How blockchain technology adds value to your business

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I believe that blockchain is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. on today's episode we have with us Alex chefchenko the CEO and founder of Aurora Labs which is a scaling solution for ethereum built on top of near protocol this is the episode that every business needs to be listening to if you are in a business and you're trying to figure out

how do you adopt blockchain technology for your business you need to listen to this if you're a user which we all are of all businesses you need to listen to this because you need to understand what are the different ways that blockchain is going to come into your life is going to make your user experience better there's so many ways that Aurora is providing incredible value to existing businesses this episode is not about new businesses in web3 this is about existing businesses adopting blockchain technology to add more value to their users to increase their revenue to decrease their cost to achieve their

objectives that they really care about that they are constantly thinking about every day not about how to convince a business to understand decentralization or understand self-custody or understand the things that we talk about so much in web3 because that's not what a new person in web3 cares about they care about the bottom line of their business and Alex is approaching blockchain in such a pragmatic way just a wonderful wonderful episode that really breaks things down in a way that we need to understand he talks about user engagement and how blockchain can enhance user engagement talks about loyalty we talk about the fractionalization of real estate and other real world assets we talk about

gaming assets and what can happen with blockchain around ownership and interoperability we talk about Supply Chain management and the transparency and efficiencies that can come by using blockchain we talk about compliance and the challenge that so many businesses face with being compliant with following regulation with paying their taxes and how blockchain can enable that in a much more transparent way and a much more efficient way it's just the level of knowledge that Alex brings he's been in the space since 2015. he's OG he understands things that I think he's been around long enough to see the hype cycles and then really break down to the

core of what we are building here in web3 and how we are going to onboard billions of people into this space Alex started his career well before his career he did his PhD in physics and math so he's got that Giga brain mentality that view as a mathematician then he worked at Nvidia where he worked on high performance Computing then he was an entrepreneur started some of his own businesses before joining near protocol and then shortly after joining your protocol he was asked to basically spin out of near protocol and start Aurora Labs as its own company within the near ecosystem you're going to hear that entire story today so excited for this episode so excited for you all to

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show hey hey thanks for having me here super are super pumped up with this podcast I love it it's great to feel pumped up right now in this space we need that positive energy and I saw you recently at consensus and you did a great speech about why we need more businesses in web 3. I sort of wanted to start there because you know you've been in the space since 2015. you've been here for a while after 10 years of us building crypto and building web 3 why is it not bigger yet yeah well I think honestly speaking everything started as a rebellion right I feel like crypto is a man in its teens right he says that everything is wrong I mean parents don't

know anything the government is is so you know you need to completely rebuild it we are going to do a revolution here right so this is my feeling about crypto and that is how everything was done and that was the approach and for similar types of people this kind of approach makes sense and everything started with the you know crypto anarchists and then younger people and people who are not very happy about their governments uh connected right that's why you can find lots of ukrainians for example and in general Eastern Europeans in in crypto space just because this happens just because they don't trust their government by default right so this is how they were raised this is how I was raised but the

majority of the world especially the super wealthy people they're not thinking like that their approach is okay I have my money what I need to do is to de-risk my investment I need no disruption happened I need you know all of that you know kind of crazy stuff and no this is a risk for me because something can change every time when something disruptive is happening the balance of power is changing and because of this I can lose my money and this is how these people are thinking and from that standpoint this revolution is broken when it was trying to disrupt the current state of affairs and because of this businesses are not coming to to the blockchain in general I love the analogy of crypto as a teenager by the way it's

fantastic because no mature adult wants to work with a teenager or very few do have the patience to do that and to see things through their eyes because you have to accept a different way and as you said there's a lot of risk in accepting a new way okay so then why are you here then you're not a crypto teenager you're you're one of the mature adults that's trying to build this the right way and bring in the Enterprises and bring in the large businesses why are you here when you when you think about what convictions you have what are they so from the first time when I was going through the concept of the blockchain I thought that well this technology actually matters it is not yet another type of a database right so

we kind of a little bit faster you know things like that it is not a new way how you are able to create more addicting games you know yet another Candy Crush or whatever whatever is there right it's not something like that right it's something new it is a new type of a philosophy this is something that brings new Concepts for me the aha moment of the blockchain was that well actually you are able to kind of implement some complicated logic that is going to work there and this logic can create a trust layer in between different participants and again as for me my first thoughts were oh my God we can do a proper Democratic voting that is much better than the current voting system in in the

countries right so there was will be no possible bribery happening is not going to make sense right you can bribe a person but then he can cast another vote and another vote and you never know what was the actual result and then yeah zero knowledge that was the 15 was the beginning kind of of the ideas of zero knowledge that this can be used and we actually created this so I'm here to use the technology and to make sure that technology is progressing forward and many people and businesses are able to utilize it to create better use cases and create and progress the world into a better condition than it is right now what you're saying is it reminds me of

uh one of my favorite books sapiens the author you've all talks about what makes humans unique is really our ability to coordinate that is what has allowed us to become the dominant species to create this wonderful world that we live in and coordination requires trust and we have had this big issue online digitally and even in all the manners in which we connect with other humans where trust is not guaranteed there's no guarantee of trust and all of a sudden we have as you said this trust layer it could take coordination to a level that we've never seen before and it's already already

happening which is why you have these incredible businesses being built it gets me really excited about that philosophical view of what we're doing here and what we're building no yeah absolutely it's also the second in this we're on the same page here okay so let's go back for a second when did you first fall down the crypto rabbit holes 2015 like that's early yeah was it uh how did that happen I was a PhD student I was finishing my education uh by the moment in time I was already working with the Nvidia company I was you know doing some heterogeneous you know parallel computers on gpus back then it was a very kind of new thing but I was already working for several years

and in general my what I was doing for my PhD it was a high performance computer I was calculating the oil fields and these are pretty huge tasks that several computers need to coordinate together in order to actually get the result and do the proper calculation and then you are able to analyze this and when I saw the concept of blockchain I thought that well it's kind of not very far from high performance Computing it just works a little bit different you have the same setup many computers that they need to call coordinate with each other yeah for this we have this consensus protocol and then together they are creating something bigger than just a single computer can create and because of this

it was a very straightforward concept for me yeah and I never thought of it but then just randomly I bumped into into a recruiter from Bitcoin mining company back then beat Fury and I knew nothing about it and uh yeah all the vacancy fair in my University and and she said well I mean you can try to apply but you know we're just selecting one out of 100 people to join us and all this stuff and obviously since I'm an a student I said okay challenge accepted I'm going I'm going to get through your different freaking program I'm going to prove to you that I'm a good one but this was a hook this was a hook she knew what she was doing right so that's how I got to

create and you got it yeah I got it and I found in the company already some of my colleagues in from the University right so people who with whom I was I was educated so you saw that the smart people were headed towards blockchain okay so then how did that lead to the founding of Aurora yeah so for several years I was working for Victoria it was one of the first people there in in the software department and then in 2018 my schoolmates were extremely talented and super bright man connected me and say hey you know I've just found that you're doing blockchain on LinkedIn and you know I'm actually pivoting my AI company to the blockchain

so I'm also going to work on the blockchain and I said wow cool super nice let's get in touch so we stayed connected and then in 2020 when I became a free agent this guy invited me to near and the guy's name is he is the founder of near protocol so he invited me need to take care of all of the evm stuff or like ethereum focused stuff inside of near and back then there were only two components there one is the bridge in between ethereum and near and this bridge was semi-done when I joined and it is called a rainbow bridge right now one of the biggest bridges in the world right now never been hacked super robust uh yeah these are all because of great engineers and great

security people who are working for Aurora and another thing was just a concept that we need to somehow allow solitary control contracts to to be around on top of near because near protocol is not compatible with ethereum right so we need to create this compatibility solution that will allow to do it and it was just an idea that can I do this and yeah and I joined and fulfilled this idea and pretty soon like in three months after I joined we were catching up with Ilya and he said that kind of yeah I mean your first quarter in the company is going pretty well so super nice to see it would you like to spin off in a separate company I said

what what I just joined and he said well you know can a decentralization stuff like that your support decentralization I said yeah well then we kind of need to decentralize because it's going to make sense right smaller teams faster pace of development stuff like that and said yeah it makes sense but please give me a little bit of time to actually release stuff so I joined in September 2020 in March 2021 we released Rainbow Bridge in May 2021 we released Aurora in June we incorporated our Labs as a separate company that's my short story of how I became a Founder it's very interesting to think about this in comparison to how

a web 2 business or any existing business would start you mentioned composability which is such a powerful and decentralization two of the you know main philosophies and mantras of what we are trying to build here we'd love to get your thoughts on why do you think that that it's so important to to Value those things and what is different about web 3 that really allowed Elia to say I can't imagine to be honest a Founder in web 2 or in traditional business saying oh spin off and go do your own thing I want you to do that and our current world's all about control and more revenue and bring everything under our

world and you know in Walled Gardens and we own the ecosystem how do you sort of think about those two in that difference so actually the the thoughts here are pretty straightforward for blockchains and for protocols the business model and uh kind of exit strategy by default is already solved in the very very beginning right so for ordinary businesses what you need to do you need to create products well probably products in 95 you're creating the product you need to find your target market you need to iterate on this you need to find a product Market fit sell it and then it's at some point in time you need to think about the exit strategy you either need to sell your

company to somebody bigger usually Microsoft Google Visa Mastercard whatever or going through a more complicated route and get into the IPO and then get your company listed on some kind of exchange right so that is a hard hard way right in general how to do this and how to think about this stuff blockchains from the other standpoint they are much easier from this aspect because blockchains are platforms and by default the product Market fit or like the business model is there you know every single time when somebody is doing the transaction they need to use the token the base token that is associated with this blockchain and since you're able to get this tokens also for the

team well then this is the exit strategy so you don't need to think about accumulating the value under the hood of a single company but instead you need to somehow stimulate more and more value accumulating by the protocol right so it means that it would be good for you as a Founder in case there will be more activity on the protocol and it it's okay in case you are not in charge of this stuff it's not a big problem in case somebody else is doing this stuff well even better you don't need to think about it you don't need to spend your Cycles on onto this person in case he is able to navigate and he is sticking

around well then it means that he's contributing so this set of incentives are absolutely super great aligned but however the blockchains are much more harder than ordinary businesses because yeah on that standpoint on the business model and on the exit strategy everything is kind of easier the bigger problem is that blockchains are never products blockchains are platforms so you need to take care now not only about people who are going to buy your product but instead you don't have these people you need to take care of two pieces right because you're in case since you're a platform you need to bring products on your platform and then you

need to bring users and try to marry them and then extract the value out of this relationship in between products and users right and this is pretty hard right so building a platform is just a very very complicated thing right there's so much to unpack and what you just said one thing that I love that you said is we talk a lot about how businesses in web 3 experience much less friction much less barriers to entry much less barriers to getting started and that is really one of the the benefits to building in web3 and one of the things that's it's still early I think is as you mentioned right now there actually still is quite a bit of

friction only because of the complexity of blockchain and the complexities leading to just a lot of bad user experience and bad user experience makes it difficult to onboard new users so but that will change we will solve all of that and we will get to a point where the friction to create a business will be so low that we've already seen this in the past few decades as the Creator economy exploded and we had so many more solo entrepreneurs all around the world well that's going to become you add in blockchain and you add in AI that's going to be on hyper speed as friction reduces so that's one thing you said that I thought was was very interesting the other thing that you spoke about is

I don't necessarily know that we need to go down this rabbit hole but the challenges of building a platform ecosystem is very different than the challenges of building a business but one of the beauties of it is if you can coordinate the right people around you and they can then with the Simplicity of composability build on top of what you're already building then they new ideas come that you would have never thought of right we all talk about how vitalik didn't see ethereum becoming what it is today in every aspect he sure he had ideas he had Visions but there was things he didn't think about and he needed those people around him in order to get there we are on a very exciting

time like the trajectory and the path that we were on right now is so exciting the potential is huge are you about a bear market so the potential to go down is very very huge which also means that there are probably there will be some juicy deals for for people who are trading that's right we constantly say buy the fear sell the greed right that's the ones of the quote couldn't be more true now it's certainly a great time to buy not Financial advice but I think we all believe that but there are lots of fear at least at least there are lots of fear yeah except there's tons no shortage of fear okay let's talk about Aurora you mentioned it briefly you told the origin story what

is Aurora what's the admission of Aurora so right now we evolved from just the compatibility layer of near right and we always have been thinking that near is a tremendous layer one it's a new generation I always think of you know genuine it was Bitcoin and just just the concept of the blockchain chain two was ethereum with an addition of concept of smart contracts and then gen 3 I I named that this is near I'm not naming Solana next to it because near is focused on scaling and near is horizontally scalable right and now near stack and everything before was was actually a teenager attack unfortunately or like

fortunately or unfortunately but this is this is what we see is that evm is extremely simple we can teach our children in schools evm they're like it's a super straightforward virtual machine I mean just great the programming languages there can evolve right solidity is not the best one but they will be better right there is no problem with that but near was going to the level near what's evolving this to the level of the real world in real world developers they think about asynchronicity of the execution they think about connecting through the apis and then this connection can potentially be not very stable and then if you're talking about some kind of crazy use

cases like Star links flying on the orbit they either they're thinking about mesh networks you know the connection channels that are open and they're closing and the algorithms on top of this machine this is very very complicated things and the developers right now they are blockchain developers are not ready for this right but let me stop here from my point of view near is making a step for the blockchains into the scalability and thus it inherits the asynchronicity concepts of this stuff so so in having this great technology and our disposal and we were able to use it we thought that why not we can scale ethereum like do the ultimate scaling of

ethereum and we formulated our mission as that we are building infrastructure for super empowered people this is literally one-to-one how it is written in the docs of the company we do believe that blockchain empowers people and because of this empowerment they are able to create new use cases and what we are doing which is to building the the old infrastructure that is required for this right yeah it's kind of kind of distant so in the formal if you will take a look at this formally Aurora right now and everything that we are building is this is a set of products it's not a single product it's a set of products that are together become in this infrastructure so we do have there is an aurora main

net that is that is maintained by us and we're developing the code for it like a protocol for it right so this is something that allows to run ethereum smart contracts on top of more performant and faster and cheaper blockchain as near but we also have a solution that allows anyone to launch such a network right you can think of Aurora as an L2 and then everyone now is able to launch their own l2s and the cool thing about it is that people can compose their ill tools which is a little bit strange how you can cross Network compose things is it impossible actually it is actually possible in our setup right because Aurora is just a smart contract that is working on here right so there is this connection then

we have built also the global infrastructure which is the rpcs and you know some additional things and it is extremely scalable and it is extremely efficient 50 of requests that are sent to our RPC infrastructure are answered within less than two milliseconds wow it is just two milliseconds right it's not 20 it's just two right and 99 of our requests are are answered within within 50 milliseconds you're able to get this only in case you have an edge infrastructure servers everywhere we are one of the biggest lens for cloudflare who's taking care of the you know the

routing of the different and crypto obviously blockchain clients of cloudflare so and this hole is needed to be a good infrastructure for people who are building on top of it right super interactive use cases all of these things all of these things are they do matter we also go into launch next week our own crypto wallet that is focused on web2 users who are on board into Aurora ecosystem and it is going to work only for our heavily utilizes our infrastructure but it simplifies everything it throws out the blockchain and all of the complicated blockchain Concepts like per transaction payment and guess what the heck is guess get a stack transaction yeah that's what I put in my car isn't it yeah yeah right

this is again we are just throwing it away and just yeah transaction yeah you just look at your phone your transaction is there transaction is executed yeah this is again the feeling that you have when you're using Apple wallet right so so we are making a crypto wallet an apple wallet right so this is the transition that we are doing with this yeah and there are tiny small things also around some additional stuff but in general it is a set of products that are there to make the journey for users and businesses simple and straightforward and in different cases they're going to use different products depending on their needs right and so initially the problem that you focused on was

scalability which is an issue that we talk a lot about in web3 and an issue that I don't necessarily think that people grasp really because those in web3 have become so used to we've become used to high gas we've become used to slow transaction speed so we just kind of accept it but that's at the current state if we're going to onboard you know billions of people we need the scalability it's so so vital and that's at this the low layer of the tech stack in the infrastructure so that was your first focus and then more recently you've been focused on Aurora Cloud which has really B2B Business Solutions which I love because what we really need is we talk

so much about new businesses being started in web3 right you know new nft projects and I hate that we call them nft projects they're just a business that is using an nft in order to provide value and experience to their customers but we don't talk enough about okay what are the existing businesses and how do we get those existing businesses using blockchain what are the challenges that they face how do we provide them with this trust layer that we talk about which can have such a benefit to their business how do we enable them to reach new customers to provide new experiences and so that's the focus of Aurora cloud and that's what I'm gathering is where you guys are going and that's what

excites me so let's talk a little bit about Aurora Cloud maybe you can give us some examples of what are some businesses that you've worked with in Aurora Cloud just so we can frame that and then let's dive into some of the features and the products such as the wallet and the no transaction gas fees and things like that yeah yeah I'm going to start a little bit before this right okay this trust decentralization censorship resistance this is something that only very few people in the world are caring about as concerts as the end goal right and usually these people are just paranoics right so because what decentralization and censorship

resistance is protecting you from is like a Black Swan event that something is going to go not as expected and because of this you need to be censorship resistant in order to perform some operations right so webto businesses are not thinking about this at all what they are thinking of sometimes they are thinking about d-risking right and they're measuring everything in terms of you know the risk and for such an event the the probability is extremely low though the cost of this particular risk can be high but but when you multiply it by probability you understand that the actual impact or the actual cost is is not that high right so but what they're

thinking about is how can I improve my revenues and how can I decrease my costs this is what they're thinking about so blockchain need to find the verticals where it can give this additional bonuses here and blockchain has been working towards this for pretty long period of time and right now we're starting to see this verticals to emerge and businesses starting to pick it up so for example one of the good things that the blockchain is able to do and you're calling it nft what I call it is user engagement so many businesses are really really relying on user engagement

because it directly translated into their revenues such verticals as gaming the more user is engaged the more he is spending and what we see in the games especially and it started with DOTA Counter Strike you know this this moves from Steam and then it in many different games that when people are able to own something then it is it's gonna increases their engagement they are starting to spend more time there they're becoming fans of some Pro players and they would like to have us the same skin that the pro player has you know all of the stuff so so this is just a very human stuff right and also from the other standpoint just people

want to like to collect things right and yeah it works another option for the user engagement is is loyalty platforms because the more loyalty is in your customer the more he's going to spend on your particular brand and voila with nfts and digital Collectibles the engagement user engagement is able to get on the next level because now it's not only in your single application when your loyalty points are exposed actually your loyalty points are everywhere when you you're dealing with things you're able potentially you know do something with them even outside of the platform which is great because again and again you're reminding the user about your

brand and this is what webto businesses understand with blockchain you're able to increase your engagement and that's why gaming companies are going into the blockchain so here is an example and here is the use case of a Korean Company Net marble this company is the seventh biggest publisher of the games in the world their revenue in the previous year was was above 2 billion US dollars so several years ago they opened a blockchain subdivision or blockchain division that they called marble X and they started to develop blockchain games and they're again very pretty big company they developing Triple A games right so it's Triple A games mainly focused on consoles and mobile so yeah

and they they see that it is extremely important for them to make sure that the transition of the user from web2 to web 3 is super simple because right now their conversion rates are super low and what they are they're trying to to find out that yeah blockchain sorts out the problem with engagement and it makes it better but now we need a technology go super down the stack so it is not disturbing the user he has the same fun of playing games he gets additional engagement from the blockchain from owning things they actually owned this but he doesn't need to think about per transaction fees he doesn't need to think about all the complication and because of this it is

super super important from that it doesn't need to think about turning his Fiat into whatever exactly doing kyc you know using Bridges you know and then from time to time topping it up what like it's not a game it's not fun it's hard work another option that webto businesses are understanding is the tokenization of real world assets this starts to become a pretty hot topic and we see lots of an uptick of of activity here and by saying real world assets I mean already several projects are tokenized in Gold many projects are starting to put some kind of Securities on chain or potentially real estate on chain we have several clients who are doing real estate

Unchained with Aurora cloud and the reason behind it is again it's not about decentralization it's not about censorship resistance so just forget about it they are looking at defy and understand that the fibrin's benefits and actually these benefits can be translated into the real world assets tokens in blockchain are subdivisible up until 18s or 24s or whatever decimal which is great because now in case you have a real world assets you are able to fractionalize is it and more frictionalization means higher affordability of an asset in case you don't need to invest half a mill into this particular property but you are

able to invest only in one square foot of this property like a thousand US dollars oh that's good because now because of refractionalization they Mark the addressable market for this asset is bigger then the tokens in case they are the real world Assets in case they're turned in into tokens well now they are able to be used inside of the D5 platforms which means that they can be used as collateral they can be traded secondary Market which means that the liquidity of these assets are improved right and more liquid assets they cost more that's super simple because of this price is discovered much better so the price Discovery is good which means that

there is more trust from the investors that the at this particular asset is is not very low or is having a proper price right and also it is very good for Regulators because blockchain enforces transparency it simplifies compliance because all of the all of the moves are recorded in one big Ledger and on top of it well you can run your taxation software you can run you can actually input taxation directly on the level of The Ledger and make it automatic right so and I'm even not talking about you know that blockchain where proper blockchains are operating 24 7 right not nine to five on their own on work days right right so and these are the benefits again that that are understood

by webto businesses that's why real estate agencies are coming and constantly saying we want just to tokenize real estate because of mainly because of fractionalization then many companies are coming and saying we would like to tokenize our business as a whole just because we would like to make it also more affordable for people to onboard and we would like to create additional use cases with our business right because it is much simpler than just going on the IPO and then yeah this is something that is very very well understood or for example we do have another client and this is a big producer of for PVC polyvinyl chloride resin out of this resin people are doing

lots of plastic stuff like plastic windows and different things so what they are trying to fight is their supply chain there are tons of resellers inside of the supply chain which are extracting lots of value then the resin producer is getting very low margin the actual Factory which is producing Goods out of this resin is having also not a very big margin but quite a large chunk of this margin is extracted by the resellers they would like to track the supply chain it makes sense because they would like to protect their industry from one end and from the other end well actually they would like to stay also compliant with some of the regulations because for example in the US in case you're

producing something out of the EOS or like if the goods are produced in the US there is a different taxation on it and you don't need to to pay any the import fees you know in import taxes and for this you need to prove that 60 of all of the components of your product they were produced in the US and how to prove it in case you don't know how to do it right it's super complicated and here you go if you have a supply chain solution well then you can track all of the way back down up until the the initial kind of producer of the initial product that was used and it is great because here is the an example when

businesses are saving or kind of decreasing their costs so yeah blockchain guys you need to stop talking about decentralization and you know censorship resistance and stuff like that and need to start talking about values that are understandable by webto businesses and surprisingly then they understand it right so we start to talk the same language with them that's an aha moment for them you make it sound so simple Alex could you go on like a world tour maybe and and just you know meet with with all the businesses maybe do some like workshops and make sure everybody understands this well well trying to do it I love that you focused on value and I see this all the time talking to our

listeners you know people are saying oh how do I start an nft project well that's not the question the question is how do you provide value to your customers to your users and how does blockchain enable you to provide more value or how do you become more compliant and how does blockchain allow you to become more compliant or how do you track your inventory and your supply chain better and how's blockchain allow that those are the questions that we should be asking and you give so many examples of of how that is coming to life so let me ask you this then I do want to talk about a little bit about the features of Aurora Cloud maybe before we get there how do you find our

businesses coming to you and saying hey we know what to do with blockchain are you having to educate business like I think what I'm getting is like how do we make businesses leaders more aware of what you're talking about because as you said right now all they hear is decentralization and you know the teenager talk they're not getting enough of the business talk yeah so businesses that are our clients they are very different I can tell you they are pretty diverse even within a single vertical that we are focusing there are people that are extremely Highly Educated about blockchain potentially even having their own blockchain divisions or people who are responsible for the blockchain

strategy they are educated right and then they're coming okay I know this stuff kind of this this and that and then we're saying okay you understand it kind of as you like right we can provide some advice but yeah but in many cases they understand what they're doing other types of businesses are kind of okay we know the concept we like the concept of the blockchain we understand the value that it can provide but we need some help and then these customers need hand hand holding any of this move it will require first of all being a good service provider this is again something that crypto doesn't know how to do right at all right so we need to learn how to be a good partner right for everybody how to notify people how

to save how to say to them that you know something is off you know haven't planned maintenances you know all of these things having projections in in the costs for operation you know budget and things you know how many crypto projects are doing budgeting I mean none no well no no Aurora Labs is doing Venture budgeting right so at least one so yeah that's that's very very important and I believe that here is the the core the core so you just need to be a good partner to this business right and how we are doing since we are having not a single product and it is not an off-the-shelf product that you just they

can use it's not a Candy Crush game but it is more a tailored solution to to all of these businesses so what we're starting with this business is so in the in the very beginning when they're coming in we are saying okay this is going to be a journey we need to go with you through the discovery process and understand what you need and what you don't need we're going to explain you different aspects and we're going to give you some suggestions about what we think makes sense for you and in case we don't like what you're thinking we're going to tell you right don't worry we're going to tell you and you're going to see just from your ordinary human straightforward web to logic that some stuff makes sense and the other stuff

doesn't make sense it's not about the technology and all of the nitty-gritty stuff inside it's just about what makes sense and then we are talking with them okay what do you want what is your goal how do you see a projection of your company whether you would like to take care of the marketing also right of this new product that you're building what is the target audience is this web2 or this kind of web3 or this is your expansion into into the web3 right in case you're saying that this is the region and this is the the audience well let's take a look at the market analysis there what is the size is this okay for you or no right so so we're kind of hand holding through this stuff and then based on all of this inputs we're saying okay you need to have this this product you don't

need right now but potentially in future you maybe would like to use it and that's okay no problem and we can do for example three options of how we are doing we can do a super simple one but it will be less functionality and you can start to to test the hypothesis then you can go to the second version and the third version as an extension right and then businesses start to understand it right they're starting to it's just being a good partner being a good proper company that that helps others to to implement stuff and then for everybody yes there are some things that you're taking off the shelf right wallet can be used right in case this is a new company yeah but but potentially they can use their customers can use also metamask or

any other wallet no problem then yes we have our all of the technologies that we have been building for two and a half years I mean they are at our disposal right so we are using them but sometimes we need to tweak some of the pieces right the companies would like to for example fans they would like to run their own network and they would like to fence this network because they think that okay it seems like we're running security tokens inside of it and you know our friend Gary thinks that all of the tokens are securities right so perhaps it is actually security so let's fence this network let's not allow anyone except for accredited investors non-us citizens have been able to get there so I don't have any problem

because I don't want my main business to be disrupted because I'm a web to business and I know how to make money in the vertical that I'm working on right so I cannot risk it so yeah we need to fence it right so let's do this we we need to have a kyc solution do we have kyc oh you have a kyc solution also great then that's included so that stuff it is a discovery process it is not something like that and then slowly one by one businesses are going to come they need to do this proof of Concepts or you know test deployments to see how things are going and again in comparison with what was seven years ago when I just was starting and I thought that all of these things are so obvious

you're able to use this but right now I've got to the point when okay now businesses are starting to understand it because we at last forgot or some of us forgot about this teenager Rebellion setup and started to talk with them as an adult with an adult and we started to talk with them the same language that they are talking about you're a Management Consultant almost in the beginning exactly there is there is a portion of which is the consultancy services yes right for sure is that a portion of the business model is that are you targeting that to grow and become a revenue stream or is that more of a necessary part that you have to provide right now until

there is more ability for off the shelf Solutions this is the necessary part overall in the future people are going to understand blockchain and then for them we will be okay we need to run business obviously we're going to use cloud we need to an AWS is a good solution so I need to find an AWS as engineer or the infrastructure guy who has been working with AWS and he knows everything you know it's just a position with a job description right yeah but until that moment when a blockchain engineer blockchain you know stuff or like Aurora engineer Aurora structure guy up until that moment in time when this becomes a job description already

self-explanatory job description there is a path right so we need to educate enough people for them to understand this right so so we need to go on this journey with many people so consultancy is is for sure they're going to be and yeah this part of the business is is hardly scalable right so the only way how you are able to do this is in case you haven't you know tens of thousands of people that are able to do this and big4 is demonstrating that they are pretty efficient in this stuff so the only way how you are able to properly scale this is cooperate with other Professionals in consultancy and then they are able to scale failure here we're going into kind of strategic Partnerships we're also exploring some of this but we are not yet on the scale

it's it's an early stage so early right so right now let's say one of our listeners has a existing business a retail company or an e-commerce they sell a product or whatever it might be they're listening to this and they're saying Hey I want to get in I want to meet with Aurora Cloud what does that look like what's the discovery process look like is there a fee that they pay exactly so the thing that I would encourage this this person well first of all I would like to say to this person that you're an amazing guy because you're thinking about blockchain and you're thinking how to how to move your business and use the benefits of the blockchain and I'm so glad to hear this the thing that it might be interesting for you is to go to the Aurora Cloud

website it is just Aurora Cloud Dot devde and there are tons of examples there in terms of case studies that can spark your imagination about how you're able to apply blockchain for your business and there is also a demo of some of the features how this can work and this demo is guiding you exactly as I was saying just hand holding you through different features and showing you what is possible now obviously every business is very very different right things that we are talking with one client the most probably they're they're just pretty unique to this particular client and because of this you're the best person to have some ideas on how

blockchain can transform your business but with all of this food for thought that you are able to get from the Aurora cloud.dev website you will be able to generate some ideas and then you can just write directly to us at all of the contact details there and you can say hey I'm just bumping in in this thing and I think that this kind of makes sense what do you think how how do we how we are able to engage and then we just get it from there it's just a simple email and we to just continue fantastic I want to touch briefly on Aurora past which you mentioned earlier in the episode the wallet that you're launching and Borealis business this uh concept and ability to eliminate transaction fees so can you tell us a

little bit about it's these are the the products within Aurora Cloud yeah these are Aurora Cloud itself is a set of products it's not a single thing right and yes Aurora pass is is a mobile wallet that is focused on web2 users who are on board into the blockchain so in case you are a webto business and you already have for example your mobile application or maybe you're a gaming company and you have your mobile application which is your game and you would like to onboard these people to your clients and you would like to onboard them to the blockchain in such a case or past maybe and a nice option for you to use right again the using or for a pass is is absolutely free there is no need to pay there is no need to there is

no cost of integration but the something that it gives is an ability for users not to think about per transaction fees for them but somebody needs to pay for the transaction execution because this freaking blockchain somewhere underneath and has this sticky and very fat business model of per transaction payments we are not able to eliminate it so who's paying for the transaction the answer is that it may differ right in case if you're launching your own business then you're able to use borealis and not only to have a good infrastructure and good response time for all of your resources around the globe but also you're able to identify these users and actually pay for the execution of their transactions in such

a case they are going to see that these are just free transactions that they're able to execute while you are going to settle with us even in US Dollars on a monthly basis with invoices not per transaction fees yeah and you are able to settle it absolutely separately which is good for you and this also kind of gives you an ability to we are able to predict the cost of the of the transaction right depending on the usage that that you expect right so from that standpoint you have now the tools in your at your disposal to actually do the budgeting for this interest and blockchain gig for your business that's a good thing but

Borealis and an ability to pay for the user transaction is working not only with Aurora pass it works with any crypto wallet that's the cool stuff so with the Borealis you are able to pay for the transactions of your users which simplifies the onboarding for you but what happens in case a user or for a pass is willing to transact with some kind of project who is not paying for the transactions of the users what happens then while in such a case the user need to purchase transactions they don't need to purchase crypto they don't need to do kyc they don't need to use Fiat on Rams and then you need to use Bridges they're just clicking one

button inside of the application and saying I would like for five bucks purchase 500 transactions and that's it and then they just looking at the screen Apple pay is doing its job and and that's it you're just getting these transactions the cool thing is that you're getting transactions you are not getting crypto here right so this is we're separating this called this concept right but that's how how Aurora passing and Boron is business very very interesting what I love about this is you're taking it from the Viewpoint of better ux which is the big challenge that businesses face that users face right now the analogy that um some a past guests use I don't remember who

used this analogy owes uh Nigel uh who's the former founder of FanDuel and now is working he founded vault which is a music blockchain product and he used the analogy that in order to use blockchain right now you basically have to be a car mechanic whereas yeah not everyone's a car mechanic they don't want to figure out what's under the hood and understand how everything flows and set up a wallet and onboard and so you're making tools that make that much easier deep thou thank you so much to you and your team that is exactly what we need to get to the onboarding of a billion people because we won't get there without it it's so interesting that you have approached it in this business mindset

way of existing businesses growing that's what that's what we need more there's just not enough of that so I get really really excited I'm I'm fired up about everything is anyone else focused on this it's interesting to me Aurora has a a lens that is not we don't see this a lot and maybe this is because most people are still teenagers in the space as you said are there any other businesses that are approaching blockchain in this way oh kinda I mean there is an extremely extremely talented business development team a in for example in polygon so we've seen from them quite a lot of announcements but again from my point of view in terms of the comparison of the Technologies uh Laura's tank is is much better right so

so we have here an additional additional Advantage but their BD is much much better there are others also who are trying to do this kind of the similar products right but in terms of the mentality how they approaching this I don't know a good example right I know that even big four companies in terms of the consultants for example they do have their own blockchain divisions I was or five years ago was meeting the the head of blockchain division for Accenture right so and uh yeah they already five years ago they have had a blockchain division because they need to consult because any new disruptive technology is becoming a risk for businesses so they come into big four and asking okay what

I'm going to do with this what should be my strategy and they need to consult them right so and because of this there are quite a number of experience I quite a lot of experience and sort of big consultancy companies right also and they are obviously talking much more web too and much more business language than web3 right which is exactly what we need to do right now yeah and this is funny and this is funny because them are extracting lots of value that kind of should be going into the web 3 but it stays in web 2. so yeah very true very true okay okay I want to give you a chance to chill and then we'll move on to a speed round you I mean you already told us where people can follow or sorry

go to your website Aurora cloud.dev we'll put that link in the show notes I'm doing the show for you here Alex make sure you guys go there I think it's I've been been on your website it's amazing how you break down the real value that blockchain can create in an industry which is the way that people need to view and think about this more anything else you want to call our users to action our listeners to action on where can they follow you personally online so as everyone in crypto I do have a Twitter account you are able to find me at Alex Aurora Dev super simple in terms of Aurora I check out there are quite a lot of different things happening in the Aurora ecosystem we have more than 200 projects that are live on Aurora and work in there in General Aurora is one

of the fastest and cheapest blockchains our transaction speed are just like below two seconds and the cost of transaction is around one cent and in case you are going to use a separate service Aurora plus you're able to easily Google this then then you are able to actually get 50 free transactions with this stuff and with Aurora pass since it is going to be pretty soon released you will be able to get this the same 50 free transactions per month they're going to a route to be replenished it is us who is going to pay for your joy inside of the Aurora ecosystem besides that I encourage you to take a look at the Aurora plus release event it is a very high quality apple style Apple event Style video so

you would be able to get lots of the similar ideas there and yeah the most important in case you your representative of some kind of business and you're thinking of expansion into the blockchain vertical take a look at solar cloud.def maybe this website is going to give you some some additional ideas and then maybe we can get connected and and create a proper partnership together wonderful wonderful okay speed round before we wrap up here Alex who's your favorite person to follow on Twitter there are many people well there are some people that I'm following I cannot say that I'm following lots of people and that I'm enjoying all of the different things

that they are saying but I would probably note too there is Guy a crypto guy Justin bonds and I like him because his ideas on on scaling of ethereum are very close to ours that l2s in their current setup they need to be upgraded in order to to be able to actually truly escape and then another one that many people are following is Alex Krueger and he's just to fungi and putting out lots of trade and stuff work and things that are connected with prices and stuff like that but and and I know that I'm a super horrible Trader so sometimes just reading Alex and thinking that maybe he has some insights and he has lots of knowledge wonderful okay a must read

book so I must read book inside of Aurora Labs because this is one of our core values is Extreme ownership so I highly recommend you this is a business book in case you don't want to read the whole long book I encourage you to listen to a an audio book it was recorded by the author his name is Joko Willem and he's an ex seal Navy SEAL and so he is you know so the situation was this we got in the battlefield it was really hard and stuff like that so that's an interesting piece of work to listen

but even in case you're not going to listen to it you can always find you know like an extreme ownership in five minutes there are lots of ideas there that we we apply every day at Aurora and these ideas can substantially simplify your point of view on the world and how you're executing anything and yeah I just believe that's a pretty valuable book and valuable point of view wonderful yeah it's a I'd never read the book but I have done the five minute version before and uh I've certainly learned a lot okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it uh so in this market conditions I know that there are tons of fear and

where lots of people are very stressed out and I know this because some people in at Aurora are pretty stressed out so what I am doing as a leader is that I'm devoting time to explain what is happening and trying to to just be there just be next to these people so I'm probably going to write on this billboard right now these two Shall Pass right so just wait a little bit you know things are going to become better the Gary is going to pass I mean not fully but you know the sedation is going to pass all of the scams and all of you know the FTX Luna Voyager Celsius this also is going to pass right things are

going to become better try to concentrate on on positive things and the positive thing about crypto is blockchain itself has Ace technology so concentrate on good things and uninstall coin Gecko and coin market cap from your phone you know just throw it away don't you know don't open the the prices and just spend more time with your friends family right so these two shall pass everything will be good I love it wonderful words to wrap up the episode Alex thank you so much for your time thanks for being a builder in the space it was a joy to have you on today yeah thank you for having me thanks for listening everybody have a wonderful day thank you for listening to web3 Academy

your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one