The Good Tech Companies - Subsquid Raises $17M To Build A New Era for Blockchain Data Indexing

Starting point is 00:00:00 This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. SubSquid raises $17 million to build a new era for blockchain data indexing by Ashan Pandey. In this exclusive interview, Dmitry Zalesev, co-founder of SubSquid, SQD, discusses the platform's recent $17 million funding round, ITS groundbreaking, modular indexing, technology, and the future of decentralized data access. 1. Ashan Pandey Hi Dimitri, welcome to our interview series. SQD recently launched its SQD token and has raised over $17 million in funding. Can you share the vision behind SubSquid and how the SQD token

Starting point is 00:00:42 fits into your ecosystem? Backslash dot, Dimitri Zalesev, a lot of effort and billions of VC funding have been put into scaling the throughput of blockchains, namely how fast you put in new transactions. But at the same time, at the internet scale, the data is read on average 10 to 100 times more frequently than it's written. You can think of how many Twitter posts you read and compared to how many you write. Yet, the read access to real-time and historical blockchain data is more like an afterthought. Our mission at SQD is to enable permissionless, trustless access to the entirety of Web3 data at the internet scale. 2. Ashan Pandey Indexing platforms are crucial for Web3 scalability. How does SQD's approach to

Starting point is 00:01:24 indexing differentiate itself from other solutions in the market, and what unique benefits does it offer to developers and users? Backslash dot, Dmitry Zalesev. Data indexing is a complex multi-step process and is not dissimilar to how crude oil is refined into high-octane petrol. And likewise specialization is key to scale data indexing to the industrial scale. We at SQDPIO neared what we call modular indexing design, where the data indexing pipelines split into multiple completely independent steps. The key bottleneck is the step to extract the raw data. We are replacing the highly inefficient RPC nodes

Starting point is 00:02:01 with read-optimized SQD network for data access. The SQD network is not only decentralized but is at least 100x more performant than the traditional way of indexing data. 3. Ashant Pandey, SQD has recently partnered with Deutsche Telekom to run dedicated worker nodes. How do you see this collaboration enhancing the security and efficiency of blockchain data retrieval, and what does it mean for the future of decentralized infrastructure? Dmitry Zalesev, Deutsche Telekom is one of the most notable players in the Web3 infraspace. For us, it's not merely a stamp of quality approval but a strong boost for network liveness and decentralization. By design, the data in the SQ disk spread across all nodes in the network with

Starting point is 00:02:45 the maximal redundancy, so with the top-tier DT infra team joining the network, we feel confidence in the quality of service it provides. 4. Ashant Pandey. Your platform started in the Polkadot ecosystem but has since expanded to Ethereum and is now in beta for Solana. How do you manage the challenges of cross-chain indexing, and what opportunities does this multi-chain approach present? Backslash dot, Dmitry Zalesev, the SQD network is designed to address the data access problem across the whole Web3 space, and can accommodate virtually any sort of on-chain data. This is the power of the modular indexing design, where we managed to make the SQD network, the base data access layer part, truly chain agnostic, putting the work of data decoding and transformation on the client side, close to the application business logic.

Starting point is 00:03:34 5. Ashant Pandey. The concept of a decentralized data lake is intriguing. Can you explain how this works in practice and how it contributes to the overall efficiency and resilience of Web3 applications? Backslash dot, Dmitry Zalesev. Well, in fact SQD network is more like a data ocean rather than a data lake. You can think of it as a planetary scale database distributed across more than a thousand nodes each holding a chunk of data. The protocol ensures that there's enough redundancy that no data is lost, and the nodes themselves act as mini-databases to query the chunk data they have. The access to the data as well as the rewards for the nodes is powered by the $SQD token, ensuring censorship-resistant, non-KYC access to the entirety of the data from anywhere in the

Starting point is 00:04:21 world. Finally, the advanced cryptography and economic security guarantees that the data from anywhere in the world. Finally, the advanced cryptography and economic security guarantees that the data served by the nodes is not corrupted and sound. 6. Ashan Pandey. As blockchain networks continue to grow and generate more data, what do you see as the biggest challenges for indexing platforms in the coming years, and how is SQD preparing to address these challenges? Backslash.Dmitry Zalesev, the exponential pace at which the amount of historical data is growing is probably the biggest challenge by far. Unfortunately, Manico systems, like Solana Foundation or like Lens Protocol,

Starting point is 00:04:56 go for stop-GAP centralized solutions like putting their data into Google BigQuery. While it may solve some immediate developer needs, having a permissionless, extremely low-cost way to query and access this data is a must. 7. Ashant Pandey Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of indexing platforms evolving in the Web3 ecosystem, and what potential breakthroughs or innovations in this space excite you the most? Backslash.Dmitry Zalesev The most exciting innovations are definitely coming from the advancements in modern cryptography. The two things I am particularly

Starting point is 00:05:30 looking forward to is the further reduction of ZK proof generation by another two orders of magnitude, going from from affordable to extremely cheap, and then the mainstream adoption of the fully homomorphic encryption. The progress on ZK would allow it to fully leverage the compute power of Verilow cost, untrusted nodes combined with the mathematical level of confidence in the validity of the data queries. Right now we are almost there, yet one has to resort to some trade-offs in terms to mitigate to yet still relatively high cost of generating a ZK proof. The FHE is even more exciting as it will allow it to incorporate private data into the SQD network, utilize the full power of its query engine to filter and

Starting point is 00:06:10 aggregate the data without compromising the privacy. Only the clients then will be able to decode the query results. Don't forget to like and share the story. Tip Vested Interest Disclosure. This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. Hacker Noon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. Hashtag D-Y-O-R. Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit HackerNoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.

The Good Tech Companies - Subsquid Raises $17M To Build A New Era for Blockchain Data Indexing

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