This is epicenter episode, 482, with guest joah thorsten. Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies project and people driving decentralisation and the blockchain revolution. I'm literally can't and I'm here with my hair Roy and today, we're speaking with do, with those citizen, who is the technical co-founder of three-box Labs, the creator of ceramic and creative. Ceramic, is this data storage solution? For web three projects and we will talk about this in just a
little bit. But just before, I'd like to tell you about our sponsor this week, our sponsor this week is Omni Omni is your new favorite Mighty change Mobile wallet. I'll need supports more than 25 protocols, so you can manage all of your assets in one place. But what's really special about? Omni is what you can do. Inside the wallet want to get yet on the allows you to get the best API.
With zero fees and three Taps need to swap on the Aggregates are major Bridges and dex's so you can Bridge into up across all supported networks in one transaction directly in your wallet love and ft is Omni offers the broadest and a few support of any wallet. So you can collect and manage your favorite and F Keys across all chains in one place. I'm need through these, the easiest way to use web three and it's fully safe custodial. Meaning, you never has Factory.
Trust anyone with your assets other than yourself and they support Ledger's. Well, If I'm near Triad Omni dot Airport. So it's a pleasure to have you on. Yeah, thanks. Great to be here. I remember you from ages ago at consensus. So clearly you've been in the ecosystem or wire, tell us what you've been up to?
Yeah, well started I was playing around with it there even before the launch in like 2015, did a bachelor project the LED to an internship at consensus and eventually started working part-time at consensus. As I was finishing my masters in complex, adaptive systems. And so at the time, the project I was working at a consensus called you bored. So this was this early identity Focus project in the theorem ecosystem so some of the older listeners might remember that.
And as you port, that's essentially where I met my co-founders. And we started actually incubating inside of you port with eventually has become ceramic Network. Right. So how did you come up with the idea of settlement or rather? What is the grand idea behind ceramic?
Yeah, so one thing that we noticed with you port was that we're building this identity solution and we kind of had to build our own wallet and even back in like 2016, 2017, it felt like it doesn't seem right to compete with metal mask and all of the other walls that were was around at the time.
And so, one of the inquiries that led to the creation of our first prototype called three-box Jas, Was essentially like, hey can we build a system that allows allows developers to build more data Rich applications but it works with any wallet. And so we're prototyping on that and that led to this three-box JS SDK and after like that having been used by a bunch of people over time, we draw some main insights from that experience and and created
hammock. Thinking back a while ago, the first thing that I kind of became aware of under the three-box umbrella. Was this chat box? And we actually, at the time we kind of integrated into a prediction Market platform that we were offering at the time. I mean, still around, you can still use them but I mean and basically, it was just a way to kind of put comments and stuff. So how did you get from there to? You know, this very comprehensive data source?
Sushi. The JavaScript SDK that we're building was very ambitious. We're trying to build this completely decentralized in browser system that would allow you to make some basic social features, like comments and profiles, and things like this and have that be live inside of your browser. So, that was using a JavaScript implementation of ipfs at the time.
And some of the learnings we got from, That is that these kind of data structures that enable this really local first type of applications or really powerful Primitives. And they are have similarities to blockchains in that you have these verifiable data structures that can be shared across multiple nodes, but doing actually doing it and starting
to build that in browser. First is really difficult and so we took the core insides of like these data structures how we can deal with identities and how we can create basically use Updates and events users create over time to create an actual database and take this and build a node application that your front-end applications can talk to. So in the same way you talk to you like an ethereal node, you can also talk to a ceramic. Now they could deal with more of
like the data Rich features. I was going through all these ceramic ceramic documentation on the on the web today and maybe I'll tell you my imagination of how like, why you need something like ceramic or how this idea comes about and maybe you could corroborate, if if I understand it, right?
So to me the story really starts with Just just the observation that, you know, the fact that you know I have data on is helium and then I can use multiple front ends or multiple user interfaces for for my accounts is really cool. And you always start to wonder why doesn't like the entire internet stack work that way inning start to wonder? Okay, why doesn't she Chill media work. That way I can put my data onto Facebook and then I can use some other user interface to Facebook.
And this is like this is like is quite a standard thought experiment. Many of us have done and there are many projects that go down in this direction. So I think one of the things that one starts to realize When you want this kind of composability that like they should be multiple user interfaces to some data. I have is you don't really need. Blockchains or consensus all the
time, right? So if your financial data that data should lie on is helium or if you have a dow that Financial logic, should lie on is helium, but if it's my personal data, That I want to put somewhere and allow lots of people to build applications. Then my personal data may not need the blockchain at all and I necessarily don't want to pay the cost of the blockchain consensus at. Also start to need some kind of data layer where I can put I can
push my data. And and then other people can build applications on top of top of that. So that's kind of like the direction. Ceramic goes down. Goes toward, but what ceramic is kind of also. Adding is the observation that for for good interoperability to exist among multiple applications. We need no standard ways of doing identity, standard ways of doing profile standard ways of doing X, like all of these news feeds and things like that and you're allowing for such standards to to exist.
So is that right? Is it is like a data. It's a data layer that enables people to build you eyes for these. You eyes to be on interoperable with each other. Yeah, I think that that's a good overview. I think there's a few things there, I could double click on. So first of all like the financial aspect of blockchains blockchains are hard to scale because we have this requirement of what in this resistance is
called strong consistency. That means that basically all nodes in the network need to be able to have an agreement, all the time, like what the state of the system is, and this is how we prevent double spins. And in a system that doesn't deal with any kind of assets but it's more data that's produced
by the user. We can kind of loosen that constraint because we're fine with what is called eventual consistency and so we don't need to always have all the nodes have the same agreement on what the state of the system is. And the nice thing is that we can also have different nodes, only synchronize, different aspects of the network. So you might care only about a subset of users or subset of data models in the network. And this is really what we
achieve with ceramic. Yeah. And then the second Point around like standards and things like this. I think that's something that is really tricky and and our approach to it has been to like provide examples where we don't want to like set the standards right? We want the community to come up with the things that works for that. Applications because ultimately like, we are not going to be able to know what the different applications needs.
And so, the approach we take to it in in our graph database product which were building on top of ceramic called compose, DB is that developers can come and create the data models, they can onboard their users and have their uses write data to these data models. And then other developers can import these data models into their applications and kind of get the onboarding of those users for free because the data is already there. So that's the composability that
you were talking about. I have lots of questions for kind of these for lots of lots of different facets here but kind of, I think I want to step back and kind of look at the larger landscape of Data Solutions in the web three space first. So I think our listeners may be familiar with products such as we even ipfs and sire. And so, how would you kind of We contextualize ceramic within that landscape. How is it different or similar to those? So, you're all of the three
products. You mentioned their focus first on this, like, how can we store files? And I can restore like pieces chunks of data in an efficient way that can scale and those are all very useful. Things to have in the ecosystem, like storage of massive amount of data is, is incredibly important. Our Focus From the Start has been on Users their identity in like how to make these systems easy to use for people.
So in the ceramic instead of having creating blocks where you either have deals with minors to store data or you have big blocks that include a bunch of data. As in some of these systems through we use. Let we don't really have blocks in ceramic. We rely on the security of a theorem and instead each user creates an event stream, Of actions, they take in the
network. This event stream you can think of kind of like a micro Ledger that is signed by the users key and all these updates, we can verify that the come from the user. And since we have like all like, if we take that together, we can have a view of multiple users with all their independent event streams and we can compose that into a database view. So it's like a different
approach to 22 the architecture. But but does it mean that basically the only the event Creator can write to the event stream? Because basically if different people have like right permissions, this won't work, right? Yes, in ceramic right now. Each event stream has a controller, which is essentially a user account. So, right now, there's support for, I think three different block chain wallets most users. Use the varium if they're in based wallets.
And so every event stream is controlled by one account, but then you can take multiple event streams and listen, to all these events and create a combined view of that. Okay. So say one of the event streams is say. My Twitter output, so things I tweet. But also things I like and things I retweet. And so on, you could just kind
of this will kind of fit the. I don't know whether broader social media data structure or Twitter data structure and then it can be compared to other people's data structures. And can be compiled into a view of a decentralized version of Twitter where they see, I can say how I want to how I want to view things or which things I want to prioritize.
Guys are which things I want to be showed because basically, the way that social media works right now is that I mean obviously there's you know, very complex algorithms at work to kind of calculate what to show you but what exactly they do and how they operate and what they prioritize, this is this is not visible and there's no competition as to this. So basically it would kind of ceramic enable.
Other people to kind of build on the same data streams and kind of showcase this differently or prioritize things with differently. The power of ceramic in this case is that we can actually start to mimic a little bit more. How the architecture of kind of web to social media works because web to social media networks like Twitter or Facebook.
They don't scale on a strong consistency model like a blockchain they have they have some databases, they have event streams in their systems and they have a bunch of micro services that they care of different tasks. So we can imagine a very primitive social network on. Around make that just like oh here's my tweets and then when I follow Frederick in mayor, I use compost that into my view. But if I follow, like thousands of people, that's not really
going to be efficient. But the cool thing with ceramic is that they could actually be a service somewhere that ingests, all of these strings of my followers as and as a micro service run, some computation over it and outputs that in a new event stream. And then, Then I consume that and this computation could be done in a verifiable matter.
Either. It's a deterministic computation that I can rerun and see that it was correct or maybe in the future, if we can have like very efficient seek a piece like that could even be that. But for the time being like having compute actually attributed, by in the ceramic stream, by The Smokers micro service provider actually gives us some Um better trust in the system. And I can actually choose which of these service providers that I want to build my my stream of tweets or what have you.
Okay, I think one thing that I kind of don't understand yet is I mean, you do distinguish between different kinds of consensus. But why do you need a consensus in the ceramic Network at all? I mean, if it's just a decentralized storage layer and it can be proven that basically my data stored, why does it need consensus? Also, we need some some basic form of consensus, right? Like if your node and my node, get the exact same events.
We want to be sure that we end up in the same state if we don't end up in the same state that's bad. So it's not like a global consensus that in the in the sense of blockchains, where there is an agreed-upon state that everyone didn't ever get grease on. It's more like if we consume the same events we end up at the same state so it would be terrible.
Check them. Yeah, in distributed systems, this is called consensus like that that your knowledge can actually arrive at the same conclusion. Okay, I think then I just have very different mental representation of consensus because to me, consensus kind of is it is by default a global thing. But I think this is maybe just a Corruption of kind of how the actual technical term is used by and learn communities.
Okay? So then I kind of then I kind of understand that part you said that you guys build on e theorem. So basically what's kind of the connection between ceramic and deuterium Yeah, so I mentioned this event streams. There are signed by end users so they're good for like, okay. Now we know we have attribution to who created what and who wrote, what into the network. But we also want some some guarantees about when certain events took place and this is where ethereum comes into the
picture. So every once in awhile event streams are anchored into the blockchain, and what this means is that That there is a hash or some other kind of vector commitment that's included in the blockchain that basically allows any consumer of this event stream to convince themselves that. Okay this event was published at least at this point in time and obviously like making one ethereum transaction per event stream update would not really
be scalable. So what we do is we create a Merkle tree That batch has a bunch of updates to a bunch of different streams and puts the root of that Merkle, Tree on Jay. So earlier, you mentioned that data in ceramic will be eventually consistent, which, which kind of means that, if, if let's say, I push to updates. So let's say I'm using the ceramic Twitter and I push two posts and one. After the other ultimately, the ceramic network will decide on which post came first and which
came second. Right? And they might be a span of time where the network hasn't made a decision, but ultimately it will eventually it will make make this decision. That's how I think of eventual consistency. Yeah. And in the case of your personal posts, you actually, when you make post one, and then you make post to your post, you will actually point back to your previous posts.
So like for your personal things, it will be like ordered but between like two different users, it's not ordered in the When done, we would rely on these anchors. Okay, so how do you reach eventual consistency in the network? Is it is it down to, is it down to the Anchor in the ethereum blockchain meanings like some ceramic node at some point of time is going to put push an anchor and then whatever ordering they did is the ordering of the ceramic network, is it like that or is there a
different mechanism here? So based on the anchor, you can look at the Block Chain and see like, hey, that's this block those produce was the block out and what's the timestamp in this block and so if you have two conflicting events in the network, you can look at like which one came first and then you would know how to choose I'm actually I'm actually curious like so data. There have been these computer science data structures called like CR DTS conflict free data
types are essentially. It's a data structure. Different people can push updates to it and they will be eventual consistency of the data. Without there being like an active voting base consensus, like in proof of stake, proof of stake Networks. So, you have ways of getting consistency of data in a decentralized network without, you know, practical Byzantine fault tolerant consensus. I you using something like that in ceramic as well. Or or or IUI, you actually
getting eventual consistency. We are some other mechanism. Yeah. So, let's sociology thesis is something that we're quite familiar with we're not actually using them. Yet, but it's something we are intending to use as we improve the protocol. So right now, if we think about a single event stream, a single event stream, is only allowed to have one canonical history, kind of in the same way at watching has like one canonical chain.
And if there is a conflict, if there's a fork in this, in this event log, then we would basically choose the the fork Was anchored earliest and this is this actually is the property that allows us to do key rotation in a secure way. And that's a whole other rabbit hole, which I have an article on our block on by the way. But for many cases, we don't actually need to choose one of these Forks.
We can actually use like do a merge and then do a senior TT based logic to figure out the complete ordering of these events. So that's that is an improvement that we're planning in the protocol. Okay, so so essentially now the way I'm imagining ceramic is okay, there's this huge Lake of data. I can push my event stream to it and by virtue of how my event
stream is designed. And the fact that ultimately this network will anchor something on the ethereum blockchain, this kind of going to be eventual consistency in the network where the network can agree on what events came. First. And what events came came. Second roughly. That's, that's, that's my, that's my picture. Yeah, exactly.
So if you have two nodes in the network and they observe the same events they even though there might not be talking to each other, but they have seen the same events they can arrive at the same conclusion. So let's talk about the nodes in the network, right? So basically, anyone can what are the requirements for running a ceramic node?
Yeah, so running, a ceramic node in itself, it doesn't have like super big requirements because when you start a ceramic node, you don't have any data on it and then you have to tell your node that hey I want to subscribe to this particular event stream and so if you're familiar with With something like ipfs, where you have to, like, pin individual objects, you have to subscribe to individual event streams and
ceramic. So, for most users of ceramic right now, you actually or the developers that are building on ceramic, they are running their own nodes to support their applications and and right now and ceramic, there's no like built-in redundancies one thing that's we're doing with this database product. Composed, the be that I mentioned is the ability to synchronize data between nodes so that they can have the same view.
For example, if you have like a blog post model, we can have two different applications that build on this blog. So that's like kind of Allowing nodes to use like, subscribe to the data which they care about now. That's fine, kind of for developers but if I'm an end user I don't have any guarantees that like these two blog applications will be online. So one thing we are going to add in the future is a network incentive where you as a user or you as a developer can pay the network.
And pay I said up Notes to keep this data available in the network. but right now nodes are run mainly by application developers that wants to leverage the functionality of ceramic You kind of everyone kind of stores their own data. And there's no way to kind of say I would back up, someone else's data or someone else will backup. My data is just basically all in my own ceramic node know, you can definitely, it's a public open network. So anyone can subscribe to any stream in the network.
So I could, for example, subscribe to to your stream and provide like a redundant copy of the Stream, So as we kind of alluded to earlier, this is for very specific types of data.
It's kind of not, it's not a general storage solution, you kind of we already talked about social networks for a bit, but what I kind of the articles that kind of what, what what, what kind of data usage is this gear towards So, yeah, so there's there's around for different niches that we look at being more common today and one of the most prominent ones right now is reputation. So we have projects like get
going and disco. There are putting different kinds of verifiable credentials on ceramic that are associated with your ethereum address, or your other blockchain address and then be able to calculate Late some kind of score based on that so and get coins. Case you have a civil resistance score but we already talked about social. So there's a few different applications building different kinds of web. Three posts, social networks or business. One cyber connected and other
one. Then another category is knowledge graphs so there we have mainly projects within the decentralized, science-based D, PSI. One of the the most furthest along there is lateral, they're building, essentially a knowledge graph that represents scientific discourse and the cool thing there, of course is like can look at this knowledge graph and since it's stored on ceramic you can see who actually contributed what to do. Us Knowledge Graph because it's cryptographically link to your
ethereum address. And what they want to do eventually is to trickle down payments to people who actually contribute valuable knowledge. Then another Niche, I think in the ceramic communities Bell, tolling. So basically, if we think about the Dow ecosystem, today we use a lot of, like, centralized tools. We use Discord, we use hosted forms that Maybe like one guy on the Dow is hosting and like this seems very fragile.
And so one example here so when we could be used to like replace these things would like a more decentralized and resilient infrastructure one place where this is starting to happen. In particular is the gnosis safe Community where the safe app has a Centralized back in that. These stores, a bunch of transactions that are pending and may be signed by some of the
delegates. So there's this company called thousand systems, they're building a decentralized, save registry for these pending transactions on in ceramic. So, those are some of the like use cases, we see today, I think there's like interesting things in the future that might be more speculative, but around data provenance that could be like These new language and image models. We're seeing in AI, there's a bunch of copyright problems.
Ceramic could be used to like provide attribution to who actually did what, and how that feed into these systems. I think we want to have Supply chains have more attribution in the systems and similar with, with iot. So that's things. That's worth exploring the future. Does it have to be public data by default? I mean, can I put private data on ceramic and have it? Stay private or only accessible to some? Yeah, this is a great question,
and it's nuanced, right? So, by default, ceramic is a fully public network. Now, the first thing you might want to think about when putting some data on ceramics, it. Hey, I can encrypt it. So you can certainly encrypt data put it on ceramic and this will be private, but you have to think about the future, right? Because in the future, we're going to have a very fancy quantum computers. That might break some of our cryptography.
So if you're using any kind of like current asymmetric cryptography, your private data might not be so private anymore, and that might be. You might also not be like satisfied with like ciphers that exist today. They might be broken, even though they're like supposed to be Quantum secure, it really depends on like your risk. And like how private this data really is in any decentralized system that is publicly verifiable.
You have this problem. So the only way you can really be safe, that your data is completely secure is probably to encrypt it and store it on your own machine or you trust someone to store. For you and then you just that they don't get hacked and so on it's there's a possibility that we could explore in the future. Some kind of Access Control
logic in ceramic ware. Only if you have an authorized Identity or like account you're able to synchronize certain subsets of data but that's not something that we really focus on right now. We think there's like a lot of exciting things in the public. Data or public but encrypted, data ecosystem. So yeah, so my imagination of ceramic is now okay, so there's a network, there's lots of nodes on the network. I can publish my event stream in
the early days of the network. It's probably nice. If I publish my event stream, either way that it doesn't contain my private data or it rather contains data that I am comfortable sharing with the world and there's eventual consistency in the networks and network will agree on what came first. Eventually.
Okay, understood. So we have that basic primitive but allude to the fact that, okay, you want to allow people to build applications on top where, where ultimately ultimately their interoperable with each other, that's on your website. So what is the meaning of interoperability for applications on top of ceramic and And what might be some of the tools you have built on top to enable it. Yeah, so at its core like ceramic is an event streaming protocol.
And this is not something that like most developers are familiar with in web to like, there are few different events streaming Solutions, but it's more of like a thing that experienced back. End, Engineers used to really scale to applications to like, handle a lot of load. And so we need some tooling to Actually usable and easy to use
for developers. And so, what we created for this is composed DB to compose DB is a graph database that allows developers to Define data models, which is basically a schema for your data. And this model you can, it's kind of analogous to a Smart contract where you define the data model and then users come to an application.
They create objects or documents that conform to this schema and then the developer can query this data and read like, hey, here's all the objects that conform to the schema and buy all these different users or query like subsets of that. And you can also have relationships between different models. So, if you have a blog post you might have a comment that points to the blog post and you will be able to query like hey give me all blog posts.
We're like this subset of blog post and also all the comments related to that subset of blog posts. So that's kind of big, the graph aspect of that and this tooling is built in something that's familiar with too many developers called graphql. So you actually Define your data models and graphql and you query read and write the data using graphql as well and compost, it be So, I understand that, basically, when I write data to my own data stream, I have to
choose a data structure. But how, how is the knowledge about which data structure? I'm using percolated in the network? Because as I understand that today, I you I host my own data. So how is, how is the lateral connection made? So, you can run an indexer by spitting up your ceramic node and towing it to index and say like, hey, what are all the data models in the network?
Or if you have some application that you really like, and you would like to use like, oh, I need that data, then you can just look at if their application is open source. You can look at their application code and it's like, pull, pull in the data model from there. So don't like, this is the early days, I think what, what we're
hoping to see in the future? There is some kind of Explorer or catalog of data models where people can use browse the different data model, see the popularity and how much usage they have. And so on and so that experience should become much easier over time. And that is also what happens. If there's two competing standards for the same data model that basically you just check what gets more usage or what people are more because you kind of, there's a lock-in effect.
I mean, if you want to be composable the number of things you can put, composable with is super relevant, right? Yeah. So there might be two competing standards for like a user profile. And you might want to choose two, most popular one, or you might just want to have a super application that can include both profiles in this, like, kind of display the information.
That's, that's best it because then you have like reach to more more existing users but really it's like enabling the developer Community to figure out what's best for their needs. So but data models are by default open source, right? So I can use any data model that's out there. Yeah, exactly. Okay so maybe let's talk about the economics of everything a little bit.
So if at the moment I kind of i-i'm not actually guaranteed any redundancy is there any way to actually monetize data that I make available? Yeah. So right now is there any because it fully peer-to-peer Network and anyone has been up a node and replicate the data. So I think the the primary use case right now is not for people who want to monetize their data, it's more for like, hey, where'd
our community. We want to make sure that are pending transactions or discussion governance, Forum doesn't disappear and then you can have like, multiple individuals in this. Wedding in this style, like providing redundancy for this data. I think monetization of data is something that's really interesting. It's not our core Focus right now and ceramic is primarily a Data Network right now.
I think there's a lot of interesting combinations that could be made with financial systems, like ethereum and other blockchains where we can Leverage The Best of Both Worlds. Like maybe like N ftes and Jersey 20 tokens for doing some of the financial aspects of social media or knowledge, graphs, or something else. And then using ceramic for that really high throughput, scalable data system, Okay. Yeah, I think I understand where
you're coming from. I'm still kind of, I think I still have a couple of mental disconnect. So if basically, if currently people kind of replicate data, you know, altruistically and are not compensated for this. How do I protect myself against censorship? How do I protect myself? Against kind of having people replicate my data either in complete lie or you know maliciously differently than I, I wanted it to be sword. Yeah. So you can certainly not.
If you have your data, you're running your own ceramic note and have that data there. You can certainly not like guarantee that other nodes in the network right now can like are providing exactly the same data. But however, if there is one on as node in the network, any honest, no disease. Like is wanting to synchronize data, your data, would eventually be able to get up to speed and and find all of the data that your Note is providing. So, - there's one on us node.
The data will be in the network, but how do I decide which one the honest version is right? So say my I was one of the hostess for my Dau community and my computer went up in flames and there there's like a couple of people who kind of hosted the same content and now they are in disagreement about which the real content is. Hmm. So the only thing that these nodes can do is to remove data and if your note that you know, as honest disappears, yeah.
Then you can have to trust that they are providing all the data that was there before but they can't like say that hey this data is in Compton completely different or here's a bunch of new data like they can only say here's all the data or like a subset of the data because all the data is signed by the end users that are participants in the Darwin. that's not really something you can fake and so, Yeah, it's be clear like this is this is the current state of the network.
We are planning to add a network incentive where either developers or communities or individuals can pay to make sure that that data is kept available in the network. Could you add something like a proof of completeness or so? yeah, I mean I think that's like kind of wood block chains to like they have this completeness because they have like this Global state in an end eventually consistent system.
You can't really know if there's like some piece of data that someone's been hiding for a long time and then eventually reveals because there isn't like a the same completeness or time you kind of have to let go of some of those guarantees to get this more scalable system. Okay, that, that that's fair. So we kind of talked about potential ways to kind of generate revenue from streams as a user. What about Ceramics? We see how it does.
How's ceramic financier? How's it going to be financed in the long run? Yeah. So as I mentioned ceramic is a fully peer-to-peer Network right now. Anyone can run a node there's a few aspects that we think it makes sense to introduce some kind of token model. So the aspect right now that is the biggest cost of the network as a whole and that three bucks Labs is currently subsidizing is the anchoring process.
So like actually making the unchain ethereum transactions, that's something that we were, we wanted To decentralized as soon as possible. So that it's more of like a network activity where you participating in the network. You participate also to this process of anchoring things, so that's one aspect. The other aspect is the availability of data. So having the ability for users to pay for their data to be available and node providers to
get paid by the network. To use like running node and keep some subset of the data network of data, in the network available. I think that's. That's also like key to understand it. Like once we have this logic and in system for nodes to be compensated, we're likely we can actually have each node. Only needs to provide a subset of the network and we can have this decentralisation without having the Throughput limitation, we have currently in blockchains. I hope that answered your question.
Yeah it does answer my question and so you already talked about kind of the four different niches that you feel could benefit from building on ceramic. There's already a large number of projects already building on ceramic. Can you talk about kind of the ceramic ecosystem and which projects you excited about? Yes, I mentioned some of them already. So I think the largest one right now is get going that they're
building this passport. Functionality on top of ceramic disco is building their data back back system. And in The Social Network in each, there is like orbis and cyber connect. They're both building different kinds of social networks or braces, definitely doing a bunch of interesting things there and they are using some other security. Multi-party compute system to actually store encrypted data on ceramic.
So that's pretty exciting. They're providing like an SDK for people to integrate comments and that kind of social functionality in in similar way that was on the the previous Omen prediction Market, I believe it was called that we mentioned in the beginning. So what three bucks JS did way back. Lateral is a project in the design space that I mentioned before the building These scientific discourse graphs and the Dowling ecosystem, I mentioned that the safe decentralized.
Safe registry. I think I think the Dowling space is there's a lot of opportunity there once people realize that this this like resilience aspect is actually rather important. And what's on the roadmap for this year? Yeah. So for this year next up is the release of composed to be on ceramic magnet. So that's something we're planning to go live with that if Denver. So that's the end of February early March. So that that's kind of what we're in the team.
Are the most excited about right now beyond that, there's a bunch of improvements that we want to make in terms of developer experience and performance to the composted be graph database. And we're also working to make a lot of improvements on the core event streaming layer. So, right now there's a pretty tight coupling between the event streaming layer and compose the
be, we want to decouple this. So the event streaming layer is more on its own and it essentially also enable other people to build databases or different types of micro services and so on. So those are like some of the most eminent Isis over the next year. I'm trying to wrap my head around this problem, that a lot of a lot of what ceramic is doing. Seems very similar to the to the work done by protocol labs in the ipfs file coin. I coin combo.
So in my imagination of Ceramics, if I think like ceramic versus ipfs ipfs is similar right, like, I can put some data into ipfs, but unless I run my node, unless I kind of replicate my own data, it can get deleted, but nobody can mess with the Integrity of that data. That's the same seems very similar across ceramic and and ipfs ipfs. Does not provide eventual consistency. So there will be no Global ordering of events, but ceramic
does. So that seems to be a big key difference, ipfs natively, did Not have. Yeah, a lot of incentives. Baked into it and ceramic. As of today, also doesn't have incentives baked into it. But then protocol Labs build file coin, where They were incentives. And people can basically be guaranteed that any data, they put into ipfs, will be replicated by file called, and made available and ceramic also seems to make take steps in in that kind of Direction.
I'm trying to understand. Like what's the meaningful difference between between these two ecosystems and why would developers prefer one of the ecosystems over the other in this case, why would somebody prefer? Take over the other other ecosystem, perfect. So I will comment on like what these systems do today to my understanding at least in the protocol apps ecosystem and and what the differences are today because things think things are
likely to change in the future. So I believe this is really good. If you have like static files, right? I can put a file, I get the hash or what they call a CID of that file and now I can synchronize that across The network and do a bunch of fun things for that. And I have integrity proof in this hash But there's no way to like update this file because if I update the file you get a new hatch, right? And so there's no way to have like a an easy way to keep track of updates in.
In ceramic, our core Focus has been actually one important thing to know is actually ceramic is using the same data model as ipfs called, I PL D and that's how we represent. This hatchling event log and the main thing we add on top of that is that we provide signal like a signature system. So we have attribution of like who created words and I can't like let me go in a little bit in how that works.
So essentially when you come to an application that uses ceramic, there's a session key created in your browser, you sign sign in with the theory of message with your wallet, the basically delegates some permissions to this session key on behalf of your ethereum a This or other blotching actress.
And now the user can actually use the application, like they would use any web publication without having to like for every like and for every comment there's like a pop-up that we need to sign in their wallet like that, the user experience wouldn't be great. So I think yeah, that's that's like one of the key differences is that there's like focus on those making the user experience of how we do attributions really
well. And in ipfs natively, you do And really have a distribution and in, currently involved coin, it's really good for storing large files in large chunks of data, in a kind of backup manner, but it's not right now. Like something you can easily query and build like feature, Rich applications on top. And so that has been our core
focus with ceramic. And so we see, we see our, our technology, as kind of like, it's kind of taking the best of like ethereum and Ifs emerging that to create a system that is like enables developers to really build something meaningful. I also compare ceramic to orbit a little bit because this this fundamental idea that they should be data and then they should be lot of, like, people should be able to build you eyes for for interoperable data.
This actually this value kind of repeats in many different ecosystems and orbit is another ecosystem in, which this, this This value repeats and essentially honor, bit the data you put on herb. It is also such that many people can build different device to it. So what? Of course, when you look at the difference between herb it and ceramic. I think like the trade-off space here is something like in orbit, you can push private data to Herb it quite easily.
Like it's, it's designed for for privacy. That's, that's a strength that orbit offers along with data interoperability, but then the big big challenge of weakness of herb it offers on the other side is, It's a completely new tech stack right from the ground up, starting from operating system to networking protocol. And so, and to even programming language. So it it's the case that the ambition in herb, it is so big that they just might end up easily out competed by much simpler systems.
That also provide application interoperability like like ceramic So that's how I tend to view that rid of. What are your thoughts on how ceramic and orbit differ from each other? Yeah, so so I'm I'm afraid I can't make like super neurons comments here because I'm not
intimately familiar with irbid. But from what I understand you have your kind of own kind of a virtual private server with orbit, which you could run on your computer or someone else's computer and that there you have the private data in the way, which we talked about earlier, where yes, it's private.
If you host it yourself or you trust the person that hosts it But you don't necessarily have like public verifiability, and so that's, that's like a core thing that we've been focused on in ceramic, like how can we have public verifiability and then add privacy features on top of that? But since we're coming from like the ethereum blockchain space, the aspect of public verifiability and that neutrality that provides is been one of our kind of core
principles. So I've also seen that setup make raised a quite a big funding around in the in the recent past. So how was that funding around structured? And what what what what did people buy in that funding round essentially and what kind of incentives? Does, does your funding round imply for the future? I'm probably not the best person to answer this question because it was led both mainly by my
co-founders. But yeah, what we essentially sold is equity in the three bucks Labs company and there's also a token warrants in a potential token, in the ceramic Network. Fantastic Joey. So if someone wants to build on ceramic or on a ceramic node, where should they go? To kind of find out more about documentation and speak with people who are already doing this? Yes, I think the main place to go for everything as ceramic top Network.
And if we specifically interested in developer documentation, Ian's, we have a developer portal at developers.google.com a cloud Network. Good, fantastic, thank you for coming on. Joey this is super interesting. Yeah, thank you very much. This was great fun. 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 podcast. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast, go to epicenter dot TV /, subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen, while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released.
If you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow On Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them but thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week. On Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them but thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.