Data Coding Network & FlexNode - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

my name is Mel Medard I'm co-founder and CEO of optimum I'm Al leave from MIT uh where I hold the NC chair for software science in engineering for the entire School of Engineering uh and the work that Optimum is based on comes out of more than a dozen years of work of research at MIT uh and why do we say that this is a new model for everything that's happening in web 3 web 3 is a network and if we look back at what has made Network successful is the ability to access the network so you need to access the network and then the network needs to behave like it's a single dedicated resource if you look at the power Network we know how to access access it I plug in uh if you look at web one or web two I know how to access it I just plug in um but it's just a different kind of plug so um in the power Network basically what's happening is I have a large distributed messy Network we just heard about uh about energy uh from the previous speaker but as far as I'm concerned the whole world looks to me like it's just one battery like the world is my battery uh and behind it there's Tech that's grabbing all of the different resources from different sources whether it be a solar panel or or a power plant and it's giving it to me um on the other side here what you have is you know in tcpip it looks like everything in web 2 is basically like a dedicated link you know I have this substract and then I have the tech behind it to make that emulation of a dedicated link a reality okay so what is the plug what is the abstraction in web 3 and what is the tech that's going to make that abstraction a reality well what we want is not just to connect but what we want is to be able to pretend that all 3 is just a dedicated computer just my own dedicated computer even though the system is decentralized and nodes are coming in and out in a permissionless way how do I manage to create this plug so what we have is this Flex syn this socket uh basically so that I can access the block as though it were my own computer I can read it I can write it uh and then we have the tech which is the flex nodes to make that reality of the tech to enable uh this access so you know little bit of geeking out very short geeking out what does it even mean to pretend that you're a computer well we've actually known this for a while uh but it sort of was a little bit Out Of Reach it was something that people had determined existed as you know the actual absolutely necessary conditions but they're just really hard to get unless you really did have your own dedicated computer and basically atomicity it looks to you like it's just your computer like your own Ram um things you know that time always goes in One Direction you always have that all of the reads and writes and you know no blocks get don't go out of order and you have durability your data doesn't get lost lost right it's your computer you turn it on the data that you left there is still there so what we want is to have this uh atomicity consistent durability and to have it in a way where the data just looks to me like it's residing on my computer even though it's actually residing in this messy ecosystem that is web three so we're not creating a new layer uh we're not creating a new abstraction other than the abstraction of having this data socket which is the socket for web three this is what's going to make everything easy in effect so whether you the application the execution the settlement consensus Network layer you just go into the optimum data socket okay so what does it mean to work on a computer you have two things in a computer you have the compute hence the name computer and you have the management of getting data in and out the two are separate the two are not on the same processors in your computer right so you have your computer has a CPU it's doing the Computing and it has memory they're not the same thing so everything else that people are building say in applications in web 3 is basically what's going on in the CPU everything that's happening in the memory the reads and writes that's what we're going to handle so that people don't have to worry about it so we can read we can write we can check whether the reads are possible so you know this is a such a fundamental question right how do I take a decentralized system not just distributed with coordination but truly permissionless truly decentralized how do I take such a system and make it look like a single computer people have been working on this literally for decades the problem is the very few solutions that were out there were so slow it was as though I told you hey look uh I gave you a tcpip socket it works great except it's only 10 bits per second nobody's going to want that so what we have done and what we've been able to do is bring technology which allows not just the socket to work so really everything to look like a computer but for web 3 to look like a powerful fast cheap computer and the way we do that is by changing how we manage data uh rather than looking at data as just you know pieces of um different uh data chunks that I'm trying to manage and having to keep State we're creating mixtures we're creating equations so everything that we do now reduces to Distributing and managing equations and um just to give you an idea of how powerful this is I'm going to show you um I'm going to show you a a quick a quick video okay so um in order to really take this system here and go from having uh having pieces to having equations uh I'm going to show you a system where no those come in and out so I'm really permissionless right uh I'm not keeping track of who has what I'm going to have this sort of flex node approach and I'm still having all of these read writes that are possible okay so I have my data it's distributed among different nodes and nodes are not even keeping full notes they're just keeping whatever they can keep and they just have whatever band they available to is available to them at that particular time so what I'm going to have is I'm going to have nodes that come on and new nodes come in and there's no node that actually has a full node okay so the question is can I actually keep this system to still behave like it's my computer like you know I have these things coming in and out can I still pretend that everything is like my own computer notes coming in notes coming out when notes come in they just find whatever information whatever equations are just lying around for them um and here's iterations of these nodes coming in and out in and out you know however they wish randomly on the left is the current infra where you can see is the following on the x axis I have bandwidth right we want bandwidth to be as small as possible so I want to be as close to zero as I can on the horizontal plane on the Y AIS I have storage slash memory per node so I want to also be as close to zero as I can the only Dimension I want to be large in is reliability and a reliability of one means my computer is still alive okay I have that durability so as soon as I go below one I have a failure so you can see with the current infra basically it dies at around 27 rounds of nodes coming in and out the only way I could keep this alive is actually to keep increasing to keep scaling up Beyond just the the measures there that you see on these U so it's it's it's on a loop so you can see it come in and out um the the beyond the the that plane that we have there in terms of storage and memory with the equation aspects that we're doing we can actually stay alive literally for thousands of years and so what we're doing is we're relying on a completely different way way of managing the data which is managing you know I'm not servicing up specific chunks I'm servicing up equations that are making my my uh my system reliable and this is basically just an illustration just a picture of how much better it does we can now be truly scalable uh in a completely decentralized way while maintaining those Primitives those read and wres that look to you as though you're just on your own computer so what are we doing we're turning web 3 in effect into a decentralized machine and the technique we use this equation that sort of uh using equations instead of the data is called Network coding uh it's allowing us to again completely free up how we manage the data and we have two aspects one is ODS the optimum data socket this is like the plug uh that's allowing you to get into for instance the electric grid and the other one is the flex nodes the flex nodes are what what's allowing all of the different node operators in web 3 to provision web3 Service as its own dedicated computer so we're going to emulate our own dedicated computer so this is in effect the abstraction that's going to power R three um the idea for doing this as I said you know goes back to um over you know 12 years of research and it took us that long it literally took us that long to get this to work um and when we saw that this was working we also saw that Not only was it working it was working like gank Busters you know I mean to give you an idea the benefits that you get in terms of cost uh it's about 25x the benefits that you get in terms of speed is about 10x which is why I'm standing here with you today um we're very oh well uh somehow that slide didn't go through but let me tell you what's on that slide uh we're very very fortunate uh to have just completed our seed round uh with uh 1kx as a lead and we have h a set of just wonderful funders and also very engaged and very supportive Angels uh I want to give a shout out to my co-founders Kent Lyn uh and also kishor Conor who's uh he and I have been working on this in Skunk Works literally for a Dozen Years uh so it's uh it's really a combination of of a lot of faith a lot of um a lot of coffee and uh a lot of math a lot of coding here we are so stay tuned uh we're just coming out of stealth uh so if you look us up you won't find much um but um coming soon and I hope to have discussions with you afterwards and see if there's any interest partnering so particularly if you're a note operator come talk to us we'd love to hear about you okay and with that I have 19 seconds to go thank you very much