Gamified Learning with Sam

Transcript

foreign [Music] and today I'm here with my guest Sam from node Guardians and jeanaju coin uh node Guardians is a platform that allows developers to level up their their Dev skills and uh he's also the founder of zoology coin which is France's uh Premier crypto media YouTube channel and uh just like all around uh you know very influential guy in the French crypto space uh he also organizes a stark net

conference here in France and so today we're going to be talking about all that and I'm also identified out why Sam thinks bare metal is better suited for validator infrastructure I tend to agree with that but anyway all that's coming up right here on the interrupt [Music] hello thanks for joining me Sam I love the intro I'm addicted to that new jingle intro you added like yeah a few episodes it's here and as a listener

it's very hard for me to be here so I'm very honored and humbled to be on the show and it's funny to be on the other side and you know this jingle feels as good as a guest then as a viewer it's really it's really a pleasant experience all the way thanks for having me yeah thanks thanks yeah well it's a pleasure to have you too and uh and and also like I I feel a little bit like Starstruck because like you know you're [ __ ] huge like you've got like such a huge audience uh you know in in the French crypto spear but like also Beyond like you know I think that you got your Beginnings in France and and certainly like is a pretty uh you know influential uh crypto media organization in France and you've got your YouTube

channel and everything but like you're so much bigger than like even you know epicenter or you know any of the other podcasts I'm I'm working with so uh it's really cool to have you on and like talk to uh someone who's like yeah really really grown a massive audience um yeah you're talking to your own fan I started listening I started listening to a presenter probably before starting an adventure in that space in that field so you know uh all the credit goes to you like seriously oh thank you um yeah so like I mean we kind of like met in person and like started chatting and talking a little bit more like in the last year or so

um but like you've been in the space since I think like 2016 or something like that and you know I we didn't really crop cross paths then like when you were living in France and you know I think like around that time I was really focused on building like this like stratum this this Enterprise uh blockchain company and and you know like I realize now that like a lot of the I went to a few of the meetups in Paris like the HCC or sorry the um what used to be called ass F the association only ethereum um meetups and but you know I wasn't like very plugged into the community and it's only like later that I kind of came in so we didn't we didn't really like cross cross paths back then I think um but yeah tell me tell me about your

like background and like where you know how you got into crypto and like how you got to start working on on July coin um sure um so my Beginnings in crypto yeah I started hearing about crypto around back in the days when Z cash was doing its trusted setup and you know sometimes you have that friend that tells you about ethereum but you just listen to it and basically you don't really like get hooked and and that's it I was just hearing about it from you know like to this whole thing this whole technology and well nothing special happened then you know in 2017 I had that that friends that I I used to visit who indirectly kind of orange peeled me or you know East build me let's put it this way

because they were using darknet markets and the whole process the way they could basically like get a commodity something to their house leveraging a network that is totally ex like you know parallel Network that doesn't function or you know doesn't comply with all the rules that are set doesn't go through without going through the you know traditional networks they put it this way I was really like amazed so I think I was sold programmable money the programmable Concepts the programmable money concept totally got me hooked and I started educating myself on a regular basis but yeah I was doing Med studies so this was taking a lot of bandwidth and so you were studying yes yeah yeah okay and and so I was not

really inspired uh with that career path I just did that so uh my parents you know get relieved and they're they're not you know just to avoid stressing them and I was not that inspired and I I was just like I'm just gonna take a year off and see how I can make this work and get involved into something that truly resonates within me and if it doesn't work it's totally okay so I kind of halted status to focus on crypto and I started to see how I could contribute to that space and increase my knowledge I'm from a city called Toulouse in the south of France it's like the fourth biggest city started doing something called the beer coin like beer coin uh twice a month it is a meet-up that

carries people that share an interest for Bitcoin on other cryptocurrencies and start meeting uh some some folks some friends who are my current Partners nowadays and um you know um started learning a bit more about that whole space and we got together to start something called Journal decline Journal ducoin.com is a media that basically covers what's going on in the in the world of crypto in in the space and seven days a week we try to cover what's going on and we abstract the complexity of some Concepts some news and we serve that in French in a in a genuine way and we also have a label you know operating sorry on YouTube there you can find some podcasts you can find some um some streams some 30 streams where we discuss all things you know the

customers governance or um also some less sexy incidents like what happened with I don't know Celsius or FTX all sorts of debates are happening there and yeah this was pretty much how I got involved with the space at the local scale and uh and yeah I guess the the rest is history many things happened after and here I am we got we got fortunate to you know things grew there was that bull market but back in 2017 there weren't that many actors in that in that field too and uh yeah slowly but surely we managed to get a few million readers on a monthly basis one two million not a few million and uh

now I think it's about the same numbers and we're just trying to keep it up not having the quality decrease and and that's it and keeping the same frequency despite the market being a bit uh hostile yeah yeah like that first mover Advantage I think is is huge and you know in in those days there you know there weren't a lot of quality media Outlets covering crypto uh in French and you know by the way like for our audience like the uh you know French speak the French speaking world is goes far beyond France you know there's like parts of Canada that have uh French speakers also like a lot of Africa North Africa and uh and so you know having having that uh that kind

of you know language Niche is uh is huge especially if you're providing quality content um and educating people not just providing content but like I think just educating people on some of the key Concepts right like you know what's consensus what's a blockchain what like just these very basic things that you can find pretty easily in English and there's many you know there's like you can find all flavors of this kind of stuff in English but to find really good quality content in in like a sort of you know I don't know what French is maybe like the third or fourth most spoken language in the world yeah it's it's really valuable and I think a lot of people probably came into crypto uh around that time you know in 2017 to

2018 during that you know during that bull market um watching watching your videos and like reading the logic going yeah uh I I I hope so and I hope the they're still among us until this day and everything went well for you know for them in that field so yeah it's it's been a it's been a crazy ride and France is quite a huge it's quite a huge region when you think of it like the French speaking word is rather large I think it's about like 200 300 million French speakers yeah so yeah it's quite a it's a it's quite a big Community we have here yeah yeah and um you don't produce any content in English or do you

so Andre and all the coin if you visit the channel you're gonna see some podcasts with for instance Adrian Brink or someone from you know like uh even Jay from say these are recorded in English and they're subtitled in French so people are not familiar with English can also enjoy it so you can find some content that's actually uh in English subtitled in French but the core of the content I'll say 50 of the content is um yeah 50 of the content is uh is in French yes yep yeah this is this is something that I also thought about it at some point I think early in the days of epicenter was okay like how do we because you know through epicenter we had this network of

of people like outside of France and I think like there were a few people around that time that had that and I was thinking like hey how can we like create content in French and it's like well none of these people speak French so it doesn't really make sense but you know sort of missing the point that you know if your audience it's it's about the audience right it's really about like creating the audience and if you can deliver that content to them you know subtitled or with like dubbing or whatever like they're still going to be there and they're still going to appreciate the content um I guess like I wasn't well you know I haven't thought like that far ahead about um you know doing content in French and sort of like let the idea kind of go by but yeah like you guys like nailed that

Niche and nailed that like that sort of General Geographic linguistic uh uh audience pretty pretty well and a lot of them to also get access to like people like Adrian Brink like people like Jay from Sayer like all these folks who genuinely wouldn't come on a like you know non-english speaking podcast but just delivering that knowledge directly to uh to that Community it's it's uh it's really impressive yeah um let's yeah sorry go ahead not at all um nothing relevant okay uh so yeah so you're working on a couple of different things also so um you know I want to talk about Stark Cc or start starting at CC

um so NCC and then also node Guardians I think node Guardians is really like it it's such an interesting idea and like the first time you told me about this it's like wow this is super cool I mean this really I think um it encapsulates a lot of the uh you know this kind of play to earn model but in a way that feels very native to crypto uh and like play to Ernie there's like so much like it's such a loaded term it almost you know it almost serves you like does a disservice to what you guys are doing but yeah like can you talk about um no Guardians and like what what it is and what you're hoping what's the vision here and then we can get into some of

the some of the details of course um I don't see note Guardians as a play to earn but uh yeah it is uh clearly a platform where you get to plane and earn something but play to earn is you know connotated as stated with some you know other types of projects which I totally respect but I really think that a node Garden is different there's no hierarchy it's not better but it's just different so no Guardian is I like to call it an RPG a role-playing game to challenge your solidity skills for now and later other Stacks will be supported so as the name suggested it is also an infrastructure provider we run nodes and rpcs across different networks and

beyond that we try to contribute to this ecosystem by creating an rpg-like experience to challenge Developers for now that is like what we offer um as a developer you log in with your web free wallet you don't need to share your email or any personal data whatsoever or pay anything and you choose our quests that you want to solve quests are basically programming challenges logic problems capture the flying exercises that you need to solve and the way we twist them is I think that's what make the the quests really stand out here is that you have some kind of story some backstory to it and each Quest like some

quests are linked to each other because there is a a bigger picture some form of lore that glues all of this quests together so you want to finish that campaign to kind of see how everything unfolds you start to maybe you know get attached to that very specific character in the lore and when you complete that Quest you get rewards in the form of gold and experience points they're sold out you cannot trade them and they will basically allow you to craft items items that basically show your degree your level of commitment into a specific field of programming whether it is low level programming or data structure on algorithm maybe you want to you know

craft that armor that shows that you're much involved with this domain specific language with this protocol you can craft this and build your developer identity on the platform there is a bit of a social aspect on the platform so you complete this Quest you craft cool items a la Skyrim or Oblivion or other RPGs which I used to play a lot and yeah you get to basically test your your your skills and and maybe hopefully have fun in the process and if you want to connect with our Engineers to ask your questions you can go on Discord your Discord identity is an inter node Gardens profile and depending on how many quests you have completed there are like different let's say Mage groups and

you can basically also chat with other fellow node Guardians that have completed the similar amount of quests and explore synergies try to discuss potentially like you know the solution to a certain problem and everything there are a lot of features that we're planning to implement to implement uh real soon or in the coming months I don't like to promise stuff and like say it's going to be amazing and everything so I try to be cautious with that but they're going to be more quests that are coming on the platform more campaigns um in the future we plan to integrate other programming languages other stacks and other form of challenges like a gas golfing so for instance gas golfing is I give you a a problem and you need to solve it while being the most efficient

in gas and then we can generate a leaderboard that basically ranks people uh and lets you see where you look at you like where you you are against other Guardians and you can have a monthly gas golfing Challenge and people that end up for instance in the in the top 15 or top 20 they can craft that very specific item that is let's say uh limited edition that is very like temporary you can explore all these different things and and I think that that kind of makes it fun um yeah so that's that's pretty much what note Guardians is you you have some kind of RPG RPG to change developers if you're not a developer you're not left out at all you have a specific type of quest that are called

Theory Theory requests are articles about distributed systems and decentralized finance that are explaining you Concepts like I don't know data availability or scaling approaches for for a blockchain and everything we always Team Up by someone who's very familiar with a specific domain whether it is scaling or zero knowledge cryptography they produce an article that we kind of make we arrange it to fit our lore you know like with infographics and stuff and you get to learn also something about blockchains and at the end you can challenge your understanding by doing an McQ and if you get it right you can also get some Loot and craft some cool items

so I also invite you to check it out if that's something of interest to you and again the the last category I think I said it earlier was taking provider you you can also uh delegate on our nodes if that's something you you know you you can consider doing that but it's it's not nothing important of course yeah this is this is super cool I I just kind of stumbled upon uh the Roll-Ups page here and I wish I would have read this this morning because I did an interview on episode with the fuse guys and they basically have this very same uh this very same graph here but like the differences between validium and Sovereign Beyond just the the fact that well it's

fun right so like it you know I've done a few you know solidity tutorials and this kind of thing and like yeah I was it was you know didn't didn't pursue those things very far I think and what what strikes me with this is it's fun right there's like there's this competitive aspect to it also where there's other people um uh that are that are also like Computing completing these guilds and uh it's like an RPG so you know like you're like I'm not a big gamer but like you know like there's an RPG so you're like loving leveling up uh as you uh as you become uh more proficient in in like these programming skills and but but then there's like there's all of this kind of fear um

you know underlying uh utility to what you guys are building so you mentioned that you're using a soul bound token like it's it's kind of an attestation service in a way you know in the same way that say poapp is an attestation service that you were somewhere or you met someone this is an attestation service that like you've done some work and there's a lot that you can do with that and a lot that you can unpack there um you're gonna say something sorry go ahead sorry I just wanted to add the little correction here it is so Bound in in a sense that it is linked to our identity but it is not issued in the form of an nft yet our data set is designed in a way that we can potentially in the very near future migrate it on on chain but so far this

is a rather centralized product and we yeah just wanted to let let people know that but uh yeah yeah yeah okay and yeah we can maybe talk a little bit more about like exactly what those tokens look like um but so from from the perspective that this is an attestation service right it's uh um it's it's a it's a platform that allows you as an individual to prove that you've done something that you've done a course or that you've read some information and you know understood the the main uh you know the sort of the Crux of like what's being explained um that you've successfully completed uh

some programming task and arrived at a result what what can we do with this information or what can like companies or people who are hiring or even like for the developers also like how do they leverage this information it's a great question you're asking here and I didn't Venture into so in our roadmap the next let's say layer break that we want to build on top of what's currently out there is a matchmaking engine between ecosystem and contributors so we can prove to a certain extent that you have solved an arbitrary programming challenge so let's say I am a recruiter or I am a foundation and I'm looking for a new go

engineer I don't know I can design a custom set of challenges to add some kind of filter a constraint before people can actually submit their application to me and I can basically be match made with a set of developers that have proven that they've completed that of course we're not perfectly civil resistant but it's still very annoying to try to cheat the system and everything and you can potentially increase the quality of the applicants for an arbitrary opportunity beyond that for open source contribution let's say we need to build a new bridge between polygon and Mina or something like that and we would like to call the ecosystem community of devs to potentially solve that challenge a bit like you know you

have this bounty board in The Witcher 3 and you know witchers can basically apply to kill that Dragon to get the reward so you and your last you can apply as a team has a red team and you can say look we've accomplish this in the in the past and we would like to solve that problem we would like to apply for that Grant and Foundation can review the different groups that are tagging together to solve that problem and eventually take better decisions because every developer comes with their folio I mentioned folio here because on node Guardians you can share your profile and you have some kind of Kernel that keeps track of what you told and we would like to explore for next year uh you know add functions that allow you also to import the reputation you have

acquired on other let's say well-respected dials or developer communities and inject it into your node Garden identity so the progress you've done elsewhere is not wasted it is again like ingested by your nugorian profile and it gives a not like you get a better Trust on the platform so this is something I'm I think it's very exciting to to build and could definitely help all all ants get the best out of everything and we want to do it and I'm very attached to that Concept in a way that doesn't compromise people identity like of course we have cookies we collect a bit of data but like we don't store we're not asking people to give

their email we're not asking your name or familiar name you can apply for an opportunity without giving anything to us and if you don't want any notification you can also disable everything we really want to give people all the choices on whether they want to be contacted or not so they don't feel like they you know this is something I'm very attached to they can just use the platform and if you just want to use the platform you don't want to be Matchmaker you don't want to share your information then it's up to you and I think this is very important to make the most inclusive community because a lot of people are extremely attached to that privacy and we really hope to keep on building that platform without making it intrusive for the user or without forcing people to do an action on social

on social networks to access free content and stuff like that even though I perfectly understand this marketing methods I think it's going to be a challenge and a very interesting path to explore to grow a product with out forcing people to to share something about themselves important I think about the platform yeah yeah I mean I I think it's important that like yeah the platform allows people to just you know learn and if they you know if they don't want to um share any information but but then given the opportunity I think you guys are well positioned to leverage all of the all of these people um and to to to help companies like

recruit right I was talking to a guy yesterday and uh you know he's telling me that they're they're hiring a uh I think you know who this person is actually they're hiring a solidity developer they're looking for a civility developer and they're running into this problem that uh they're getting kind of like scammers applying for positions and the way that they're doing it is I didn't know this but apparently like they'll get like one or there's like one or two good sort of like decent programmers in the in the group and then a bunch of guys that just have no clue and then they'll pass they'll go through an interview with like no camera a lot of these guys are like in Asia so um uh you know like maybe for like

Americans or or westerners it's hard to to tell the difference between like one person or another especially if they don't have their camera on they'll do a test uh they'll um basically sort of pass the interview get a job and then like after a month after they've received payment and basically have done nothing they just kind of run off um they just kind of run off with the money and like this is this is but you know if they're getting positions that are paying like four or five six thousand Grand a month um and they're doing this like all the time it's like a decent chunk of money right um so with with something like this like you can actually show that you know it takes a lot more work and there's a much

higher barrier to entry to um to doing like a scam like this if you're leveraging this and like other attestation services to kind of prove that you know you are who you say you are or that you have the skills that you think that you say you have um yeah I wonder if this is something that also like companies maybe that you're interacting with or maybe like prospective customers are also concerned with uh trust you mean being able to uh uh to attest to confirm that someone has a certain skill set and everything uh I I believe entities that do recruit show an important interest for for that aspect and I I think that yeah we're trying to

build that trust Network at a humble scale right now and I I really think that this is the way to go and as the platform becomes more exhaustive and more integrated we will be able to to connect with other initiatives other hackathons other communities and we'll be able to to have some kind of score and index that that can more in the future as time goes it can be accepted as something that really represents someone's genuineness and that's a huge problem to tackle maybe this solution will not work but I think that doing it this way might make the process fun for for everyone and hopefully it works out I think there is a it's an it's a very big problem to

tackle and we're excited to give it a try here yeah um you know on the other hand though I was in a governance call the other day I think it was for fmos and uh you know what someone was arguing that basically if you know as a Dao um you know if you're gonna get hired by a Dao and the Dow is going to pay you then like this person was arguing that the community that you should you should be doxxed um you should you know have your LinkedIn out your qualifications all these things and I guess in absence of some kind of attestation um that you're competent and that you've completed you know previously other

tasks or maybe maybe in like something like git Co-op right like I see git Co-op as another form of attestation that you've contributed meaningfully to open source without that like of course you know if you're gonna like get hired by a dow um you're just like some handle on Discord or maybe like an ethereum address or something like that you know it's like it's it's difficult to establish trust there um especially if you're taking funds from a community right where there's like you know the the implication of voters might not be such that you know you can like take someone out of of that contractual relationship fairly quickly until some damage is done

so yeah I I think like this is this certainly adds to the the weight of uh you know one's competency and uh and like previous work you can go to you can go to jail if you contribute to certain chunks of you know to to certain type of code and I think it's important not to be doxed if that is actually your wish uh imagine you're working on some zero knowledge solution or and then you're basically summoned I mean I took the cost you get swatted because you contributed code for this would have been nice to be able to to contribute and get women like you know get paid without having to compromise their identity and it's nice to have an option and if we can keep

that option for let's let's try to build solutions that allow us to keep that option and it's definitely not easy yeah um what's the business model here and how uh yeah saving money with this other than staking rewards which also I want to ask you about staking rewards and why well why are you also a staking provider oh that's uh sure happy to answer that so yeah we are stating provider so we take money uh through our staking you know like through our nodes we take commissions on different networks and that generates some income we try to also do delegation programs uh while contributing to ecosystems we can increase the stake that's litigated on

an arbitrary node to be able to generate more income out of uh out of this operation the question you asked about what's the link between being a pure educational player and an infrastructure player let's say is that we would really like to create some kind of One-Stop hub for the developer you're not obli you're not forced to but let's say you come to learn for free and then you're ready to go at production level you're ready to ship code on the mainnet and you want to use an RPC service you might as well use the dashboard as a note Guardians used like you know do you do your queries to our infrastructure if you feel like it you might consider using our infrastructure and you know you can you pretty much get

like a suite of tools not only rpcs but different like items that you can just get from this thing which was initially a platform to to learn or to compete against other developers on the gas golfing exercise so I think that this is an interesting system to grow as a stacking provider to offer to offer resources for for developer for free without asking anything in return that's the way I see it beyond that um before doing node Gardens I was doing a lot of Grants for different foundations when I was focusing a lot on Journal decline I was trying to find a way to be economically viable without pushing some some let's say logic projects so we were applying

for Grants and we were asked to do a lot of tech writing or content to abstract the complexity of a technical stack or something like that and there were there was really a lot of demand so that's pretty much what pushed me just for like to do it in French so that's what gave me the hint that you know Tech writing and devoriented resources are actually something that it's something in high demand and I was like how can we do it in a way that's more interactive that's more involving and that's more yeah that's not static and that's how we went for that design that basically consists of doing these interactive challenges so grants to get back to Grants um the Integrations on those Guardians if we design let's say 50 hours of

content on a new domain-specific language that's going to take two or three months of engineering so we can also take our margin on the labor that has been allocated to do this integration that is one way we uh actually uh that's one way to to to make the whole Enterprise variable then we do events which are fortunately for now so far have been profitable Ventures overall there is the RPC concept it's not yet deployed we're still testing it but this is something that we hope will be able to generate as income and then there is the you know being a grant distribution point if you distribute resources for open source contribution and you do it

effectively foundations might want to distribute have their dollars distributed through such an intermediary then distribute Distributing it directly themselves because they might lose a lot if they do it directly themselves without like all the data that that intermediary might have so if you distribute budget for contribution that could be a way to generate income but beyond that matchmaking is important matchmaking means like let's say you match make one developer with um how do we call that way the job opportunity provided they both consent and everything you can take account on top of that this is something that has been really battle tested by other players in the ecosystem and this is

something that comes in our roadmap but it each thing in its own time we're not there yet so that's pretty much how a platform like note Guardians could generate income these are let's say the the five-man main access then there are other things we can work on like implementing liquid staking and doing other things on other networks but I don't want to start talking about the ambitious stuff when this is just a blueprint that's hanging somewhere in our you know in our on our slack so this is uh come on talk about the ambitious stuff no it's nature enough to be discussed but a lot of other things we can also explore but um I've shared here what we we think should should help us to to

sustain ourselves yeah and um with with regards to yeah the you know the events and and and everything I think there's also maybe maybe like a play here with hackathons um you know where you could have like quests kind of exactly in collaboration with hackathons like built into the platform like also bounties like um yeah there's just like so much cool stuff yeah if you integrate a small D5 protocol with a set of quests to know how to integrate it we can charge also we can extend our offering at smaller price tags and diversify and be you can be able to onboard smaller actors uh on

with smaller campaigns and find ways to generate income while also helping them in their in their mission uh that's one way and we can also host hackathon through the platform and find something that's relevant both for the hackathon you know like uh the the network that we're supporting through that hackathon and ourselves that's definitely something we we are working on and thinking about and then designing challenges for hackathon and organizing chain agnostic events is something we are at the moment working on uh for the middle of next year in in Paris hopefully we'll be able to communicate about this early next year but yeah definitely something that we are very excited about organizing offline events

uh for Developers for everyone actually but having the challenges of these hackathons in CTF designed in-house with our own let's say recipient lore could be very fun to do yeah yeah we need to not overlap this year with our events the nebler the nebler I don't want to miss that one like this no no no no no this is definitely something I'm gonna work on I cannot I cannot I cannot miss it this year yeah I know I'd love to go to Stark net CC as well yeah I mean we're we've already started playing it and we're already kind of like know when the date's gonna be and

like there's other events also coming uh this year in addition to um basically there's a there's a big Cosmos event uh in addition to to uh to nebular Summit that's going to be happening in Paris around that time uh I can't say anything can't say anything yet but uh but we're trying to coordinate on like what the dates are so well yeah I'll keep you in the loop so that we can we can uh make sure we don't overlap um yeah um uh yeah and then uh okay so I mean so look look at the comments here um I want to ask you about this uh is this is this uh is this relevant or or

or no there's no there's no point like you know totally is this being is this like just people trolling or uh I think this is not really uh relevant it's true that um you know there has been that document that has been shared on on Financial Times about like uh uh whoever like uh in in you know whatever investment FTX Ventures did or whatever and uh and yeah a lot of people are speculating about why actually we we received investment and everything and uh yeah I don't think it's it's like the most interesting topic I I don't think that we should provide explanation to this at this point but um I think explaining it through another another session or another medium post

is definitely something I'll consider but yeah there's nothing really exciting about this people should just enjoy the platform as it is because the experience is not going to be bound to a token as people speculate on it the the token is you should enjoy note Karina as it is and that's it there's no there's not going to be a paywall or something to build or to use anything that we offer that is like you know forcing you to have a token and I think that's really what we should focus on let's forget about the one token or the airdrop and just try to use the platform as it is because it's not we're not planning to change the way we actually do things in the way we function and that's pretty pretty much all regarding like how things are located and

everything the only thing that I can sell is that it's done in a rather rather really fair Manner and there will come a time when we'll be extremely transparent about this and I'll be more than happy to explain all the intricacies about this but I really want this project to be a community project and things are not going to change just forget about drop Source token and everything this platform is as it is a platform that's for developers you can use it for free you don't need to share data and I think that's the most important aspect about I don't plan to change that and neither does the team want to I think yeah so so just just for clarity here because I I'm just discovering this because I'm seeing these messages so that's why I want to ask you so of course this New York Times thing what

what is this New York Times thing um so the financial times I think our financial times yeah they they collaborated with the block research team to compile and release a sheet Google sheet that compiles all the Venture Investments of FTX Ventures and Alameda um that's it and it just shows that the Venture arms of uh you know rftx and Alameda have been deploying more than five billion dollars of capital across various uh crypto projects and that's it it shows the amount and the and so they had invested in node Guardians is that yes

yeah yeah and we're not like we we could have communicated about this but to be honest I I don't like I know it's kind of uh it's a must do or something like that to communicate about your fundraise and everything but to be really honest with you I wanted to build that product and keep on building that product without ever revealing who we have been working with on this and who we race from and how much we raise because I think it it takes us away from the main topic and our mission and I'm a bit disappointed that I ended up having uh you know working with them even though they have been dealing with amazing people the

person that were managing this entity have been doing some like whatever you know whatever happened and it's kind of backlashing on us because we were meant to to keep things secret and we both agreed on that and now it's just being disclosed maybe to get engagement or to to bring some more data on this whole time drama and we're kind of like getting some consequences out of that but my vision was that I didn't want it I didn't want to celebrate the fundraise or make a PR and say hey look we raised please join our Discord this is very off with whatever I'm trying to build like from the bottom of my heart so I'm very very saddened by this but now we can just keep on building and just abstract for forget about this I don't think that

you know something worse could have happened to us we could have actually have we could have our treasury managed by by entity a b or c and this entity being insolvent um yeah this didn't happen to us um no like our roadmap is not compromised and I think we're still genuine we're we're still like committed to building what we wanted to build then if people want to speculate or something or do something out of this information this is their entire right but there's nothing I think there's nothing really relevant about this yeah and there's I mean like there's a lot there's a lot of projects on this list like yeah there's a line of companies that and even like companies that are reputable companies that are in the cosmos ecosystem or

people we've interviewed in on you know like even masaris on here you know I mean a lot of their ones their twos yeah cryptography research they were spraying everywhere yeah um and uh yeah I mean I think it's like it's just that we didn't want to part of our marketing or let's say marketing I don't even want I mean our PR strategy you did not include communicating about a fundraiser we need resources to build something that's sophisticated and we need the right strategic partnership to to increase our chance to succeed in the path we choose to take so I could either build this myself in my corner

or choose this path and do it this way I still do not regret working towards this Direction doing it this way to be really honest but yeah I couldn't know that this could happen I got Bamboozled I I was actually trusting these folks my mistake I was not like you know skeptical enough I really I really thought that this would be a fruitful collaboration but you know things happen things are like that let's keep on building uh maybe the debate is relevant for some people to me it is not and we will still be communicating about all of this uh at some point but right now the imperatives are different on our side that's kind of answer I can offer to the

community and um yeah I yeah that's it yeah no thanks for cleaning up I mean I wouldn't have asked you if everyone would have asked you if it was like so many people asking here in the in the channel um I understand the questions through trendy and uh yeah but I try to do to Dutch them but I'm also I'm not gonna run away from it I'm happy to actually have this debate or like to actually answer react to this but yeah here's my favorite opinion about this yeah not cool what to do yeah yeah um okay moving on uh yeah so tell me a little bit about yeah I mean I want to use this opportunity to maybe

dive into the starknet ecosystem because I think like you're the guy that I know that is the most connected to that ecosystem and I know nothing about it uh other than it's like start wears behind it and um so why is starknet so cool I guess um I think it's very personal and what is really so what is what is why is Darkness so cool okay so I'm optimistic about ethereum and I kind of see like the report the distribution of activity across different blockchains Roll-Ups execution environments in the future and I can be totally wrong

as I can see it like you know trading activity Commerce at a global scale a lot of it seems to be happening in North America and Western Europe and the 30 percent risk that's left is between breaks and emerging economies and everything so I think that ethereum and its Nexus as I like I call it like that with all the Roll-Ups and everything it's going to capture 60 let's say of that activity so I took interest into Roll-Ups and scaling solutions for ethereum and I asked myself obviously I want to support all of them I think all the designs and approaches to scaling are interesting some excite me a bit more than others and I have a preference for validity proofs and ZK proofs then I started like looking at

all these Solutions and asked myself which one I want to celebrate which one I'm most excited about and personally it was stuck in it so as I told you earlier in the podcast I heard about crypto and I started a bit reading about it when zcash was doing its trusted setup and so one of the founding scientists of zcash was Eddie Ben Sasson who is a mathematician and Israeli mathematician that has been committing a good part of his life into theoretical compute or problem her Computing problems and the rich the research in this validity proof so he was involved with nikesh um which is not based A Primitive basic payment Network I don't think there is a there are smart contract there yet I think it's Pro potentially coming to the

to the to the interchange but I'm not sure about that I think zuka has been talking about is very Evolution about that but anyway I'm straying from the main path and so I saw that in 2018 he withdrew from zcash to start working on a new project called stalker and he authored the paper called Starks and you kind of proof that have their transport that have their own like let's take properties and that offers that have their trade-offs and some advantages and everything and they were looking to tackle the scaling ethereum kind of problem back in 2018. what I found very interesting is that they were among the first to work in this path and the provenance their background as researchers makes them to me extremely legitimate to actually explore such

Technologies and develop them and I was like Wow after making a market ready the first let's say accessible use of zero knowledge proof like the something from the 80s or 8485 I think the gold Master paper is very old it actually comes to fruition and becomes like applied to a real business like to real purpose and now they're trying to to expand it and work on other Solutions so that's what got me excited from you know like let's say the science side of things so they're working on on this solution and I really like what Stockton is doing because if you take a look at the chronology and the evolution of the product they they they were pioneering and they were working on these problems um very early on and they took design

choices that are not necessarily the best for Mass adoption on the short term but they're not necessarily for instance working primarily on the ZK AVM but they're going for their own mathematically provable language they were thinking and tackling these issues before it was actually a big debate on on the on the crypto space and I think that this is something that's very respectable another thing that's nice about this technology is that you know these proving systems and roll ups they're evolving at a pace that is surprising us we were thinking that this thing would be production ready by 2026 back in 2018 probably it was not really something that sounded like reality and now we're talking about main nets for such systems starting from next year or

even this year so it's really moving fast because a lot of money has been coordinated and a lot of interest from you know brains from all around the world is uh directed towards this and among all the solutions that exist in this validity proof and zero knowledge Roll-Ups I I think that's what's interesting about Star Wars technology and starknet is that stalker battle tested it first through something called stargax so Stark X is a permission it's not permissionless roll up they deploy for you they do the compression for you basically and they post the proof on ethereum mainnet and any business can can run on a stark X like solar air or dydx and everything and so for the last

two years so we're still doing stockx or so we're still doing all right I think yes or dydx is Shifting to Cosmos uh but it's been running for good chunk of its time on on the star kicks a lot of things like so so-called immutable X different solutions I think are leveraging this technology I might be wrong about immutable I don't know if it's a I think yeah it's a stark X and um they battle tested it for millions of nft means hundreds of millions of you know Perpetual like trading set trades that have been settled and everything and it's been like rather stable over the last two years and they have some data to basically move forward and and migrate towards something that is open

permissionless and uh and ready to support any form of business logic with decent uh let's say liveness warranties so I think it's a nice Point um that Stockton has against other Solutions but I'm not trying to segregate the others I'm very excited about polygon ckvm about what scroll is doing in collaboration with the internet Foundation very excited about also optimistic approaches fuel in particular is something that I find rather original optimism and arbitrary but yeah so I really like what Stockton is doing and they're so Cairo is a tricky choice but it's also a very elegant very elegant thing and I think that they're going for that path because the team is convinced that making this choice is what will offer true

scalability and right now you know block space is not is in lesser demand than it used to be but they might kind of like a time where gas and efficiency might make the difference and if you decide to not do any like you don't do a ZK VM you have your own language that is optimized for proof generation at the lowest level you can really get these performances that will be ready to to onboard that same mediums that will make your system ready to on board really millions of users and I think that this is likely to pay out in some context and I think that's that's very that's very that's very interesting to to see how this is going to play out because right now we don't have any

objective Benchmark and how the ZK system is performing Pro in production like there's no nothing that proves you that this thing is actually faster I think there's some experiments that are being done but it is still very foggy when it comes to compatibility you know I think that in the short term ZK VMS are actually gonna still win because people are not gonna bother probably for most learning a new language that is not the sexiest to get like maximal gas efficiency because you want to get ready to do business fast while learning the least stuff and it's normal that's why we take decisions you want the project to cost the least so zkvms might capture a lot of uh attention but in the longer term and Midterm I still think that what they're

doing is very valuable and starknet is not totally irrelevant when it comes to the whole ckvm thingy because you can you have some kind of type 4 compatibility with solidity through what nethermind is doing with the transpiler you can put your solidity code and you know transpile it into Cairo and basically have it have it work but it needs some adjustments not perfectly compatible and you need to revise a lot of things not all of the tooling might be compatible it's not an ideal experience definitely but they're working now on a layer you know on the ZK VM on the layer 3 that's built as a layer free on top of starknet which is called Kakarot in reference to Dragon Ball Z and this is a ZK VM that targets

the Cairo VM it is almost op code complete 90 of the opposers supported some tricky ones are still left but it's been built very fast and now we're getting to the other exciting Parables starting it it's been built very fast with contributors that from from all around the world they just sat and gathered and in this event and within a few days they they were it all started from some meme on Twitter that was basically I think like a joke laughing at Stark uh as darknet like trying to build this super sophisticated language that might never find mass adoption While others are just realistically building a solution that caters to most people a fair take you would say and one of my friends who's uh the head of

ecosystem took it very like it was very painful to him and it was just like I'm gonna feel that he gave me I'm so pissed and so you know like he he gathers contributors and different contributors from from all around the world through systems like only dust and other communities everyone like gathers hacked together and works very efficiently in a distributed Manner and they they're all glued together through various initiatives like community events like in this Darkness space Not only starting with CC the stock net buildings they come Community is very like Keen to everyone is Keen to help each other and be very everyone is trying to solve each other a problem and that's some kind of dynamic and energy uh a will to help one another that's at least from my

perspective I I haven't seen in all the in other communities and I could be totally wrong on this maybe I didn't sit at the right moment at the right time like to to see such kind of things in other community but it's very unique the way people interact the way people help each other the the synergies that you have uh how people come to stocknet For the Love of the technology itself the level of commitment that you find yeah Cairo is some kind of big filter it's not the sexiest language at all to learn but if you come there well you could have done something that's maybe easier you could have been something on on you know in solidity and totally respectable you could have chosen another path people go there because they appreciate some specific concept of that stuff you

know whether it is Cairo and what will enable you to do in the future its guarantees where whether it is account abstraction and so I think that yeah this Purity this like kind of genuiness from the community is also what makes stagnet uh interesting and it's not obsolete because there is still an agenda to support higher level languages and solidity so it's going to take time but I believe that it's going to happen and hopefully it's going to happen and cool projects are being built and blue chips are also being ported it's going to take time it's gonna take a lot of money unfortunately but Ave is coming to stocknet um maker is coming to stocknet and hopefully we'll have all the bricks of a mature defy stack that that arrive on that ecosystem so yeah no

I I'm not a VP it's interesting I think one of the things that resonates with me here is the sort of pureness of of the interests of the community right like people really people are there like it's just like it is this uh this thing that you know the learning curve curve is uh fairly high right because you have to learn this new language this new like abstraction um but but people still uh dedicate toward that Community because because of the tech right and like like that's why

um why a lot of people uh are in the cosmos ecosystem as well like and why the you know they're like they're like these kind of under the radar ecosystems and I've tried to I've tried to capture this in a way that because you know like we're raising a fund right now and like we're talking to investors and they're like What's this Cosmos thing like you know why is it why is it why haven't I heard of this or like just kind of barely heard about it and I think one of the things is well it's under the radar because people are really in it for the tech or at least until until now there's been like a really core group of people that have been in it for the tech um the tech works and uh and it scales and like people are building cool stuff

on it and like now it's starting to get a bit of interest and I feel like when you're telling me about about the start making the ecosystem it kind of resonates a lot of those same uh it rings those same spells for me um and so and then and then the other thing I wanted to ask is when you say that like Ave and maker are deploying there that's that's interesting because up until now as far as far as I know those projects have only deployed to evm chains yes now they're they're deploying to so basically they have to Port their code in order for it to be compatible on Stark net they're funding this with their treasuries their respect to

treasuries they're granting this and over the last um 18 month property or 12 months they have been full focused on porting their existing code base into Cairo and now this I think effort is coming to a certain level of maturity and now it's getting audited super long it's not easy but they've made the choice to support stocknet so I think it's also a nice signal and an acknowledgment that this technology is rather relevant so um yeah it's exciting to see that they also yeah make that choice and leave the evm path to also support Cairo that's huge I mean I think that sets a huge precedent also for other ecosystems that are not evm like you know like like Solana like

Cosmos like polka dot uh that uh that tip where there's typically there's really like a divide like between the evm world and where projects just have to take the evm it's a culture but it's also like it's technology right like I mean you've got your you've got all your code base and everything in evm uh compatible like solidity um it's a lot of work to Port all those functionalities and then have to maintain that over time um so yeah I think it like sets an interesting precedent um yeah well we'll see how it goes yeah we'll see right yeah so yeah no no I was gonna say like tell tell me about this your

your conference so you did the first one last summer on the same day as nebular four weeks ago and um now the community actually did it in Bangalore a week ago it's not even us anymore it's becoming some kind of you know if Global like what I wanted to see is you know the community takes ownership of this we help them with like getting the word Out Among the developers the community but we're not taking any tax on top of it you you host with Stockton CC in the environment that you know best you think you can do it we'll do our very best to support you uh and like the folks from like Rohit and the team and I

think Prana from the graph they teamed up and they pulled up a huge hackathon and event in Bangalore for East India and it's pretty moving to to see it becoming something that's amazing it's not my my thing anymore so it's amazing it's amazing and now it's coming to Israel uh in February at a smaller scale um and there are projects to bring it to to Turkey and Argentina in March and April so it's it's not us that's carrying those it's uh other entities and projects that are Spar heading the effort and we're just like lending them Helping Hands and uh license to use the brand and yeah so we're not asking any fees we actually held them getting the sponsors and making the events and economically

viable we don't it's not like a lucrative business um but we just make sure that the it fits like you cannot make it something about like uh you know to speak about let's say weird stuff dodgy stuff it still has to be a tech Centric conference yeah system relevant to replicate the stock necessity recipe some workshops some tech talks and some talks that are accessible to everyone it still needs to be fun for everyone so a stagnant City conference has to offer content for people that isn't eligible for people that do not have a CS background so if you basically adjust everything to kind of fit the stock net CC Vibe um yeah there you go you can go wherever it is whenever it is

um yeah that's super cool yeah sorry no no it's super cool like I mean that they just picked it up by themselves and decided to do that on their own yeah so I'd love to I'd love for someone I mean if there's anybody out there that wants to do a nebler event somewhere around the world uh oh man I'll help you do it so man don't don't you can speak about like the The Interchange but I it can be a very long podcast but this is something you're feeling to me actually a fun challenge I would like to take in the future if I ever have the time if if it's open to carry the nibular spirit somewhere else I mean like yeah it could be interesting do it in Dubai or in Korea or in Korea yeah

uh someone's looking someone here is waiting to see you in Argentina I really hope this day happens tonight I hope we can take it there yeah hey we did we didn't talk about this but what's this uh what's this bare metal versus uh you know contrarian what's my contrarian take you asked me about this I've been thinking about it I don't think it's that contrarian but yeah I'm like okay so I I hate trading analysis I think a lot of Builders probably are not like fond of this but I I don't like training analysis and I get I clash a lot about this I think that this rating oh trading analyst like the charts reading analysis uh the the chart based analysis um you know yeah so yeah

I I I I I don't like that and I I think I clash I've been clashing a lot very often about this so I don't comment about this anymore on on on socials and stuff like that but I just think that this is um some very occult science and this is borderline you know it's it's unhealthy it's really unhealthy and I think that's the the debate the abstract the thing I've been debating most where a lot of people do not agree with me I'm very allergic to trading regarding the bare metal and and versus Cloud debate is just to to annoy my my friend and uh uh CTO who is basically meditating to everything is running on on the cloud that uh at node

guardians but I'm advocating for bare metal because I want us to be super Keen from a financial standpoint for mental instances tend to be much cheaper than you know like than cloud-based systems and also you get more iops you get better performance since you have the all the the raw power yeah yeah so you miss less Vlogs on on on for instance like the Hub and stuff like that and of course that comes with other trade-offs in terms of I I believe security and everything but this is one of the The Clash one of the clashes that has been very very common in my in my daily life over the last few days so I would be very curious

if there are developers from or validators watching this podcast they interrupt that are running chains in The Interchange I would love to see in the comments once this gets eventually online uh tomorrow in the future like I would love to see some comments about how people are building their infrastructure and what's their take regarding this question I I had this I I had this uh this kind of Learning Journey I guess sometime mid yeah mid but mid of the year when I started running uh an Atmos validator and yeah I was like okay where do where do I go through an infrastructure provider do I run it internally uh do we run it on

bare metal do we do Century notes and I like I talked to a bunch of people and everybody has their own opinions on how to do it and you know to some extent I think it's kind of cool like I think it's cool that every like everyone's infrastructure is running on on a different setup it kind of maybe creates some robustness in the in the in the infrastructure I think what really needs to be addressed is the um the seeming uh tendency for certain service providers or certain Cloud providers or or or bare metal providers to to capture a lot of the uh a lot of those servers so you know I think on Cosmos like I don't know

how many are using hetzner right just because it's cheap and they do bare metal and but then you have wanna and hesner they kicked there exactly yeah they kicked everyone out so I think this is a this is something that we need to address and I'm hoping that you know either polkachu or not not pukachu but um one of these one of these uh dashboards um maybe just also shows like hey like here are the validators that are running on like AWS here are the validators and you can get a an idea and then also I think for validators validators I think maybe don't really have a good idea of what other infrastructure providers are running on

um and having that information be kind of publicly available and for everyone to see maybe causes you to pause and say hey like I'm not going to run on AWS I might run on some other infrastructure because you know or some like local cloud provider in my country because we want to be more decentralized it's a very nasty topic because it would be ideal that we I use my garage and I ask for some specific plan to get my internet with better slas to run the the racks in my garage and and I get I get to run my nodes at home but it is very hard to have the same availability levels and performance levels that for instance AWS or gcp have in their data centers like it's the

expertise that has been they've built over like decades or years or years and years and they have a staff that's working around the clock 24 7 to ensure that each components is you know like working flawlessly everything is like cooled in an efficient way blah blah blah blah blah and this is why no company runs their own intranet anymore runs their own web server like everybody yeah yeah and gcp you know dashboarding the interface it's very comfortable and kubernetes like their implementation of kubernetes like that you have you have like all these tools that make you want to stick to a specific provider against another but in in Ideal World I guess you need to have a backup no that's that's running on another provider eventually that's not some you know

subject to the Patriot Act or that is in another jurisdictions or that is you know using it not yeah designs can be very there are a lot of approaches that can be taken but yeah it's very hard to to choose like the least popular providers to to mitigate risk because also the experience you get out of them or their availability is poor like for instance this vulture we we it's one of the providers we use for instance for some test Nets they have Sometimes some very nasty maintenances that are you know they they happen very often or sometimes they happen in a they don't warn you ahead of time some some stuff happens and your your your workload is stopped and so that's it what if your node was monitored in the context of of

um yeah of I don't know a dedication program or something like that it can still have a lot of yeah so you really want to work with the best but at the same time you work with the best you concentrate the activity with the past and then like comes all the the backlash from making such choices although the drawbacks sorry so I like that question I really like this this this whole you know infrastructure Choice kind of debate it's very fun yeah I I also like it I I find myself often getting into like devops conversations with people even though like even though I don't do a lot of devops uh it's like yo it's like it's like I don't know it's like building it's like

building stuff right like you're you're actually like using infrastructure and building a tech stack and like making sure it's robust and making sure it's back up so that you can like access it and secure it it's like inclusions architecture paper I read that thing I read that thing it was like this is the Grail that is not our setup and and we're actually changing our setup so um so um but yeah listen uh this has been really fun um thanks for coming on and uh sharing uh sharing uh about node Guardians and starknet and yeah just shooting the [ __ ] here thank you come back again sometime soon

I'll be happy to and you should hop on the podcast too and thanking everyone who was also on the live chat or watching this and uh if you have some time give a try to to those Gardens and tell us what you think how we can improve it uh what we can add what kind of content you'd like to see and we're soon coming um getting things started on on YouTube and yeah we'll be covering all sorts of topics and you're also welcome to to to give it a try once it's live and yeah again thank you all right thanks Sam and to our listeners thanks for tuning in uh do live streams every Thursday and if you want to get notified when I go live you can hit the notification Bell

hit the like button but subscribe you should definitely subscribe to the channel and you'll get notified when we go live every week so thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you next week