The Wolf Of All Streets - Amazon & Microsoft Will Fail | The Future Belongs To Decentralized Storage | Colin Evran, Filecoin

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Are you familiar with cloud storage? You may have heard that the market is largely controlled by three major players: AWS, Google, and Microsoft. However, did you know that there is a growing movement towards decentralized storage solutions? In this episode, Colin Evran, the ecosystem lead at Filecoin & Protocol Labs, shares insights on the benefits of decentralized storage and how Filecoin offers its services at a significantly lower cost than centralized storage networks. He also delves into what is driving the remarkable growth of Filecoin and its potential to shape the future of cloud storage. Tune in to discover more about the advantages of decentralized storage and its potential to revolutionize the storage industry. Colin Evran: https://twitter.com/colinevran ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/ ►►BITGET GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The importance of decentralized storage and compute has not really caught the attention of the mainstream yet, but under the surface, it's becoming an absolutely huge movement as people realize that Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft control effectively all of the cloud data and storage in the world. Just like with Bitcoin decentralizing money, it's essential that we decentralize data. I spoke with Colin Everin. He is the ecosystem lead for Filecoin at Protocol Labs and talked about why this is so essential and what they're building. I read recently that Filecoin is at a meaningful percentage of the capacity of Amazon Web Services at this point. Can you talk about what percentage it is at getting to the full capacity of Amazon Web Services and what's, I guess, being stored and built right now using your platform?

Totally. Yeah. So within the Web3 space, let's start there. Filecoin is now 99% of total data capacity and about 96, 97% of total data storage, so utilization, and starting to become like the developer platform of choice. For the Web2 space, when you think of AWS, it's really hard to get like actual data on what's going on over there. But we think we're somewhere in the 1% to 5% range of where AWS is. What we do know is we're at the point that if you combine AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure in the first six years when they launched cloud services, we basically got there in the first year. It took them six years in the early days till from, I think, mid-2000s to 2012 or something.

We got there in about a year, which is pretty remarkable and gives you an overview of the crypto incentives and how powerful they are, just like the Bitcoin incentives. It's absolutely wild. And it gives an opportunity. What's important to remember is we had some banking scares over the last couple of weeks, but the data cloud storage market is even more consolidated than banking market, right? Two-thirds of all data in the cloud is stored by three providers, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And that's getting even more consolidated. They

combine, take about four points of share every year. And so if you zoom out to like five to 10 years from now, we're going to be uniquely reliant on like one to three cloud support providers. And I'm not sure that's like the right answer for the world's internet infrastructure, right? And so Filecoin is really trying to like put that on its head, enable thousands of different service providers from all over the world to offer storage and retrieval and compute services and to be able to access it in a much more open way. And we've seen a lot of traction both within Web3 and Web2, which is super encouraging and happy to go into some of that if it's helpful. It is. First, I want to touch on why it would be so problematic to have all of that data on

a few centralized platforms and with a few centralized companies. Because I don't think a lot of people still, even though they hear your privacy could be violated, you are the product, sort of all of these memes. But I don't think they understand how impactful it is that these few centralized services control everything. Totally. I think for one, I think as a society, whether you believe and are a fan of the big cloud storage fighters or not, it's good to have a choice. We just don't want to be cornered where one bank stores all of the world's financial assets. And similarly, I don't think you want to be in a world where one company stores all of the world's financial assets. And similarly, I don't think you want to be in a world where one company stores all of the world's data as well. But the specific watchouts is control over your data. You want to be able to make your own decisions on how your data is used, whether

it's used to be monetized through ads or whatever it might be. And that's really, really hard to do in like a Web2 paradigm, very easy to do using cryptography in Web3. Two, you want it to be verifiable. So right now we're trusting that a centralized party is storing your data. And if that goes wrong, we won't even know necessarily gives rise to things like data integrity or fake news and things like that as well. And so in the Web3 world, you have cryptographic proofs that this data is being stored on a daily basis, on an hourly basis in a decentralized network. And then three, let's say these companies want to jack up prices by 50% one day or not lower prices to be able to

make them affordable for really important data sets that should live in the cloud. Filecoin, as one example, is about less than 1% the cost of centralized cloud storage. And so it opens up huge new markets, even in the Web2 world, where like nonprofits or governments or universities that could otherwise not store really valuable data sets can now find a home from them in kind of like a Web3 network like Filecoin. We've also seen them go down, right? And when they do go down, you see half the internet go down with them. Exactly. And to pull on that thread, there are certain regions where the entire internet can

go down. You can just block an IP address to a centralized data center. And, you know, even if it's not like being reliant on a big cloud storage provider, the government could take control as well. We saw that in Catalonia, as an example. So Catalonia, I don't know if you're familiar with the situation, but they were trying to separate from Spain, they were hosting a referendum on their citizens voting on whether this should happen or not. Spain didn't want this to happen. And so the Spanish government blocked the IP address in a centralized way to kind of the data centers

that were having all of those, all the information on how to vote and what to do, et cetera. And so the Catalonian government actually moved all their assets onto IPFS, which is kind of a decentralized storage network. And overnight, everyone had access to this again, right? And so even if the cloud storage providers are reliable and do what they say, etc., you're at risk of various forms of censorship and failures. And it's maybe not obvious today, but if you fast forward 10 years

when you're really reliant on a specific set of protocols and companies to store your data, I think it's pretty scary. But interestingly, a lot of Web3 and a lot of, I guess, self-proclaimed decentralized protocols and networks still run on Amazon Web Services

or Google or Microsoft. So begs the question, is there really such thing as true decentralization in Web3 if you could still just be susceptible to a failure of your cloud service? Exactly. And we, you know, about a year ago, we're pretty scared about that, especially with NFTs. Like you're now kind of relying that these assets that you're paying lots of money for and are super valuable in different forms are now still stored on centralized servers and so we spun up something called nft.storage where it would be super easy to store it in a decentralized way on the falcon network and content address through ipfs and now there's 120 million nfts

that rely on that service in a decentralized way in a much more resilient fashion. And I think the one thing that last week, we had a big catalyst on March 14th, where we launched smart contracts and user programmability with the Filecoin virtual machine. This makes it extremely easy for Filecoin to integrate with any other blockchain. And so any other blockchain, let's say Ethereum, can easily now write a smart contract, store, retrieve, and cause computation to happen over data using the Filecoin network. And so that was possible in the pre-FEM era, but it was a little bit clunky. Now it becomes a lot more smooth. And so we're hoping most of Web3 can embrace decentralized storage and content addressing as some of the core primitives.

So just for clarification, I guess, for the audience, when you talk about decentralized storage, I mean, I know that you have OpenSea and Magic Eden and all of these huge platforms everyone's heard of. But most people, when they buy an NFT, they put it in their wallet, they self-custody it. So what are you storing exactly for platforms like these? Yeah, it's the actual asset, right? So when you mint an NFT, you get an address to an asset. But that actual asset is physically stored in AWS or Google Cloud or one of these centralized providers if you're not careful, right? And so moving them on to content addressing with IPFS, kind of like standardizing

what the addressing scheme of that would be. And so now you can store it on multiple different data centers around the world and with FVM in a perpetual way. Like for example, NFT storage now has this like automated contract that says, hey, store this NFT across, let's say, 20 data centers across three continents all over the world. And if any one of those data centers fails, the smart contract will automatically pick up and renew that contract with another data center with those parameters. And so these things become much more resilient and self-healing using smart contracts and a much more resilient system. Really, really interesting.

And so obviously, if you then have all of Web3 officially, effectively using Filecoin, is there any risk of the same sort of situation? Or is the decentralization of the network make it basically impossible to have those problems that you have with those centralized services? I think it becomes much more resilient. You can have smart contracts that automatically renew specific contracts with different data centers around the world. There are now reputation scores where data centers can be ranked on how often they've been slashed for failure or precludes retrievability or anything like that. And so it becomes like this really resilient network where you're spreading the risk over many, many more parties and incentivizing it with crypto economics that make it super, super resilient.

For example, for a data center, let's say in Europe, they have to post Filecoin as collateral before they start storing information. And so there's like an economic penalty if they can't post their proof by the end of the day on whether that information is still there. And those data centers can earn 10 times more block rewards for Filecoin if they're storing verified deals versus if they're storing ones and zeros or just kind of like non-verified data. And so there are these strong, strong crypto economic incentives to make sure that the network is super resilient and store, you know, humanity's information in a way that's super resilient for the long term. I mean, it's the very core ethos of crypto, right? You're incentivized to help the

crowd even by being completely selfish. Exactly. Exactly. It basically all mirrors the original ethos of Bitcoin, which is why I love when these things are built and the core of decentralization there. So we talk about, obviously, NFTs being a huge, I'm sure that's a huge portion of what's being stored for now. How much of real world data can eventually be stored in a decentralized manner? All the things that still are dominating Amazon Web Services and such. Totally. So the Filecoin network is the largest decentralized storage network in the world. There are 3,800 storage provider systems plugged in across 44 countries

with a capacity of 13 exabytes of data. And so that's enough to store like 4 billion high-definition movies as like one analogy, right? So it is absolutely massive. And so in terms of like how much is stored on it today, you know, beginning of last year, we were storing about 24 petabytes of information that has 27X to over 650 petabytes today. So in a bear market, the usage has gone up 27 times over the last 14 months. And so, and, you know, that's only kind of like a fraction of the network that's available in terms of capacity. So we're excited

to like get to the exabytes of onboarding there, right? And so, you know, that usage breaks down into, you know, a bunch of like Web3 applications, think like metaverse or gaming or personal storage or communication or NFTs, as one example. But all of that information within Web3 is actually pretty small. It's probably like a petabyte or two of total information. The large volumes of data have started coming in from the Web2 world. And so this is really, really exciting because I originally got into the space because I thought we really wanted to accelerate the transition from Web2 to Web3. And so Filecoin, I think, is like one of those blockchains that is starting to catalyze that transition, getting Web2, traditional Web2 companies storing their data and eventually getting

compute over data to operate on that, things like AI, machine learning, things like that as well. Literally, my next question was going to be if you'd seen any negative effects from the bear market, if you'd seen a plateau. Sounds like there's been no bear market for you. I'm not talking about the price of the coin, obviously. I'm just talking about an adoption of the actual protocol and usage. Exactly. And that's kind of what we've been

focused on is like, how do we bridge Web2 and Web3? Obviously, we want Web3 to have unlimited access to storage, retrieval, and compute over data for all the assets that are stored within Web3. But how do we pull more enterprises and more consumers from the Web2 world to be able to truly verify their internet interactions in a way they've never done before. And so we're having companies move over not only for cost, but for verifiability. So for example, the Starling Lab is this really interesting use case where they work with different parties like the USC Show Up Foundation to store videos of genocide testimony in a way that's totally verifiable back to the person who

said that. They're also storing assets from Ukraine to basically fully verify that like, hey, these videos, these pictures, these information that's happening locally is actually what's going on versus the fake news that like Russia might be spreading or something like that, right? And so you can cryptographically verify back to the source of where these things were captured on a network like Filecoin in a way that you just can't do in the Web2 world. And so we're noticing many universities, many nonprofits, many enterprises started to take part in that kind of movement. That's so interesting. I interviewed at one point Sam Williams from Arweave and kind of

conceptually blew my mind as well, Sam Williams, that you effectively are storing all of the data of the world. So it's not even just about what you're storing right now, but about literally capturing history that can be stored into perpetuity. I mean, it's basically exponential in what you'll be able to do, I assume. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, kind of like as you start to cause computation to happen over the data, you can start to move like major applications like of the order of magnitude of like Twitter or YouTube or something like that to live on Web3 tech. And that's really the goal, right?

Like that can't happen with the scalability issues that Web3 has today. But of the scale of the Filecoin network and with compute over data, like you can start to move major applications like that, not necessarily move them, but cause them to exist where you can serve billions of users and run like large scale kind of like AI or other types of computation over like the largest and most valuable data sets in an open way on Web3 tech. So I want to circle back to AI, which you brought up earlier. I use ChatGPT. I've been absolutely blown away by A, that zero to one moment just using it in the first place, but how fast it's learned and what you can now do with it. So with that in mind, I have to imagine there's going to be exponential need

with that exponential growth for storage and compute power. So how does Filecoin play into that? And I mean, is that a correct assumption? Totally, totally. So Filecoin basically enables not only the storage of data, but like compute over data on top of it. So things like AI, machine learning are like absolutely in the wheelhouse. There are two main kind of like reasons why, you know, you'd want to use something like Filecoin, right? So first, for open data sets,

you know, there's a much more public way of running many different types of AI training models. Like we think we're in the first out of the first inning, chat GBT is going to be one of them, but there's going to be many, many others. So if you take a large public genomics or clinical trial data set and put it on Filecoin and make it public, now many different parties can run different kind of AI training models on that and get a whole bunch of differentiated insights on things like clinical research or drug discovery or things like that. And so it totally changes the game on how many different parties can participate in getting insights from AI. And then the structure of the PowerPoint network actually makes it like cheaper and easier to use for different types of

decentralized compute. So you can run compute over data exactly where the data is versus having to move it out and into a separate container. You can start to parallelize compute over multiple data centers. And there are specific data centers within the Filecoin network that are now getting specialized hardware so they can be like the AI specialists. And so you can start to take advantage of specialization as well. And so it's kind of like openness, but also driving down cost of like what it would take

to run compute networks like AI and ML, things like that. Is there enough compute right now in the world for what's coming with AI? I hear that that's sort of the expense and the potential barrier. Eventually, obviously, as technology does, it will come down in price. I'm sure that it'll be deflationary. But right now, with how fast this is coming, I mean, is there really enough compute to accommodate? Yeah, I don't think there is. And so we need to grow that. But there's a couple of ways to grow it. It can, again, centralize into a few different providers, similar to the cloud storage market, where It can, again, centralize into a few different providers similar to the cloud

storage market where you're, again, dependent on a few folks to run these kind of systems. Or you can basically say, hey, there's an open network where anybody can join, anybody can buy specialized hardware to run computation and different kinds of things things like that and so you can you can basically have like different configurations different specializations and have like many many different businesses compete in this market uh versus kind of like centralizing again so again like we're in the first out of the first inning you know our belief is like these decentralized systems are a much better way of like growing the market the market than having a few large providers basically specialize. Yeah. How did you get into this, personally?

I mean, what's the story? Because this isn't somewhere you just kind of land. Yeah, totally. So I was kind of like the first business-y hire at Protocol Labs back in 2017. So almost six years ago. So my career path was like, you know, more in the business kind of world, right? I was in consulting for a few years and private equity as an investor, did the MBA thing, did a startup, and we ended up selling it to kind of a larger organization around, you know, it was like a sharing economy play for like large industrial equipment.

And a good friend of mine in 2017 had been with Bitcoin and Ethereum since the beginning. He had joined one of the large crypto hedge funds. His name's Ryan Zerr, just an awesome guy. And he basically dragged me by the ear and said like, you are going to meet Juan Benet. I don't care. Like, I don't, I'm not going to hear a word of it. This company is reinventing the infrastructure of the internet and you need to be a part of this. And one night I headed off and I just absolutely fell in love with the mission to upgrade the internet, to make it faster, safer, more resilient to attack, more open. And I thought it was only researchers and engineers in the company for the most part at the time. And so I thought I could say, hey, I could bring a different skill set to the table to increase adoption from millions to hopefully billions of users in the future. And the learning curve was steep, right?

I can't imagine. Open source, ecosystem development, crypto economics, like all the technical kind of like fundamentals like libp2p and IPFS. And that took many years, but it was such a fun journey. And now, you know, you kind of like are able to bring a different skill set to the table while also understanding the roots of open source and cryptography and things like that as well. I mean, it's interesting. So Protocol Labs obviously existed before you were there. Right. And you got hired from this business space in 2017. This was an extremely ambitious vision. Probably most people wouldn't get it or care. Do you feel like in 2023, people still get it or care? You know, it's a great question. I think it's fundamentally different, you know, because like back in 2017, as you probably know, like, you know, there was the early adoption was still kind of early

developers and speculators. There were no institutional capital in the space. There was like very few, like we'd never really crossed the chasm into the web to world, you know, into various industries. Whereas today I really do feel like with NFTs, we crossed the chasm into the Web2 world, into various industries. Whereas today, I really do feel like with NFTs, we crossed the chasm into gaming and creators and artists. There are now institutional investors that would lock you out of the room in 2017 that are now very active in the space. And a lot of the underlying rails are a lot more robust and accommodating for other different parties and businesses and investors that want to join. And so I think it's like fundamentally different.

Now that said, like we have a lot of work to do to really truly cross the chasm at the scale that Web2 exists. Like I mentioned, like a Twitter or YouTube can't operate on Web3 tech today because scalability is not there. But if we can get there and, you know, we've been working on various tasks to make sure that's very feasible from a storage and compute standpoint, you know, I think that's like really the really gets me up every morning is like, how can we accelerate the transition from Web 2 to Web 3 and kind of get out of our own community to bring other people in? Yeah, I mean, I guess that was the question.

I think everything in the crypto space and the decentralized Web 3 space, it is a bit of an echo chamber, right? I think that increases in size. But even I, when I'm talking about this stuff, I find myself realizing that your average person doesn't understand what I'm talking about, doesn't really care about these issues. I mean, you go to Bitcoin, they don't even care about their money, right? And so it's even hard to explain that. So what do you think it takes for the average person, nothing to do with crypto, doesn't care to have some aha moment about centralization and data and all these things that are so important to us. But I think your average person is still just as clueless as to why it's important. Yeah, I think it's both the rails and the language.

So I'll give a personal story. A few months back, I went to present at a collection of Web2 cloud storage analysts. So it was media from the Web2 world. I started launching into my Web3 spiel and why verifiability is important and crypto economics and decentralization. And five minutes in, somebody just stood up and stopped me. And they're like, Colin, I don't care. How does a bank in Idaho store their data on this network that you're talking about? And so I think it's up to us to present it very differently. Yes, the underlying protocol like Filecoin or Ethereum or Polygon has very strong decentralization benefits, but the interfaces to the average enterprise or consumer has to be tailored to that.

So maybe if I could go back in time, I would pitch it as like, hey, here's the onboarding interface. Forget about the underlying protocol for a second. Here's how you would drag a file and use... UX, UI, dude. How can I just do this without knowing it's Web3? It's all abstracted away. I'm just dragging a file. I mean, that's exactly the question. Exactly. And maybe you don't even call it Filecoin because that scares off some fraction

of Web2 users. Maybe you call it eStore, decentralized storage, or something like that. And then you can back into like, hey, these are all the benefits. It's less than 1% of the cost of cloud storage, truly verifiable, users are in control of their data, you're not locked into a vendor, it's censorship resistant, all that kind of stuff. So I'm still learning on how to interface with Web2 organizations and consumers.

And I think that's the the next wave of like developers and applications, what they need to pay attention to is usability, not kind of like, you know, throwing the decentralization terms at the user. It's like how to make those interfaces and the language and, you know, super, super easy to understand. Interesting. I have these conversations all the time. And all we talk about is UX UI for grandma, right? Like how is grandma going to use it? How is grandma going to understand it? But now talking to you, it seems like we should actually, that's where we should have started. I think the starting point should like, let's build something that grandma does and then add all the, you know, complicated crypto stuff in the background. So we're trying to extract it away, but it would be interesting the complicated crypto stuff in the background. So we're trying to extract it away, but it would be interesting to start from sort of the back. Yeah. I'm curious

your perspective on this and what you've seen from some of the other folks that you've talked to. Well, everybody, I mean, we all agree. I mean, that's exactly it is that, okay, we've built this incredible thing. People who get it care. It's superior in a number of ways, but I don't want to have, if I'm a person who's not crypto native, I don't want to have to go on Coinbase and buy ETH, open a MetaMask wallet, send ETH to my MetaMask wallet, understand how to store my seed phrases just to play a video game. Exactly. And then buy some other coin and send that coin through a bridge to a Ronin wallet so I can play Axie Infinity. I mean, yeah, people played Axie Infinity because there was a monetary incentive.

And I think that was the first example we saw of literal grandmas in the Philippines finding a way to do this because there was an incentive, but they weren't doing it because it was improving their life in any other way than the monetary incentive. So I mean, that's the consistent conversation. To me, the major challenge that we just find with everything is that your average person is not in this echo chamber. They're not going to do the hard work to secure their assets. And so they're going to mess up.

Right? So not only do they have to understand it, we have to make it so they don't lose all their money all the time. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So that I think is the next leg of the whole Web3 industry is like, how do we enable that? And we're probably reaching the upper bounds of early adopters, early majority that will go through the pain of doing all the things that you mentioned. And now we've got to look at the problem a little bit differently in this next,

especially in the spare market, but going forward to get the next wave of folks to adopt. I mean, you're obviously institutionally focused, right? Huge platforms. Is there a way that your average person just uses this like a Dropbox? And this becomes the norm for your everyday person to store all their files. I mean, so many people obviously are backing up their computers or their phones, the basics. Totally. Yeah. So there's lots of applications that integrate with Filecoin in the backend, where you can put your credit card in and charge like $1 or so a month and store all your files on decentralized tech. So Skiff is one that I'm a big fan of, ChainSafe files, Fleek storage,

all these ones just have super easy Dropbox style interfaces. They're fully encrypted. You're in control of your data. No one can ever get access to it. And some of them have really awesome collaboration in a way that's totally peer-to-peer. So kind of like replicating the Google Docs interface.

So it's really about getting really awesome founders and developers to get to the point where they build some of these interfaces and abstract away the complexity of the underlying protocols. So what are the big challenges that you're tackling now? It was 2017 and you were looking at things that would come to market in 4, 5, 6, 7 years. What are we looking at in 4, 5, 6, 7 more years with this exponential curve? Totally. Totally.

So I think we've been following a three-step plan for the Filecoin network. One is build the world's largest decentralized storage network. And we've largely accomplished that, right? 3,800 storage providers, 44 countries, 13x bytes of storage. It's now bigger than many Web2 public cloud platforms, which is kind of incredible, right? Yeah. Step two is like onboard as much of the world's information as possible. And so we're off to a good start there. A lot of work left to do. But we're up 27 times in terms of the data stored from the beginning of last year to

today. So we're on a good path there. And then step three is like what we're launching this year, which is basically bring compute to the data to enable web scale applications to live on Web3 tech. And so that started with the launch of smart contracts and user programmability on March 14th, which now opened up like this whole open data economy, which is like super, super interesting. You can basically think of like the FBM is like the orchestration layer.

It's kind of like the transition moment for like iPhone, where they opened up app stores where anybody can build apps. Like that's kind of the foundational transformational moment. moment for iPhone where they opened up app stores where anybody can build apps. That's the foundational transformational moment. And so now anybody can build smart contracts, they can port over smart contracts from EVM and the Ethereum space, which is super easy for Solidity developers, et cetera. And then we can enable things like compute over data, cross-chain bridging, next generation scalability as a result of that foundational step. And so for the next few years, we're super focused on that additional value add

of opening up a truly open data economy and bringing compute to the data so we can scale to the point where we can get a YouTube or Twitch operating on Web3 tech. Is it literally can be utilized with any layer one blockchain or layer two blockchain with the addition of smart contracts? Or is it still somewhat limited? And do you really need to be able to because I think some of them probably just won't be that successful or have that much adoption? Right, right. So we're kind of doing it one by one. So the EVM and the Ethereum ecosystem was the first one. And so, you know, FEVM is technically what's live, which is like,

you know, people could write contracts on Solidity and port them over with like minimal changes or anything like that. But we'll probably just start to go down the list and start integrating with Polygon and like others. So it's like a multiple runtime environment where you can integrate with like multiple chains. It's interesting that Polygon has sort of become the second in every conversation now. It's funny, right? I don't know. Like maybe that's just what I hear, but it used to be like, okay, we'll do Ethereum. Then we'll probably add Solana, right? Because it was so hyped a year ago and such, but now it seems at Polygon everywhere. Yeah, we participated in Phil Bangalore. It was a big developer conference in India, and it was unbelievable.

I think it was something like 10,000 developers that showed up, and a lot of them were from the Polygon ecosystem. There are specific markets that are totally underrepresented from even my viewpoint that we're now seeing the excitement towards. So I think Polygon has exposed that in India, which is really, really exciting. And we're happy to support them. It's incredible how big this ecosystem is in India. It absolutely blows my mind how much talent and how many programmers. I mean, outside, in general, where are you finding that the

bulk of your programmers and developers are coming from? Are they all over the world? They're all over the world, but we're definitely making specific pushes in India. So we're going to have a major conference there later this year. We did one at the end of last year called Phil Bangalore in Singapore that was organized by a few community members. And we were just blown away by how many thousands of developers showed up.

So that's been a pretty big market. And then like, we're definitely targeting like North America and Europe, but we're also seeing pockets in Asia, like in South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, that are starting to emerge as first-class developer ecosystems. And so from our standpoint, we're trying to really spread as wide as possible. We have hackathons running on a monthly basis in different geographies. We have accelerator programs that are uniquely focused on North

American developers, European, and then Asian out of Singapore. And then we have like programs. I'm not sure if you participated in Phil VC, but it's running right now. It's the website is Phil VC, but it's basically 750 investors, 25 pitches from like founders within our ecosystem. And it's been an awesome way to get whole global investors educated and invested in different startups around the ecosystem. So we're trying to prioritize but have equal representation in different geographies for sure. So now the hard question, is there anything that can stop this? I mean, we obviously hear a ton about regulation, legislation, governments with aggressive or contentious policies towards crypto in general. Is any of that a concern for what you're building? I mean, it's also a catalyst

for what you're building, but is any of it a concern for what you're building? Yeah, I'd be curious to get your take on this as well, you know, but like, it is disappointing sometimes, right, that there's like, misinformation that, you know, you kind of like, because of a couple of scapegoats, you kind of cast a wide net over how the administration views crypto as like a total industry, right. But we kind of believe that like, hey, if you show real adoption, that's the way to push through the noise here. We're storing genocide video testimonials. We're storing large-scale scientific datasets from CERN and UC Berkeley. We're storing government data sets from the New York City open data set exchange. And so are you really going to come at a network like this that's storing these for cheaper

in a verifiable way for real users within the economy? And our argument is like, hey, the more progress you show around that, the easier it becomes to make sure that these things are protected. I think that makes sense. easier it becomes to make sure that these things are protected. And then, you know, yeah. And, you know, like the banking system is super fragile as we've like seen, you know, like, and of course, like we want other parts of like the Web3 ecosystem to take that on so that, you know, financial assets can be a lot more secure in a verifiable way. But, you know, it's just like one big data-related issue on the scale of Silicon Valley Bank

that would catalyze a lot more folks to take a look at. That's what I'm wondering. Is there some black swan event that could just trigger a massive wave of understanding and people coming in? Yeah. I don't know what that would be, but yeah. It's hard to know. There was like different pockets.

Like I thought when the internet was like shut off by the government in Iran, that was like a big moment for us. Like, oh my God, like this could literally like get off. Web2 infrastructure is so fragile that you could just like lose access to like this basic human right, like the internet overnight, right? And, those have been like interesting catalysts. You know,

back in 2017, when I was first joining the Turkish government blocked access to Wikipedia, as an example, because Wikipedia was running all sorts of stories about the administration. And they put those onto IPFS, like Wikipedia onto IPFS. And all of a sudden, in a peer-to-peer way, everyone had access to Wikipedia the next day. And so there's these few examples where you see pockets of the fragility of the Web2 infrastructure that start to move societies or different types of users even like countries over to Web3 tech. And, you know, we haven't seen as many of those in the United States, I would argue, with respect to data. But, you know, it just takes one or two for people to start to turn their heads.

Yeah, I mean, look at North Korea, right? Or even China, right? I mean, China, they basically just created their own closed internet and a duplicate version of every single platform that we have and closed off everything. And this could completely solve that. I guess back to the other question of what could stop it. It seems like nothing could stop the platform. The fear, I guess, would be that they come after the coin as a security or something

like that, which can be dealt with, of course, right? That would just be going through the process or procedure of whatever it is. That shouldn't affect the protocol massively, even if that happened just in one country, I would imagine. Exactly. Exactly. I think the bigger risk is making sure that the usability of the tools are really tuned towards a broad audience, right?

Like AWS has a 15-year headstart on their SDKs and their APIs to like the application layer that makes it really easy for folks to adopt. And we're not there yet, right? Like I worry more about those kinds of like issues that prevent adoption versus, you know, something, something like of that nature. Is there anything I might have missed here in this conversation that you're dying to tell everybody about um yeah you know maybe uh maybe just a plug for phil bc just because it's running right now so it launched on march 21st it's a demo day for 25 startups uh across the web3 space primarily building on filecoin ipfsFS, LitP2P, and stuff like that. They're incredible startups. There are 750 investors that are signed up to engage in the platform. And it's like all the top investors within Web3 and increasingly Web2. So for folks that are out there that are interested like that, just go to phil.vc. You can request to sign up

because it's invite only. but we're trying to encourage lots of folks to get much more clean and visibility to the whole Filecoin ecosystem. And so that's been just an awesome, awesome thing to do. It's a Web3 Shark Tank. Exactly, exactly. And so with FVM just launching, there'll be like many startups building on FVM in the next still a lot, you see in a quarter or so. But we were already seeing like pretty exciting new kind of use cases that this like open data economy enables. So we're super excited for the future. And where can everybody follow you after this conversation and keep up with what you're doing?

And of course, I guess, you know, start using the tools. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Colin Evren is my Twitter handle. And for folks that are interested in FBM, just because like that's been an awesome kind of pod for developers, I just go to fbm.falcone.io. We have a support team and a bunch of like hackathons, accelerators, and kind of like platforms that really make it easy for folks to join the ecosystem. And so FEM.falcone.io is the place to visit. Awesome. My next task is to check out PhilBC, so I'm going to go do that myself. Awesome. Great. Awesome. Colin, thank you so much for the conversation. I think it's exceptionally

important what you guys are building and that we get the message out there. Because like I said, I don't think your average person knows, but there is going to be some tipping point and some moment where people start to care deeply about this. Definitely. This was a lot of fun, Scott. Let's do it again soon. We will. Thank you, Colin. Take care. Let's go.