DePINs: Ensuring the Future of Web3 in the Face of AI's Ascendency | Chloe Avery - Orchid

cool hello my name is Chloe Avery I'm going to be talking about deepins today so I am a mathematician by training I have a PhD from the University of Chicago and my thesis was actually in Geometry topology so essentially shapes uh and really all that I used for my research was a pencil and paper or you know a chalkboard so when I first stepped into the world of web 3 it was just a few years ago and I had no idea what I was getting into but I knew that there were a ton of really really interesting problems in the space and to be a good mathematician is to be good at solving puzzles so that's what I started doing when I started working for orchid and I have to admit I'm one of those people who get into who got into tick talk uh during the early days of the pandemic I was hesitant for a while but my sister who is solidly jenzy insisted that I try it I'm not that much of a social media person I don't post often I forget to like or comment on things that my like actual real life friends post but I do really like watching funny videos and Tik Tok quickly learned my particular sense of humor I have two dogs and and Tik Tok started me showing me all of these videos of dogs that look just like the dogs that I have Tik Tok really seems to know me the algorithm knows me and as someone who works in web 3 I'm maybe a little bit ashamed to admit this but I love it I love that Tik Tok knows me I love these like very personal suggestions but I feel like I should know better and this really makes me think as AI becomes more and more oh sorry what have I done ah I am so sorry hold on there we go okay as AI becomes more and more a part of our daily lives AI is also going to know me and probably even better than something like Tik Tock knows me even if I'm not the one using AI think about how much you can find out about me from the people around me AI is going to know me is is this a bad thing I don't know honestly I mean there are probably amazing things that we could do using the fact that AI is going to know me but I don't know maybe this is also scary if this gets in the hand of one person that is a lot of information that they are going to have about me and information is power that's terrifying so what do we do about it decentralization and today I want to talk specifically about decentralized physical infrastructure uh the term deep in has recently become this like Hot Topic in web 3 and as people who work in the web 3 space we love the word decentralized we love to put it in front of every everything but but why decentralized physical infrastructure why this specifically I mean I I really think that deepins have a compelling narrative we're taking these principles of decentralization and we're taking them to the physical machines that power the internet storage compute bandwidth Etc All In incentivized and paid for using crypto here are a couple of examples from the company I work for which is Orchid Orchid uh has two projects the first is a VPN Marketplace so the VPN Marketplace allows bandwidth providers to store tokens or to Sor I'm sorry to stake tokens to advertise their service in the Orchid directory it's an ethereum smart contract providers then receive a proportionate amount of clients this is using something called stake weighted random selection when a client is connected to a provider they can start providing service uh by the packet if a client receives they can start paying for service by the packet if a client receives bad service then they can simply just switch to a different provider this is in contrast to a traditional VPN service where users are expected to subscribe and then maybe pay a monthly fee uh users in a traditional VPN have to trust that the provider is actually going to provide good service whereas with something like a decentralized VPN if the provider starts providing the service you can just switch to a different provider um and and actually the ability for a user to switch to a different provider incentivizes the provider to provide good service the other project that we have is a is storeid so storage Orchid storeid this is decentralized data storage and actually we're currently building this if you're interested uh in thinking about this kind of stuff please please come talk to me I'd be happy to so the idea for this is rather than store your data with a single company that that's a single point of failure and you're putting trust in this company the idea here is instead of that you could break up your file into a bunch of different pieces and send each of those pieces to a different storage provider when you break it up you do this in sort of a redundant fashion so that if you lose one or more of the pieces you're still going to be fine um actually I I mentioned that I'm a mathematician there's a lot of really cool math that goes into exactly how you break up the files if you want to learn more about that please come talk to me I love talking about cool math things um yeah so so you break up these files and if you lose one we're able to repair that storage provider you could the other providers and the cohort can uh pick a new provider for you they can send them the data that they need so this is this is the idea of decentralized data storage these are a a couple of examples of this decentralized physical infrastructure and one of the technologies that both of these use is something called Nano payments so I mentioned before the idea of trust if you if you're using these these decentralized physical infrastructures you don't want to have to trust providers these are Maybe random people so suppose that you're a provider that I do not trust and I want to pay you for a service say maybe it's bandwidth well I certainly don't trust you with $10 I probably don't even trust you with a dollar but maybe if I sent you a fraction of a penny well if I lose that if you screw me over fine okay I've lost a fraction of a penny I will be okay so how how do I send you these like tiny tiny amounts of money because if you think about traditional payment system systems there's usually a minimum amount that you have to send and some sort of transaction fee so how do we do this say I wanted to send you a penny well instead of sending you a penny what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you a one in 100 chance of getting a dollar so if I do this over and over and over again you're going to get the amount the same amount of money that you would have expected if I had sent you pennies and like I said you can do this with fractions of pennies you can do this with tiny tiny amounts of money and the main principle that makes this work is something called The Law of large numbers it says that if you repeat a probability theorem a BN enough times a large number of times that you're going to get the expected value so I guess why why nanopay for uh for decentralized physical infrastructure that idea really goes back to trust um yeah I mentioned this before but you don't want to trust these people that you're you're just randomly finding on the internet so so there's actually one more really interesting uh example that I want to talk about for nanopay uh which is using nanop payments to pay for generative AI there's this little demo that um somebody else from Orchid Dan Montgomery has been working on um so the idea is that rather than pay for a subscription say something like chat GPT I don't actually know how it how much it is a month I think it's like I don't know it's quite quite expensive so rather than paying for something like that uh you could pay just buy the question you ask chat GPT you could pay these tiny tiny amounts of money and you can use nanopay for it um so this is just another interesting example of how we could use Nano payments uh if you're interested in this here is the link right here and yeah I mean I'm really excited about decentralized physical infrastructure I think this idea of using using these principles of decentralization to power these these sort of basic things that we use to get the internet services uh that we use every day is really really compelling to me uh if you want to learn more about any of this please do come talk to me if you want to talk about the Cool Math please come talk to me um that QR code is the link to our website there's my info thank you so much everybody give it up for Dr Avery wow I messed that up everybody give it up for doct Chloe Avery all right our next speaker will be