The Pomp Podcast - #569 QuickNode on Building World Class Blockchain Infrastructure

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Alex Nabutovsky and Dmitry Shklovsky are co-founders and co-CEOs of Quicknode, where their mission is to help blockchain ecosystems scale, by providing accessible core infrastructure. In this conversation, we discuss infrastructure importance, data structure, low latency, popular use cases, picking various chains, and the long term vision. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies: https://www.gemini.com/ =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alex Nobutovsky and Dmitry Shklovsky are co-founders and co-CEOs of Quicknode, where their mission is to help blockchain ecosystems scale by providing accessible core infrastructure. In this conversation, we discuss infrastructure, data structure, low latency, popular use cases, picking various chains, and the long-term vision for the business. I'm an investor, and I'm really, really excited about what they're building. I enjoyed this episode, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though,

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all right guys bang bang i've got my friends from quick node here hello how are both of you this is the first two-person interview that we've done in the new studio so you guys are uh are uh the the guinea pigs we're gonna hopefully that this works um let's just talk about the uh quick node story right and i think just kind of starting there and that'll lead us into some of the data infrastructure that's actually happening in crypto um walk me through kind of your guys background to get to actually starting quick node right what you guys are very technical right very kind of well-versed in terms of uh of a lot of this computational power and infrastructure so like what did you guys do before we get there sure uh so you know alex co-founded a managed hosting

company like back in 2001 maybe even earlier you're still messing around with it early early internet stuff and um you know we we built out a company that was managing thousands of servers uh in like over 10 data centers around the world um so like we got awesome um experience on how to be like on the provider side and how to build global networks um manage like all different stacks of software um then you know there's different projects within that company you know with regards to like video encoding uh ad serving we got to work with a really broad range of customers um 20 was it's like 2015 we started building our content delivery network uh because you know people started the internet started being more media rich and you needed faster speeds you

couldn't wait for your server in new york you know if somebody's living across the atlantic it'd take forever to load a video you know if the video was hosted in the united states so what we do is we clone that video over to somewhere in europe so they would you know the download speeds are a lot quicker um and that that experience we we decided to bring into quick know because as that company, that tech was very valuable. A company called Komodo SSL acquired that company. And as we were transitioning out of that, this was around 2017, 2018, we got really intrigued with what smart contracts could enable.

And we knew what Bitcoin was back from 2013, Mt. Gox days. We bought some Bitcoin at like 300, sold it at 1,000. it's silly to think about that now but you know so we're like alright so let's buy an ENS domain name or like maybe

some of these token sales were really interesting and we tried to interact with like MyEtherWallet at the time Metamask like the very early versions of it and we noticed that when one of these like popular token sales like 0x

for example uh it crashed the my ether wallet servers it crashed the metamask servers and um we're like well this is no way for web3 which is like this uh network of blockchains to to grow and so like how do we help how do we take our experience and how do we help this ecosystem expand grow develop and we're like well who better to build web3 infrastructure than us who have been in we've seen the transition from web one to web two we contributed to a lot of open source software and a lot of a lot of businesses uh that that are on web two today um how do how do we help web three um so and so really the idea was like the experience you guys had uh in terms of low

latency and and kind of all that computational infrastructure you'd previously built for almost two decades it sounds like right uh when you got to crypto it was like essentially not there right like it was just everything would crash it couldn't handle you know large uh volumes and then also um it sounds like as you got deeper and deeper into this you realize like one we probably can just build the infrastructure but two also there's all kinds of things that are unlocked with better performance uh in terms of actually connecting to the blockchains is that fair sure enough yeah so we we basically took all the experience that we would gather during uh especially during our um cdn time you know we learned a lot we understood what what latency

translated into conversions. For customers, we understood how to optimize certain layers of the business and infrastructure and software to maximize throughput and to have the absolutely lowest latency in the business. And so we took all that and we applied it here because, as Dmitry pointed out, we saw the transition from web one to web two and into web three in the beginning of 2018, for example. And what's web three really? It's web one was read only, Web 2.0 was read and write, Web 3.0's ability to verify. We saw there's a lot of that, what he described, and we understood that we could bring this experience over with our team and build something that people will need going forward. Initially, that was dedicated nodes that helped

to transact on blockchain, but that had limitations, which eventually grew into this our QuickNode API product, which we released in February 2020. That thing completely took off. Everybody observed it and started using it. We grew like 1,100% in three months. And so we understood we had a market fit, right? Yeah. And so when you think today, the main chains that you support are Ethereum, Matic.

What else? XDAI. XDAI. And those are pretty much the main three. No. We also support Optimism. Optimism. Yep.

Binance Smart Chain. Binance Smart Chain. Okay. So here's something that's fascinating to me. I'm going to call them smart contract platforms, Ethereum, Binance Chain, and Matic. And when we look at that stuff, it feels like Ethereum is the one that everyone knows, right?

And that's kind of got like the, when people think of smart contract platform, they think of Ethereum, right? So it's got the mind share. uh but binance smart chain and matic you know i should start by saying i'm an investor in the company right so we've had a lot of conversations about this um are popular as well right and so is this a world where like these chains are actually just competing on technical infrastructure and like who can create the most innovation who has the fastest throughput speed who has the lowest

cost fees and like it really is uh kind of this like race to zero on fees right maybe it doesn't actually ever get to zero but there's definitely like the commoditization um across these various smart uh contract uh platforms so there's there's a balance there's a balance you have to achieve and and this was most prominent recently when the fees on ethereum mainnet skyrocketed they were just really expensive to move anything around um people started looking for alternatives and you basically you know you sacrifice some decentralization and and thus some security for doing something but if it's like every you know transactional stuff not uh like all important governance stuff yeah you can you can do it layer two is is the solution and it's not like you know

you don't sacrifice much um it's just a trade-off and again more and more uh people are starting to realize that the future is multi-chain you know you might have your your governance contracts on Ethereum because, yeah, it's expensive, but, you know, it's worth to have that security to make sure that this is governing your entire organization. But the everyday transactions, if you're moving, you know, a couple of dollars around, you move some tokens around, that stuff can be done with, you know, with security, with confidence on a layer two like Binance, like Matic, like XDAI. And then we're looking forward to seeing what, you know, what people build with the optimism uh technology and so really the idea is uh a decentralized smart

contract platform is really important for governance like you said right so there's a reason for decentralization in that standpoint you want to have almost what i call like democratic governance right as many people participating as possible and uh as least concentration or kind of single point of failure as possible but if i simply just want to make a trade i don't necessarily need all that decentralization right i actually want the most efficiency that i can gain and sometimes uh the decentralized systems are much less efficient sometimes for certain things they may be more efficient right that's a whole nother thing uh but if i simply want to just get the efficiency lower fees faster throughput then decentralization doesn't really matter in that

situation fair sure okay uh explain to people the difference between uh matic finance smart chain and ethereum just from like a technical you know high level uh in terms of block times and like why are these others maybe more efficient without decentralization as kind of the core linchpin? So Ethereum currently is proof of work. It's got about 15 to 12 second block times. Matic has validators and there's like a three point system

where they're validating. And then the block times are also shorter, quick way rather. and binance smart chain also val also validator concept with three second block times so you know a lot of recently a lot of d5 platforms have moved to binance smart chain because binance you know just because they're they're uh an exchange and they have all that that deep you know financial pull but um it also helps to have like order books update every three seconds because you want to make those trades you want to compare to ethereum being 12 to 15 seconds exactly okay

Okay. And they've made the fees less expensive. So again, you're building a wallet app, a decentralized wallet app. You'll have the main governance on Ethereum. You'll have the transaction, like moving tokens around on Binance Smart Chain. You'll have your NFTs moving around on Polygon. There's a big move of NFTs and media platforms moving to Polygon. so they're you know again future is multi-chain we're looking to support that um you know we're looking to expand the chains we support because yeah there's it's good to give developers choice you know when they're building a an application you know you don't force them to use ethereum because ethereum is not perfect neither you know i don't think any any platform is perfect

and so when they have that choice they can choose and pick and choose and put how we how we say like legos together to build their application so the way i describe uh quick node is it's basically like amazon aws but for blockchains right exactly which i think is like a fair thing um how does the product work itself right so if i'm a developer i come in i go to the quick node website like what do i choose from and like what is actually technically happening okay i mean you just sign up for either a free or nine dollar account for example as a developer you get an endpoint right away within five minutes you'll be able to take that endpoint plug it into your code and you're ready to transact i think great example of that was

customer of ours for example doing analytics came to our site in the middle of the night four in the morning had an outage under self-hosted nodes able to sign up or within five to ten minutes they were back online without having to speak to anybody and so what we built is a self self self-serve platform that that customers could come without um having to speak anybody just sign up and go and and then on to add to that on the back end we're we're running uh like dozens of clusters of super super powerful uh ethereum finance smart chain matic nodes and a node is a peer-to-peer piece of software which maintains an up-to-date copy of the ledger and it talks to other nodes on the network miners validators it sees when a new block arrives and

And then it builds that database. And then we have these middle layers, like a routing middle layer, which if you're making a request from the Netherlands, you're going to hit a node cluster in the Netherlands. If you're making a request from London, you're going to hit a node cluster in London, China, Singapore, San Francisco, New York. So by bringing the data closer to the users, you minimize network hops, you reduce latency, make things quicker, snappier. And as Alex mentioned, that's experience we bring over from our CDN experience.

Companies like Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into research, into human psychology, that faster speeds results in happiness for people. When something happens fast, people get excited. And that results in them coming back to your website or using your application more, making a purchase, taking a call to action. so we understand how important speed and like blockchain is notorious for its slowness so if you know our platform makes you know if we can make it just a little a little bit faster or in some cases a lot of it faster you know some customers came to us they're like hey we switched to you guys and we saw 100x improvement in in our polling speeds and we're like wow so this is fantastic so i can say this you guys can't say this uh because people that you're bragging but

when I was doing the diligence to research, to invest and researching all this, I'd go talk to customers and they were like, listen, it's like not even close, right? In terms of a lot of the other services in the space, just there is that latency and they maybe just be focused on other things. That's not the most important thing they're building.

I think given your guys' background, you really understand the importance of latency and you're looking for customers that want a lack of latency, right? And so because of that speed, what are customers actually doing? Because there are one or two examples that you have of like hey a customer is doing x with our infrastructure that uh can highlight to

people like why this is so important from uh just a pure like infrastructure interacting with these blockchains sure um i think you might like to talk about this a lot so go for it yeah yeah the great part about being at the infrastructure level is that everybody uh who's working with blockchain interacting with blockchain needs a service so we we work with a bunch of projects across the board. Anyone from traditional finance systems who are looking to interact with the blockchain to decentralized finance systems and professional traders who are looking to get the fastest information, the latest block information, what happened to the smart contract, what happened to this Uniswap pair, what happened on any one of these decentralized exchanges.

But moreover, there's a lot of people looking for the mempool data. And the mempool, for those who don't understand, the mempool stuff is that's what happens before transactions get mined and accepted as truth into the blockchain. and there's about you know a 10 to 12 second period where people's transactions get entered into the mempool and then miners get to choose which transactions they mine into the next block and what happens there let's say a transaction is submitted somewhere in new york and it's mine and it's mined somewhere in new york by the time that propagates and by propagates it goes from one node to another node to another node and makes taps to a node in China, it might be anywhere from several milliseconds to several seconds.

And that's very valuable time, especially in the finance sector, where they need to make these split-second decisions on what their next move is. So what we've done is we're aggregating the Mempool data from all the nodes we run all over the world. We have over 12 locations. We're in multiple clouds. So basically anywhere in the world the transaction enters the mempool, we then broadcast it to whoever's subscribing to that data. And they're paying as like a subscription?

They're paying for that. For every transaction that they're subscribed to, they're paying for that request, like to receive that piece of data. Got it. And so when we think about this, you have not only infrastructure, right? Like what I consider just you guys have done the work, you've built out infrastructure, now I can come in, I can basically plug in through your infrastructure and I can communicate with these blockchains. I can get the actual kind of copy of the blockchain or whatever. But also you got a ton of data, right?

And so maybe talk a little bit like the data importance versus the infrastructure importance and like how you think about like the business evolving over time. Yeah. I mean, sorry, if you look at the relationship between Citadel and Robinhood, for example, there's a lot of, you know, business there. So what we, what we able to gather is all these transactions that are going on a network and all this data that we were able to share perhaps with someone that could be very valuable specifically for large funds

who are executing on things and need to have more insights and research companies to better understand the landscape of what's happening before the rest of the world sees it. And so that data piece could be very valuable and by our estimation somewhere in $10 billion a year range you know over the next five years or so and so that piece is is very not a lot of people talking about that piece specifically but we think that piece of the business is huge you know we we've been having certain conversations with

certain funds and things like that with with with CEOs that are interested in the data that could utilize this data to make better decisions on their end got it and when you think about um the infrastructure really it's kind of a two-step business right you have to have the infrastructure in order for you guys to get the data but you're monetizing the infrastructure itself and then if there is this opportunity to do data as well that's really additive to the business it's not kind of an either or decision not at all it's both sides yeah um what do you think is the biggest challenge going forward rather when you think about all right we got all this work to do we're going to keep doing this what's the biggest challenge for

business to to keep to keep up with demand uh and and that's a good problem it's a great problem it's like every you know startup's dream uh to have a problem but it's to keep up with demand uh and keep meeting customers expectations like and their expectations keep growing day to day a day you know when you know there's there's some people that were querying maybe like five blocks at a time for data now they're querying like chunks of thousands of blocks and they need that data in a millisecond so like we're we're working on different ways to index it we're using special um special hardware that's like super snappy like super super fast disks to be able to access this data work uh we have a caching layer that stores some of this data in memory again to to improve

speeds so you know the the great thing about um again infrastructure layer such a wide range of of customers. We get so much data from our customers around how they're using it, what their use case is. Maybe perhaps I didn't touch up enough on the range of our customers. We also have NFT platforms that are minting NFTs. We have customers that are building blockchain gaming ecosystems. They're doing esports tournaments that are blockchain backed. So things like in-game skins and and certain like prizes um there's uh there's people building universal basic income there's another project called a pool together which is a no-loss lottery i think that's one of the craziest inventions because uh people basically buy a ticket for the lottery uh it goes it gets

lent out into a decentralized lending platform which earns interest and then one person wins the interest and everybody gets their money back like it's fantastic no and this yeah this happens trustlessly automatically how often do they like do like a drawing they they do a drawing i i don't know once a week or something something like that but like it's an amazing concept that you can have you can do this without an intermediate like you're not buying a lottery ticket from the state of florida or anything this is just it's a global lottery that's trustless and automatic and you don't lose money and you don't lose money somebody just somebody wins some interest to win room it's win-win yeah and i guess because you're really getting everyone's interest it's not just the

interest that you would have gotten going by and doing it yourself right you're contributing to this big pool the big pool earns a ton of interest all at once and then basically somebody wins that as part of the lottery yeah that's incredible yeah it's wild um one of the things that uh fascinates me about this is as you guys have chosen new blockchains to support uh they've turned into uh we'll call spectacles to be nice uh which is um you say hey we're going to support something uh when you choose to support it uh that community gets really excited but also other people start to pay attention and so just like what is the process for vetting these deciding who to work with um and kind of like how does that work and through like prioritization yeah

so i mean for us it's all about we're all about community right we would like to build a community we'd like to support the community and we understand for this to grow for everybody to benefit the community piece needs to exist so we always look at when someone the foundation for example like matic approaches us or we approach them every time it's a different story usually we will we'll look at their github how active are there how many developers that have how involved they're with the whole ecosystem are we helping the whole ecosystem and they'll make a decision whether or not we're going to take our eyes off our roadmap and add them to um to add to add them to our network and for us it's very important that whoever we add to our network

that they're contributing to the whole ecosystem they have a sort of a sandbox environment for their developers you know public endpoints that they could subsidize so that's a very important piece for us because we understand we're not only helping us we're also helping the whole community and the whole ecosystem to grow and yeah that's pretty much it yeah we're also listening a lot to our customers and the customers basically tell us what they want you know customers come say when when are you guys going to support Matic? We're like, okay, we'll look into it. We're like, when are you guys going to support XDAI or BSC?

And this is such valuable feedback because when you get enough of these requests, you're like, hmm, maybe they're onto something. And also, we've been in the space since late 2017. We've built the brand. It's a known brand. And when a company chooses to partner with us, it's celebrated very, very well, especially in the community, because it's like this particular foundation is serious about supporting their developers and giving them choice, giving them robust infrastructure to be able to build these global scale apps. because these the foundations they're they're they don't have the kind of teams with the kind

of experience that you know quick node brings to the table so being able to bootstrap um you know this high performance scalable uh node with infrastructure uh is like super super valuable to these people and um it's very well received by by the community it's celebrated like you know almost like a token listing um like yeah it's it's great it's crazy right crazy well i mean you know we we we went we were accepted into the white combinator um uh batch for the winter and you know they pumped out instacart they pumped out coinbase for example and i'm looking at coinbase's story and they started out just selling bitcoin and then they added ethereum and then they added litecoin and then they and now they're now they

have like i don't know it's like 20 30 assets so i'm like this is very very much parallel to i feel like what quick note is doing you know we're not we're not just dedicated to ethereum we support bitcoin and we would support six six uh chains and 10 different networks at this point and this is just just the beginning yeah it's fascinating to me too that um you guys have done a lot of this uh you've also raised capital so maybe talk a little bit about that but like outside of like the hardcore development community maybe people don't know about you right which is almost like a testament to you found the right people that to know about you like who cares if everyone knows right it's just like the people who are the customers they all

know and when they think of hey i need infrastructure that's got low latency like bam i got a quick node right and so was that intentional or did that just kind of naturally happen of course it's a natural progression really um i don't think it was intentional i mean we just try to build the best possible product and and and you know that's why i love you guys you go oh no it's just like built the right thing we know we had to build we had to build the right thing that that worked well that people would love the user experience was absolutely the best and we took all the things what not to do from the previous companies and we applied it here we had the right formula you know we learned on our mistakes we learned we i remember being in

late 90s being in high school coming home before aol you know going to irc and all this i remember all this progression from web one to web two understanding how to change the world and i wish i was older you know older back then to understand what i was being involved in you know and now being here with experience with with all that to be able to take all that and to apply it here just a piece of cake we know exactly what people want we're listening to our community we're listening to our customer and we drive from we're driving the the need from within the company and so like i don't think anybody else works harder than us you know we we're there in the office building 12 hours a day 14 hours a day nobody's sleeping you know seven days a week so we understand i know you

guys are yes well talk about the fundraise in terms of uh what was the thought process you went to yc uh and also did the fundraise either one of you which everyone's talking about yeah i think uh i'll start off and you could pick up yeah um so we we started our fundraise sometime in in november and then we got a during during the initial stages of it we got accepted to yc and um that was very exciting yc is a you know a great process to go through um we learned a lot and um but we decided like you know yc recommends not to start any fundraising during yc until the demo day since we're already in the process we sort of just left you know we sort of just ran with it and that was that was great because you know in the beginning

thing, we got a lot of like, hey, what the hell are you guys talking about? Why doesn't Amazon just come in and do it? We don't believe that there's a need for this product. Towards the end, so that was November. By January, we had so much interest in our company that we had literally probably over 200 companies coming up like, hey, let us write you a check. What's the valuation? What's this? Can we get in? You're an investor. We met with you And it was no brainer, no brainer, you know, it was it was one of those processes that that I think YC also helped us a lot through, you know, like as we were taking on some of these some of these investors, we want to make a strategic partnership with each one of them. You know, we understood you as a strategic piece to it, you know, you know, very listen to me, a 50 million followers, et cetera, like you would definitely help spread the word. you know like we had michael errington who who was um who actually convinced us to stay with yc

because we're in the beginning like oh do we really need it you know we sort of have the experience but he was like hey you guys don't understand what it is you definitely want to be part of it we're like hey for sure you know we'll go with it then we had like alexis ohanian you know like he brings in so much seven seven six seven seven six fund yeah he brings in so much so much experience and every two weeks he him and his team are with us for an hour at a time we're going through things we're strategizing you know

we're going through everything like he's been amazing throughout the whole process so but you know and we sort of like so Hashkey one of the

one of the investors for them we were like what do they bring to the table well they're Asian you know one of the biggest Asians invested into blockchain space they have a lot of

blockchain companies in their portfolio you know and we sort of picked them for that environment and so like we sort of put a team together

for investment that could drive us to the next level and today i think we're we're we're very happy with our partners i've asked for for better partners absolutely amazing so bank so bank so bank brings in so much experience the opportunity fund as you know has been created for um you know um sort of uh you know the black founders and um one of our founders happens to be austin he's uh he's half black half um South American South American

and he was able to you know connect us with Soul Bank and we're able to work with them and we love their team

you know them too we get on monthly calls with them strategize accounting pieces you know how to structure

certain deals how to close certain customers how to grow the business from within and you know how to focus

on the culture also I mean 776 Fund these guys also they want to diversify our team they want more

women on our team we actually just recently hired our first woman uh for for for hr and customer success yes i mean she's she's going to be like the mother of the we needed a mother yes company and so like we've been trying to hire like from all different backgrounds first of all we all immigrants you know like all four co-founders uh three co-founders are immigrants you know he's from uh russia i'm from ukraine the other one is from from germany manuel kreutz and so like we understand the process you know we understand the importance of diversity within the team and so for us like what we are building is exactly that we understand that you know they can't be just a bunch of white

dudes sitting and building on facebook there needs to be somebody that that understands the the pain points that the people go through and sort of that that's the sort of company we are building yeah i mean it's fantastic what what has been the uh biggest surprise in building the business over the last uh couple of months i don't know the amount of the amount of demand that's coming in. I mean, we opened up our gates and people are just flooding in. We have so much interest in the business

and so many foundations are coming to us. It's like, please take our money and add us to the platform. And I think that's been the biggest surprise from my perspective. Yeah, I think it's the number of diverse projects that are building on a platform and that we're able to facilitate.

They're giving us this feedback like, oh, your platform is so easy to use. We were able to get started real quick. And, you know, just again, there's companies building like new ways of governance. There's new ways of voting, meritocracy, just all across the board. And then, you know, you have some of these large financial corporations with like billions in crypto under management. They also need this service, you know, banks and hedge funds.

I think we're just at the very, very beginning, even though there's been so much progress, even from when we entered the space in 2017 till now, you know, it's so much easier to build a decentralized application or a blockchain powered application. And like what Alex had mentioned, like back in the 90s, how difficult it was to build a website. But then you had, you know, companies like Amazon come along and make all that process like streamlined and made it so easy. So when you think about running node infrastructure, you probably have to go read a bunch of documentation, you have to learn how to use a command line, you got to go do your research on what kind of specs you need for your cloud server, or you just go to QuickNode, sign up, and you go. And then the complexity increases as you scale up. You need two nodes, you need a load balancer in front of it, how to keep the data consistent between the different types of nodes. But being able to support such a wide range of projects is just, it motivates us every day to come to work and just like build the best possible product and make our customers happy. If you look forward like five or 10 years, how big can this get?

And like, what does this morph into? Right? When you just kind of look at like, what's the natural progression of this? Web three, every single application we use today will have some element of blockchain built into it. So, you know, you think of middlemen, the first thing that comes to mind is like real estate. You need an agent, you need an escrow agent, you need title insurance. Once you have deeds on the blockchain, you can govern a real estate transaction by a smart contract. You don't need a middleman, you don't need a third party, you don't need escrow. You know, one side sends USDC, for example, the other side submits the deed, they submit the title, and the title is governed by a system that keeps it honest. So you don't need title insurance then. It eliminates friction, it eliminates that trust layer. so when both conditions are met the smart contract uh that lives on the blockchain it's completely independent of anyone's control then just swaps it and yeah and and that could be tied down to like

the keypad uh changing you know changing the code so the person can get access to to the property um that's that's where we see this going you know we see was it uh bit cloud but cloud yeah so social networks moving into into blockchain every single application i mean everything from uh from universities issuing diplomas on the blockchain so you can then you know imagine you you you're asked to vote on something that you actually have a merit in like only if you have a phd in medicine can you vote on on a certain on a particular uh issue so that kind of stuff that's what that's blockchain enables that's the kind of future um you know that that we see so i mean global scale this is the next this is like the new the next iteration the next version of the internet

yeah it's pretty wild to think about right like if you just think about like all right like where we are headed is fucking nuts compared to where we've been and uh today we look at like cars right and it's like wait he's right horses like there is that element of like you know you said like title insurance like all these things that aren't going to be needed you're like you did what before there's physical paper involved yeah now people are gonna be like okay like obviously the digital system's so much better you're telling me people literally didn't think that was going to be true yeah okay man get get gen z to send an international wire they'll they they won't be able to do it yeah of course not they want cash app they want square they want you know it's

just peer-to-peer like here's an address here's my address send send send me the tokens that's companies like venmo and whatever exists today you know to be able to do that but i think you know primarily if you look at like if you're looking to purchase a property somewhere abroad for example say spain right so you're looking to buy a home in spain the amount of bureaucracy and crap you need to go through i went through that so i understand like to from your bank to send the money there they need to exchange it from dollars to euro they need to you need to prove that this money is coming from you then you need you know you need to go through this whole process and the way the real estate is done there globally you could have one global system that that sort of

eliminates all that like if if you want to send you an 500 bucks on a sunday yeah you know in in in a traditional way the banks are closed you're unable to do it they're going to charge your nominal leg you just went through you have to go a bunch of kyc stuff you know because russia's in yep you know whatever like it's crazy you can't even use your own money during the certain times same thing in the banks here like if you're making a large transaction whether it's a deposit deposit or you're withdrawing that you need to tell them what why why is this happening this is your money yeah so so just you mentioned transfer money but like a a small era controversy was like recently vitalik was airdropped some like a couple of billion dollars of this shiba token uh and he

was able to donate that to an indian uh relief fund you know because of the of the covet stuff happening in india and that he was able to do that without anybody's permission for like like it was like 12 or something in fees maybe maybe a hundred dollars in fees but like a billion dollars moved across the world any to any point without anyone's permission uh for a very small amount do we know if they um went ahead and liquidated it or did they hold on to the shiba token would have would have to look at the we have to look right i don't know it's transparent like if you want to know know what happened to it just go go look at the transaction yeah which is like the best part about it right is because now all of a sudden like one kudos to him for doing that right uh two is you

can literally see what they do with it yeah and so it's like pretty crazy to think it's not just about the transaction itself it's the fact that he got it right then once he got it right what they do then he donated it okay now once the day get the donation what do they do with it it's transparent like there's a whole bunch of ramifications in just that one um kind of mechanism that you're like wait a minute this was not possible before yeah like look what happened in haiti you know during the during the whole thing like a bunch of stuff went there it never went to the people it rotted it got stolen and you know and and this is exactly what it's for and we talked by the way he burned the rest of the shiba you know completely i think it was like

six billion dollars worth yeah yeah he burned he just burned it you know he donated most of it and whatever he had left he burned it and he left the message like don't don't airdrop me these tokens without my permission i don't want to be responsible or something like that but he he was very like philosophical about it yeah he he basically because what they tried to give it to him so that it would seem more legitimate because the creator of ethereum held the tokens so basically he was like i don't want these and get rid of it yeah it's i mean it's fascinating there's not very many people who say they donated a billion dollars to something even even uh who is it uh sandeep from from one of the co-founders of matic uh he released a tweet he's like i can't

sit around anymore i have to do something i have to help you know the people in india and within within like a couple of hours he created a multi-sig uh wallet and had the whole global crypto community donate to to this cause so on a philanthropic uh philanthropic level you had a global crypto community like get together and and and like create this fund to help something you know in a different part of the world like in a day like that just you know you could try with gofundme or whatever but i think this this was just um a great example of a the crypto community coming together but also uh the application of you know moving moving funds cross borders without permissions without any kind of like red you know bureaucracy or red tape i mean it's crazy to think

about right what are you guys most excited about moving forward uh everything what's every every every day every day something something new something pops up you know projects like i said projects signing up and being able to to support them um i'm looking forward to see what optimism is gonna optimism you guys keep talking about this so you're excited about that team what they're doing um can't talk much about it but i think that's one of the projects i'm really excited about um going forward by you definitely that you know we have we have a couple of chains we signed a couple of new new um contracts with foundations with new chains that we're we're gonna we're gonna develop um you know we're hiring i was gonna say who are we trying to hire we're

hiring we're hiring across the board we're scaling the team you know we got devops engineers front end uh front end developers um back in engineers yeah then then we have like um technical support engineers um we had a good amount of additions to our team like we we grew from like you know a five people team on like a month and a half ago to 12 people team and we continue to expand our team so if what we look i'm looking to to build the culture i'm excited about building the culture in the company and and sort of this foundation of quick note that will grow into its own departments in the near future. And so we just recently hired somebody from TikTok

and previously worked with Facebook. They ran a sales team there that was excited to join our team and we're excited to be working with him. He's an amazing individual with a great view of what this could become. And so I enjoy personally work with him every day and sort of attacking different angles of the market,

how we could attack enterprise, how we could improve our sales process for developer platform and all of this and sort of like looking into what we could build together in the future and sort of segmented into smaller teams that like one team will attack the chain market, one team will attack the developer market,

one team will attack the foundations and the whole business sector. And so that's very exciting. I think working with that is... Yeah, so to finish my point, it's like what we've been able to accomplish with a team of like five, six people, now that we have this additional funding

and we have this momentum, what we'll be able to accomplish with like a double the size of the team. That's what really excites me. Like we're going to 10X the performance of the tech, make it way more faster, way more reliable. We're going to expand the product. We're going to expand it into different markets,

you know, and now with some of these bigger players catching on, starting to ride the wave, you know, being able to provide services to mainstream banks and mainstream investor and hedge funds. That's what I'm most excited about. I think you guys are on to something. For sure. Thanks.

Anthony, you've been a great help, man. It's amazing. Like I said, we have the best investors. We have the best partners that we're working with. So it's great. I think also what's really exciting is to see some of these big players like Cash App, for example. I had a conversation with Cash App the other day.

and they sort of understand that DeFi is going to put them out of business. This is their words. Like we understand DeFi is going to put us out of business. So what we do and we create a team inside to sort of put ourselves out of business before that happens. And so they're really smart people.

They understand that this is going to change the world. This is going to change the way people transact, the way you use money and the next generation will no longer be able to, you know, to stand for the previous, you know, standards that we had growing up. And so like, you know, companies like that that understand that and we still start early on that they're building

something next and something cool that for you know for the next generation so yeah that's super exciting you know that's awesome yeah right that you can uh you can participate there uh before i let you guys go i asked everyone the same three questions so i'm gonna do it and you both answer uh each uh individually uh most important book you've ever read hard things uh hard things about hard things by uh ben horowitz credit twice i still come back to it very often yeah that's a great one uh that book and high output management by andy grove that's another great one you guys are well read uh second question is sleep schedule comes from our friends over at eight sleep i sleep on one every night it's cold as shit sleep perfectly i feel like i'm like a convert of

sleep religion what's your guys sleep schedule oh that's not a good start we actually actually had a friend who was who was uh i guess he was he was trying to like he was advertising this cold bed idea to us and uh you know maybe we'll go out and try that sleep schedule it's try to get six to seven hours um i mean you we're working crazy crazy like super intense days so about like nine ten rolls around i'm exhausted yeah i'm 12 to 6 midnight and 6 6 6 a.m i'm up yoga and then 6 30 6 45 i'm with the computer working really yeah so you can go 12 to 6 and you're perfectly fine yeah totally fine oh man i need it's all about the mushrooms you know that you got the the reishi the you know cordyceps cordyceps you put that in your smoothie chocolate it gives you it gives you

amazing energy we're using uh something by uh paul stamets uh i don't know if you know who he is he was a guy yeah that guy is amazing he's like one of the biggest mycologists in uh in the united states uh he was in joe rogan's uh podcast a bunch of times the guy is just like out of this world super fascinating podcast super fascinating and definitely watch that he has a movie on not netflix amazon prime but anyways he has these on fungi.com he has this product these products these mushroom mixes that you could put into your yogurts or whatever incredible do you drink coffee or that or you just use the i used to do matcha so i stopped the caffeine during this time it's so crazy that you have so much energy so much excitement working every day yeah but if you

anything else you you start crashing yeah i had to cut back on the call like i stopped coffee i switched from full calf to i started making my own mix of like two-thirds decaf one-third caffeinated okay now i'm completely off because it was just messing with my mind so really yeah just maybe every once in a while i have like a sensha green tea uh but i i can't do full-on calf at least at least not not right now because it's already intense yeah i uh i drink two coffees a day and i've been thinking like should i try to stop but i don't know if i could that was me man And that was me. I would have these crashes in the middle of the day.

I'm like, shit, I'm out of energy. And I got so many things to do. And it's just like, it's messing with you. Coffee is definitely messing with you. And so you just don't do it at all and then you're good? No, no. It's good without it. There's a good argument for that.

A very good argument for that. Last question is aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're not aliens over here. How did we all of a sudden end up here, right? That movie he saw when Paul Stamets, he said we all came from mushrooms. like x amount of billions years ago so the mycelium was is actually like this this network

sort of like quick note right that that's connecting all the trees and all the living things around around the forest and all the trees and all the all these all these uh plants are able to communicate with one another and transfer nutrients so the the trees and the plants they transfer nutrients through the mushroom mycelium networks underground really yeah yeah that's wild it's called the fantastic fungi i think it's called fantastic fungi all right i have to try to watch that amazing and so that's all about like quick note whenever one region becomes overloaded or unavailable we're able to transfer that that nutrient to the other region with the same region on a different cloud you know so like we are the product of of that you know like we are

like people people believe there's a lot of so if you look if you speak to mycologists and you speak to some scientists everybody has their own theory on how we came about you know but i definitely stay more on the mushroom side because that's a lot more compelling yeah i mean you guys might convince me to go get some mushrooms oh yeah all right where can we send people to find you guys on the internet or find out more about quicknode quicknode.com quicknode.com we recently rebranded from q-u-i-k-node.io to quicknode.com the way it was spelled we had both domains from the gecko but there was you know we were drinking kool-aid in 2018 it was a cool thing to do it was a cool thing to do everybody was misspelling things so you had both the whole time

the whole time yeah oh we knew we knew from day one that you know it's gonna be autocorrect people are gonna want to go to the dot com so we booked we booked it from day one but you know we were quick and if you leave a letter out you're faster to type it and it was it was and uh come on that's a shitty answer you know you know there's there's there's no there's been research like uh when uh when if you can shorten your url uh-huh uh you know you might save like a hundredth of a millisecond or something like that so just just leave it just leaving it i love it it was a cool thing it was a cool thing to do but now that you know we're more mature we're in a different stage of the company uh we're like all right let's spell let's spell it right um especially looking five ten years

ahead you know maybe we go ipo or something we need to have a proper spelled company name all right so quicknode.com quicknode.com quicknode.com everyone go check it out thank you guys so much for doing this thanks for having us