On The Brink with Castle Island - David Vorick (Nebulous) on the Maturation of Decentralized Cloud Storage (EP.189)

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

David Vorick, the cofounder and CEO of Nebulous, the firm developing the Sia network, joins the show once again to talk about the growth of decentralized cloud storage. In this episode:  Skynet reaches its 1 year anniversary Dweb versus Web3 Current capacity and utilization of the Sia network Where Sia stacks up in terms of the decentralized storage networks by usage How the internet ended up massively siloed Why data portability and thin internet applications are so important Current breakout applications of decentralized storage New models for authentication for web apps How the dweb could return the internet to its 90s-era topology The current state of property rights on the internet The intersection between Handshake and Sia

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to On the Brink with Castle Island. Today we have David Vorg back on the show. He's the co-founder of Nebulaus, and he is the man behind the SIA blockchain. Saya has been around since 2014, I believe. It's a decentralized cloud storage platform with actually really a material amount of usage at present. I know Falkoin gets the headlines, but Sia has been operational for a while now, and it's sort of part of that emerging D-Web stack. Now, David was actually the last in-person guest that we had on the show, about a year ago, we haven't had an in-person one since then. Turns out David might have actually had COVID when we recorded the first time,

but I somehow was spared. Anyway, we cover the growth of their SkyNet platform, what people are actually using SIEFOR today, and how the D-Web has begun to mature. Let's jump right into the episode. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group,

AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of constituted easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

David Borg. It's about a year to the day since, well, not exactly, about a year since you last came on the show. It's been a very tumultuous year, I think, for the both of us. You were telling me that you got sick in March, which is when we recorded the last episode in person in the office in Cambridge. So you may have actually been sick while we recorded that episode. Is that right? Yeah, it's kind of not great to think about, but the timing, works out and I may I may have been infected when I was in the office and just not not showing symptoms

at that point. Yeah, I mean, you seemed, you know, chipper enough. And we had a good conversation about SkyNet, which you were just telling me as a year to the day that Skynet launched. Is that right today? Yeah, we, I believe we launched a year to the day ago. And we should have a some solvatory things in the media. I know that this podcast, won't be out today, but certainly the recording is on our one-year anniversary. Yeah, so for context, today we're recording on February the 18th. So unfortunately, we have backlog now. So it might be like a week or two before we actually get it out.

But congrats anyway, very exciting. Thank you. It seems like Skynet has some good traction. So we're going to talk about that. it's been an up and down year for sure i don't think for the record i don't think i don't think you have anything to you know feel bad about and uh at that point it was like mid-march so i fully knew the risks anyway and it was a good episode so um we've we've dragged you back on to talk about what has happened with the dweb as they say in the last year uh so we're

we're here to get an update basically So maybe we can start with Skynet, you know, how it's evolved the traction that you've had and what people are basically using it for today. Yeah. So I think that the vision shifted substantially over the past year. When we launched, we had this kind of idea of it being this universal data platform. And then I think sometime maybe around late May. or June, we realized that the really interesting stuff was all happening in the web browser.

And the reason it was interesting is because anyone could use it. You didn't have to download special software. Just the user friction was really low. And so we started to focus basically entirely on JavaScript and entirely on supporting web browser things. And then in a little fuzzy on the timelines, but I think somewhere around October, we released this thing called Skydb, which again, in March, of last year. That was technology that I thought was, you know, about three years out. And

at some point in September, we were like, oh, hey, there's a really easy way to do this. We figured it out. And we basically just dropped everything, made it. And so what Skydivie does is it allows you to store mutable data at a pub key. And so what that data could be, it could be like a list of blog posts that I made, or it could be a list of tweets that I've liked or retweeted, or it could be my profile information, my avatar. And I can go and I can change those as a user. And everyone will see the updates in real time. It takes right now maybe three to five seconds to make a change and publish it.

And that's actually comparable to how long it takes to post something to Twitter or how long it takes something to post to Reddit. It seems instant because the interface lies to you. It tells you that the comments is now published before it's actually in Reddit's database. And so that's something we're excited to be able to do on SkyNet. And it really just completely changed the landscape of what's possible. And that's when the really interesting things started occurring. So within the launch or within one month of launching Skydb,

we had a fully believable decentralized Twitter. So it is a completely decentralized alternative to Twitter. You could post, you could repost, you could like things. And since then, they've been working on it. The interface is a lot cleaner now, and you can do like reactions and post music and videos. But there's a decentralized Dropbox. So things have really started to flourish on the decentralized web. And we're very excited about specifically web browser applications and focusing on the JavaScript ecosystem.

So do you call it Dweb? Web 3 or something else? Yeah. At the moment we're calling it Dweb, we may pick a new term. We found that Web 3 to most people really means like the parity ecosystem and it implies some sort of Ethereum or smart contract, which Skynet is generally doesn't have smart contracts. It's just really open data and interoperable data and like user-owned data. And so, yeah, we tend not to say Web3 because I think people will make assumptions that aren't true if we say Web3.

And if we say D-Web, people are more likely to guess correctly what SkyNet is. Yeah, I agree. Web3 was what I used to call, like, decentralized Internet applications. but I guess that's sort of been captured by the parody side of the house. Maybe like just to remind us like what would you say it costs in dollar terms to store like a terabyte of data on on SIE or Skynet for a month? What's sort of our current costs there? Yeah.

So I think right now it's up to about $6 and it tends to go up in a bull market because hosts are a bit slower to adapt their prices. And the other thing that we've really been kind of messing up for the past two months is that our portals were initially very price insensitive. So they would just use all hosts. Hosts have, of course, responded to this by increasing their prices a bunch. So we've recently cut that back and we're now only using cheap hosts. But it's going to take probably, you know, a month. one to two months for that price to come back down.

And what are the kind of assurances you have when you publish data to SIA or Skynet? I'm not sure which one I should refer to. Yeah. So Skynet, of course, is entirely backed on the SIA network. So if you publish something to Skynet, it is going on to the SIEA network and going on to SIA hosts. The assurances you get are redundancy. You get a repair mechanism. So if some of your redundancy goes offline, it'll spin up new redundancy and make sure that the file remains in good health.

And then the hosts have put up collateral. So before a host takes a file, they supply some money out of pocket that says, like, if I lose the file, I'm going to, this money is going to be slashed. And so because we use a broad redundancy scheme, generally 10 of 10. 30 either one of 10 or 10 of 30 that means that you're very robust to host going offline so we've we've never seen a file get lost because all of its hosts disappeared usually if a file gets lost is because there's a bug and the renter like either accidentally overwrote the file or the repair mechanism never kicked in or you know something to that effect it's not because unstable hosts disappeared and the file disappeared

And what are we looking at today in terms of capacity and utilization on the network? So I believe the capacity is around 2,500 terabytes, and the utilization is around 600 terabytes. And this is something that we expect both those numbers to go up pretty substantially, starting in mid-March. Already, SkyNet is about 400 terabytes of the utilization, so we're two-thirds of the network, and we are growing very rapidly. So if this growth continues, there's no question that we're going to, on SkyNet alone,

we're going to be pushing the upper bound of what the network's doing today. Does that make Saya the second biggest decentralized storage network right now? I think by utilization we're the first biggest. I think file coin by utilization is under 600 terabytes. Okay, yeah, I saw them posting some. eye-popping numbers, but that might have been capacity. Yeah. So they have, yeah, I think over a million terabytes of capacity, but it's all just burning

a bunch of electricity. It's not actually storing data. Okay, because like file coin miners are getting paid to create empty storage, but there's just not a lot of demand for it right now. Yeah. And I think the total file coin subsidy right now is on the order of like, I think it's tens of millions of dollars per month. And so if you're just paying that to people who have storage, you know, obviously you're going to get a bunch of it. Wow.

So what is, I don't even know what a million terabytes is. What's the prefix that you use for that? That would be one x a byte. Seems quite large. That's really interesting. but the utilization ratio is much less. Yeah. So before we hopped on today, you were telling me about the nice features that you get in terms of data interoperability on if you use SIA.

And I think there's a lot of urgency to this because the internet infrastructure is getting more politicized and just more unreliable, it seems. It's almost like we're regressing and things are just getting worse in terms of who has access to like internet services and corporate APIs. So tell me about that angle and sort of why it matters, especially to to sort of entrepreneurs. Yeah. So I think the, you know, the internet's been in a massive land war since probably 2015, where you get these like, I guess, balls of momentum. and users get stuck using applications and they can't leave because the network effects are so powerful. And so Facebook, I think, was really like the first immovable giant that showed up on the internet. And it just, it doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem possible to

displace Facebook. And then kind of, I think LinkedIn is the second one, whereas like, LinkedIn is so bad. And yet no one can build something better because its network effects are, just so, you know, so strong in keeping it in place. And so I think with Facebook and LinkedIn is the examples, everyone else has been striving really hard to take over their niche and become a similar immobile giant. And so we're seeing a lot of the internet lockdown as like the Reddit, the Twitch, the YouTube's, really try and try and just absorb everything in their corner of the And it's stifling innovation. It's bad for users.

But at the same time, no one's cracked the code on how to overcome the network effects. Like it's just unfathomable to make a new YouTube that would be successful because you have to have so many people. And there are a lot of people trying and not really succeeding at the moment. And I would say that the key issue here is that every time you launch a new. platform on the centralized web you start from page zero. So if you make the best, you know, software, you make the best YouTube website in the world. It's a hundred times better than YouTube. On day one, you have zero users, you have zero videos, you have zero commenters. Like the whole, your whole ecosystem is empty and dead. And what makes YouTube amazing is not its interface,

but it's billion users who are actively pushing the platform forward and contributing content and basically doing a bunch of work for YouTube for free. So that's where Skynet gets really interesting, is that it's possible on Skynet to launch a competitor to an application, and then on day one, you actually have all the users of that competing application. So you have all the videos, you have all the comments, you have all the private chat groups. because on Skynet, every application has read-write access to the raw data of every other application.

So YouTube can hide all their videos behind an API, and no one can touch them because they're on YouTube servers. But on Skynet, the videos are owned by the individual users. When you upload a video, that video belongs to you. Or if you watch a video and you pin it yourself, you've taken ownership of that video. And so, or you make a comment or if you make a private group, you know, it's private because it's encrypted. It's not private because it's on a centralized server. It's that that group is accessible to every other application.

And if you say, yes, you know, allow Facebook X to access Facebook groups, Facebook X can read and post to your old Facebook groups and none, you know, none of your friends need to know that you've switched to a new application. You can still interact with them. And so applications on SkyNet can maintain network effects or like brand new applications can establish network effects on day one with zero users. You can build an ecosystem that just leans into all of the activity on Skynet already. And I think that solves the network effect issue. We have the problem like one time, right?

So right now Skynet is fairly new. There's not a ton of stuff on it. But all it takes is one application to build a rich data ecosystem. And now we have a launching point for everyone else that's just substantially elevated above anything a centralized option can give you. So how close is this vision of being a reality? I mean, what are people using Skynet for right now? Are people actually uploading videos and content to the network?

Yeah, so I think there are two platforms right now on SkyNet that have material traction, which is, you know, and when I say material traction, I mean, there are people who use it because they prefer using it to other solutions. The first would be Sky Feed, which is kind of a decentralized Twitter. So you get people posting images, videos, or just random thoughts similar to how they do on Twitter. And then the second one would be Mars Storage. which is a decentralized Dropbox. And again, people have been using it to store their files the way you would with Dropbox, but it's fully decentralized. And so I think we're the very early stages of that, but really like more interesting to me, I think, is some of the standards that are starting to come forward. A lot of creators have been working together

to make content standards that they can more easily use each other, data. And I think the two biggest ones right now that we've got our eye on incubating is first universal login. So we have this thing called Sky ID that manages user data on behalf of an application. And so it means that if you log into Sky ID, that's equivalent to logging into all of SkyNet at once. And so once you log into SkyD, even if you've never been to Sky Feed before, when you go to Sky Feed, you just instantly have an account. It knows your username. It knows your avatar because SkyD manages those things. Or if you go to Mars Storage and you log in with Sky ID, again, it just instantly has an account for you. It has, it can load your specific data.

And I think somewhere between like 20 and 50 applications today, log in using Sky ID. And it's, it's so easy to integrate that it's pretty much just what everyone uses. It's, it's easy. and it's really healthy for users. And then the other thing that hasn't gained as much traction yet, because I think people are still figuring out the best way to build it, but it's the social graph. So on Skyfeed, if you follow 100 people, and then you go to say SkyBrain or some other feed-based application,

at the moment, your followers don't come with you. But because of SkyNet's open, there's no reason that they shouldn't, right? All your followers should be able to come with. you. So the creators are working on formalizing those rails so that every application just has access to all your your whole social graph. So if I'm remembering correctly, you've probably been working on this for, I would say, over six years at this point, right? You got started in 2014. Is that right? Yeah, the company started in 2014. The original idea, I think, happened in late summer 2013. So almost seven years of this point. I'm sure that it's taken longer than you

expected, but how does it feel right now? Seems like you're getting real critical mass, real traction. It seems like all the tools and the infrastructure is almost ready. And it also feels like we're at sort of a moment in the history of the internet where it's getting increasingly siloed and sort of like tyrannical at both the corporate and the state level that there seems like there's a real urgency for the Dweb like does right now feel like a critical time for what you what you've built yeah it feels in some sense is like extremely lucky that um you know the the two points where uh things have gotten bad enough that mainstream has started to ask is there a better And our technology has gotten to the point where we can answer yes.

I think those two things happened within like four months of each other. Right. And when, you know, when you look at, we've been working on this for six, seven years. Yeah, I think it's very lucky that those things happen together. I don't feel like, you know, if the mainstream had started asking this question in 2019, team. We'd have still been at a loss. We wouldn't have known how to do it. And I think that's, that's something that, um, the site ecosystem has kind of gotten used to. Uh, for the longest time our team has been of the opinion, like, you know, we're still, we're still a deep tech company.

We're still developing. Like, we, we don't have a technology that we feel we should be marketing right now. And that's, you know, often to the dismay of a lot of, a lot of our community members. they see file coin going and raising $200 million. And they're like, why isn't Sia doing this? And we just kept saying, like, we need to keep playing with the technology. It's not at a point where we can stand behind it. That changed. And I really think the key thing that changed was SkyDB.

Now that SkyDB is out, you know, just everything feels ready to go. And we're really shifting as a company. you can kind of see internally us setting up to be marketing heavy as opposed to engineering heavy, which is something that, yeah, I think a lot of people didn't think we were capable of. But again, it was just about waiting until the right time, which, yeah, I think we're here, right? It's time to go. How do you think that we get to a world where user social graph portability works, and makes sense and all these applications transform into being mere interfaces as opposed to

full-on data silos. How do we get there? Is it just an organic process or is it actually one which is triggered by regulation? You could imagine like a stepped up GDPR which mandates data portability or something or does it just not matter to the trajectory that we take? Yeah. So I think early on it'll happen automatically. And then as always happens, the biggest companies in the space are going to be, you know, we're going to have probably a decade of like the golden years. It's going to be really great. And then same thing that happened to the internet. You know, you had these really great years all the way up to maybe 2000. I think 2010 is kind of when when the golden era started to slip away. And then what happened was people figured out how the protocol works. They figured out how to

capture the data. And I think the same thing is likely to happen to Skynet where you have all this open data and then eventually people will figure out the old strategies of like embrace, extend, extinguish and kind of start to co-op. So I think regulation will be later stage. But early on, I think it'll just make sense. Like when you use Sky ID and when you've used, logged into 15 different SkyNet applications using Sky ID.

And then you go back to the centralized web and you try to sign up for Clubhouse. And you don't have Sky ID and Clubhouse is asking you. And you can only sign up if you have iOS and you want to give up your phone number. Yeah. So you give up your phone number. You have to have iOS. And you need an invite. And it asks you for a username.

It asks you for a profile image. And it doesn't have any of your social graph unless you like, it permissions on Twitter and let it see all your contacts. And like all of those things just felt so frustrating and dated to me because, you know, I got into Skynet apps with one click of one button and just boom, everything was there. And so yeah, I think I think that Skynet will take over and just like once we have it, everyone will be like, wow, that that like siloed world that we came from made no sense. like it was so awful and now that we're now that we're like breathing fresh air like why

why did we ever do it any other way and so i i think that will happen and then eventually um the slick businessman will be will be looking at uh how to capture the value they'll be asking themselves how can we turn this into a mode how can we turn this like hive of activity into money printing machines for us um and that's that's one will be at one will be at again. Yeah. I don't know if this is the way you think about it, but I see the Dweb as like this restorative movement to go back to the roots of the internet as it existed in kind of like the 90s. Not that I was actually on the internet in the 90s, but I think I first used the internet like 2002. It's embarrassing to admit. But like where people actually ran their own email servers

and they administer their own websites and they had that. their own self-hosted blogs. That's sort of like the true vision of the internet almost, not to have this fake nostalgia about it. Is that the way you think about it? It's just we're returning to that epic. Yeah. And I think a lot of the early users of Skynet,

that's a lot of what they talk about. They're like, this feels like the old internet that I remember. And I think a lot of the leaders in the Dweb space, whether you're looking at like ScuttleVod or Matrix or Mastodon or like XeroNet or some of these other things, you know, they, they remember the days when every internet forum was its own website or every blog was its own website. And you had a lot more freedom. You didn't have to today when you make a forum, it's either on Reddit or it's on Discord.

And you must comply with their policies. And you like, you must use their interface. And sure, you can make your own CSS, but that's the amount of the amount of liberty that you have in building a web community today as a community leader is just so much less than it used to be. And it kind of brings us back to the era of, you know, it's your kingdom and it's your rules. And we have all the advantages and all the nice things of the cloud and that it's super easy to deploy. It's super easy to maintain and it pays for itself. but you don't you don't give up the ability to do wonky things or write your own code. Yeah, I love the way you put it with it being your kingdom because I really do think of it in terms of sovereignty.

Like on the current internet, you are not sovereign over your domain. You're actually like a sharecropper or like some kind of surf. You know, like you not only do not own your internet property and your internet presence, but you're actually being put to work for some like feudal lord that owns that territory, which is crazy to me. It's like if you own your handle on Twitter or whatever, you're providing commercial value by posting interesting things. And that is being extracted completely by some baron that owns the territory and who retains

the right to kick you off indiscriminately. So you're like literally at the bottom of the totem pole. It's unbelievable. Yeah. And I think, I mean, if anything, it's a testament to how clever or, like, innovative the businessmen of the internet have been. I think, you know, it's not an accident. And it also happened through a lot of, like, just genius power plays. But, yeah, the net result has just been very bad for your average internet denizen.

I've been trying to effectively, like, rebel and, like, reclaim my sovereignty, but it's, like, a very difficult process, I must say. So, like, I'm acutely aware, as someone with, like, a sizable audience on Twitter in particular, I'm acutely aware of the fact that that can be taken from me. At a moment's notice, with no notice and no justification, really, that can just be seized. property can be expropriated and you would be legally without recourse right and so starting the podcast this podcast that we're doing right now that's one way to seize control because like arguably podcasting is like this quite sovereign thing to do right and you can pretty much distribute it through a bunch of different rails and you can reach an audience newsletters or another way that's sort of like the original way to have an audience that you can take with you through email lists.

And then I made my own blog. And then here's the intersection with our conversation, actually. So I bought my handshake domain, Nick Carter, forward slash. And I am currently using a SIE product to host that domain. I'm using D-Link. So if I get de-platformed, let's say from everywhere, let's say I get the Joe the Alex Jones treatment and I get kicked off the whole internet, you will always be able to go to Nick Carter.h.ns.2

or however you resolve handjic domains and see my landing page, which I think is hosted on SIA at this point, right? Yes, I believe D-Link puts all the data on SIA. So that feels like a small, quiet act of rebellion, you know, and I'm not really like at risk for being for being D-platform from every internet service, but like it happens you know it happens to to like political dissidents and and people that have like offended the wrong Silicon Valley cabal kind of thing yeah or sometimes even just by accident you know you the the Google algorithm mistakes you for the wrong Nick Carter and then uh or it just

just for some reason it decides it doesn't like you and it happens where users users lose their whole Google account so it means no Gmail no YouTube no docs no and it just like it's completely devastating. If you have no Gmail, you can't reset your passwords on any of your website. So I hope you remember all of them because those accounts are all gone if your Gmail's gone. Yeah. It's this incredibly fragile system that we've allowed ourselves to be, you know, to become accustomed to it. And it's so surprising to me, but it obviously is convenient to have an identity with Google or Apple or Facebook and then use that. identity. That's almost the most insidious thing about it is you end up using that single

identity for all number of web services. But it all traces back to one gigantic trillion dollar corporation, which could kick you off arbitrarily for no reason. Yep. So there's this interesting Boston-based D-Web alliance occurring right now. So we've got Handshake is also sort of partially Boston base, I think name base is here, or at least Tia Shan is here. We did a podcast with him recently. So tell us about like the relationship between Handshik, which is like a domain system and in Saya. Yeah. So I think I met Tia Shen through his sister. I've known his sister for probably five years now. So it's been a while. And then it just happened that, you know, I think their whole family is pretty interested in decentralization.

And so I've known him kind of incidentally for a long time. And then, of course, once he got really involved with the handshake ecosystem and launched namebase, we've been working together pretty closely. And I think, you know, what I most like about Tia Shen and the whole name base crowd is, you know, they have that same passion and excitement for decentralizing the internet that we do. And so it's just, I think he's a brilliant person and he's great to work with. He really knows what he's doing. And it's just really exciting to, I think there's just a lot of power in people working together

when they have very similar goals. And I think, I think, Tia Shen's goals and name-based, his goals and Skynet's goals are very well aligned. And so that makes an alliance just very natural. And I think it's great to have two, you know, kind of powerhouses of the Dweb starting to buddy up and kind of do things together. What do you think the Dweb looks like in a year or two? Like, are there other services aside from SIA and Handic that you know, find promising?

or not even necessary applications, but just like other themes that you're into. Honestly, I think Skynet's going to basically rewrite the whole playbook for how the Dweb thinks about itself. I think the Dweb today is really struggling from just how difficult it is to write distributed and federated systems that have good U.S.

And Skynet just completely melancholyte. all those barriers. And things that took, say, Mastodon, like three or four years to get right, or Matrix, like one or two years to get right. And like teams of smart engineers working very hard, you can get done in like two weeks on SkyNet. And so I think there's going to be a major shift in the Dweb landscape and how people think about technology and that Skynet is going to have.

end up as the cornerstone of nearly every interesting Dweb application. And that's owed purely to just how far ahead the SkyNet Tech Stack is. And I think we really just hit the nail on the head of making it easy for developers to make life easy for users. So we don't really talk about or we try to deemphasize like the coin prices on the show. I know every podcast host says that. But, you know, talk us through like the connection between the consumption of network resources on SIA and like how that what the interplay is with the actual token because there's a native token. And it's, you know, you guys were, I think, clever when you set it up.

You had the utility token, so to speak. And then you had this like equity style token that was sort of later codified or formalized a little bit. So what is that relationship between network utilization and the actual token itself? Yeah, so we've actually started to feel it in the sense that when Skynet Labs does its budget every quarter, the line item for buying Scyacoins to spend on storage is starting to be, you know, for the longest time, I was like, yeah, whatever. and now it's like oh that's a material that's that's a material number and we actually have to be price sensitive and we have to be kind of smart with how we spend our side coins because we are providing enough storage to the users to the network and like for our users that we are forced into buy pressure we have to buy sire coins every month and we have to buy next next to

our multi-100 million dollar market cap it's not that much but you know sky net's growing at as much as like 10% a week and in lockstep with that so are the number of side coins we're buying and so we're building this economy that I think unlike other um tokens uh like especially if you look at defy there is no fundamental economy behind defy it's it's a bunch of people trading exciting things but But if you dig, it's speculation all the way down. Whereas on Skynet and on subsequently the SIA blockchain, there is a foundation of people who have goods and services that can only be paid for using Sia coin, which means those people must buy Sia coin at the end of the day.

And that gives SIA, I think, a much more interesting economic base than I would argue almost any other token. You know, maybe Bitcoin, but it's hard for me to think of any other token where there's a base of users that has no recourse but to buy Siacoin. Yeah, in some sense, this is the true original vision of the non-financial applications of the blockchain, as they say. And it's so funny because I've been a huge critic of utility tokens for as long as I can remember. And it seems like finally there's one that actually has critical mass that's not being treated as pseudo equity, like you disentangled those two things. And the reason that anyone would buy it was because they actually want to consume network resources.

Yeah. And I think that will probably be a much more material part of the coin price and story after a little bit more growth. We definitely have some catching up to do. But yeah, You know, our accountant can definitely tell you that we are doing the catching up. And the, I mean, to use, to use SIA, do use Skynet, like an end user, they don't necessarily need to go to an exchange and buy SIECOIN, do they? Yeah, so that specifically for Skynet, you don't. So for SIE, you do. And then Skynet kind of figured out this portal model on top of SIA, where users sign up with portals and they, they, act kind of like pseudo-ISPs, where you pay through any means you want, typically like credit

card, maybe Bitcoin. And you, you know, so you're paying like five bucks a month for the service and you just get access to Skynet. And so as things cost money on Skynet, your portal or, you know, you can think of it as your ISP, just kind of covers it and maybe sets rate limits, maybe sets a bandwidth cap. But you're not really worried about it. Your bill is going to be five bucks at the end of the month, whether you're on SkyNet for 10 hours or 100 hours. Right. So like anything else, it's a layered model where you have a consumer interface and then on the back end, the blockchain itself is more of sort of a utility model. Yeah. And I think we've just done a lot of work on trying to figure out what's the lowest friction for users.

How can we present them with a model that they understand and like and make sure that there are no surprises or no points where they have to do something that they wouldn't have to do on the centralized web? So there have been some governance changes in the SIA ecosystem this year. Explain to us what happened and how the governance model for SIA has evolved. Right.

So what happened was during the pandemic, the whole global economy, including kind of the token market, entered this kind of deep bear market. Our company almost died, and we had to really slim down a ton. So we did a fundraise on not very favorable terms. We had to slim down, and essentially we had to drop all non-business critical objectives of SIA development. And we had kind of already done that over the past three years. So for the past three years, there are pieces of the SIA code base and SIA ecosystem that are beneficial for users, but don't change the fundamental growth of the SIA network, don't affect the fundamental storage elements.

And so they just got completely neglected. And so the business objectives just couldn't take on a bunch of things. of a bunch of tasks because they were expensive to fix, you know, one of which being like an explorer. Explorers are expensive to build. We didn't have a ton of money. And so we were like, no, we're just not going to put engineers on explorers. The ecosystem has to figure out its own explorers, which it has. But that's kind of been a tension always in this high ecosystem is that the for-profit business has to look at every decision through the lens of, you know, I am accountable to a bunch of investors in our company for how this money is spent. And if I can't, you know, if I can't convince myself

that spending, you know, money on this thing for ecosystem health is going to produce ROI. I have a fiduciary responsibility that prevents me from spending money that way. So what we did, again, like kind of ended at the bottom of the bear market, is we split the SIA ecosystem into two entities. So now we have the for-profit entity, which rebranded from Nebulaus Labs to Skynet Labs and is run by me. My co-founder actually left Skynet Labs. He's leaving the board,

and he started a nonprofit called the SIA Foundation. And that nonprofit is being given a block reward from the SIA ecosystem, and a charter that instead of having a fiduciary responsibility to for-profit investors, it has a ethical responsibility to improve the health and seek out the objectives of the SIA ecosystem. And so now things like an explorer, Luke, my co-founder, has a explicit budget that says, like, if this is good for ecosystem health, you are allowed to spend the money purely because it's good for ecosystem health. And so the site ecosystem, I think this sets it up much better

for long-term sustainability. And that's been a very big shift. For a long time, our community's kind of been on the side of, you know, pre-mines and dev fees are closer to scam coins. And I think we've come around to the idea. I think, I think, you know, with Zcash serving is probably the best example.

Zcash's dev fee for all the challenges that they've had, I think it's been on the net, very good for the ecosystem. And if they didn't have that, I would go as far as to say, if Zcash didn't have a dev fee, we would not have great starks and snarks that we have to date. Like, I think the entire crypto ecosystem has benefited immensely from the Zcash dev fee. and that ended up being spent very well on the whole in terms of pushing the mission of Zcash, which is privacy for everyone. And so, yeah, we're kind of inspired by that model and hoping to replicate its success in producing a lot of good for the blockchain ecosystem and specifically for the end goals of

of SIA of being, you know, decentralized storage and data sovereignty. So how did the SIA ecosystem react to the rerouting of block rewards? I would say the ecosystem is probably 80, 20, maybe 70, 30. And then we actually had my co-founder and I long one-on-one discussions with every major contributor in the entire ecosystem. And I think we got it to maybe 8020 or 8515 in favor, which means that you still had this minority, that was against it or uncomfortable with it. And I think, well, I know because the events has passed, right? We've added the dev fee, the hard forks over, and the foundation exists.

And there was no contentious split. So there is no classic chain. There's nobody mining the old version. And there's no like ecosystem that sprang up around keeping the dev fee out. So in that sense, it was a big success. And I think it's just been a long. slow process. I think if you go back to 2018,

when Bitmain's miners launched, there was a push for a dev fee back then as well. And I think it was 40-60, so 60% of the ecosystem not in favor of the dev fee, 40% in favor. And just slowly over the past three years, that number has been pushing up and up. I think finally that the evidence got to the point where most of this high ecosystem's like, okay, this is probably better for the ecosystem than it is like a scam.

Well, David, it's been great having you back on. Hopefully in a year's time we can get you back on the show. And we can talk about the Zeta bytes of storage on the Dweb. Absolutely. Glad to be here. Thanks again.