers, which is UX for me. This is where it starts and ends.
This is something that's the main focus of our team at Fowers. We want to improve the UX of people collaborating, coordinating online. I think the reason why those companies reach that level of quasi monopoly is because they offered users the ability to abstract away a lot of the complexities that were involved
in, let's say, e-mail protocols. Google comes in, tells everyone, hey, PGP is cool, Your e-mail protocol using Thunderbird is is cool, but you need to specify a million different things. You need to be aware of spam. You need to be aware of all those things. How about we take it all away for you? We also give you a way to recover your information that is not just dependent on you losing
your password or not. We automatically take care of the server and give you guarantees even if you don't pay our server. So amazing UXA, they just made something that was revolutionary into something that is revolutionary and easy to adopt. And we like to use that analogy at fibers because we're taking something that is already revolutionary. Block chains, smart contracts, But we're trying to make them into something revolutionary for everyone else in the world, my grandparents included.
Oh yeah. Yeah. So I'm totally with you. That user experience is, is currently not what it should be for web three products and we'll get into that in just a bit, but kind of spell it out for us a bit more. So kind of Google offers this amazing user experience. So kind of like a fully wide glove service for kind of like reading, answering, storing your emails. How, how do they make a living off of this? And clearly they they are making a very decent living. A killing.
Yeah, they're making a killing, that's for sure. So there are a few. There are a few things about their business model I'll focus on. The one that allowed them to have such an amazing UX and the thing that allowed them also that created the past dependency for them around something that we consider predatory today.
So they made everything free at the beginning in order to ensure that they could get, they could establish the foundations for a new kind of business model at the time, you know beginning 2000 around data. What Google realized because they were building a search engine at the beginning is that there is a lot of public and private data that is being that, that is being sent around the the Internet and the private data doesn't have much value associated to it at the moment.
So what they decided to do is we're going to take people's private data, semi private data. We're going to tell them that they can store as much as they want of it on our servers for free, but in a very long and legally full terms and condition. We'll make sure that we can use that data for our own purpose and specifically in order to make some money. So Google created this big market of data brokers that buy people's personal data. And that personal data doesn't have to be necessarily.
The content itself of whatever you sent via an e-mail or stored on Google Drive. It is also the metadata which arguably is so much more important. I remember that quote by by the by NSA operator that helped catch bin Laden, which is that 95% of all the work that they needed was open source and on Google and it just required them to piece things together. So most of that data that he was talking about was location, address book was time of things being sent. So all that is metadata.
They're taking the data, they're selling it to a market that they created of data brokers that need that data in order to sell a product, in order to do better identification of categories of users in order to sell that data then to other companies. Again, it sounds OK, maybe in principle doesn't to me, but this creates a lot of endemic issues. I think in the US it's still so prominent. In the EU, you know, we have the GDPR. It's reduced a bit the amount of predatory things that come from
that model. But in the US, you can buy millions of people's cell phone data, you can track them around the country, you can corroborate their interactions with other data points and infer a million things from that. And it's as easy as spending $150 on some website. It's not OK. Yeah. Sorry. You see, we get passionate, so we we're going to use some big words, maybe like predatory. Now I I clearly see why you think this is, this is super
important. I think there's a couple of things that kind of I would kind of like to keep track of here. So kind of one thing is kind of how could this be tackled without blockchain and then kind of why did you decide to kind of go the blockchain route, right? Because basically, even without using blockchains, you could, you could offer a service that kind of is not exploitative in that sense and kind of doesn't sell your data that way. So I'm thinking of services
like, say ProtonMail or similar. Why do you think they, they don't have more traction than they than they actually do. Do people not care? So I'll start, but I I see Vijay twitching a bit. So I know that he has a, he has a big speech prepared for this. But I'll start by maybe rejecting your premise, kind of rejecting your premise specifically. I think that more and more people care. You look at the Signal app user base, it's been exploding for the past two years.
WhatsApp, which is that mega app that everybody uses for communication, it started end to end encrypted. It started with all the right values until it was bought by Facebook and now you know, still end to end encrypted. But there are a few things that ring people's, yeah, paranoia. Same for ProtonMail, amazing team. They do a lot of the right things I think and their user base has been growing quite significantly for the past two
years. So there is really a movement which we want to capture and that's our, you know, our first audience after the crypto people. It's the privacy conscious individuals and that category is growing massively. So I think it's it's growing and people are care more and more especially you know everything, Everything is to our advantage because you continue with the the model we currently have leaks are going to continue to
happen. It's just about how big of a leak or fuck up will happen for more people to take that radical step off. OK. I abandoned Facebook. So on that side. And then on the tech side, I think most of those companies are so ProtonMail for example, are doing what I consider 95% of the correct choices, but they're still server dependent. I think their servers are in Switzerland. I remember a year ago they received a warrant forcing them
to open up one of their server. Of course everything was end to end encrypted, but it freaked out a lot of people, a lot of their users. I remember receiving the e-mail and this is something we want to remove. We want to remove the server, we want to remove the need for a server for authentication and authorization. And this is where I stop, and I let Vijay give you the better
explanation. Yeah, so like one thing which I've seen like blockchain do very well is basically like there is one property in blockchain like that excited me and the reason why I like find it very interesting that it can be used in different places. One of those is like, it makes it very easy for people like, for example, like you and me to agree on things. Now what does that agree on
things mean in this case? Like let's say if you do a transaction on either Nosys or Ethereum or any of these chains, and you send a transaction hash, that's a cryptographic proof of something that you did computationally right? And that computation in this case signifies that you did a value transfer from 1 address to another.
For now, with all the different things that we see, we can go and verify it on ether scan, we can go and verify it on public infrastructure or we can even run our own nodes to verify that that thing actually happened or not right until all this happens for finance. Now how does that happen for finances for example, we go ahead and update token balances and all of these things. That's how you have entire D5 and everything else happening on top of it.
But what we are doing is we're doing similar thing but for data. Now imagine this like cryptographic proof you were able to give for your own data like first create for your own self and then second also share it with other people saying that OK now you can also go and check the access or check the document without me intervening in that process, right. So there are different other patterns that open up. Those patterns are for example,
you send tokens to someone. Now you can never revoke access to that document. This is one of the like key benefits that you get. The other way is like you can have for example temporary permissions or time lock permission that is visible on chain and everyone knows it's not just one server or one person controlling all of those things for everyone and so on and so forth. So it's it's that base assumption and the things that you can build on top of it is what we are enabling with the
use of blockchain. And one like interesting thing which I'll say that would like I think highlight how interesting the work is and why it's like very caution for the next step that we are taking by moving away from this kind of infrastructure is if you go to ProtonMail and you lose your keys, you won't be able to gain access back to it, back off it, right. But if you take a look at the blockchain, it's a core premise that you should not be able to
lose your case. So to give you an example of the same word that SAFE did with Recovery Hub, to give you an example of one of the EF work that me and Andreas were working on for like allowing people to recover access to a smart contract in a low like for a low risk in a low risk method. So it's all of these things that actually come together that won't be possible if we didn't use blockchain to like leverage as a like as an advantage in my opinion.
This is super interesting. I think this is the first time I've heard someone say that kind of the advantage of blockchain is that you can't lose your keys. I I I get back to that in in in just a second. So there's very obvious kind of question here, right? So storing data on blockchain is notoriously expensive. So kind of How do we make that work with with Fire Firebirds? Beauty of content addressing. We're not storing the the whole
file itself. Yeah, we're storing the content hash onto the blockchain, which is just a pointer to a file. And that pointer comes with some properties of self certification, which we consider crucial for what we're building, especially for public data. So you want to be able to see and have that data integrity prove that this information came
from that person. And we're absolutely sure of it because we have a formal proof that VJ stamped that data with his key and that data generated hash that anyone can verify and can verify that no future or no new edits or changes happen on that data. So those properties are quite important. This is what we use blockchain for. We're making sure that those hashes are stored on chain available for anyone. And this is what VJ meant with not losing your keys.
You can store it in, for example, a smart contract and make sure that the smart contract is being controlled by multiple people, maybe just one person but with multiple series of key pairs and you know, with some rules that are publicly viewable by anyone and triggerable by anyone. So this is something that we're that Vijay and I are working on for the for the Ethereum Foundation.
We have a mechanism for example that let's say that Andreas and Frederique decided that the there are too many scientific publications that disappear every year from the Internet and this is important loss for humanity. So we decided to put a lot of that data on IPFS or R with and store those hashes on the blockchain to make sure that it's always available to everyone.
Andreas and Frederique might disappear, but they want to make sure that this public data, this public good remains available and recoverable by someone else. So they make sure that on that smart contract where they they, they store the hashes of that content and through which they pay for the storage of that content is recoverable by a public community. So yeah, this is some of the work that we're doing and it's not something that you can do with any centralized server.
That depends on you maintaining it. I think in in that context it makes a lot of sense. You already said that kind of like the actual data gets stored elsewhere, namely on kind of protocols such as IPFS or are weave reminder. Remind us how they make sure that the data actually stays around. OK. So in the, the way that we have done right now in terms of in the in the way that we have structured as like structured our nodes or the way that we allow people to host their data, right.
So what we do is we have a storage node let's say and that storage node does spinning for that person in this in case of fireworks. This storage node is something that we are running right now for all our users. But later on what we have is like you can actually run it on your local machine, you can run it on your own AWS instance, you can run it on your like some cloud that you just hosted that you're hosting in your home and so on and so forth.
So what it does it like that storage service pins that data. There is a concept called pinning and IPFS which keeps
that data on those notes, right? The beauty of this concept of pinning and like why this kind of thing actually makes sense, is that anyone can come in and participate either in the storage of those pins or can come up with, for example, things that can work on top of, like can do the transfer from one system to another without worrying about if data gets clogged or like lost in the middle, right?
So to give you an example of that, how that looks like is that you can have a IPFS hash that is pinned on one machine, then you have another machine that pulls that data from that machine and then start spinning it for that on on the different machine, right? So you get right to exit from one server which is let's say hosted by us, and then you can actually start doing the pinning for your own self and all your
own smart contract. OK, but basically if I don't want to host stuff myself, I just want to use IPFS as a service. How do I make sure not all the nodes that kind of because not all the nodes store the data. I think this is kind of like the crucial difference to kind of like blockchains, right? So basically you have you every node kind of stores a subset of the data.
So kind of how do I make sure that my document doesn't get dropped from the network by by way of kind of all nodes that kind of used to store it, no longer storing it or no longer being online? Yeah, it mainly financial incentive. It's cool because it really allows for a self sovereign type of experience of the Internet and data storage and management because you can pick and choose or mix and match different providers of data storage
according to your needs. So if you're someone that really wants to ensure that your data will never disappear, you give a 200 year financial incentive for a network that is specified for long term user storage like our Wave. So instead of going the APFS route, you might want to have better permanence guarantees and pay upfront something that is so much cheaper than doing the same activity on Google Drive.
So on our Weave, for example, after five years, four years .5 of storage on the our Weave network, you're more cost effective than storing that same data for 4.5 years on Google Drive. And from there on it's free. So you paid for a 4.5 years equivalent to a Google Drive on our Weave and then you know that you have that data there for 200 years because of the incentive mechanisms of the network.
One last point about that, going back to what you said, how do I know, how do I make sure this is another benefit of what we like to call community computers? You get a formal proof that you can query, that you can ensure every day that is there that your data is stored on a specific hardware somewhere in the world. That proof is undeniable, unbreakable and unspoofable, which is very important for someone that wants to ensure that their data is still up
there. So yeah, you have that proof instead of a promise by a company saying yes. So we have your data, but also according to section 7.3 of our Terms of Conditions, we can drop that data if there is a picture of a naked bot on it. Little do they know that this naked bot is your newborn baby. You took a picture, it's on your Google Drive and now you're not allowed to use a service and you
all your data is deleted. I I use that example because it happened a year and a half ago with someone using Google Drive. Yeah. So yeah, that that cryptographic proof plus financial, an incentive system that works pretty well. Why is it so much more expensive to store things on Google? Is it just because they have an insane profit margin, or are there some? Are there some deeper underlying causes?
I will point at the fact that there hasn't been much change in the pricing of data storage in those quasi monopolies for one reason. They're quasi monopolies. They do not need to abide by market demand conditions dynamics, meaning there isn't a race between different providers like there is in different Falcon Falcon nodes competing with each other to either provide the best service in terms of UX or provide better pricing for the users here.
When you know that you're the only person that the people, or the only company that people will knock at the door of in order to get a certain service, why are you going to, you know, compete with yourself towards a more a cheaper or more efficient or better UX? You're already there. But there are quite a quite a few cloud service providers, so it's not just Amazon or Google, it's also Microsoft and then kind of like smaller ones like Hetzner and local ones.
So it should it it it seems like if if any one of them were to kind of break the price barrier here, they would all have to follow at some point, right? So I'm not. I'm not sure why that's not happening if if if storage is actually much much cheaper. Well, because they're all focusing. So this is me going into this is not the fact. This is reasoning, educated reasoning. So AWS compared to Google Drive are focusing on different types of markets, different types of
users. AWS has a quasi majority, I think they have 66% of all server usage and and data storage. But this is much more for businesses, for developers, for ML engineers, etc. Google Drive and the Google servers have N same for Microsoft Office, have direct to Consumer Focus with their data storage and their servers and they're basically just those two together are 2/3 of the market for data storage for consumers.
So yes, there are other players, they're fighting for a much smaller chunk of the pie and usually they're they're focusing on a part of the pie that is much more specialised. So it's a part of the pie for consumers that are very focused on privacy, preservation or guarantees.
So they allow themselves to have a different pricing method because they know that what they're providing is not just better pricing but or not at all better pricing, but just better UX or guarantees that meet their audiences needs.
But if you were to take all that market together, put them all on the one big category, a system where you have millions of nodes, millions of providers competing with each other to meet the needs of their users, meaning either pricing or UX or privacy guarantees, you would have different dynamic, is my my interpretation and different pricing models here, because you have quasi monopolies. Even though there are a few competitors, those competitors are not fighting those quasi
monopolies on pricing. They're fighting them on some marginal improvements that are very important for a certain subset of users. This is how I see it I I want to see. An efficient market person kind of debate this because to me it sounds like like because it's such a huge market, it's it should be an enormous business opportunity to kind of just drive down the pricing here there. There is also one important.
Element to that, which is people are not just coming for storage, they're coming for the usage of an app or a feature, a Google Doc, a Google Sheet. And those companies have created an ecosystem where everything that is your essential needs when you when you're online or you're doing activities online, relates back to their storage space. So competitors that might emerge would need to also compete on the full stack of features and tools.
So it it explains part of it but I I hear the I hear the the concern yeah I I think I think the full. Stack explanation makes a lot of sense to me. So you guys are leveraging smart contracts to kind of point at
existing file storage protocols. If you kind of look at what a Google Doc does, it kind of gives you an infinite number of points in time that you can go back to obviously kind of if you need to store every one of them as kind of a pointer in a smart contract that's expensive on kind of you know the the, the smart contract fees. It's also expensive because you need to store each one of those kind of as a separate IPFS or are weave document. Yeah.
How, how do you go about that? Yeah, so the. Interesting part in that is basically there are two types of things when the data is at rest, rest being that rest state being for example like OK I have finished, I'm finished with this document, now I want to publish it or put it out there, share it with the people that can actually take a look at it and so on and so forth. That's when we put the data on chain. Right before that we use a peer-to-peer database called gun.
And what it does like it creates the cryptographic proof for all those updates that are happening. And then it makes sure that those updates get transferred between the peers that are connecting to Fireworks and actually help share the bandwidth or the updates with all the other peers to reduce the latency in general. So basically there are two types of systems. One system is on chain storage, another is off chain storage.
The off chain storage is peer-to-peer and shared amongst the clients that are connecting to the system, connecting to the document and so on and so forth. And then there is another system which is when you want to publish and push the things on chain or share it with other people, that's when you push it on chain with the fingerprint method. OK and. Then you also alluded to the fact that kind of I can share it with whoever I want for however long I want. How do you, how do you implement
that kind of? Is it on the smart contract basis or is it on the file storage system, so basically? There are two three different cases of permissioning as we implement as we had implemented. One of them is like you have a document, now you want to share it with someone. You generated the keys related to the document, pushed it on chain, shared the thing with other person.
That happening either through NFT or through contract is something that we can say that abstracted out for the sake of the simple discussion, right? And then we have the other way which is like you want to have the revocable access, meaning you give access to someone and then you want to revoke it after some time. In that case, like we have something called, it's, it's still something that we are working on or experimenting on. So I'm sharing a bit of a
forward thing here. So it's sort of an UTXO approach like unspent transaction output approach. And then you once the transaction is executed either through a smart contract or through someone else, that's when you lose access to the document or things like that.
So there are different paradigms that we are like implementing and using and are possible because of the smart contract and us being able to trust someone for being able to share the access or revoke the access without it being done through one of our servers. OK. So if you look at. The product as it is today, Maybe this? There's a question for Andreas. What what does it offer me? How can I work on it? How can how can I collaborate using it?
And how does that compare to Google Docs for instance? OK, so. I like to think of it more as a Google workspace as a whole. So inside of it, you have Google Docs, you have Google Drive, Sheets, etcetera. Why? Because this is really the suit of tools that we're trying to provide. So today you arrive on fibers, right now we're permission
based. So your address needs to have certain characteristics and it's for us to better manage our initial user base and core users, improve the UX and then open it for the world to join. So if you have permissions, you arrive, you create your account in two clicks. Those clicks. What do they do? Very similar flow to safe the safe. Multi sync you deploy. Your smart contract.
That smart contract will serve as your repository of of content hashes and will be doing access permissioning for anyone that will give access to your files to and what type of access. Once you've done those two clicks and deploy the smart contract for free, there is a dashboard that opens up in front of you UI. That UI is not stored on our server only you can access it through any public IPFS gateway. So you never need to interact with with Fileverse ever again.
From the moment you've deployed a small contract, you have AUI that allows you to upload files, store them publicly or privately. If it's private, you can choose token gating, you can choose anyone with a link or you can say any of those 10,000 addresses in my CSV can access my file, et cetera. Basic storage and permissioning. You have also a bunch of plug insurance and this is probably the most exciting thing that Favis is doing.
We like to think, or we like to communicate the idea that you can think of your workspace as something as customizable as your browser. Today, a lot of people are customizing their browser experience or their Internet experience by adding extensions. I have the Internet Archive, I have Metamask, I have a bunch of others, Grammarly, etc. And we want to do that for your workspace, for your
collaboration space. So instead of having a Google workspace or a notion that is limited to whatever new feature the developers have decided they should push on other users, here you have a store, let's say, where you can drag and drop new plug insurance. Today the plug insurance are developed internally, but we're already starting to see people propose new plug insurance for the dashboard.
So lawyer versus Frederique versus a meme Lord like me will want to have a different workspace and different tools to create, be productive, etc. So right now you have a whiteboard. Anyone who uses Xalidro would love that feature on fibers. It's just like Xalidro. You can invite people on it as well to collaborate live with you and the difference is that you can create as many whiteboards as you want. Whereas for eskalido there is a limit of five different pages that you open.
Here you can as many as you want with groups, without groups etc. You have also AD doc, decentralized docs plug in so it acts like Google Docs. You have mostly the same UX with a few differences like you can dock and gate or people joining you in that are editing your file can retain their anonymity or be represented through their wallet address or ENS.
And you have another that's our latest plugin which is called Deep Pages. Centralized pages, you'll see the pattern that act like a notion. So you click on that plugin and you open up a blank page that has exactly the same characteristics as you have today. On notion, you can create tables. Tables within tables You can do cord coding or a code markdown. You can embed images, videos, tweets. On that page you can put a cover picture. You can customize it as much as
you want. So on that you can really do anything from blog posting to having your internal database or knowledge base or if. And this is where, interestingly enough, most of the companies that came to us saying, hey, we would like to use Fileverse because we want to use a decentralized version of everything that we use. They've been very interesting in deep interested in deep pages specifically for documentation, governance and knowledge basis.
Why? Because they realize that if notion goes down tomorrow or whatever other service they might be using, like Gitbook. That's it. There is 10 years of crypto knowledge, discussions, interactions with a community that has disappeared forever. So this is where we intervene and this is what most actually enterprise, let's call it clients have come to us to address. OK.
And how do they? Pay for this, I mean do they pay for the on chain storage directly and how do they pay for your services because you kind of just you're just an interface to the those services. So what's your business model as fireworks? Great question. A few things. One is we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We're not going to go into this with, hey, we're pricing it according to the number of words you write. We're going with something that is quite similar to existing models.
So it's either based on storage, storage space or based on specific features that you might want to get, like, and this is me already giving some secret details of what's coming soon. But let's say you want to have a local LLM help you either generate images or synthesize a report for you or help you write something. Those are special features that you would need to unlock by either paying or etcetera. Right now though, Favors is in allow list mode and everything
is free. So we want to make sure that the the first iteration of Favors, what we're working on right now is just something that blows everyone away in terms of UX. And for that we decided to focus on there are over 7000 unique addresses that are recurrently using Favors at the moment. Those individuals are for us the opportunity to nail the UX.
So we're not pushing a business model onto them and we want to ensure that even when we do and it is either storage based or feature based payment, we want them to know that whatever happens, they can continue using the service and paying through
alternative paths. For example, instead of having your data replicated on three nodes and that managed or paid to fibers directly, you do that yourself on R WIF through the same UI and through the contract that you deployed or you want to. You really like pinata or the
APFS ecosystem. You use pinata or you want to store everything locally, perfect your smart contract and the UI were made for you to customize your needs in terms of storage and never be dependent on a team that might disappear tomorrow. So yeah, this is the customizability even on the business model side.
And we think that we're going to be attracting a lot of people that do indeed want to have those options and you know, an ecosystem of plug in where they know it's not the Fibers team that created this new, this new plug in, but it's someone else. And I can pay that developer myself. Yeah, nice. And. You said. Earlier that kind of you're. Striving to kind of make the best UX possible, you you actually said that you want your grandparents to use this.
Currently web free products are notoriously difficult to use. How do you achieve that? Or do you think you're there already? So I. Think we're halfway there. I think already, and this is this is probably my my favorite success story with flowers, which is that at my university department a lot of people, if not the majority, are quite sceptical about the value of block chains and anything crypto associated.
And I presented our our product to them without mentioning anything a blockchain about it, just, you know, talking about data and computational integrity, recovery mechanisms, group ownership and trustless interactions. And people really liked it. And it was a version where you didn't have to connect any wallet and people used it and people really liked it. Then I said I dropped the B word and they were like, yes, but you're burning the planet by by using those logs. So what's?
What's really I think? Our our main contribution to the crypto space is that we're pushing non financial applications and those non financial applications have a extremely low barrier to entry, even if we don't have the best UI or UX at the moment. Why? Because we removed a huge barrier, which was you need to have a wallet. In that wallet you need to have tokens. For you to have tokens you need to go through a centralized exchange.
For you to use that centralized exchange, you need to give your ID. You need to pass KYC, you need to give the color of your cat. You need to tell them how many times you go to the toilets per day. You need to do all those things that are quite ridiculous, that are that destroy any trace of privacy for anyone that starts interacting with the crypto world like we we want to like the space in general, wants to push self sovereignty, privacy
and ownership onto people. And yet, their first stop in order to join our industry is through a centralized exchange, is through buying tokens. That's not, that's not OK, that's not going to be sustainable. We want to have that one stop entry where you don't need anything. You just need to want to create a doc, share something with someone.
That's it. It's daily activities people already have on the Internet. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to provide that with better guarantees of privacy and ownership. How do you log in? Then without a wallet, OK. So. There are a few things. The first iteration of Fathers, it was just. You can think of it as an alternative to We transfer. You would arrive, you'd upload the file, you would share it immediately. No wallet needed. Your identifier is basically
just your browser. Things happen client, client side and that's it today with the current version of of Fathers. It is wallet based, but you have options to go without a wallet that are coming very soon. It's the work that we're doing in parallel also for the Ethereum Foundation and it's the famous social login. So social login is something that happens on your browser
level. On client side you can so depending on the path that we take, you'd be able to for example use your e-mail as your identifier or use let's say an existing key pair, your PGP key pair in order to associate the wallet to it in an efficient and non long setup, seed phrase blah blah blah way. Or you can do something else, which is This is what we call internally the Argent path which is put 2-3 phone numbers of your friends or yourself or your
family. They will now become the guardians of the access to your data and to all that in case you either lose it or you just want to fast login. So there are a few paths, and one that already exists today is, but it does require. A bit of a. Setup You can create file versus file with smart contract via the Safe Multi sync today via Safe Multi sync, so the Safe user interface and thankfully safe shipped.
Also social logins. So now you can you know with with an e-mail login directly onto followers if you go through the Safe UI. Cool. Perfect. So. Unfortunately we're almost that time I need to wrap up, but what's coming for five hours in in in this new year, Yeah. Great question. Thanks for asking. There are a few really exciting things that are coming, including things focused around UX.
So we want people to be able to log in finally just in one click and without having necessarily to go through the mental exercise of creating a wallet, etc. So this is coming. We have better recovery
mechanisms that are coming. We have something that is core to something we've been, we've been focusing a lot of our efforts on which is customizability of data storage even more than there is today and there is also a lot of new plugins coming in. I just want to mess to mention in passing that VJ is the Co creator and organizing of She Builds which is the biggest non male focused hackathon event in in an organization in India. And we have not only a lot of
participants that are learning what Web Three is all about, but we've had a lot of people already start proposing new plugins and ways for them to monetize their plugins via fowers. So this is going to be very exciting because you're you're seeing really the seeds of fireworks becoming something that is not just VJ, Constantine, Andreas and the team, but something that is that has been. Completely. Re adopted, re appropriated by anyone who wants it and go into
into a full community play. So those are a few things I'm excited about. VJ probably has maybe different things. Yeah, so one. Key thing which would sort of like answer one question that you were alluding to like how do you make sure that the IPFS hashes that you have published on chain actually stay around. So those are different kind of like that's that's a very interesting and unique problem that we have just because our
storage is decentralized, right. And this problem has been solved by multiple providers, for example File Coin RV and different other players in the ecosystem already.
What we are thinking of is like how can we make use of these different providers and then maybe ask them to come up with the network that supports Fireworks, let's say network one, Network 2, Network 3. And users can pick between these three networks instead of, you know, us giving them an option that OK, you go with one person or the other.
And the best part that you get is like you get right to exit from network A to network B because of the data like fingerprint that is stored on chain, right. And you get this right to exit from any of the services that we do just because of the way that we are making sure the data is stored, making sure the data is shared and so on and so forth. So yeah, that's a that's a very interesting work and I think that's something that's very unique as well.
Super cool guys, so. For people who want to build on fibers or just try it out, how How does one get whitelisted to kind of use this? Right now it's. Direct communication with us. There are a few things that you can already do in order to get access. For example, if you have a safe multi sig, you're automatically allow listed and you can deploy your filers. But if you want to try it out, we have recurrent campaigns that pop up every now and then. Or you can really just DM fibers
directly. We're usually very open to that or any one of the the the people working on on fibers. And this is both for users that want to try something non financial in crypto or show during the holidays to their family. Hey, you don't need money or speculation to use something in crypto.
And for teams that want to build on fireworks using fireworks, destroy fireworks, whatever they want, they can either go directly on GitHub, they can go on radical, or they can again message us. We're constantly talking with different teams, so we're happy to see that type of those types of interactions. Perfect. Thank you guys. It's been a real pleasure, Hedereke. Thank you. Thanks for all the great questions.
Also for putting your finger where where you know the the real discussion can happen and things might be a bit wobbly. It's always a pleasure and yeah, hope we we can return maybe in a year to show how much progress has been made. Thank you for joining us on this week's. Episode We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it.
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