Harsh Rajat, Prashant Maurya & Aniket Jindal I Web3 Infrastructure as a Service | Pragma India 2023

there's a lot of things we want to talk about and kind of the part that I'm interested in is having people really understand that it's not just about doing some protocol and just putting it out there you can do a lot more for the space by actually making it easy for them to use this thing without them having to worry about making sure that the latest Cod base is running or they can always get the Upstream changes or they need to know how to run this on your own um we we shouldn't lose that part of building um in the space so maybe the first thing would be like let's kind of start with each of you uh give me a very concise two line description of what your product is and uh what it does sure thanks and GM everyone I guess uh so yeah uh we are building push protocol push protocol is a decentralized communication middleware using which any protocol can send any sort of communication onchain or offchain which is is directly tied to their wallet address and once that happens because push is a network any crypto wallet or dap can tap onto this network and can show the communication to the web3 users which are wallet address thereby improving the ux at a m massive scale yeah uh from our side as pH Network we are trying to democratize the Entire Computer infrastructure and what does that basically means that basically means like today if you go to any of the chains today most of the time you might be looking into their notes running on some C servers what we are trying to enable is make it much more easier for the companies or the app chains or or the new things which are getting built into the ecosystem to use bare Mets and decentralized infrastructure on their day-to-day activities and that is what we are enabling at spon in just few lines of a code and few clicks of a button he guys yeah so B econom is leveraging EIP 437 to build smart contract wallet as a service infra that involves two parts the account part where we have our own smart smart con wallets and also the infra part that involves bunders and pay masters amazing um that was good and concise I like it because it lets us ask you 10 more questions later so um maybe I'll start with with her so you kind of chose communication as a category it's a massive space there's hundreds of ways people can communicate there's already tons of services that offer different means of communication uh what made you build and decide to uh to kind of start push sure so I think it was two things karik like one we were at the right time at the right idea and at the right place and the other thing was rage uh let me explain on that I was tring this D app I took a loan then I went ahead doing my job volatile Market came back after a week my loan was liquidated and I was like no way this cannot happen there needs to be some communication that I'm missing and that's that's when we realized that this is so nent space that commun iation didn't exist notification didn't exist so that was the reason why a push was built and yeah now that D5 protocol kind of uses push so full circle that's a that's incredible okay so losing money and then making sure that nobody else loses money is always was a good solution to a problem um pan you kind of talked about a ways people can set up notes maybe give us a slightly more deeper understanding of what you can do with spiron and and why would somebody use it or when would they want to use this so um I think every time they should be using speron so it's a good answer so that is that is something which we promote but um on the coming on the sideline with on a very serious note um like when when I started looking into the space the one thing which I've seen is we call ourselves web3 companies but in reality if you look at on the value derivation part most of the web3 companies getting the value out of we3 and putting into web2 and the foundational layer of that is the uh infrastructure part and very few people were working around that so there was infra which was getting build on defi side notification services and lot of other things but there were literally a Bas layer uh uh system which were missing out and that is where we thought is like why can't we go and bridge that app um it's not like we are the first people who are doing it there are companies uh for example Akash network was one who has started that there are other companies who have been started doing that but the problem with all of them was uh they missed out few things and few aspects of it INF is not just about just giving out something or somebody leing your computer right infra is about doing a workloads and workloads are different kinds and most of the time the people who pay for those workloads are the people are the Enterprises or the bigger companies or even app chain and the nodes you cannot run a node on your computer every day right it is going to screw up everything and that is where we kind of realiz is like why can't we just go and fill that Gap in by bringing the data center across the world which are trusted data centers tier one tier two tier three and all of those audit data centers and only allow that to happen and only allow users to kind of go and deploy and choose those those data centers and that is where it started filling the Gap in so from permission list creation the permission list on the um user side permissioning the uh the supply side on from the dog basis structure which you're going working on so all of those things which we have done over the time and now again as you said like why uh if you are in web3 you are making money in web3 at least put that money back into the web3 uh as such so that more and the more you put it back the more money we as a founders and be lot of Builders into the space will get that money back to innovate into the space and and we we thought the infra is the right place to be at and that is why we started reading it on I think reinvestment to kind of do more R&D is always a good strategy for any company doesn't matter if it's Tech or crypto or or otherwise um maybe kind of to understand a bit more about B economy here uh you kind of said you kind of make it easy for people to take advantage of 4337 what is that why does it matter what can you do and how does B economy help definitely I mean like there's a lot of Buzz around a for last I think almost two years I think very few understand it properly in fact like I think the main uh time that we spend on is that uh uh having a can primitive for wallets like that's that's where a all comes in and changing the mindset that you know there shouldn't be just one wallet that should be used for all the applications where the wallet should become like part of the app experience itself so till now like I think there like two kind of wallets that people all one is like cold wallet that's where like exchanges and all these places come in second is like more like e like uh metamask and all that is definitely used more like a end user level personal wallet but with smart contract wallets in a what we're trying to do is like how the wallet experience should become like a more like a DB expens so that anyone who wants to use an application shouldn't just first use metamask and then use an application where they can use like uh you know applications uh that has wallet within the application itself and I think two areas we seing like most demand of it um uh in the social fire space you know you must have seen like fentech and few companies where War experience becomes like part app experience itself that leverages like you know a to make it like extremely seamless for people to like use applications also like in off late like we seeing like lot of D5 per platforms leveraging smart accounts so the journal pitch is same right like how we can have like a account for every application and and then like play around with the ux right how we can make it extrem be simple we can add like gas abstraction we can add like biometric for transtions we can do like sessions and all this kind of stuff but the the main objective for everyone is that changing the mindset to have accounts for like different applications not just one one wallet for every application out there oh amazing okay so that's a good way to understand this thing so you effectively let them have a wallet that is more of a contract but it behaves like a normal wallet so you can just enable a lot more interesting use cases in the future especially as you kind of connect to multiple chains um kind of coming back to the actual topic of this panel which is around offering this infrastructure as a service instead of just kind of letting people figure this out on their own um my kind of obvious kind of question here is why consider doing a lot of this also in addition to building the protocol um why why should I not just use twio I want to do push notifications why should I just not go run an instance on AWS why can't I just like not manage the W for somebody and just do normal HTTP request to do all the transactions uh what's what's the advantage here or or why does this matter for us to kind of offer this to the the wether ecosystem I'll kind of have anybody take on or all of you should comment on sure so I mean one thing I would like to add over here like there's this very good answer that people give that we are doing it for decentralization uh I would like to add that it's not just about decentralization like that's the ethos that we follow but when we are talking about a billion users right uh we want to do things in a way where it benefits them uh then using the web2 apps so for example for push what we are doing is we are enabling web three native ways to chat and web three native ways to put notifications out like when you're interacting with a protocol you are interacting with a wallet address so therefore you need those Communications in that wallet address and that cannot be done by 12u and that's where the web3 services really shine even with group chat like the token gating feature that cannot be done with a normal thing so I would say like if we are thinking about building on top of web3 as an infrastructure it needs to be something that follows the ethos with which is decentralization but it needs to add enough things for the users or for the products to users on our side at spon um there are a lot of things which we like why people should be like using us uh one is um I come from infra background so I have done my entire career I have done infrastructure and I one thing which I've learned over the time is the moment you start using one infrastructure and like that is how it has been designed you get logged into that and and that is called win locking issues and lot of companies if you might have seen uh in the past either it is eBay or it is recently there were a couple of more companies who moved out from cloud native services and the only reason they moved out is because their $1 increment was paying them around a 10 millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in the loss in their in their profit margin and that is uh the place where we started building around and and web3 enables it from the day one the optionality of the web3 part where you integrate go and work with lot of data centers build start in a a very good layer of um uh system where you are not Ved lock in with any of the specific cloud services you have an option to switch and that is where we kind of have started focusing on and and we saw like that is a great opportunity to be tapping into and that is one of the reasons why people should be using it apart from that um the moment you go to decentralization there are two more major factor which we Al also get out of the box and we uh generally don't talk about it the one is called the cost benefit the reason being because let's say I am running my sandbox environment is it necessary for me to run that sandbox environment in us or is it necessary to run it Europe and different regions it might not because that doesn't even have a user data so I can run that sandbox enironment in the place where where it is much more cheaper but since you are already logged into the vendor you can't switch it very easily right and that is where you also get one more optionality to go and switch to the to the nearest location of the data center which is much more cheaper for you and you get a cost benefit and since it's a direct bare Metals you get additional Advantage like it is I can bit like it is 60% 70% even 40% cheaper than any centralized Cloud providers um the third and the most important part which with the reason it can be only built on web 3 is the payment settlement layer if you have to it's not like in web2 people have not tried it they have like we have done a research tons of research around it we found D solution if you guys know one of the companies one of the greatest leading companies we also Inspire them a lot um they have done it but the problem with them was at the initial scale of the time was the settlement layer around them on the Fiat side so if you operating India you have to settle in Indian currencies and you have to open an entity here you have to do tons of different things here to make sure that it happens now the moment you go to the web 3way now you have only one settlement there which is a blockchain right you go and settle your transaction there and then you offload with a some offchain kind of a off ram or on RAM you do all of those things on the sideline but your protocol doesn't gets impacted with that and that becomes the much much more beneficial part for us to go and enable it and that is where we thought is like web 3 can solve it at scale which web 2 cannot and that is where we started building is f on that's an incredible answer like you listed every possible thing that gives you advantage in this space Maybe maybe maybe an can top this we'll see yeah yeah I can just add to it you know I think for us it's a it's a bit of simple brid like uh and there's some sort of pmf for daps right like we all seen dap developers building daps in the ecosystem I think every dap is struggling for users uh you know like no one's getting any users call it like XY reasons but I think one of the major reasons that we found out was ux that okay ux is like really shitty it's still shitty right and we like okay how do we improve it you know how do we make it even better so that people can use all these applications so so that's where we come in we make sure that you know all these become simple and more and more users can come to decentralize Applications I can go more specific to it as well you know like I've been spending a lot of time with like purple applications thesis and we all seen like last year what centralized exchanges can lead to right with FTX and all this and that led to like lot of uh onch per platforms to ersg right last year was you know we seen GMX you know like EO all these guys kind of heading the market and I think for them it was very clear like I talked to all of them that how they can give like a balance experience on on chain like without compromising on user funds and also you know at the same time like making non codal and smart account wallets like make it extremely easy to make it happen you know so major P platforms are trying to use us to give like a more you know uh centralized kind of an experience on their decentralized applications so so that's where we come in we make sure that you know uh we have uh better ux people are not feeling or not shying away from the complexities of you know uh the application or the seed phases and all this kind of stuff and make it like made like a more six like experience so so that's where we come in amazing I mean if I were to summarize it's you have a lot more freedom and you have less situations where you're locked into a vendor uh which is kind of you have that with more big cloud providers um and of course kind of summarizing um hsh's point you want something that understands the context of what's new here so interfacing with a web service is not the same as understanding a smart contract and you want some native experiences that have that built so that you get to do a lot more um new things instead of just replicating the old ones let's going to talk about some challenges um what's been kind of the hardest thing you've had to do so far running U your companies thear with with harsh all right so I mean running the company um as a early state hackaton project and as a Founder is completely different uh when you are early stage founder you think that you can do everything and you might be good in doing everything but you will not be there at every point of time you cannot be there at marketing and handl Tech and everything else so I think the hardest challenge for us was uh hiring the right team um and I think that's that's there for all the startup uh but yeah once you hire that uh that's where the actual scalability part of the startup starts so I would say hiring the uh right team that's that's a challenge uh figuring out what to do at what point of time that's also a challenge uh and one more thing like as the startup grows you will have to unlearn a lot of things and relearn how to do it because at that point of time you might be after community and then at one point of time you want to go after scalability so every time you have to unlearn and relearn uh I think those are some of the challenges maybe I'll push you more to be also uh be more on the technical side so what about the protocol itself what about offering this a service what are some uh challenges that you end up facing or harder things yet to solve for that for sure so of course decentralization that's that's the biggest challenge I think everyone faes uh with push the thing was this is a real-time communication Network right so everything has to be near instant and uh that is something that was very challenging for us uh I mean I mean I always take decentralization as two-step process one is content cannot be changed immutable which push was when we began and then the other is content cannot be censored which means that uh no matter what content is there people should be able to pick it up no note can censor it and uh that took us a lot of time to solve but after 2 2.5 years we are finally ready so notifications decentralized they are coming uh they might be out in December or because we want team members to enjoy their uh holiday so maybe M January uh but yeah that that was the most uh challenging part and the most exciting part as well amazing and uh what about you for us uh a lot of challenges so one of the challenge was um again the finding right talent because infra space you really find people building to infra to be very honest like and and and to build an infra you need a very deep expertise in in lot of other places it's not like you just wake up tomorrow and then you go and learn one thing and you build it it has devops it has networking it has lowlevel networking it has high LEL I don't know like how many networking are there itself so um that is that was one of the challenges which we had to face but initially I and my co-founder kind of build it all of those base so that was kind of solved but we still face that challenges so if anyone is very good infra developer here please reach out to us um the second part which we kind of face on the challenge side is convincing people about uh and also letting them know there there's a issue called when the lock in um because lot of time you like lot of time we we Thrive and survive as a initially startup Founders over credits so you might have heard a lot of credits I have got 100,000 credits I have got 200,000 credits but we are startups we can't give you those much credits right if we start giving you then I think I have to find some other job to kind of do and feed you guys right so for for me that was the that was a problem and um we tried to solve it in a very different way we we said like we are optimizing your devop but again uh that was our biggest challenge even as of now still a lot of Founders comes to us and they say like you know what if you guys don't give us gr we we don't work with you then we tell them is like once your credit credit is over then you should definitely come back to us um but that is where the Second Challenge the third and the most one which we are currently working on is the building the community around it because the moment you start building the protocol or network and all of those things you have to ensure is like there is a proper decentralization in the place by enabling everything on the community angle as well and infra Community just name some infra communities you will not find a lot only few and um because it's very tough to understand it make people understand like a five years old kid you can't because inra you cannot explain a 5 years old kid you have to be mature enough to kind of understand and that is where we end up in facing a lot of problems but we are still trying to figure out in different ways educating uh from the bottom layer we're trying to build some education materials doing lot of other things but still that is still a problem for us and we are still working on to solve it as skill so very honest answer appreciate it probably going to categorize into like two parts one is like founder level challenges like U another is like product level challenges you know what we face and still facing right I think with founder level I feel like um setting the right culture in the team is like really important I mean I know like hiring is definitely important but this industry is like still very new right like you you don't have like 15 years experienced people everyone is still learning so uh getting the people and also just you know educating them and web through and and and making them we through we we spend like a lot of time on that just make sure that you know the culture is there and it's always it also needs to get evolved right like you know every time like there's something new happening so we have to make sure that you know the culture is very three saing the team second is like also uh this industry is like very narrative driven right so there's every day you see like bunch of narratives out there you know so filtering all the noise out there and just focusing on what you're trying to do is is like really important it becomes challenging you know as a Founder that you know you know you you see like you know different projects you know working on different things you you there's a lot of distraction hear all the noise from investors that okay why why don't you do F why you do this all this kind of stuff so just being very honest just focusing on you know that that probably is the not start for us and just be headstone and building on it it becomes a challenge uh next when it comes to product level stuff right uh so again like you know with smart contract wallets uh it's still getting standardized right like 437 is like one standard of creating smart contract wallet so there's no like benchmarks there that okay what need to be followed What not need to be followed so we just like of course Ming sure that this becomes sort of a standard in the industry that how people should use wallets in that like we still facing challenges then it's still expensive right every wallet needs to deploy like there's a cost involved in it how we can reduce that cost you know AA on ethereum is very different than a on zync right a on zking is very different from optimism how do you standardize you know different uh 437 stack all together across all all different evm chains you know so all these challenges are still there but we're kind of taking like a step byep approach like we started off with a small tool like like gasless and then evolve into like a smart con wallet and then also in there like focusing on a specific Niche once like we we win there like we probably going to expand other thing so so pretty stepbystep approach over there no incredible um I'll leave a couple more questions um but one thing I'm kind of you sort of answered this in your your answer a couple a few minutes ago but maybe it's worth kind of calling on directly are there newer business models that exist now with offering these types of things of services but for more decentralized world or are we going to go back to a SAS model where you going to put your credit card it's just that you're going to figure out the token stuff on someone's behalf how does that business change um we are still exploring a lot so to be very honest so there is no business model which we have analyzed Aton on the protocol layer yes there are a lot of other ways to kind of figure it out because protocol has already seen that on the user perspective um there is a terminology which I have learned over the time is there's a something called mus muscle memory and muscle memory is like we are used to of attaching our credit card even if you ask you or not you are used to of putting your cbv even if you if you ask you or not so it's a it's a it's already fitted into our our memory so in order to drive the adoption slowly we have to go with the traditional route is asking people to go and attach your credit card and debit card right and by putting on RAM and offr into it and making sure it's like they are getting into the system now once they are into the system then as a Founders and as a company we have to figure it out how we can move them slowly more towards a wallet based payment model and that is where I think what anik and team is doing is is amazing job there and we can use a lot of account abstraction and all of those things to abstract out the complexity of even installing a wallet right directly but you can embed the wallet directly into the protocol layer so that your user don't even care about all of those things anymore so that is where we are kind of looking at but still we are also figuring out to be like on the on the right side but I I'm very highly inclined toward making the model work in the more traditional and business oriented way versus going in a more web3 way where you for everything you just have to attach your wallet Nobody Does it right um I don't do it so how can I expect people to do it so that is what I uh inclined myself to so I think there are some new models that are coming out like one thing I really am fascinated about is micro payments or streaming uh if super fluid is around shout out to them uh but yeah that's that's quite new because that is something that never existed and uh I have always fantasized like I don't watch Netflix a lot but maybe one or two hours so why pay them monthly and that is where streaming might be really really cool uh then another thing is staking which is you are not spending but you're locking your tokens and based on that you are getting the service uh which benefits the network it's secur the network and it kind of works that cannot work in web to so I would say like those two things are uh quite fascinating still in the early stage but yeah amazing uh so maybe I guess for for my last question um we obviously covered what each of you do but what are some other infrastructure service that you think should exist or don't exist in the the right kind of level of quality that you would want uh what's kind of missing that makes a developers or a Founders life a lot easier yeah I think one thing I really want to see and uh you know I'm spending a lot of time is like I we should have better explorers uh you know like uh Better Block explorers yeah yeah okay uh you know like I I want block block Explorer to be like my Twitter right like right now people just spend lot of f in Twitter just like you know getting all app about all these things but I think the beauty of crypto is that everything is on chain you know like there's a lot of data that can be abstracted and you know we can treate like better ways of you know looking at all these data if if you look to like a non-technical Founder people get you know like really scared by using met e scan right like they don't understand everything that's happening there so uh yeah I mean I feel like we should have better explorers and you know like we should be spending a lot of time just looking at data regarding what's happening we can have like different you know social aspect to it we can have different aspect in general how people look at data but this is an area where we see like you know a lot of uh uh I I personally am like quite bullish on and probably going to see like a lot of them the next year or two and then uh very specific to what we are doing at Bon AA I think like better standards around like bundlers I need it and pay masters also need it like entire like gas gas abstraction thing uh is still very complicated we can have like a globalized you know like pay master that can probably like abstract every all the gas and and and you know like we can work very directly with the protocols out there so it's very B economy specific but industry specific I think explorers you know I'm looking that just to add to it like uh there was this uh conversation I had with anik back in 2020 uh when we were discussing like what infra can be and we were talking account abstraction uh we talked about communication and right now it's a reality so uh I'm just fascinated what can come next I think uh verification or onchain identity is something that still needs to come and reputation is something that might be good to have uh but what I would say is we are getting there as infrastructure uh we need to realize like when we are going to YouTube or Gmail or whatever we are using storage we are using signin by Google we are using using notification and other form of communication and that is getting a reality in web 3 so we are inching closer uh Prashant you want to add I'm much more so you have already covered that little part of it but let me just name that so that is in the space of Deen which has been uh very trending in the market and I'm very excited about it because past 3 years we haven't kept on building and nobody was talking about us now suddenly everyone is talking about us so that feels good in web 3 good things take time so um so that is something which I'm very uh excited about and want to see more and more Founders getting building into that space because that space still has to mature and all the foundation has to go from there and and that is where uh my uh interest is in inclin toward awesome uh well I want to thank all three of you for an amazing conversation hopefully you also get some insight into uh using a lot of these services and not doing everything on your own so please give a massive Round of Applause for H pant and and K thanks having us thanks everyone all right