Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi: Fileverse: A Trustless Stack to Decentralize Knowledge and Collaboration

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Web2 file storage relies heavily on centralised entities, which have mostly outgrown their competitors, establishing a quasi-monopoly. The reasons for this are twofold: enormous operating costs and seamless user experience (e.g. social logins and account recovery), which, until recently, could only be solved through centralisation. Add to this the reluctance to change platforms as users need to re-upload their files, and you get an ossified user base. However, data leaks and hacks are a constant threat to users’ privacy, and indicate the disruptive potential of decentralised file storage and sharing.We were joined by Andreas Tsamados & Vijay Krishnavanshi, co-founders of Fileverse, to discuss their decentralised file sharing solution and how they plan to disrupt the Web2 quasi-monopoly.Topics covered in this episode:Returning to the P2P roots of the InternetWeb2 vs. Web3 user experience (UX)Business models for Web2 dataDecentralising dataWeb3 data storageCosts of data storageManaging file updates and permissionsFileverse use casesThe business model of FileverseImproving UXFuture roadmapEpisode links:Andreas Tsamados on TwitterVijay Krishnavanshi on TwitterFileverse on TwitterSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/531

This is Epicenter, episode 530 with guests Andreas Samados and Vijay Krishna Vanshi. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst and today I'm speaking with Andreas and Vijay, the two co-founders of FileVars. FileVars is a super interesting project that leverages in existing infrastructure that kind of lets you use it as an on-shayshay. Google Docs sort of like product, but we'll hear all about this in just a second. Before we talk with Andreas and Vijay, we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought to you by NOSIS. NOSIS builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem.

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decentralized nosus chain. Get started today at NOSIS.io. Course 1 is one of the biggest node operators globally and help you stake your tokens on 45 plus networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, Celestia, and DYDX. More than 100,000 delegates stake with QuarS1, including institutions like BitGo and Ledger. Staking with QuarS1 not only gets you the highest years, but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually exclusive for institutions. You can stake directly to Quarice 1's public note from your wallet, set up a white table node, or use the recently launched product, Opus, to stake up to 8,000 eth in a single transaction.

You can even offer high-yield staking to your own customers using their API. Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind. Startsaking today at chorus.1. Andreas and Vijay, I'm so happy to have you on Epicenter this week. Same, excited to hear. Hey, Frederike, thank you for having us. Very happy to be here. Super cool.

Tell me about yourselves. So who are you? What's your background? What makes you get up in the morning? And maybe I'll start with Andreas. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Just one quick thing.

Also, we're honored to be here after the celebration of the 10 years of Epicenter. We watched the live stream yesterday. It was very cool. I can't believe it's been 10 years already. I think I've been a listener since half that time. Yeah, really crazy. Also, I was going back in the initial episodes, and I saw that even in 2014, you had an episode on meme coins with a Kanye fish coin, which is hilarious. You see that CT hasn't evolved that much.

So, sorry, back to the question. So, yes, I'm Andreas. I'm one of the co-founders of Favours. I am also a PhD student. I'm finishing my PhD at the moment at the University of Oxford. My focus there is specifically on human control of AI systems in hacking operations, so what we call computer network exploitation and attack. It's something that I'm quite passionate about,

and yet I see it as secondary to a lot of the work that we do at Favours. And in some sense, quite complementary as well. So we always have great conversations about that within the company. Why do I wake up in the morning? So I think what drives me is, first of all, as a proper Greek kid to buy a house for my mother, is the first answer. And the second answer is that, and I think this is something quite common in the And the team, we are aggressively, maybe naively, optimistic about the impact that we can have on the world. I hope it doesn't sound too EA-like, but we really want to have direct impact on things that we consider very problematic for the way people communicate,

collaborate, and live together. So most of our work is dedicated to that. Cool. I'll come back to that in a second, kind of why you think these areas are problematic. But maybe first, Vijay, what about you? Who are you? Yeah, I am like mainly you can say that out of Andres and Constantine, I fill in the tech gap. And if you think about it from the perspective of what do I associate with and what is it that excites me most? it's how can we use different kind of technologies that exist, like, out there, and how can we make it fit into the users, like, you know,

how can we make a connection between the users and the data, and how can we bridge the gap between those two things? So that's the, like, general thing which excites me for either experimenting with different things, for building different things. And I like, like, in general, to create small softwares or small things that increase either the interactions or the efficiency in general for people that are doing things on top of them.

So, yeah, I know it's sort of a techie pitch. So you're the tech co-founder, Vijay. Yeah. But I also heard that there's not just Andreas, but there's also Constantine. So there's three co-founders. Tell me about Constantine. Yeah.

I'll say the first part you can complete in Vijay. I think you can only hear good stuff from us about Constantine. So he's the eldest one in the co-founder group. He won't like that. He's someone that's been in crypto since around 2016. I think he's his main special. until Farvus was really doing product marketing and getting a lot of non-crypto people to get interested in crypto.

He ran the most popular by a measure of audience crypto campaign in the world. So with the economic times of India, over 150 million readers. And he's someone that writes. now at Favours, makes sure that things happen. You have Vijay and us and me who are, you know, going all over the place, generating ideas every time that we talk. And Constantine takes all that, canalizes it, focuses it around clear objectives and make sure that, you know, both Vijay and I know that, you know, we're developing something bigger than just. side project that excite us.

We're developing something that has users, that has people depending on it. And yeah, he's really the person that manages to organize the whole team, which is also why he's the CEO at Fathers. Yeah, every company kind of needs that sort of person, otherwise things don't get done. How did you three meet? Yeah, so me and Constantine, like we worked at a cryptocurrency, company for like I think for four or five years and that's how that's where we met and we understood

that okay we are excited about common things and one of the thing like which anders was saying about the crypto campaign which constantin had done like it was me and him like we were organizing that that thing and that's how me and constantin met and like after that, Constantine introduced me to Andres, and it has been like a crazy story. Maybe Andres can add on the, like, the moment when we shared the POC of Fileverse first as an anecdote. Yeah, yeah. It's very funny. I'll reveal something on the podcast, but I met my, I met Constantine through my mother because he's my brother. he's my older brother and we were back in Christmas at home in Greece

and he tells me hey dude look at this and he opens up an email and it's an email from Vijay VJ sends really like pretty pretty straightforward the POC on helping people just use IPFS and things exploded things exploded because we immediately thought of what we could add with, how we could develop it,

how we could make it in a proper product and then into a protocol and, yeah, the rest is history. Super nice. Yeah, one could say you and Konstantino go way back. Which Christmas was this, by the way, because it's Christmas again, right? So how many Christmases have you worked on five hours now? So now it's going to be the second. So we started in, officially we started the work around April 2020. 2022, yeah. But the first POC by Vijay came during Christmas 2021. Towards 2022.

So yeah, we're closing our year and a half. reaching two years now. Cool. And as you said earlier that despite the fact that you kind of work in AI, kind of your largest concerns are not around AI. They are around kind of how we collaborate. Or at least this is kind of like what it sounded like. What's the thing that you're taking issue with?

Okay. So there is definitely a strong relation with the issues that I'm talking about and AI and how we solve it at Fowler. So I'll just give you a general picture and then we can maybe dive in deeper into what I mean, but it's something that both VJ Constantine and I noticed at the very beginning before we even started thinking actively about building something, which is that there is a strong point

of centralization, the remaining point of centralization, if you want to say it like that, crypto, which is how people collaborate and communicate with each other. We're a whole industry that is ensuring that people can have computational and data integrity in their financial transactions. We've built amazing what I like to call community computers, those blockchains. And yet, we're not leveraging them for something that is non-financial but essential to the way that crypto evolves, which is dissemination of public knowledge, communication, etc.

So this is for the crypto-specific, but it's shocking that this is a case in crypto because we have those values in the crypto community. But the problem is much more general. The problem is global. Anyone who uses the Internet abides by a search. server client model. This is something that people see as, you know, the status quo today on the internet, but the internet did not use to look like this even 15 years ago. I like to use that example that until 2010, a third of all internet traffic was peer-to-peer, was purely bit-torrent

links being shared between individuals. And this is a third of all internet traffic was peer-to-peer. And this is quite important because we took a radical turn into something that is much more centralized. And now the whole world depends on three big companies for the storage of their data, the recovery of their information, they're dependent on, you know, an arbitrary decision made by some Google engineer in California that had a bad day and thus decided to delete customer's data. We're dependent on a server going down. every now and then at AWS and my Roomba cleaner are not working anymore because of it.

So there are points of centralizations around servers usually based in the US which come with a series of endemic issues including lack of privacy, predatory models of mining your personal data, selling it to 100 different data brokers. You have no idea even exist. manipulation of your attention, of your mood, all those things.

So we want to take that away and redistribute it to people. Do you know which proportion of internet traffic is peer-to-beer today? It's a very good question. I think it's, so last time I checked, I need to remember the source as well. It's my academic side. I don't want to throw things without proper backing. I don't remember exactly. I think I read something like less than 8%.

Yeah, something like that. I can specify it next time or online. Okay. And the three internet companies, just for the record, they are AWS, Google, and I assume Microsoft or who's the third one? Yes, yes. Those were the companies I was thinking about. But, you know, you have some auxiliary actors.

that are maybe not at the same scale, but are quickly closing in and capturing a lot of consumers into their predatory model. Why do you think this consolidation of the market has happened? So this is a great question. I'll be honest, even if it sounds like it's something that would limit people from even looking at farmers, which is UX. For me, this is where it starts and ends. This is something that's the main focus of our team at Favis.

We want to improve the UX of people collaborating, coordinating online. I think the reason why those companies reach that level of quasi-monopoly is because they offered users the ability to abstract away a lot of the complexity that were involved in, let's say, email protocols. Google comes in, tells everyone, hey, PGP is cool, your email protocol using Thunderbird is cool, but you need to specify a million different things. You need to be aware of spam.

You need to be aware of all those things. How about we take it all away for you? We also give you a way to recover your information that is not just dependent on you losing your password or not. We automatically take care of the server, give you guarantees even if you don't pay our servers. So amazing UXA. They just made something that was revolutionary

into something that is revolutionary and easy to adopt. And we like to use that analogy at Fabers because we're taking something that is already revolutionary, blockchain's smart contracts. but we're trying to make them into something revolutionary for everyone else in the world. My grandparents included. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm totally with you that user experience is currently not what it should be for Web 3 products.

And we'll get into that in just a bit. But kind of spell it out for us a bit more. So kind of Google offers this amazing user experience. So kind of like fully. wide glove service for kind of like reading, answering, storing your emails.

How do they make a living off of this? And clearly they are making a very decent living. A killing. Yeah. They're making a killing, that's for sure. So there are a few things about their business model. I'll focus on the one that allowed them to have

such an amazing UX. And the thing that allowed them also that created the path dependency for them around something that we consider predatory today. So they made everything free at the beginning in order to ensure that they could get, they could establish a foundations for a new kind of business model at the time, you know, beginning 2000s around data. what Google realized because they were building a search engine at the beginning is that

there is a lot of public and private data that is being sent around the internet and the private data doesn't have much value associated to it at the moment so what they decided to do is we're going to take people's private data semi-private data we're going to tell them that they can store as much as they want of it on our servers for free. But in a very long and legalese full terms and condition, we'll make sure that we can use that data for our own purpose, and specifically in order to make some money. So Google created this big market of data brokers that buy people's personal data,

and that personal data doesn't have to be necessarily the content itself of whatever you sent via an email or stored on Google Drive. It is also the metadata, which arguably is so much more important. I remember that quote by the NSA operator that helped catch Bin Laden, which is that 95% of all the work that they needed was open source and on Google. and it just required them to piece things together. So most of that data that you were talking about was location, address book, was time of things being sent.

So all that is metadata. They're taking that data. They're selling it to a market that they created of data brokers that need that data in order to sell a product in order to do better identification of categories. of users in order to sell that data then to other companies again. It sounds okay maybe in principle, doesn't to me. But this creates a lot of endemic issues. I think in the U.S., it's still so prominent.

In the EU, you know, we have the GDPR. It reduced a bit the amount of predatory things that come from that model. But in the U.S., you can buy millions of people's, cell phone data, you can track them around the country, you can corroborate their interactions with other data points and infer a million things from that. And it's as easy as spending $150 on some website. It's not okay. Yeah. Sorry, you see, we get passionate, so we're going to use some big words maybe like predatory. Now, I clearly see why you think this is super important.

I think there's a couple of things that I would kind of like to keep track off here. So kind of one thing is kind of how could this be tackled without blockchain? And then kind of why did you decide to kind of go the blockchain route, right? Because basically even without using blockchains, you could you could offer a service that kind of is not exploitative in that sense. and kind of doesn't sell your data that way. So I'm thinking of services like, say, proton mail or similar. Why do you think they don't have more traction than they actually do?

Do people not care? So I'll start, but I see VJ twitching a bit, so I know that he has a big speech prepared for this. but I'll start by maybe rejecting your premise. Kind of rejecting your premise. Specifically, I think that more and more people care. You look at the Signal app user base. It's been exploding for the past two years.

WhatsApp, which is that mega app that everybody uses for communication, it started end-to-end encrypted. It started with all the right values until it was bought by Facebook and now, you know, still into and encrypted, but there are a few things that ring people's paranoia. Same for Proton Mail. Amazing team. They do a lot of the right things, I think, and their user base has been growing quite significantly for the past two years. So there is really a movement which we want to capture, and that's our...

You know, our first audience after the crypto people, it's the privacy conscious individuals. And that category is growing massively. So I think it's growing and people who care more and more. Especially, you know, everything is to our advantage because you continue with the model we currently have. Leaks are going to continue to happen. It's just about how big of a leak or fuck up will. happen for more people to take that radical step of, okay, I abandon Facebook. So on that side.

And then on the take side, I think most of those companies are, so ProtonMail, for example, are doing what I consider 95% of the correct choices. But they're still server dependent. I think their servers are in Switzerland. I remember a year ago they received a warrant forcing them to open up one of their server. Of course, everything was into and encrypted, but it freaked out a lot of people, a lot of their users. I remember receiving the email. And this is something we want to remove.

We want to remove the server. We want to remove the need for a server for authentication and authorization. And this is where I stop and I let VJ give you the better explanation. Yeah. So like one thing which I've seen like blockchain do very well is basically like there is one property in blockchain. Like that excited me and the reason why I like find it very interesting that it can be used in different places. One of those is like it makes it very easy for people. like for example like you and me to agree on things now what does that agree on

things mean in this case like let's say if you do a transaction on either noces or Ethereum or any of these chains and you send a transaction hash that's a cryptographic proof of something that you did computationally right and that computation in this case signifies that you did a value transfer from one address to another for now with all the different things that we see. We can go and verify it on ether scan. We can go and verify it on public infrastructure.

Or we can even run our own nodes to verify that that thing actually happened or not, right? Until all this happens for finance. Now, how does that happen for finance? For example, we go ahead and update token balances and all of these things. That's how you have an entire defy and everything else happening on top of it.

But what we are doing is we're doing similar thing. but for data. Now imagine this like cryptographic proof you were able to give for your own data, like first create for your own self, and then second, also share it with other people saying that okay, now you can also go and check the access or check the document without me intervening in that process, right? So there are different other patterns that open up. Those patterns are, for example, you sent tokens to someone, now you can never revoke access to that document. This is one of the key benefits that you get. The other way is like you can have, for example, temporary permissions or time log permission

that is visible on chain and everyone knows. It's not just one server or one person controlling all of those things for everyone and so on and so forth. So it's that base assumption. and the things that you can build on top of it is what we are enabling with the use of blockchain. And one like interesting thing which I'll say that would like I think highlight how interesting the work is and why it's like very crucial for the next step that we are taking by moving away from this kind of infrastructure is if you go to ProtonMail and you lose your keys, you won't be able to gain access back to it, back off it, right? But if you take a look at the blockchain, it's a core premise that you should not be able to lose your case. So to give an example of the same work that saved it with Recovery

Hub, to give an example of one of the EF work that me and Andreas were working on for, like, allowing people to recover access to a smart contract in a low, like for a low risk, in a low risk method. So it's all of these things that actually come together that won't be possible if we didn't use blockchain to leverage as an advantage, in my opinion. This is super interesting. I think this is the first time I've heard someone say that the advantage of blockchain is that you can't lose your keys. I get back to that in just a second. So there's a very obvious kind of, kind of question here, right? So storing data on blockchain is notoriously expensive.

So kind of how do you make that work with file verse? Beauty of content addressing. We're not storing the whole file itself. Yeah, we're storing the content hash onto the blockchain, which is just a pointer to a file, and that pointer comes with some properties of self-certification, which we consider crucial for what we're building, especially for public data.

So you want to be able to see and have that data integrity prove that. This information came from that person, and we're absolutely sure of it, because we have a formal proof that Vijay stamped that data with his, key and that data generated hash that anyone can verify and can verify that no future or no new edits or changes happen on that data. So those properties are quite important. This is what we use the blockchain for. We're making sure that those hashes are stored on chain available for anyone and this is what Vijay meant with not losing your keys,

you can store it in, for example, a smart contract and make sure that that smart contract is being controlled by multiple people. Maybe just one person, but with multiple series of key pairs and with some rules that are publicly viewable by anyone and triggerable by anyone. So this is something that VJ and I are working on for the Ethereum Foundation. We have a mechanism, for example, that let's say that Andreas and Frederike decided that there are too many scientific publications that disappear every year from the Internet.

And this is an important loss for humanity. So we decided to put a lot of that data on. IPFS or R-WIF and store those hashes on the blockchain to make sure that it's always available to everyone. Andreas and Frederike might disappear, but they want to make sure that this public data, this public good, remains available and recoverable by someone else. So they make sure that on that smart contract where they store the hashers of that content and through which they pay for the storage of that content is recoverable. by a public community. So, yeah, this is some of the work that we're doing, and it's not something that you can do with any centralized server

that depends on you maintaining it. I think in that context, it makes a lot of sense. You already said that kind of like the actual data gets sued elsewhere, namely on kind of protocols such as IPFS or ARWIV, remind us how they make sure that the data actually stays around. Okay, so in the way that we have done right now, in terms of, in the way that we have structured our nodes or the way that we allow people to host their data, right? So what we do is we have a storage node, let's say, and that storage node does pinning for that person. In this, in case of file works, this storage node is something that we are running right now for all our users.

But later on, what we have is like you can actually run it on your local machine. You can run it on your own AWS instance. You can run it on your, like some cloud that you just hosted, that you're hosting in your home and so on and so forth. So what it does, it like that storage service pins that data. There is a concept called pinning in IPFS. which keeps that data on those notes. The beauty of this concept of pinning and why this kind of thing actually makes sense

is that anyone can come in and participate either in the storage of those pins or can come up with, for example, things that can work on top of, like can do the transfer from one system to another without one, worrying about if data gets clogged or lost in the middle. So to give an example of that, how that looks like, is that you can have an IPFS hash that is pinned on one machine.

Then you have another machine that pulls that data from that machine, and then start spinning it for that on the different machine. So you get right to exit from one server, which is, let's a hosted by us, and then you can actually start doing the pin for your own self and your own smart contract. Okay, but basically, if I don't want to host stuff myself, I just want to use IPFS as a service, how do I make sure not other nodes that kind of,

because not other nodes store the data. I think this is kind of like the crucial difference to kind of like blockchains, right? So basically you have, every node kind of stores a subset of the data. So kind of how do I make sure that my document doesn't get, dropped from the network by way of all nodes that kind of used to store it, no longer storing it or no longer being online. Yeah.

Mainly financial incentive. It's cool because it really allows for a self-sovereign type of experience of the internet and data storage and management because you can pick and choose or mix and match. different providers of data storage according to your needs. So if you're someone that really wants to ensure that your data will never disappear, you give a 200-year financial incentive for a network that is specified for long-term storage, like RWave. So instead of going the IPFS route, you might want to have better permanence guarantees and pay upfront something that is so much cheaper than doing the same activity on Google Drive.

So on RWE, for example, after five years, four years, point five of storage on the RWE network, you are more cost effective than storing that same data for 4.5 years on Google Drive. And from there on, it's free. So you paid for a 4.5 years equivalent to Google Drive on R-Weave, and then you know that you have that data there for 200 years because of the incentive mechanisms of the network. One last point about that, going back to what you said, how do I know, how do I make sure?

This is another benefit of what we like to call community computers. You get a formal proof that you can query, that you can ensure every... day that is there, that your data is stored on a specific hardware somewhere in the world. That proof is undeniable, unbreakable, and unspoofable, which is very important for someone that wants to ensure that their data is still up there. So yeah, you have that proof instead of a promise by a company saying yes, we have your data, but also according to Section 7.3 of or in terms of conditions, we can drop that data if there is a picture of a naked butt on it.

Little do they know that this naked bot is your newborn baby, you took a picture, it's on your Google Drive, and now you're not allowed to use a service and all your data is deleted. I use that example because it happened a year and a half ago with someone using Google Drive. Yeah, so, yeah, that cryptographic proof plus a financial, an incentive system that works pretty well. Why is it so much more expensive to store things on Google? Is it just because they have an insane profit margin? Or are there some deeper underlying causes?

I will point at the fact that there hasn't been much change in the pricing of data storage in those quasi-monoplies. For one reason, they're quasi-monopolis. They do not need to abide by markets, demand, conditions, dynamics, meaning there isn't a race between different providers, like there is in different philcone nodes competing with each other, to either provide the best service in terms of UX or provide better pricing for their users.

Here, when you know that you're the only person that people or the only company that people will knock at the door off in order to get a certain service, why are you going to compete with yourself towards a more cheaper or more efficient or better UX? You're already there. But there are quite a few cloud service providers. So it's not just Amazon or Google. it's also Microsoft and then kind of like smaller ones like Hatzner and local one. So it seems like if any one of them were to kind of break the price barrier here, they would all have to follow at some point, right?

So I'm not sure why that's not happening if storage is actually much, much cheaper. Well, because they're all focusing. So this is me going into this is not the fact. this is a reasoning, educated reasoning. So, AWS, compared to Google Drive, are focusing on different types of markets, different types of users. AWS has a quasi-majority.

I think they have 66% of all server usage and data storage. But this is much more for businesses, for developers, for ML engineers, etc. Google Drive and the Google servers have, and same for Microsoft Office, have direct to consumer focus with their data storage and their servers. And they're basically just, those two together are two thirds of the market for data storage for consumers. So, yes, there are other players. They're fighting for a much smaller chunk of the pie.

And usually they're focusing on part of the pie that is much more specialized. So it's part of the pie for consumers that are very focused on privacy, preservation or guarantees. So they allow themselves to have a different price. method because they know that what they're providing is not just better pricing but or not at all better pricing but just better UX or guarantees that meet their audiences needs but if you were to take all that market together put them all under one big category a system where you have millions of nodes millions of providers competing with each other to meet the needs of their users, meaning either pricing or UX or privacy guarantees, you would have

different dynamic, is my interpretation and different pricing models. Here, because you have quasi-monopolis, even though there are a few competitors, those competitors are not fighting those quasi-monopies on pricing. They're fighting them on some marginal improvement. that are very important for a certain subset of users. This is how I see it. I want to see an efficient market person kind of debate this, because to me it sounds like, because it's such a huge market,

it should be an enormous business opportunity to kind of just drive down the pricing here. There is also one important element to that, which is people are not just coming for storage. They're coming for the usage of a app, or a feature, a Google Doc, a Google Sheet. And those companies have created an ecosystem where everything that is your essential needs when you're online or you're doing activities online

relates back to their storage space. So competitors that might emerge would need to also compete on the full stack of features and tools. So it explains part of it. But I hear the concern. Yeah, I think the full stack explanation makes a lot of sense to me. So you guys are leveraging smart contracts to kind of point at existing file storage protocols.

If you kind of look at what a Google Doc does, it kind of gives you an infinite number of points in time that you can go back to. obviously, kind of if you need to store every one of them as kind of a pointer in a smart contract, that's expensive on kind of, you know, the smart contract fees. It's also expensive because you need to store each one of those kind of as a separate IPFS or R weave document. Yeah. How do you go about that?

Yeah. So the interesting part in that is basically there are two types of things. When the data is at rest, rest being that rest state being. for example, like, okay, I have finished, I'm finished with this document, now I want to publish it or put it out there, share it with the people that can actually take a look at it and so on and so forth. That's when we put the data on tape, right? Before that, we use a peer-to-peer database called it Gunn and what it does, like it creates

the cryptographic proof for all those updates that are happening. And then it makes sure that those updates get transferred between the peers that are connecting to filers and actually help share the bandwidth or the updates with all the other peers to reduce the latency in general. So basically there are two types of systems. One system is on-chain storage, another is off-chain storage. The off-chain storage is peer-to-peer and shared amongst the clients that are connecting to the system, connecting to the document. and so on and so forth. And then there is another system which is when you want to publish

and push the things on chain or share it with other people. That's when you push it on chain with the fingerprint method. Okay. And then you also alluded to the fact that kind of I can share it with whoever I want for however long I want.

How do you implement that kind of, is it on the smart contract basis or is it on, the file storage system? So basically there are two, three different cases of permissioning as we had implemented. One of them is like you have a document, now you want to share it with someone, you generated the keys related to the document, pushed it on and shared the thing with other person. That happening either through NFD or through contract is something that,

we can say that abstract it out for the sake of the simple discussion, right? And then we have the other way which is like you want to have the revocable access, meaning you give access to someone and then you want to revoke it after some time. In that case, like we have something called, it's still something that we are working on or experimenting on. So I'm sharing a bit of a forward thing here. So it's sort of an UTX, so approach, like unspent transaction output approach, and then you, once the transaction is executed,

either through a smart contract or through someone else, that's when you lose access to the document or things like that. So there are different paradigms that we are like implementing and using and are possible because of the smart contract and us being able to trust someone for being able to share the access or revoke the access without it being done through one of our servers. Okay, so if you look at,

at the product as it is today. Maybe this is a question for Andreas. What does it offer me? How can I work on it? How can I collaborate using it? And how does that compare to Google Docs, for instance? Okay. So I like to think of it more as Google Workspace as a whole.

So inside of it you have Google Docs, you have Google Drive, sheets, etc. Why? Because this is really the suit of tools that we're trying to provide. So today you arrive on Favours. Right now we're a permission base. So your address needs to have certain characteristics. And it's for us to better manage our initial user base and core users. Improve the UX and then open it for the world to join.

So if you have permissions, you arrive, you create your account in two clicks. Those clicks, what do they do? Very similar flow to SAFE. Safe Multisig, you deploy your smart contract. That smart contract will serve as your repository of content hashes. And we'll be doing access permissioning for anyone that you give access to your files to and what type of access. Once you've done those two clicks and deployed a smart contract for free, there is a dashboard that opens up in front of you, a UI. That UI is not stored on our server only.

You can access it through any public IPFS gateway. So you never need to interact with fileverse ever again from the moment you've deployed a small contract. You have a UI that allows you to upload files, store them publicly or privately. If it's private, you can choose token gating, you can choose anyone with the link, or you can say any of those 10,000 addresses in my CSV can access my file, etc. Basic storage and permissioning. You have also a bunch of plugins, and this is probably the most exciting thing that Favis is doing. We like to think or we like to communicate the idea that you can think of your

workspace as something as customizable as your browser. Today a lot of people are customizing their browser experience or their internet experience by adding extensions. I have the internet archive. I have Metamask. I have a bunch of others. Grammarly, etc. And we want to do that for your workspace, for your collaboration space. So instead of having a Google workspace or a notion that is limited to whatever new feature the developers have decided they should push on other users. Here you have a store, let's say, where you can drag and drop new plugins. Today the plugins are developed internally, but we're already starting to see people propose new plugins for

that dashboard. So a lawyer versus Frederike versus a meme lord like me. We'll want to have a different workspace and different tools to create, be productive, et cetera. So right now you have a wideboard. Anyone who uses Excalidro would love that feature on Fathers. It's just like Excalidro. You can invite people on it as well to collaborate live with you. And the difference is that you can create as many whiteboards as you want. Whereas for Excalidro, there is a limit of five different pages that you open.

Here you can, as many as you want, with groups, without groups, etc. You have also a D-Doc, decentralized docs plugin, so it acts like Google Docs. You have mostly the same UX with a few differences, like you can token gate or people joining you that are editing your file, can retain their anonymity or be represented through their wallet address or ENS. And you have another, that's our latest plugin, which is called D pages, centralized pages. You'll see the pattern that act like a notion. So you click on that plugin and you open up a blank page that has exactly the same characteristics

as you have today on Notion. You can create tables, tables within tables, you can do coding, coding, or a code markdown. You can embed images, videos, tweets on that page. You can put a cover picture. You can customize it as much as you want. So on that, you can really do anything from blog posting to having your internal database or knowledge base.

And this is where, interestingly enough, most of the companies that came to us saying, hey, we would like to use file versus because we want to use a decentralized version of everything that we use. They've been very interesting in deep pages, interested in deep pages, specifically for documentation, governance, and knowledge basis. Why? Because they realize that if notion goes down to tomorrow or whatever other service they might be using like Gitbook, that's it there is 10 years of crypto knowledge

discussions interactions with the community that has disappeared forever so this is where we intervene and this is what most actually enterprise let's call it clients have come to us

to address okay and how do they pay for this I mean do they pay for the on chain storage directly and how do they pay for your services because you kind of just you're just an interface to those services. So what's your business model as Fivers?

Great question. A few things. One is we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We're not going to go into this with, hey, we're pricing it according to the number of words you write. We're going with something that is quite similar to existing models. So it's either based on storage, sort of space or based on specific features that you might want to get like and this is me already

giving some secret details of what's coming soon but let's say you want to have a local LLM help you either generate images or synthesize a report for you or help you write something Those are special features that you would need to unlock by either paying or etc. Right now though, Favus is an allowless mode and everything is free. So we want to make sure that the first iteration of Favours, what we're working on right now, is just something that blows everyone away in terms of U.S. And for that, we decided to focus on their own. over 7,000 unique addresses that are recurrently using FIvers at the moment.

Those individuals are for us the opportunity to nail the UX. So we're not pushing a business model onto them. And we want to ensure that even when we do, and it is either storage-based or feature-based payment, we want them to know that whatever happens, they can continue using the service and paying through alternative paths. For example, instead of having your data replicated on three nodes and that managed or pay to fibers directly, you do that yourself on RWIF through the same UI and through the contract that you deploy it.

Or you really like Pinata of the IPFS ecosystem. you use Pinata. Or you want to store everything locally. Perfect. Your smart contract and the UI were made for you to customize your needs in terms of storage and never be dependent on a team that might disappear tomorrow. So yeah, this is the customizable ability even on the business model side. And we think that we're going to be attracting a lot of people that do indeed want to have those options

and an ecosystem of plugin where they know it's not the Fivers team that created this new plugin, but it's someone else and I can pay that developer myself. Nice. And you said earlier that you're striving to kind of make the best UX possible. You actually said that you want your grandparents to use this. Currently, Web3 products are notoriously difficult to use. How do you achieve that? or do you think you're there already?

So I think we're halfway there. I think already, and this is probably my favorite success story with Fivers, which is that at my university department, a lot of people, if not the majority, are quite skeptical about the value of blockchains and anything crypto associated. and I presented our product to them without mentioning anything in blockchain about it, just talking about data and computational integrity, recovery mechanisms, group ownership, and trustless interactions, and people really liked it.

And it was a version where you didn't have to connect any wallet. And people used it, and people really liked it. then I said I dropped the B word and they were like, ah yes, but you're burning the planet by using those docs. So what's really, I think our main contribution to the crypto space is that we're pushing non-financial applications. And those non-financial applications have an extremely low barrier to entry, even if we don't have the best UI or UX at the moment.

Why? Because we removed a huge barrier, which was you need to have a wallet. In that wallet, you need to have tokens. For you to have tokens, you need to go through a centralized exchange. For you to use that centralized exchange, you need to give your ID. You need to pass KYC. You need to give the color of your cat. You need to tell them how many times you go to the toilets per day.

you need to do all those things that are quite ridiculous, that destroy any trace of privacy for anyone that starts interacting with the crypto world. Like we want to, like the space in general wants to push self-sovereignty, privacy, and ownership onto people, and yet their first stop in order to join our industry is through a centralized exchange,

is through buying tokens. that's not okay that's not going to be sustainable we want to have that one stop entry where you don't need anything you just need to create a dock

share something with someone that's it it's daily activities people already have on the internet there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to provide that with better guarantees of privacy and ownership how do you log in then without a wallet Okay, so there are a few things.

The first iteration of Favours, it was just, you can think of it as an alternative to we transfer, you would arrive, you'd upload a file, you would share it immediately, no wallet needed, your identifier is basically just your browser, things happen client side, and that's it. Today with the current version of Favours, it is a, you know, it is. wallet-based, but you have options to go without a wallet that are coming very soon. It's the work that we're doing in parallel also for the Ethereum Foundation, and it's the famous social login.

So social login is something that happens on your browser level, on client side. So depending on the path that we take, you'd be able to. to, for example, use your email as your identifier, or use, let's say, an existing key pair, your PGP key pair in order to associate a wallet to it in an efficient and non-long setup, seed phrase, blah, blah, blah way. Or you can do something else, which is, this is what we call internally, the Argent path, which is put two, three, four numbers of your friends or yourself or your family. they will now become the guardians of the access to your data and to all that in case you either lose it or you just want to fast login.

So there are a few paths and one that already exists today is, but it does require a bit of a setup. You can create file of a smart contract via the safe multi-sig today, via safe multi-sig, so the safe user interface. And thankfully, safe shipped also social. logins. So now you can, you know, with an email, login directly onto Fiverr's if you go through the safe UI. Cool. Perfect. So unfortunately, we are almost at time. I need to wrap up. But what's coming for FALVAS in this new year? Yeah, great question. Thanks for asking. There are a few really exciting things that are coming, including things focused around UX. So we want people to be able to log in finally just in one click and without having

necessarily to go through the mental exercise of creating a wallet, et cetera. So this is coming. We have better recovery mechanisms that are coming. we have something that is core to something we've been focusing a lot of our efforts on, which is customizability of data storage, even more than there is today. And there is also a lot of new plugins coming in. I just want to mention in passing that VJ is the co-creator and organizing of She Builds. which is the biggest non-male-focused hackathon event and an organization in India.

And we have not only a lot of participants that are learning what Web 3 is all about, but we've had a lot of people already start proposing new plugins and ways for them to monetize their plugins via Fathers. So this is going to be very exciting because you're seeing really the seeds of fireworks becoming something that is not just Vijay Constantin Andreas and the team, but something that has been completely re-adopted, reappropriated by anyone who wants it and go into a full community play. So those are a few things I'm excited about. Vijay probably has maybe different things. Yeah, so one key thing which would sort of like answer one question that you were aduding to like how do you make sure that the IPFS hashes that you have published on chain

actually stay around. So those are different kind of like that's a very interesting and unique problem that we have just because our storage is decentralized, right? And this problem has been solved by multiple providers. for example, Filecoin, RV, and different other players in the ecosystem already. What we are thinking of is like how can we make use of these different providers and then maybe ask them to come up with the network that supports file versus, let's say, Network 1, network two, network three, and users can pick between these three networks instead of, you know,

us giving them an option that, okay, you go with one person or the other. And the best part that you get is like you get right to exit from network A to network B because of the data like a fingerprint that is stored on chain, right? And you get this right to exit from any of the services that we do just because of the way that we are making sure the data is stored, making sure the data is shared and so on and so forth. So yeah, that's a very interesting work. And I think that's something that's very unique as well. Super cool guys. So for people who want to build on file verse or just try it out, how does one get whitelisted to kind of use this? Right now it's direct communication with us. There are a few things that you can already do in order to get access. For example, if you have a safe multi-sig, you're automatically allowed listed and you can deploy your fileers. but if you want to try it out,

we have recurrent campaigns that pop up every now and then or you can really just DM Fathers directly we're usually very open to that or any one of the people working on Favours and this is both for users that want to try something non-financial in crypto or show during the holidays to their family, you don't need money or speculation to use something in crypto.

And for teams that want to build on fileverse, using file verse, destroy file verse, whatever they want, they can either go directly on GitHub, they can go on Radical, or they can, again, message us. We're constantly talking with different teams. So we're happy to see those types of interactions. Perfect. Thank you guys. It's been a real pleasure. Frederike, thank you.

Thanks for all the great questions. Also for putting your finger where the real discussion can happen and things might be a bit wobbly. It's always a pleasure. And yeah, I hope we can return maybe in a year to show how much progress has been made. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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