How to Capture Alpha in 2024: AI and Gaming Projects | Joanna Liang - Jsquare, Greg H. - Shardeum

Square so take it away sure thank you and hello everybody uh thank you for joining our panel today um before we officially start I will let our panelists make a brief introduction about themselves uh so let's start from Greg awesome hello everyone thank you for being here my name is Greg Hammer I work at a project called shardi my title is head of fundraising and ecosystem shardi is an evm based layer one which scales horizontally its transaction capacity is relative to the number of validators in the network so each validator you add to the network increases the amount of transactions it can process per second uh we aim to enable no fee markets um so the transaction price will be the same forever no matter how many transactions there are uh we've raised $26 million in pre- seriesa funding backed by J Square Janes Street Arrington capital and many others uh our main net is planned to launch at the end of Q2 and we're co-founded by Nish alett who's the founder and CEO of the largest centralized Exchange in India uh our community is very fast growing in India and our mission is to onboard users in Emerging Markets like India and Nigeria and bring them on chain to make decentralization accessible to everyone thanks so much for being here hello hello uh I'm Dimitri I'm a co-founder and CEO of Subs squid uh thanks a lot for inviting to the panel so at Subs squid we are building a decentralized uh query engine in a data Lake uh that allows you to handle uh terabytes and petabytes of data currently we are focused on onchain data in particular uh focusing on indexing products uh that all allow us to deliver decentralized and permissionless indexing that is up to 100 times faster than the existing indexing Solutions and the secret source is uh the data leg that allows you to uh query and extract onch data uh a lot faster and more efficient compared to a traditional RPC thing so uh in particular we can scan the ethereum blockchain uh and just if few seconds and you can extract all the information that you really need uh with the RPC that would require you to go through each block and probably would take like hours if not days um we are currently cover most evm chains and l2s and ecosystem also substrate chains and uh in q1 we also will support salana which is hundreds of gigabytes of data and uh 100s terabyt of data so uh that proves impres the scalability of our data Lake which basically grows uh with the number ofet nodes in our Network yeah hello everybody uh I'm the moderate moderator today I'm Joan Al the CEO and co-founder of J Square I came into this space and have been doing investment for over seven years so far and I co-founded um J Square group together with James in early 2021 and so far we've been uh managing an aom of over $150 million in total and since the money all came from myself and James so the um the investment strategy is pretty flexible um so far we have invested around 70 projects in total and it's very coincident and lucky that both of the uh Shard and Subs squid are our portfolio companies and besides we also invested in in companies like coin list Runa and the recent very popular nft project paji Penguins and decentralized the compute Network Jensen and so on and so forth and so thank you guys for the introduction and um so my first questions comes to Greg so we know that uh scalability interoperability has always been the main problems that await to be solved in space and what's your view of the mirror is of l1's L l1's l2s projects in space and what's the future structure and lscape uh look like great question Joanna um this ecosystem is evolving so fast the only way to keep up is to spend a majority of your time throughout the day on Twitter to see all the new products launching and you know what they're building um my wife often gets frustrated with me sometimes when she asks me to hang out with her and I say I'm busy working working and then she comes in my office and sees them on Twitter um but she doesn't realize that I'm researching all the new projects in this space that are launching every day um there are many new blockchains launching um I think when you look at the space today you can divide it into uh monolithic networks and modular networks um on the monolithic side you have networks like ethereum and salana and um few other chains and on the modular side you look at networks that are optimizing for one specific function of a blockchain such as data availability uh or execution um for example layer 2os focus on increasing the speed of execution by executing transactions off chain but the biggest challenge that remains in the web 3 ecosystem today is how to increase the speed of transaction execution at layer one um you know I think the modular networks are a result of not being able to scale at layer one and optimizing different functions across different networks um we really need to be able to figure out a way to scale decentralization at layer one and that's what shardan is focused on um so you have these new networks uh launching these days which focus on parallelization um but there are many different ways to parallelize transaction processing and uh often you'll hear parallel evm as a new buzzword but the way they're parallelizing the transaction processing is by parallelizing transactions across the different cores of the validators in a network every validator still verifies every transaction but they increase the amount of cores of each validator in processed transactions in parallel across those cores which results in vertical scaling ultimately leading to more centralization so the biggest challenge that needs to be solved is when blockchains become congested how do they continue to scale um most networks today don't have an answer to that problem um they rely on mors Law and you know Hardware requirements becoming more performant every two years um or just ultimately increasing the hardware requirements of the nodes and the network um which is not what web 3 is here for we're here for decentralization and so we need to optimize systems to become more scalable as they become more decentralized that's what we are building at shardi shardi is the first layer one where each validator in the network processes transactions in parallel while ensuring that every account has a redundancy of 128 validators so uh shardi am's positioning in the ecosystem landscape today is uh layer one optimized for horizontal scaling um but there's a lot of other great products out there and I think most people don't realize that every blockchain has its own product Market fit based on the design choices it makes and the trade-offs it makes I think layer tws are really great for app specific customized networks such as gaming uh or in systems that don't require a lot of censorship resistance um the modular ecosystem is uh pretty exciting as well um however there could be some trust assumptions with more centralized data availability networks um and you know even other networks that uh are specifically focused focused on things like execution at layer one um but less focused on um you know decentralization maybe good for like an onchain order book but not a global general purpose smart contract platform um so uh you know ethereum when it launched didn't know that it was going to be the settlement layer and it has fallen into place as the settlement layer salana has become a place for deepin um and uh Bitcoin has become a store of value uh we're going to continue to see more networks fall into their product Market fit based on the design choices of the network yeah than thanks Greg um so dimma uh we just mentioned about the scalability issues that a ways to be solved and so from your perspective how does the current solving of scalability changes the data the infr DAT landscape yes so first of all Greg uh mentioned uh that there are different ways to scale right so roughly speaking there are chains who try to build beefer and more performing notes like salana and increase TPS and another direct direction is where we have a lot of rollups in l2s so basically we scale the number of chains and like right now we can have hundreds of l2s and rollups uh and at the end of the day uh each of those chains produce information because uh each of those contribute to the total number of TPS if you count it across the networks uh at the end of the day uh each user has its presence in the footprint across all these networks like salana arbitrum charum whatever and in order to get um any kind of grip of this data you really need to have a separate place where you can analyze the historical transactions where you can extract the historical data join it across multiple chains and uh in particular for example if you're building a multi-chain DEX you would be needing to show transaction history across all the chains in the network so at the end of the day we really need a a place to put this data uh in such a way that you can query it efficiently and uh the more transactions are produced across on the Chain the more data uh eventually it it becomes right so uh right now we currently have uh hundreds of terabytes and uh we produce probably like tens of terabytes uh every month and uh obviously this requires a dedicated solution so that uh everything that we've been using before was really meant to be used only for like of the small data sets that for example were produced by ethereum which is just like 15 TPS and this is exactly where uh we see the future so instead of relying on the existing uh Solutions like uh rpcs or uh POS databases for example uh we designed a horizontally scalable data leg that grows with the number of nodes and it allows you to put pretty much everything that we we produce across all the zoo of these chains into a single place and uh extract only information relevant for the developers because out of this ocean of data uh normally you would need only like a very tiny piece but it is very hard to see it through like all the millions of blocks and of the history and this is exactly the key purpose of the data Lake uh as we have it right now in Subs squid and uh in the future we see that even more data will be produced uh through offchain uh stuff for example even right now foraster doesn't store everything onchain but instead they have like a hybrid thing where some information is to offchain some onchain and uh in order to get any understanding of this data you would rather have this into a single database and again uh for that we have a performing data Lake from where you can have efficient queries you can build indexers on top of it you can build interesting applications and uh this is exactly the missing infrastructure piece uh that is often overlooked when people are concentrated only on the scalability of the execution and consensus layer yeah thanks um so a quick question for for Greg and I I see that um shm has already buil a large uh ecosystem and community and so what's your view uh of the like different the community and ecosystem in terms of different territory and geography yeah it's really interesting how differently crypto is viewed and used in different countries around the world uh but first I wanted to say it sounds like J square has found Alpha in horizontal scaling you have a horizontal scaling L1 and a horizontal scaling date infrastructure so look looks like horizontal scaling is an important place in the market um you know decentralization in web 3 is such an exciting industry to be in this industry is here for decentralization and the vision of building open permissionless systems where you and I can interact with each other on different networks around the world without having any middleman controler have ownership of our interactions and data um the vision of this industry is decentralization and there's a real problem that web 3 can solve today in different countries around the world many of us here in the US don't realize it because most of us are focused on buying Bitcoin and ethereum and other tokens and you know holding them for profit but in countries like Nigeria where they're facing 26% annual inflation there's a real opportunity to solve problems for them the sad truth is most of these users in Emerging Markets aren't on chain they're using centralized exchanges for crossb remittances and um you know custody in their crypto there's a massive opportunity to build blockchains that can Bing users in emerging countries onchain and give them the power of decentralization but the issue today is that the view onchain is expensive centralization today is cheap and onchain is expensive and we need to solve that problem that's shum's mission is to enable decentralization for Everyone by keeping transaction fees low no matter how many transactions there are with auto scale um and uh another interesting uh Trend in an emerging country is India our co-founder build the largest centralized Exchange in India um if you've read news about the India ecosystem at all recently you may be familiar with the TDS tax which says that anytime you transact with a counterparty regardless of if the transaction is profitable or not 1% of that transaction will be taxed so any transactions on centralized exchanges or any transactions with a counterparty get taxed so what's everyone doing they're going onchain because there's no counterparty onchain so onchain order books are about to have a lot of growth in India there's a lot of new teams popping up building onchain order books while they have this window of opportunity to bring a lot of volume on train um you know so it's really easy interesting to think about how you know narrow focused people in the US and the West can be when today all they look at is coin Market cap and what's the next token to pump while other communities and different emerging markets around the world have actual real world use cases of web 3 today and we're really excited to be one of the teams building a product to help Advance those ecosystems thanks for the great question Joanna thank you um so my question for you dimma um so the ethereum ethereum's next big upgrade Duncan is coming and we all know that it will support the layer two scale scaling through Proto dun dun sharding and so can you illustrate more about dun sharding EIP to our customers and to um and what kind of data challenges it brings about yeah that's a really great question so first of all like what is D sharting right and like what is this Buzz about so this new upgrade uh introduces a new type of transaction and this is the first time where uh the transactions uh came and reference basically an external data so the idea is that we are currently at a stage where the nodes cannot really store all the information that are needed in order to process this the uh State transitions of the VM machine so before this uh every transaction data uh all the things that were ever produced in ethereum were stored by the network uh in the um in the full archival notes but with the introduction of these blob transactions basically there is a separation between the execution and the data this is an inevitable step when you want to scale to basically separate compute from storage and the compute from the data and uh uh that would mean that uh a lot more data going to be uh moved around the network but at the same time it will be unretrievable from the network after some time and again uh it basically emphasizes how it is important to have a separate data layer uh in order to be able to accommodate all this uh basically shortlived pieces of data that are nevertheless very important to any kind of indexing or applications thanks uh so one last question um um since there are a lot of new Concepts and the money is flooding into some new areas like crypto AI uh Depend btcl l2s and so on and so what's what do what are you most excited about in terms of the areas and verticals that could could potentially bring Mass adoption to our industry yeah um in uh 20 seconds I'm excited about new Founders entering this space and finding problems to solve that billions of people face and verifying those problems exist and then building decentralization decentralized solutions for them um you know to build real world use cases of decentralization that apply to billions of people worldwide uh I do think dpin is a very exciting category of products uh a friend of mine built a web 2 project where he hired his friends to drive all around the US and he tracked the cell signal on their cell phone and he discovered where all the dead spots were in the US and uh built cell towers there and started renting them out to the cellular networks and that was pretty success uccessful but it was really hard to scale worldwide because you know how do you collect all this cell data worldwide um this is what dpin can do is you know help help scale these decentralized infra networks infrastructure networks quickly by rewarding users with tokens and you know coordinating coordinating Global communities so uh I think we're going to see a lot more growth and deep in and I we hope we can bring more deepen projects to the evm ecosystem yeah I think we are really out of time so just like say socials I am very bullish on socials uh in particular wecast and foraster need more frames we need more frames okay great uh thanks everybody and thanks for your listening [Applause] and than for