BBW22 - Day 2 - Let's Meet the Creators #2

[Music] like you said my name is Ray Payson I'm a blockchain community manager over at Fidelity Investments in the Fidelity Center for Applied technology um real quick about me before we dive in is I actually manage our internal community of about 5 000 folks who are really invested in the blockchain technology and crypto Community hosting events around education and networking and career building so that's enough about me let's dive in and introduce yourselves uh hello everyone you mind if I go first go for it uh so my name is Chris winter I am the CEO and co-founder of company called reach uh I am old uh I started as a software engineer 24 years ago uh about 12 years ago it jumped over into entrepreneurship um and uh products executive management things like that uh 2013 is when I got into crypto because my friend is a jerk uh he he sent me a thing called Bitcoin because I bugged him about not paying me back for lunch uh and then like a couple weeks later sent me this thing called Bitcoin and say hey I paid you back and and I was like I don't know what this thing is um so I then I started looking into it and then every year after that I have sent him the email receipt to show him how much money he paid me for that burrito so uh so thank you uh Henrik is his name uh and uh but and so like I said started really investing in 2013 started building in 2015 and I've been running companies in crypto since 2017. uh early 2017 and uh started reach and so September of 2019 so three years so happy birthday to us congratulations thank you uh but we started the company because we saw that there was a major issue with blockchain blockchain as you all know is awesome uh the potential of it is awesome it's not so awesomer yet but it will get there but we will never get there if more if if more developers aren't coming into the space and so that's what reach did is we we asked the question of a wire what is stopping developers coming in uh turns out it's too difficult they have safety concerns there's tax too much toxicity uh so we fixed that we built a bull end-to-end blockchain development platform it consists of a programming language a compiler deployment tools testing tools pretty much everything that is required to bring blockchain development into the modern world and we achieved it we've now onboarded over uh over 7 500 developers we were approaching 8 000 at this point uh we have around 25 BC back startups building on top of us with blockchain agnostics so what we're really doing is we're building the Microsoft of blockchain and things are going really well so far it's fantastic we're gonna dive real deep into that first Spencer over to you cool uh hi everyone I'm Spencer I started my career as a software engineer about 12 years ago in 2010 at the evil empire at Google for a little while uh very quickly realized that the big corporate machine life was not for me uh left enjoy and what was at that point a startup called mongodb which was a database web you know traditional web 2 uh database platform um was an engineer there for about eight years really focusing on the distributed systems components of the database so I worked for many years on their horizontal scaling sharding system and then I was a tech lead for a few years of the replication system which also involved uh running the being responsible for their consensus system based on the raft consensus protocol which familiar with that but basically thinking about these distributed consensus protocols uh was kind of a natural progression into starting to think about blockchains is much much bigger scale decentralized consensus systems uh my entry into to web3 and crypto was a little bit later than yours I didn't really get involved until about 2020 because for me the thing that really hooked me and got me excited about this space was the idea of decentralized data and decentralized identity and the sort of the the actual web 3 vision of like a consumer internet where users really control the the content the user generated content they create online and can bring it with them across applications so I don't like the content moderation policy on Twitter or I want to try be able to have a different news feed algorithm for surfacing information I should be able to switch to a different platform but not have to start from scratch have my whole social graph come with me have all the content all the posts all this Rich amount of data that we as you know users of the internet are actually contributing back to these platforms break down the style those where where that data gets controlled by the application that you use to create it and then gets kind of held hostage and used as a moat to hold you in and lock you into their ecosystem I am really excited about the potential of decentralized tech to break down those barriers and allow much more data portability interoperability uh with user control and really making the user the root of all data rather than the application so that they can bring their data with them so that was the vision that really excited me about what's happening in this space and I started looking for you know what do we need to build that we really need like a real database platform and you know obviously I'm coming from a database world so I started thinking about who's building the web3 database uh and that really led me to ceramic where I've been for the last two years I do have to uh make an admission I am not technically a Founder uh I was a early engineer and I've been a core part of the protocol development for for the last two years a team was about eight people when I joined that's really cool so are you using like semantic web type of uh you know a system or so we don't uh directly build with like the semantic web protocols and standards that kind of came out of the original web 3 movement from a few years ago but I think we are building a graph database that allows expressions of relationships between different pieces of data and Greece so I think ceramic could become a platform for semantic web information as something that you would build on top of it but it's not something that we're like actively building with at the moment that's cool so uh so Samantha Webb you know timbersley stuff that he's working on is really cool if you're here I don't know if he's uh you're doing great things uh but one of the things I like I've always seen a problem with that is speed is is like caching is like if I'm gonna build a uh a social network on top of users information that's that could be shared number one the only thing I can do is I'm gonna cache it because I need to be able to display it really quickly and if I cache it then it's not their data anymore it's my data how do you guys prevent against that um I think it's a great question so uh a little bit of how ceramic is built we build on top of ipfs which is a decentralized peer-to-peer file storage system um built by vertical Labs a team behind filecoin and all of the data in ceramic is stored in these sort of verifiable event logs uh every update is signed by a user's key and stored on this peer-to-peer Network so it can be synced from anyone and you can validate the Integrity of the log and the Integrity of the current state but you're right so like the first version of ceramic that we kind of have in market right now anytime you want to load a user's data you kind of have to go to the network and query the network and load it on demand and that means you're seeing several seconds to load a user's profile and one user's profile yeah exactly uh and there's really no way to run queries across the network so you can see like how do I get all of the posts from any user over the last 10 minutes this was a real obvious usability problem the performance you know people aren't going to actually use a social product or really any you know classic web product for Mass Market is going to work if it takes five seconds to load the page people just aren't going to use it um and you need that advanced query functionality so the system we're building now we're calling that we just released developer preview for last week two weeks ago um is called compose DB and it's basically a way to for applications to deploy an application specific database that indexes and basically it does kind of keep a local cache uh for that application of all of the data but it's organized around this concept of data models so you might have like a profile model let's like let's say you're building a blog post a blogging application you might want the user profile model the like social followers model like who do I follow who do I care about blog post model comments on blog post and like on blog posts right like let's say those five models and then similar to how you might install like an open source Library through a package manager like npm you can kind of install the data model and get all of that data within that data model that's been created on the networks thus far synced into your applications database and so then now you can build a really fast index with sort of traditional web 2 where you're building it locally though yeah you're building it locally you can store the data right now we're just putting it in postgres and you can have the kind of traditional web 2 scaling techniques for Speed and availability and scalability of the local deployment but the source of Truth for all that data remains a decentralized network which is the key there's is that like it's not writing to select to postgres and then getting sync to Ceramics the other way around it goes into ceramic first the ceramic Network which is built on these verifiable events on ipfs that is the source of Truth for the data and that becomes the mechanism for syncing all these different application specific databases and eventually there will be right now there's no token economics on ceramic but eventually there will be an economic system for State availability to actually incentivize data sharing and making sure that applications don't just hoard that data and actually contribute it back to the network so expensive I'm sorry a lot of what you said you know I'm still very new to this space and I understood so I didn't um but what is an actual use case of like owning your own data and keeping it locally what is the value there to an average person you know beyond just saying oh well Twitter has it now so do I and I have full control right I'd say I think the big Advantage for consumers is interoperability and portability is the ability to share the data across applications so that instead of just using so let's say I start publishing on psychic which is a web 3 medium clone that I just invented um the the web 3 version of medium uh and it and it publishes that as a ceramic and then I I start putting a bunch of data there and then medium starts or whatever this medium clone starts censoring post starts taking down uh certain content from their from their server and not not sharing it and I disapprove of the the policies there the decisions they are making now if another app wanted to spin up and be a competitor they could a start their own brand new they could even if medium was open source if the you know they could Fork their source code create a copy with different content moderation policies and if the code's not open source it doesn't matter they can still build their own front end on top of the data if the data is stored in ceramic the data is open so now you can create another blogging platform that interoperates with media and I think the other big value is actually the rate of innovation um because now let's say you have some sort of blogging platform or social media platform and it's not even so much that you disagree with the platform it's so much as this another developer goes this is great I love what you're building here and I have an idea of something I can add on top that will make it even more valuable I'm going to add I've got a team of really great machine learning experts and I think I can make the best possible algorithm for surfacing the data that's being created on your blogging platforms like you built this platform for creating the content that's awesome now I'm gonna build like an AI or curation mechanism for surfacing the most interesting information right now if you wanted to go to medium and be like I've got a great team of AI Builders and we want to build you a really incredible AI content Discovery system you'd have to get hired by me right like they control all the access with if this was built on web3 this data would lived on ceramic someone could just go pull all the data that's being generated by medium and just create a curation Marketplace or some sort of new UI or some or add some new commenting feature or some new you know social discovery feature or anything it creates this whole collaborative because it's very similar to what's happened with defy right like in D5 you deploy a contract someone else and go that's awesome I'm going to take that and I'm going to take the outputs of that and I'm going to feed it into the inputs of this other thing and I'm going to create this whole interconnected ecosystem of contracts and applications that are all playing with each other and interacting and composing really well it's the same idea was that's kind of what ceramic's trying to do to data so all these different applications can share data and new application developers can come in take the data that's being created by other applications and add more value on top so I think the other advantage to Consumers is that the collective web3 ecosystem is going to move much much faster than the web 2 ecosystem can because the access to the data is open and you have this permissionless Innovation that can happen on site that's okay I think that another way that I would put it is that it removes the walled Gardens it removes the wall guards the and it's these centralized companies that we know as a medium or anything turn into uh more interfaces for the data rather than the actual the Walled Garden so it allows for like I would even like you said that you know build on top of um I think that what this does is it allows for uh number one people that you don't even need an interface to be able to access people's data anymore you could like if you had the skills yourself you could access the entire database of all information and uh if you're you're a developer you like I like to use Uber as an example like right now if you it's not really data because it's you know whatever but sort of is that say I want to create a new Uber right now everybody's is driving for Uber I would have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to actually incentivize these drivers to come over from Uber to my my new application and being able to actually separate the the foundation from the interface it allows for a a smaller you know two two kids in a dorm room to be able to build a better interface on on the actual Foundation of all of the data because Uber would no longer own the drivers they just own the interface the user experience and this this allows for uh I think more Innovation it allows for better competition because you don't need to actually raise hundreds of millions of dollars and this Uber's just one example but pretty much all of these things are a good examples and it creates it makes the um the switching costs for consumers much lower right if someone wanted to come out with a competitor to Uber or even you know or competitor to to Twitter right like like Google tried to launch a competitor to Facebook and finally right like Google couldn't do it with Google Plus because I'd have been the only one who signed up for Google Plus um and it's because there's so much value in the data and in the network effects no one wants to use a social network none of their friends are on so the switching costs become really really high you have to really add a lot of more value to get me to justify re-switching everything over recreating re-following all of my friends recreating all of my content building up the platform right now in this new world a brand new competitor can be launched and on Day Zero the very first day it launches you could sign in and have a full feed of data information because it builds on the data that's already been created by other applications just with whatever the unique pitch of this new competitor is they can add their their value ad and their unique flavor and whatever makes them stand apart but without having to build the entire ecosystem from scratch so now users have choice they can switch they can be like oh this new social media app just launched I'm gonna check it out and you can try and you can see oh they have these extra features and the other one I was using doesn't those are some cool features I like that or it's not that bad I kind of like the old UI better I'm going to go back but you can switch back and forth you can even use them both simultaneously and the data you create in one shows up in the other so you're not constrained into one ecosystem or the other that's really helpful Chris I want to ask you a little bit about more of your transition into what you're doing now so you said you were a software engineer for sure for 20 years before you you know got into entrepreneurship and and now what you're doing now what was the problem statement what was the the point that led you to where you are and I know you said you've had your company for a couple of years now tell me about that Journey what what was that like for you um what was the the fulcrum there that made you decide to make the switch I think that the the major thing that the Catalyst was I love responsibility and you don't hear that all the time um I as a developer I had a lot of a lot of control because I've been building product and making things and it's just that I always wanted more and more and more as a and it kept going up and becoming the CTO and everything and and I mean it first started a large company and really didn't feel like that had that much responsibility because I could take a week off and who cares right because it's a big company and then I uh then I started working in uh in Academia and I was like ah people worked like 30 hours a week this is like I don't really love this um if you work in Academia you know it so then then I was like okay I need more than this I need to I need to be able to something that I know that I can actually bet on myself and this is when I found startups I was like oh startups still engineer at this time and so I'm still building and I'm like okay but like I have a lot more responsibility now because if I take a week off it's going to hurt the company I'm like oh this is actually awesome I'm really actually making a difference here and then I started like going up in startups and then eventually got to a point I'm like okay well I think I need to start my own startups to get even more responsibility most people like a vacation so you and I are different people Chris I was like a reluctant startup person because I value work life balance too much yeah I was like but this is what I want to be building and everyone building in this space as a startup so here I go but if you have that passion and you have that drive I can see what why the draw is there for you work life balance to me is doesn't exist because of how much I love what I do that's great so it me doing what I do fulfills me in both pleasure and also this you know productivity so it just kept going like I want more I want more I want more um and that's kind of where where how we made the switch from the developer to being in management and um uh helping more people do better things because the more I can actually Empower other people to do things the more effect I can have on the world and you know eventually maybe they'll write about me in history books but only if we keep going that direction I don't know I feel like sometimes you can allow yourself to take a break do you ever take a break when's the last time you took a vacation this is part of the questions I don't know uh I sure don't do as me I'm not I'm not a role model I don't have work-life balance do the thing it's just something that works for me I I work a lot um I've always worked a lot like I said when I worked at the in Academia uh everybody around me worked 30-ish hours a week I worked 60 to 80. and it was weird it was like an awkward situation um and I didn't do it because I was forced to it's just because I loved doing it that's so important I think you know sometimes when you're you're innovating and you're starting something new no one really focuses on the joy so it's really good to know that like you're diving in because you're passionate and that's just what brings you that level of satisfaction and that's that's wonderful I just like I like my team also is the best team that I could ever even dream of building um and uh working with them every day and seeing their passion as well also motivates me um I also make sure that I should take time off I I they don't always but they should um but it that is one of the things that energizes me that's fantastic so your your organization that you're right now can you tell me a little bit more about the problem that you were trying to solve and and how you got there where did the idea come from and sure how did you how did you start to take that idea and put it to paper and make it happen and bring it to life the way you did and how's that gone that's a big question yeah so you guys hear you like blockchain right you think it's it's pretty powerful there's the future is great um and it's doing so much how many developers do you think are working full time today in blockchain none nobody's actually working yeah it's all fun uh so Andreessen just came out with a report uh probably a few months ago that's estimated around 6 000 developers are building block building applications full-time in blockchain six thousand uh with a market cap of one trillion dollars that's a lot of lot that's a lot of Leverage on a small amount of developers um the internet which we all love you guys love the internet too right okay um internet has 25 million Developers so how can the web 3 actually ever be truly a web 3 if we only have 6 000 developers so what I did is I looked into the actual issues like why are these 25 million developers not flocking to it because I mean you guys all like like blockchain's amazing this is like the next generation of Technology where are they and uh you know did it asked around really kind of got got to the Crux of it and the Developers found it too difficult it was to to switch from the modern web 2 development to actually to the Antique web 3 development because a lot of actual building in web 3 is more like building in the 50s it was a completely different Paradigm switch where it's like they don't know actually how to do that they would have to re-learn how to develop in that way so is that why you said that blockchain has a lot of potential to be great oh yeah uh blockchain is not actually provided any value to the world yet so yeah we're still building we're still figuring things out and it's going to be a big big thing it's just not there yet um so like I said number one the blockchain development is too difficult second big thing is like not only is it too difficult but if if you make a mistake when you when you build in blockchain it's a game over mistake there's no rolling back the mongodb database there's a you ruin people's lives mistake so it's much bigger stake there's zero budget for bugs and it's harder to build in so there's more of a chance you're gonna write a book so why would anybody want to come over and risk that and the final thing that that's I personally really don't like and I think a lot of people don't like it uh either is that blockchain is toxic and the reason why blockchain is toxic is because you are incentivized to be toxic what do you mean by that because if you own a token the more toxic you are the more value your token your token is because if you tell everybody else why their token's bad and they believe you you make more money and so this is the only industry that I can think of that is that incentivizes this toxic Behavior this this tribalism and just go on crypto Twitter see what people say about other chains that's bad that's a horrible place to be and uh that needed to be fixed as well so how do you fix that oh it's a great question so what we did is I partner up with an amazing man uh Dr J McCarthy he's not here so I can say nice things about him um but uh so he has been researching uh programming languages compilers uh formal verification for over 15 years now I think it's been close to 20 years and all of those things if you package them correctly we'll fix all three of those issues and that's what we did with reach is number one we built a program language that is a higher level language that's similar to what traditional developers develop now they're no longer needing to build state state machines um it's so it's much faster much easier to write uh the second thing that we did through the compilation process we use a thing called formal verification we automatically generate formal proofs to mathematically guarantee that the code is correct this is not testing this is actually literally turning your math up your your program into a math problem and proving it will be a correct in every potentiality so it's like testing on steroids it's amazing and the final thing that we did is we abstracted away the technology we abstracted away the actual blockchains so developers building on reach no longer asks what chain are you building on they don't say are you ethereum are you algorans are you you know whatever the new Layer Two is um of the week they just built and they help each other build and no matter where they're actually launching so we fixed we made blockchain easier we made blockchain safer and we removed the toxicity that's amazing that to me is work yeah all the time in effort I put in well now I see why you find your joy yeah I love a lot of the things you said there and I feel like I I definitely noticed a lot of similar similar things when I entered this space um you know you said at the beginning about how despite being you know almost you know over 10 years like 14 years since the Bitcoin paper now like into this crypto Journey that you look around it's like where are all these applications that we've been prom people been talking about how blockchains are going to change the world they're going to unlock all of this incredible new types of applications where are they like we have D5 there's like some cool things you can do there we have nfts we have like some very preliminary things but in terms of like really transformative applications for end users they're still not there 75 of all contracts ever launched are one of 12 contracts how's that feel yeah I feel like great and the reason for that is because people are scared to write their own applications because if I make a mistake I I ruin people's lives and reach fixes this and let me I like using like real use cases like rather than big flash I think we're a product that exists and we've been existing and people building on top of us a a use case that I like to actually use uh maker which is one of the most beautiful elegant applications out there it's a stable coin if you don't know uh look it up great uh Rune um he's one of the people I look up to on Twitter but uh great product and it is used quite a bit they spent like around 1.2 million dollars in launching the the MVP event to actually get the actual contract out and it took them around 11 months of coding to make it happen um we have a company on top building on top of reach uh called expact um beautiful wonderful people and they built the same actually the same product with more features in six months time and they did it by hiring web 2 developers from insurance companies they they spent 80 percent less money building it than what maker did um and that's real savings at 80 savings not not 20 80 savings uh because we made it easier we made it safer and uh we can take a web 2 developer and then four weeks they can be they can build anything on blockchain from scratch that's awesome so I'm going to ask both of you you know what comes next for your organization Spencer will kick it over to you uh what comes next for ceramic I mean so we just I mentioned we just launched this developer preview about two weeks ago of our new graph database which enables much richer types of applications in terms of being able to express relationships between data and query across the entire network to do things like find me all of the posts by all of the users that I follow uh you know for within this sort of data model system we're going to be working on a UI Explorer for these data models to really make this as seamless as possible I think that again like like Chris mentioned you know building on blockchains has traditionally been been challenging and even on ceramic right now it's you know it's harder to get started right now on ceramic than it is with mongodb or another web 2 database but I think the goal it actually should be significantly easier when you think about web 2 application development when it comes to data every single almost every single Adventure application has a user profile table somewhere in their database how many different e-commerce apps have an orders table and a products table and all of those tables look incredibly similar but are all slightly different and every single web 2 application that wants to you know launch any sort of product has to think about how to structure their data how to model their data from scratch and they wind up making the same mistakes and you know going through the same process over and over you have all this duplicated effort across all these organizations with ceramic you can have you know one person or one team or people spend a lot put a lot of thought into designing a well-designed data model that they can be reused by dozens or hundreds of application developers all you know all around the world so now you only need one person to build a profile model once and now instead of having every single application it's like okay let's make a profile table in our database you just go to this registry of all the data models that exist and just like open source software development like really revolutionized software development because now every single application that needs to log a file doesn't need to log you know a log message does it need to build a logging system from scratch they can just like npm install you know a logging framework or whatever you can just so compose DB install profile and now boom your application has data capabilities to read and write profiles a without you having to do any of the schema design or database configuration yourself and also getting the benefit of access to all the profiles that have already been created by any application on the network so the goal is like as the ecosystem starts to grow at the beginning okay right now there's not that many data models in the network if you want to start building on ceramic you have to Define your own model as the ecosystem matures you're going to start seeing this great catalog of all of the models that people applications have already built and more and more often the new application is not going to have to Define their own data models at all they're just going to go to this Marketplace see like oh okay I need a profile I need a post I need a comment click click deploy and boom you get started in 30 minutes you have a full feature database that you can read and write with all the apis auto generated for you to create data in any format you need so I think this is the real Focus for the whole team right now is kind of making that Vision come true um we just launched our developer preview of this two weeks ago we're adding a lot of new features into it right now including uh we're trying to get ready for Devcon in in Bogota in like two weeks I'll be there yep we're planning on having uh the developer preview support relationships between data models and be able to say like okay you have a comment on a post right and that's going to be added later you can have a post model and then a different team could later on add a comment functionality on top of it by creating these relations relationships and then we're just doing a lot of work on making it more robust in production ready right now it's still only on our live on our test net the goal to have it be kind of production ready by uh East Denver in February oh that's ambitious good luck yeah thank you it's awesome Chris that was my question what's next what are we gonna do next uh I really like what you guys are doing by the way I think that's uh it's extremely it's needed the way that kind of see it is that you are building a the graph for ipfs like it's kind of like what I like to see is like you're you're building a like a caching system for the actual like almost semantic web that anybody can actually build and eventually I would hope that you're building like decentralized node structure so that's that's eventually that there will be a network that you don't rely on a single place and anybody can you know work so I think it's really cool and I don't want to I'll add one more thing very quickly uh which is just if you want to go even further long term in terms of what's next um compose DB is this database layer I just talked about this graph database with these data models that I think is really important for demonstrating the value of interoperable data longer term we want to eventually pull out um the event streaming layer that powers that so like all every piece of data has these like verifiable event streams that build it up we want to actually pull that out and have that be almost like a decentralized Kafka so you have like a event streaming system that can be totally agnostic to what is actually in the events and what type of structures you build so then that can be then at that point composed baby might just be one of many database systems built on top of ceramic and you can have ceramic can be almost a glue layer between a bunch of different decentralized platforms and architectures with how far off do you think that is that's probably I mean I think we want to start having like start prototyping that probably by the end of next year um probably have something like don't do not quote me on any of these dates but uh maybe hopefully have something like write this down you know going live on mainnet uh in early 2024 for that I mean it's tough because it's gonna be a gradual process like we already are we already have these decentralized event streams it's more about separating out the architecture and adding the crypto economic intensive layer that will power it um and so you know it'll take time to to sort of pull those pieces apart and figure out the right the right tokenomics and whatnot for it but right now we're pretty much all focused on compose DB and making that successful that's really cool awesome Chris back to you my turn okay so what are we doing next world domination how do you get there how do we get there so I think I mentioned this early is that what we're doing is we're following the the Microsoft and Apple Playbook first what you do is you build developer tools to make building and uh building applications easier and make it easy for them to to build provide value to the world that's going well we've focused primarily on algorand and our marketing and our training wise because we love algorands we think that the tech is great they sponsor this event of course they're amazing um but we are starting to look at the other chains we've always been blocked animastic but we're a startup you have to focus uh resource somewhere now we're ready to start taking over the evm chains uh convincing those developers there's a better way stop spending so much money stop losing everybody's losing everybody else's money and build on us how do you convince them ah show them the proof like the I I'm not a big fan of like you know Big Marketing words and I just like to show and point like right now we released a Dao um similar to molot dial which is a fully on-chain treasury management and I believe it was under 200 lines of code fully complete to give you that comparison molot doubt itself lots and lots and lots more complex code that's just one example why would you go and build all of that when you can actually write this and have it more secure and make it so you don't need to actually learn so much you don't need a mean to actually build molecule you can actually go and hire a web 2 developer and teach them a few things um but like I said we're following the Microsoft Playbook we're building in the developer tools we are um we are owning the developers over the world and just like you know my buddy Steve Ballmer said developers developers developers Developers developers developers developers Developers um if you would you say I'm sorry could you say that developers developers Developers so if we have all the developers in the world then we start providing them tools to actually provide better user experiences for their users we then start actually approaching the our business robot uh business model to directly to Consumer and this is like once again what Microsoft did with their Windows started actually going directly consumer and we started going at that direction as well but at the in the end um my goal is to commoditize all protocols make it so that that developers can build on us and choose which protocol they want to launch on Purely based off the actual features of the protocol and not the onboarding system and um you know my goal is for for reach to be blockchain just like Google is the internet you know the the the thing that people see and think when you actually ask them on the road what do you what is blockchain so if our audience wants to learn more where do they go to to learn more well uh if you want to learn more um if you want to hear me talk like I do all the time I'm always on Spaces Twitter spaces follow me on Twitter at chriswinner um what I want to learn more about reach uh just very simple reach.sh is our website if you want our documentation if you guys are nerds and actually want to get your hands dirty is this docs.

reach.sh but yeah come and join come and join like our Discord is actually full of pleasant people not your toxic crypto Bros so come and build let's let's make the future real that's fantastic love that [Applause] Spencer folks want to learn more about Sarah I just want to say also that um when you're building a super cool and a very strong agreement on the developers being the key to everything and making that experience much smoother is is really what's going to unlock the power of this space so really glad to see I feel like you know blockchain Tech is really cool but it's been way too complex for way too long and anything that we can do to actually make it accessible is gonna is is really game changing so really important work thank you um if you want to learn more about ceramic you can check out our website ceramic.network that's c-e-r-a-m-i-c dot network uh the website is a little bit out of date um but you can also join our Discord is actually probably the best way to to get in in contact with us and I think there's actually chat.ceramic.network we'll we'll direct you to our Discord so we only have a couple of minutes left and so I I guess I'm limited to just one more question that I'm going to toss to each of you is if you had any advice that you could give to somebody with an idea oh I love this question what are you going to tell them all right all of you guys out there uh if you are new to the space or if you're worried about you're too late you're not um the future of blockchain is going to be built onto on the backs of the people that aren't in the space today because if us were as smart as what we thought we were we would already made the blockchain mainstream so not only am I urging you on to say keep pushing forward we need you to we if you don't come in and bring your crazy ideas the idea is that I think are stupid because if I thought they were great I would have done them blockchain won't exist so be motivated be passionate your idea is great and let's make it happen that's fantastic [Applause] how'd you follow there you go yeah I don't know if I can follow that up other than a big plus one um yeah I mean I'm excited about the potential of when blockchain stops being Niche and stops just being for people who are like in it for the ideological reasons right like I really believe in the value of decentralization I really believe in the the value of self-sovereignty over our data our identity our finances all of that but blockchain is going to win when people who don't care about that stuff are also using blockchain technology because it it delivers value to them in their daily life not just in this like abstract way but it's like oh like this is my favorite app I love it I can you know do cool things with it that I can't do anywhere else and it's using blockchain under the hood and I don't even need to you know maybe you know I don't need to understand all the nuances of what that means I think there's an interesting question about whether users need to be aware of the fact that they're managing keys or not um but that I think is there's a lot of potential there in just thinking about you know when my grandmother can use blockchains and can you use applications built on blockchains that's when we win so I'm really excited about what's going to get us from here to there it's funny that's uh so you you said you came from [ __ ] I use mongodb as an example when I talk about blockchain all the time yeah um because when's the last time you heard someone say uh I'm building Uber but on mongodb like that just doesn't it's not it doesn't exist it's a huge red flag to me when someone says I'm building an x on blockchain who cares why you're rebuilding on block history like that you if you tell me that you are building that you're trying to do a cash grab you're trying to to build something off the hype off the back of blockchain build use blockchain because it's adding value to your product there's a there's a a white paper out there or not white paper a research paper out there is called some simple economics blockchain if you have not read this write it down some simple economics of blockchain not not enough to go right in the sun um but the reason why I said to actually read this is because what it what it does is a whole research paper on what the true value of blockchain is it's uh everybody when you say What's the value of blockchain people go decentralization immutability um you know trustlessness uh resistance yeah censorship those aren't values those are features what do all of those features actually provide as about as far as values go and this paper goes into an in-depth explanation of what the true value of blockchain is and if you're thinking about using the blockchain at all read this paper because this tells you where you can actually truly squeeze the value out of blockchain to make your product a better product you're going to have to tell me the name of that again when we get off the stage um we are at time I want to thank you both for being here this is a great conversation thank you all for being here as well sure we can go for another hour I don't know it yelled at over there so have a great afternoon and evening and uh enjoy the event thanks [Music]