Web3 Thrives: Pioneers, Challenges, and Collective Vision | John Gleeson - STORJ |

hello everyone this is web thrives Pioneers challenges in the collective Vision this is John gleon with storm J and he's a COO thank you John thank you JT all right everybody thank you for showing up for the talk um you know I know everybody who is out there walking in just kind of smelling the air outside I'm glad we're doing this in February and not July kind of smells a little bit like a new algorithmic staple coin out there but it's just livestock um so I'm here to talk about uh what it's going to take for web 3 companies to really grow and break out and get real world adoption and I'm talking about Mass adoption where web 2 companies are starting to use web 3 Tech in real world workflows so what I'm really talking about here is like not just you know dabbling their toes not just the Innovation team doing a proof of concept or a trial or getting a partnership and doing an announcement raising another round um I'm really talking about what's it going to take for the little tiny bubble there that's the web 3 utilization to be bigger than the other bubbles in that market and a lot of projects when we're talking sort of in our little sewing circles right we're we're all all sort of focused on the set of what are the barriers to adoption what are the big things that are preventing those Enterprises those smbs those individuals from taking this Tech and really running with it and from our perspective what we've seen a lot of uh it comes down to a few things right um everybody talks about wallet ux but it's more than just the wallet ux it's the user experience from end to end it's really making sure that you know when we are Building Services we're building them with a customer or an end user in mind and making sure that we can hit those those needs and solve those problems uh a lot of the time because it's a distributed service it ends up being slow it ends up being unreliable because it's all untrusted under infrastructure at the end of the day and frankly a lot of these things are the sort of the the Rube Goldberg machine or a science project way of solving what is otherwise a perfectly Wells solved problem in web 2 but we have some ideas about what's actually working uh because at storage one of the things that that we're really happy about is we are seeing really good growth and part of our hypothesis is we started with really looking at a market that we wanted to conquer and it wasn't creating decentralization necessarily although that was sort of the the heart of the the the bottoms up is finding a decentralized way to solve a specific problem in web 2 but really the why the problem we were focused on was disrupting a market and that market was Amazon S3 right object storage the largest market for storage in the world we wanted to find a way to bring all of those workloads in into web 3 and so if we think about our particular space right object storage um the outcome first right we wanted to find ways for customers to move off of the hyperscalers and onto web 3 and what that means is we had to provide a value proper them we had to address what they care about most and in the current market we're seeing a lot of growth it's because they care about reducing cost right Amazon bills are enormous they care about privacy they don't want their data being mined they want security and frankly at the broader Market more people want to participate in the cloud economy that currently costs a billion dollars if you want to crack that nut and if we can uh limit decentralized um the centralized dependencies of these Services all the better but when we're doing these things and we're solving the problems and we're trying to build this use case it's really important that the actual service that you build is good it's got to be better than the centralized op uh alternative or nobody's going to move it's got to got to be cheaper it's got to have broad-based applicability to a lot of different customers and that's what's going to help drive that adoption and that's what we're seeing as well so in the storage space that's one set of things but we're also seeing this in a lot of other areas right we're seeing a lot of traction because Cloud builds are high in this economy people want to reduce their cost and their highest element of cost other than pretty much salaries is generally their Cloud bills but there are other players in here in kind of the deep end space that are also seeing really good track and these are sort of the players who are in the AI space right people who were in decentralization they had built this pool of GPU and all of a sudden the market came to them and said oh hey we need GPU and lots of it and they were really well positioned to take advantage of that because they had built these distributed systems these distributed systems are able to scale much more broadly and much more quickly because they don't have to worry about the supply chain issue of getting new equipment they can get out there and tap into an existing Market of underutilized resources and underutilized services and bring those to Market quickly much faster than anybody else who's just in the wait list trying to get GPU purchased similarly if you look at something like live Pier Live Pier is doing a great job because they bring a service to Market that looks and feels very familiar to your web2 buyer but at the end of the day it's all web3 on the back end they have a distributed network of CPU and GPU that's doing all of the video transcoding they have hosting Services they're actually backed by storage for the uh the storage services on the back and we do all of the storage and the uh VOD on demand streaming with live Pier but the key thing about looking at why these these projects particularly are succeeding in a market where uh lagging adoption is sort of the norm for web 3 Services is kind of key so when you look at these three services and you look at what they're doing and you look at things like the web 3 index which kind of tracks usage and utilization of services you'll find that a lot of the players that are in the deepend space are at the top of utilization networks because they're solving real problems they're solving problems for people that have money to solve them and they do it in a way that's familiar and compatible so I can talk a little bit about what's driving our growth and adoption and by growth and adoption what I'm uh talking about is we have real world web 2 customers migrating off of Amazon migrating off of cloudflare Wasabi back Blaze mainstream products that are offering object storage today we're growing anywhere from 40 to 50% month over month bringing on real paid storage and the way we're able to do that is sort of focusing on some of the inherent benefits of distributed systems so we tap into 23,000 storage nodes in 105 different countries today they're operated by 10,000 different individuals and the aggregate it's the size of a very large storage Data Center and we built that by crowdsourcing it kind of acting like the Airbnb of hard drives and building that data center then gave us some really distinct advantages over the web 2 providers right we're building this all on Opex not capex we're not buying servers we're not building buildings we're not stuffing them full of hard drives we're finding existing capacity that's underutilized that people want to monetize and in many cases it's fully depreciated it's stuff where any money that gets made is absolutely attractive to the person operating it but because of that structure our costs are a lot lower we don't have to worry about that stuff so it affects our cogs it allows us to price more aggressively and in doing so the entire network benefits right 22,000 23,000 nodes all earning real money that's coming in from outside the ecosystem from a speed perspective when you have a distributed system when you have those 20,000 nodes you have all of that underutilized bandwidth available it's incredibly uh fast from a throughput perspective you can move a lot of data across the internet and it can be fast consistently anywhere in the world we don't have to build 10 data centers and replicate it 10 times all over the world the network effect of having that huge distributed system gives you a performance Advantage we are globally faster than Amazon S3 everywhere in the world we are faster and that's even with like a fmeg upload download distributed systems are generally terrible with tiny files but we are able to leverage that network of of computers all over the world and be faster from an availability perspective every distributed system out there uh allows you to sort of take advantage of the fact that because you're pushing that workload around if any component fails it's it's not a big deal because you have a ton of redundancy elsewhere in the network and so it gives us the ability to offer the equivalent of multi- region storage with a single upload and it helps anybody using that service and distributed systems kind of all have that in common that ability to distribute risk across a large amount of u of networks and because of the way uh that availability of all of those resources work it gives you durability right it means and durability means that if you upload an object if you start a workload that it's going to complete it's going to be there in it's going to endure as opposed to some of the the maybe less structured things where if you have a single Data Center and that data center goes offline like Amazon Us East does from time to time every service in the world that you love from Netflix on down goes offline with it but with the distributed system you kind of avoid that single point of failure inherently now distributed systems and in decentralization decentralized projects also you know in addition to sort of exploiting the good things about their architectures generally kind of avoid the successful ones um some of the harder aspects right so if your onboarding process is easy if you simulate an experience that is familiar to web 2 as much as possible it's going to drive adoption those friction points of wallets uh and and finding abstraction layers to solve those problems are absolutely critical to driving adoption and that familiarity is really advantageous if you have a compatibility layer if you have things that are consistently um uh uh compatible with the EXA existing infra structure that they have today it's going to make it easier to adopt they don't have to hire people with new skills or rebuild applications it just works with what uh with existing kit and then not falling into ideological traps right focusing on the customer what do they care about in certain ways they'll care about a lot of the the the things like cost speed and durability but buyers in the web 2 world don't care about decentralization and so presenting them a message that here it's decentralized they'll respond they don't buy decentralization ation but if they get all the benefits of decentralization the speed the cost the availability the durability all those good things that turns the meter for them and so it's breaking into web 2 has as much a messaging component as it does a feature and uh an interface so the things that really move the meter for us right driving adoption uh from web 2 is compatibility and performance and this wasn't easy by the way because it's hard enough to build decentralized service let alone make one that's good and then make it better than something like Amazon that's had a 15year head start and billions of dollars to put into it and so from our perspective that compatibility layer we put up an S3 Gateway on the front this is how all of the apps and Enterprise talk and it spoke a native uh web 3 protocol on the back end we think of it kind of like as the the web 3 mullet right it's all business up front talking web 2 and party in the back talking web 3 um but a lot of this is is actually also related to price um and it's not price in the terms of like uh token value or tokenomics or anything like that it's really about price uh in terms of value right and being able to come in and establish a price point where ultimately Enterprise will look at it and say it's so inexpensive I can't not at least take your meeting and have a conversation with you and then once they see the value being able to actually get real dollars in from Web Two into a web 3 economy is absolutely critical for scale right it takes it from a project to an ecosystem in which you can build businesses uh whole data centers can contribute a ton of capacity to an ecosystem and monetize it in a way that that is material to their bottom line and so when I talk about the web 3 mullet when I talk about those interfaces um we talk about those in terms of like bridging those web two and web 3 worlds and there's a whole bunch of benefits to to the decentralization there's a whole bunch of benefits to having sort of a minimum viable Central ization an interface that's familiar to web to and it gives you those sort of two sides of the coin right that whole decentralization aspect gives you the Privacy the security the immutability all those benefits around performance availability data sovereignty owning your own data and the economics that really Mak sense for people when they're using it but at the same time you have a similar set of features in web 2 that just the compatibility layer that same familiar experience and so when you bring those two things together it really allows you to break out and break into that space so what does this mean for decentralized services going forward right when I think of um all of the services out there that are building applications and not the ones that are talking about any any sort of transaction that could be in any kind of um of blockchain and and cross compatibility and all of that good stuff and composability I mean Solutions I mean things that solve problems for customers that have money to pay to solve them in a differentiated way I mean putting the decent and decentralized like making them good so compatibility is key um you know not just with web 2 but a kind of across web 3 as well and so what when you think about web 3 today in even over the last few years it's still a lot of discreet Individual Services and point solutions that are composable into an application layer but nobody's going to do that work right everybody just wants something that's already a solution that works and what we're seeing is in web 3 people putting together a a bunch of disparate Services into Solutions things that solve a problem my favorite example is one of ours so it's probably why but our integration with live Pier is actually an end to- end solution that we're winning in web 3 we take that solution to the National Association of broadcasters event the largest median entertainment show in North America in Vegas it'll be there next month and we will take that application out there and we'll integrate with Munch of media workflows but this is a viable solution that is 80% lower cost than Amazon just as performant just as scalable with an 80% lower carbon footprint and you can take that message to a web 2 audience and they will buy it and when they try it it's good web 3 Solutions also have to be scalable and not just scalable to the sense of like thinking in terms of like how many transactions per second will this do before the blockchain falls over I mean scalable in terms of thinking in terms of what uh the web 2 world looks like so when I think of Amazon I think of Amazon's 16 exabytes of storage that's a lot um and for storage to store that storage a on our Network we' need 440 exabytes right we need we have an expansion Factor where we're storing that on lots of things that's an enormous amount of storage and if we store normal data on there I don't even know what how many zeros that is but it's also a lot um we need a lot of space and if you're storing that on file coin the way they do it they need a zetabyte and that's even bigger so these are these are scales at which billion dooll companies struggle to sort of get to that scale Amazon is obviously the biggest they are much bigger than Google they are much bigger than Microsoft Azure right and everybody else is a rounding error but web 3 technologies have this unique ability to tap into underutilized capacity all over the world and actually achieve bigger scale than some of the largest organizations in the world and I think this is what's out in front of us this is our challenge is to provide those those layers Bridge those gaps bring those web 2 workloads in to drive Revenue success and ecosystem sustainability in web 3 Innovation is all in web 3 we are doing things differently I look at our own project we are the first net new architecture to try and disrupt Amazon since Amazon brought Cloud to the market in the first place everything else has just been a met too carbon copy of their existing approach trying just to eek out more and more narrow margins this is a net new disruptive approach it's like Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry it's like uber and lift disrupted kind of wrecked the taxi industry all for the better um this is an approach that we can take to existing cloud services existing Financial uh systems everything in web 2 can be disrupted if we do it right but we have to focus on the customer because even though the Innovation is in web 3 the workloads and the money today is still in web to and we need to bring that into our ecosystem if we're going to succeed so that's my talk I appreciate you're listening thank you if anybody has any questions you can ask me or you can find me on telegram LinkedIn Twitter whatever your choice is uh I'm surprisingly unoriginal across all three uh got a question in the middle sir hi thank you very much for your talk I represent uh hell which is a deepin aggregator and storage is one of the first protocols that we've integrated into our platform can you give us a an update and snapshot of usage of storage uh money spent and and what you expect over the next 12 months sure so um if you want to kind of look at uh at traction Revenue metrics we're very transparent so you can see uh Revenue uh tracking on the web 3 index you can see usage on storage stats. I think it is uh but if you search uh storage stats and you search storage info you'll get public dashboards that are maintained by other people that are pulling information about the network to give you exactly the size utilization full breakdown on egress data stored accounts registered the whole nine yards so you get a really good footprint just on publicly available stuff in terms of the next 12 months um we are relentlessly focused on providing a disruptive service in web 2 and growing Revenue that's like job number one so we are adding more compatibility uh this quarter we're bringing out um uh S3 versioning and following that will'll be object lock and basically once you've got that set of features with what we currently have today we are immediately compatible with the uh with two two subs segments of the object storage Market mediate entertainment where we're uh rapidly growing in the media uh uh workflows for Productions and CDN origin but this gives us a huge leg up in media archiving and then in the second area it's a backup services and so today we work with most of the backup uh products today but then there are things like uh vhm and haou that require some specific features around um object lock and versioning to achieve sort of their um immutable uh storage for certain compliance use cases so those are like the you know kind of product feature-wise and then on the web 3 side we're continuing to find projects to do Integrations with that really bring well-rounded Solutions so we're working with aosh to bring together uh compute and storage um and that's been working well we have a number of joint customers together but we want to scare that scale that up uh we're going to continue to double down with livepure because it's just working really really well we have a lot of joint customers in that space um and it's really just about Relentless focus and so we have um you know just a ton of progress in terms of Enterprise offerings achieving uh you know uh compliance requirements for large Enterprises that need sock 2 or whatever um so it's just uh you know it's the boring stuff right focusing on cogs CAC LTV um the the SAS metrics that really Drive uh growth and then all of that boring stuff really translates to Rapid 50% month-over-month growth kicking ass against web 2 uh companies right and and that's what I'm really excited about um hopefully that answered your question maybe long answer to short question question all right anybody else all right well thank you very much I appreciate it with 16 seconds to spare thank you have a great day