What Infura and MetaMask data collection means for users

Transcript

today we're talking about privacy and data collection and specifically the news that came out from inferior and metamask who are owned by consensus and the update that was made that they made to their privacy policy what does this mean what what happened what data are they collecting on you how do they collect this data and is there anything you can do about it if you're like me you probably use metamask and you might not want them to collect your data because you don't know what they're going to do with it now we'll talk about what metamask and consensus has said that they are doing with this data uh and right now they're not talking about

doing this in any web 2 or any nefarious way of selling our data however you need to be informed and this is a very important issue a big part of why we were building web 3 is for decentralization and putting ownership back in the hands of users and not giving our data to companies that they can then just go sell so you need to be up to date on this issue and you've got to listen to this show today we have on with us Arthur sabinsev Arthur submissive is the CEO at pocket Network and just a giga brain in the space of product development and Engineering he spent a decade scaling mobile consumer

apps he worked at Capital One and was the lead executive on their mobile payment and mobile platform system he worked at the Washington Post where he was the lead mobile architect for their SAS platform which Powers 60 plus news Publishers around the world Chicago Tribune Boston Globe L.A times and many more he's advised on many projects in the blockchain space including polab and Phoenix and also in a past life he was a physicist so he's got an incredible brand that he's bringing the show and we're going to do our best today to give this information to you in a digestible way trying to not get too technical only explain what you need to know so that

again you can be safe with your data and you can feel secure because the last thing you want is somebody selling you your data without you knowing and monetizing you as the product that's not the point of web 3 and that's why we're here today before we get into Today's show if you can just do me a favor take a quick minute and if you're on YouTube hit subscribe if you're listening on a podcast platform we would greatly appreciate a follow and a review these are the things that help the web3 academy show gain more traction and more followers we've had an incredible year of growth and we just want to get web 3 information into the hands of the masses

and that's a simple way freeway no cost way that you can help us out before we get into the show though let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsors the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to the profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well

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subscriptions Community Access event tickets are all forms of memberships one of the most common business models for creators and entrepreneurs today building an nft membership opens many new possibilities for your members everything from tailored multi-platform experiences to the ability to sell an unfinished subscription on secondary markets these are things just not possible in web 2. however in order for this business model to work creators need nfts which are time-bound or have built-in recurring payments unlock protocol does this for your nfts better yet with a few simple steps you can

create your own nft contract without code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for membership nfts if you're an nft Creator you can't rely on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft memberships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build on unlock learn more at unlock dashprotocol.com today we are talking about a very important topic which has been hot news the past few weeks and that is is metamask collecting your data what's

going on in this data collection this privacy policy change that came out of inferior which is owned by consensus which is also owns metamask we're going to break this all down for you make sure you understand what is going on and here to talk about it is Arthur this Chief Operating Officer at pocket Network Arthur welcome to the show thank you I'm really happy to be here appreciate the offer to come and speak about this pretty pretty relevant and Hot Topic very relevant I mainly appreciate your eagerness to talk about this on such a short notice we connected with each other just a few days ago and here we are recording things happen fast in web3 and you were ready to respond so

kudos to you yeah well it's been like an ongoing issue since the information dropped Wednesday or Thursday it was Thanksgiving here in the US so I had to yeah that's right right so I had to pull my wife a son I need to work now and she understands right so she got it so we got a question people and yeah shout out to your wife thanks for understanding that's that's amazing okay so let's start by setting the context so as you said Thanksgiving American Thanksgiving last last week here's what happened so consensus their API tool inferior said they will begin collecting users IP and eth addresses and to be clear consensus also owns metamask now about 350 000

developers use infuria including argon gnosis open Zeppelin you know some of the largest players in the space and obviously metamask uses inferior so when moving forward with this new privacy policy change when you use infuria as your remote procedure call provider your RPC provider and we'll break that down what that definition is in a second we'll get that when you use that in metamask it will collect your IP address and your ethereum wallet address whenever you make a transaction okay so the big a little bit of a

difference so consensus is this company that spun out of I think the original ethereum group right there's a course out of developers Joe Lubin was one of those developers he started consensus sys how that ends and it has a bunch of products under it two of them happen to be infuria which is a blockchain access provider or an RPC provider and metamask which is a front-end utility that allows you to transact interact with what we call web3 the various evm blockchain so ethereum virtual machine blockchain so the blockchains that are built on to work as layer twos on ethereum or work as side chains or just work or ethereum directly so it is in fira the blockchain access provider that is collecting this data right okay and let's just talk

about how inferior works and how remote procedure call rpcs were because I think that sort of lays the foundation for a better understanding this issue yeah I never really had a great so I like to do things by knowledge I don't really have the best analogies for this one because the way to think about it or the way I like to think about it is you come in and you're just making a request you're sending a requests saying hey I'm on ethereum I'm trying to read data from the ethereum blockchain at the current height and then you send you you tell that to the RPC provider or the application you're interacting with tells that the to the to the RPC providing the RPC takes that call and then sends it to the appropriate data

node which I'll describe in a moment so I the way I like I think I'm trying to think about it right now because funny enough as long as I've been in this industry no one's really ever asked me to explain it oh it's crazy so and I've done enough of these interviews that I should have come up at some point but basically like you say you want to go to Starbucks which is like you say you want to go to etherea you know you're going to go to ethereum but you're not and then you say I want to get a coffee at Starbucks or I want to visit sit with my friend at Starbucks so it's like do you want to do a swap request do you want to read data from the current block height or do you want to go to the restroom I don't know

whatever the equivalent of going to the restaurant if you send something you know send something to you want to send a transaction Into The Ether would be a bad example but I guess send transaction to zero X zero zero zero zero like to burn something yeah yeah right so that's kind of how to think about this if you're going to somewhere and you have different choices an RPC provider effectively is like the Starbucks that sends your data to the different things that you can do at Starbucks so like fetching requests reading or get requests read requests transaction all different types of requests transactions right so these rpcc providers sit in between the blockchain and the apps yes so the way the apps interact with a blockchain is through an RPC provider so like in in the web 2 world

we usually the company that you work for or the tool that you're building you own the server it's private you own the database it's private and you have your app which is yours right so if any company I've ever worked with I'm accessing data from my own private database however in the blockchain industry there it's a public database a public Ledger and because it's public um you everyone kind of can own it or interact with it or operate it not own it but operate or interact with it is I guess the way to think about it and because everyone can do it and no one truly owns it the question is how do you set up a connection to it so rather than you set up a server client a client server connection directly from the app that you own to the database that you're

trying to interact with you go through this middle layer which then routes the request for you on your behalf because this middle layer usually stands up those nodes for you if you want to be truly self-sovereign and do it yourself you could stand up your own data node your full own full node to access it so you could effectively create your own endpoint and say hey I am going from my app which I built like Arthur's app to Arthur's ethereum full node and you can just interact that way but it's very expensive to do so so most people and it requires wildly different skill sets to set up a node versus building an app even though it's a software engineering or it or whatever you want to call it it's like that whole mixture of that whole thing yeah someone's going to kill me I'm an Engineers Everyone by the way

I've done this for a second this is hard to kind of quantify where devops fits in this cycle but basically devops individual sets up a node a software engineer built an app the software engineer sends a request to the dev node and then boom so either the question in this case is most people don't stand up their own notes right of course not we're not going to right that's not the that's not the solution for us onboarding a billion people to web3 and let's be clear one of the reasons why this attracted so much attention is because and we'll get into this deeper in a second but privacy and data collection have become a massive issue of the way that we have created these web 2 monolithic companies that own so

much of our data and then and use it so we'll talk about that in a second but so right now basically what this means is I use metamask whenever I use metamask I am by using metamask I am currently in the default setup using the inferior gateway to connect with the ethereum blockchain and as a result of that now infuro will know my IP address my it'll collect my data and it and let's just be what data is it collecting I think they said it's collecting like where so it's geolocation and your wallet right so your IP address tells you where you are in the world and depending on if it's a static or dynamic

IP could effectively drill down to the street that you're on right they could drill down except for your country potentially your city potentially like the portion of the city or town that you live in it can go really really deep and then the world address is what do you own so basically without asking for you for your name it effectively says this person lives on Main Street or close to it in the town of I don't know Townsville my kids are watching Powerpuff Girls a lot lately so Townsville comes to mind so yeah so you live on Main Street in Townsville in the country of the United States of America right so they get you know and they're like you use this address right great so that information is there which can lead to a lot of other it can lead to them to create a

profile on you uh yes who you are right they can probably profile you create a profile of how much money they think you make what your hobbies are what your interests are right because of that they get a little bit of data on you and they can take it or worse or Worse right so you know this information and again I'm going to say this right now I am you know we are friends with the people the company I work for we are friends with the people at inferior right yeah we are Cooperative competitors I guess is how to think about it yes I don't know why they're doing it Joe Lubin the CEO of that company said they're not going to be reselling any of this data right I don't know what it's needed for but they're doing it so maybe their lawyers are

trying to figure that out like I know right now we're going through our terms of service and privacy policy to update it to make sure it aligns with what we actually do at pocket Network where I work yeah because you know lawyers sometimes want to be all-encompassing and say just in case but given the data that's going on you know I was already actively over the last two weeks updating this information now we're doing it a little more you know stringent to make sure we actually say what we're doing because we don't do much on our end where I work right right so so essentially and we're jumping ahead a little bit but just to tease this what pocket Network provides is one of the things you guys provide is the same same Gateway that inferior provides and you do it without collecting this data so I don't want to I'm just gonna

tease that we're going to talk about how you do it in a second I will try to not go I like but I like that you're exciting okay so before we get there just a couple other definitions I want to get through end points is a word that keeps coming up I want to make sure people understand what endpoints are logging practices and nodes let's just briefly explain what numbers are so everyone understands I will start with notes so nodes how do you access a blockchain like how do you access any Bitcoin ethereum or what do you do you stand up a note it's I'm pretty much a machine that keeps up to date with the current state of the network is trying to connect to so when you connect to the ethereum blockchain or the Bitcoin blockchain or what have

you you effectively download all the data from other nodes other peers in the network that say we are currently at this point in uh the current block height this is how many blocks we've processed the database is this High The Ledger is this high is full of this much data so a data node effectively is something that keeps a copy of the blockchain all over the world right so the reason you can't kill web3 is because as long as one blockchain is up and running on this network or this is connected to this you know Global Network the the network will continue to exist so a node is just a way to access this network and it's can be and cannot be trivial to stand up depending on the blockchain you're working with for the reasons I don't want to get into right

now yeah yeah okay okay so I know it is a computer that somebody created whether it be an Enterprise or whether it be a person probably a more highly technical person and as you said depending upon the blockchain there's various difficulties of nodes it's basically though it's a machine a computer that somebody has at home that they are using to access blockchain and to be part of the creation of this decentralized network yeah it just it's part of the infrastructure right it just stands up it's a scaffolding that kind of stands up the entire network each time you get out of node it's just centralizing it a bit more right yeah so logging practices it's just the harvesting well harvesting is a bad word but like I can't think of another one it's just collection or harvesting of information so right anytime you do anything on the internet

information is copied by you know whatever provider using like even if you're using the most private obviously preserving tool on the internet they still get that information temporarily and then they either eject it or store it yeah right so I'm not going to go into what pocket does yet because we'll get to that later but logging practices is effectively just storing data from user interactions or non-interactions like just loading a web page it'll automatically log like you loaded this webpage using this browser used on this device on this day at this time and then whatever other things they can glean about you based on what the browser shares which is exactly the problem that we're in right is we and as a web 2 problem right is that we have

these logging practices that we have accepted whether we volunt you know whether we consciously accepted them or whether we just didn't have a choice because these tech companies built their business models on this they are logging all of this data from us and currently they're using it to sell Us ads and that's their form of monetization which is I mean I think most people would agree is not a great thing for Humanity and for our privacy and our security of our personal identity and you know really things that we would never think that somebody else should be able to know and should be able to monetize about us so

let's just talk a little bit more about that problem because I I just want to in prepping for this episode I took a look back at what does Google collect about us and it is shocking to look at it's if you want to if you want to feel a little bit sick to your stomach and I mean I say this I use Gmail I use many Google products so I'm I am only allowing them to do this to me but you know Google has our location they have everything we've ever searched and deleted on Google obviously so even if you delete something from your search history they still know that you search that they have a full ad profile on us you know they have based on basically are the information they have they they have our

location their our gender our age our Hobbies our career our interests or relationship status possibly they know our weight our height our income what apps we use etc etc right it's scary yes it is but I saw this tweet and I wish I'd saved it but the fact that we gave him all this data and then they were able to Target us help them build better products right yes and that's why we continue to do this right and it sucks okay before before we jump into pocket Network let's just talk about and I think the way I want to let's talk about decentralized apps decentralized data as a whole and I think where I want

to lead into this is actually by understanding your decision to join pocket Network I think is kind of an interesting lead-in because you worked at you know you're the accountable executive at Capital One for their mobile payments and mobile platform you were the chief mobile architect for the Washington Post SAS platform so you've managed large teams and large projects and some of the biggest companies in the world you probably could have gone and worked anywhere and YouTube you chose pocket Network and so what why first why did you choose web 3 and then maybe why pocket Network requires a little bit of history about myself if you don't mind

me no problem I am someone that always thinks about the future as a child as well and I've gotten very lucky to using whatever methods that have existed to pay attention to what's going on world so I began coding one summer in the late 90s I'm 36 right now so you can I was like 11 12 13 when I started coding when I went to college Firefox and extend extending Firefox which is a browser that isn't common properly isn't big anymore it was a big thing and I started doing open source development and I wrote a bunch of Firefox extensions that became very popular like we're talking millions of users and then from there based on my developer profile on that website I landed a job as a mobile engineer in 2011 which was like three years after the App Store came out but

apps weren't really they're becoming a thing but they weren't that big yet and so I caught so not only did I catch the Firefox like the browser extensibility open source wave I caught the mobile wave so I was able to capture the user experience waves or as like the human adoption waves of Technology yeah from the early 2000s and sometime in the mid decade 2015 2016 I happened to do a lot of personal brand building in the iOS space which is what I primarily did for a decade and I met this guy online who asked me a bunch of questions sent me his I wanted to Pivot into software engineering there's a point to the story he sends me his resume I kind of help him get his first

job and then he pivots to web 3 and asked me to actually consult for him on a gig on a mobile related gig happens to be a company called pocket Network which wanted to put blockchain access in everyone's pocket which is where the name kind of came from or related to that and next thing you know we keep talking for last couple of few years and then things come to a head about a year ago and he asked me to join and kind of help lead the team and I couldn't say no because that entire time I had you know once I had kind of gotten a taste of what this space was like I was kind of thinking about on the side and then obviously during the coveted lockdowns and the early I guess 2021 with the Bitcoin Bitcoin hitting like 20K or 60

40 whatever it is whatever like shot to the moon and ethereum followed suit and nfts were becoming a thing like I couldn't you can't ignore that especially if you're in the yeah you listen to Tech podcast all day and then I realize that's all I started thinking about it's just like this space was so like holy moments it felt it felt like it's okay you can swear oh yeah fantastic it felt like I we were reliving the yeah for I'm gonna really date myself like the Angel Fire tripod Fortune City web days and then like the Myspace Friendster social media days all at the same time like we were speed running like like the entire adoption curve all starting that year and I knowing that I love working in user experience with

user experiences and I saw how not how non-mature this industry was I'm like okay this is still the beginning and then obviously I had this connection with Mike the CEO and he reached out to me when I was literally starting to look it was really like a coincidental that that happened and then I said yeah I'll take the job and it's been a really crazy year and in no regrets I definitely had a really cushy job in the past and now I work like 18 hours a day very very different yeah yeah but I love it it's exciting I feel like I'm actually doing something and this isn't even like user experience this is middleware like middlewares the way we explain it is middleware is like during the Gold Rush who is it that made money is it not the people mining for gold it's the people selling picks and

shovels and cigarettes and alcohol we are those drug dealers we are those like we give you axes and booze you go have fun yeah that's that's what we that's what we do it well yeah no one I don't want that sound bite out there but we at pocket Network we provide you with the tools to build the products that you want right which is where we're at right now because as the products were not maybe we're building products in like you know great the nft boom that's 2021 and wow all of a sudden you know jpegs are worth you know six figures a million dollars and are still selling at that rate but the there's a lot more and we talk about this all the time in the show there's so much more business application to come there is so much more usability and use cases to come for

blockchain but right now we are focused on this middleware layer the infrastructure layer and one thing that we come back to a lot is data and privacy because it's such a problem in web 2. so obviously with inferior making this announcement everybody goes nuts and is like oh my gosh this isn't what we're trying to build so let's talk now about what pocket network is building and how you guys are doing it different than the way inferior is doing it and yeah and just the break that down for us so we can all understand that it doesn't you don't actually have to do it the inferior way yeah so pocket Network effectively has three entities under it

which I know we'll discuss later on but basically we are a corporate company based out of the us we have a foundation based out of the Cayman Islands and we have a dow or decentralized autonomous organization that effectively helps vote on making changes to our protocol so we are a L1 we are like you know Bitcoin is an L1 blockchain lightning is an L2 Solution on top of it ethereum is an L1 blockchain optimism and arbitrum are L2 Solutions built on top of it pocket is an L1 blockchain it is a proof of stake blockchain currently written on top of tenderloor forked from tendermint and we are all working on our own homegrown version of our blockchain which will get released in later in the next year what we do is we effectively we act we relay

requests from using our blockchain to other other blockchains and then relay it back and the reason we do it this way is we can this uh using blockchain technology can decentralize RP like blockchain access you can decentralize the entire connections so I'm going to keep going I'm going to try to distill this is going to take a few minutes so basically pocket Network Inc the company is has a Gateway we have an API Gateway like inferior has a Gateway at the moment that Gateway is centralized by us however with the release of our future blockchain in the end of next year or close to the end of next year we will be able to decentralize that layer below like when you get into our Gateway what we do is we take your traffic like

the Starbucks example and we send it to a node that is not owned or operated by us so like our people like our competitors or our friends in the same industry like quick node infuria Alchemy Morales anchor and the rest they oh anchor them not so much but the others they own all the nodes we own well we own a small portion of the nodes but we don't own all the nodes we contribute to our network but we don't overwhelm the entire network of nodes so what we do is let's say you want to read data from ethereum you use Pockets RPC endpoint and I'll define endpoint in a moment I realize we didn't but use Pockets RPC endpoint and you send your request to read some type of data from ethereum and

our Gateway will randomly or pseudo randomly select a node somewhere that is close to you in the world for latency perspectives to make it like a fast connection and get you that data back and then what the reason that node even exists is we've incentivized node Runners infrastructure providers devops Engineers to stand up nodes because they get a token for being randomly selected to process your request and this token is used to stake new nodes and it's also used to pay for the throughput or pay to access the blockchain so we stake tokens to stand up a node like you would stake ethereum tokens or what people call ethereum two tokens or and then you stake tokens to actually Define your bandwidth or your throughput so like a

certain amount of tokens will allow you to have a million requests per day right and so tokens have this Dual Purpose incentive of providing you know paying for Access providing providing reliable infrastructure for yield and yeah that's kind of that's kind of how our system works and we all are able to do this because we decentralized to our own blockchain so basically you have your app your app puts sends stuff to our Gateway our Gateway interacts with our blockchain our L1 blockchain pocket the blockchain and it chooses a random node on that blockchain to relay the request and then sends it back right and just to ask the obvious question of you guys being your own blockchain you're not the purpose of pockets blockchain is to be

this RPC provider is that correct the purpose there's more other objectives as well so the reason I don't like to call the folks that you know the companies I mentioned are competitors but our friends is because eventually we believe that all be our customers um here's why we believe that we are another base layer protocol so tcpip the internet protocols the ones that Define HTTP and IMAP and SMTP and all of the web and internet email protocols the ones that say allow one browser or another browser to load the same website and for the website to render properly We believe We are on that level of base of being a base layer protocol we believe that all of these centralized providers will eventually want to offload some or all of their traffic to

our decentralized network of providers because that's that's the goal here the goal here is to give you fast reliable and affordable access to blockchain data without actually having to create an entire web 2 company around it so even though right now pocket Network Inc the US company is a web 2 style company we don't do the same web 2 practices because at some point later next year is our goal we are going to have other gateways that will be connecting to pocket the blockchain the pocket protocol blockchain pocket protocol without having to go through us right now they only go through us because there's a limitation in how tendermint works and how many apps can actually

connect it's like it's just right something we can't get around but our goal is to have other other providers in our ecosystem will we be one of the providers bigger providers potentially because we're here first and we built the thing but our goal is to not be the only one so it's like decentralizing ourselves out of a job to some degree [Laughter] which maybe is is it fits really well with the ethos of web3 it does that's what we need we need to be open source we need to all believe that you know wag me we're all going to make it we support each other it's not building walled Gardens it's you know yes we're gonna do this but at the same time at the same time you still need user experiences right we are we will we have an SDK our SDK can't can access the blockchain

without a front end but it won't work in the way it needs to work because you can't perform certain actions yet without going through our Gateway but in the future if you are so adamant on doing things yourself like standing up your own node standing up your own access points you could literally direct connect to the blockchain with our SDK without using a Gateway a Gateway is just a front-end just like uniswap is a front end for swapping tokens yes right yes and gateways will always exist right just like banks will always exist custodians will always exist for your tokens because not everyone has has the ability or wants to even learn or even has the time to manage their own coins or whatever it is that they're trying to

manage it's just not feasible to onboard people by telling them hey you need to go grow your own food and kill your own cows and you know desalinate your own water right it's just not it's just a crazy way to think I don't know how many humans would be capable of that anymore at all food we'd all be screwed if that was the case yeah okay let's come back to hmm what what happened with inferior sure and and how I want I just want to I want to explain what the alternative so if somebody's out there if one of our listeners is currently using metamask which I'm sure most of our listeners do

use and you don't want to give your data to to inferior there is there's options yes so metamask and consensus the company they're not all bad right I'm not saying they're bad that's a good point they're saying they're they're doing what they're doing what they're doing what they have to do and again I don't know the reasoning for everything what I can tell you with respect to metamask is metamask is one of the few wallets that has the ability to change the RPC provider so by default just like Windows gets pre-loaded with Explorer and Macs come with Safari yeah metamask comes pre-loaded with a way to access the metamask the ethereum blockchain and

the ethereum test Nets and maybe polygon at this point yeah yeah out of the box there's a few that are supported yeah what's they also allow us for you to change that provider that's a very web three specific thing that's like going to Google and saying I want to use google.com but give me the data from lycos that's not even a thing anymore I'm sorry I mean the 90s in the 90s multivista hotbot all whatever search engine what is another search engine that exists now duck go right I should know that or the brave search engine right it's like I'm going to Google's front google.com but give me the data from Brave right that's just that will never happen Google will never do that no however in the consensus

they're like yeah we're gonna follow the web through ethos we will not only build you the front end piece we will also give you the access layer for free but if you want to use a different one because why not you can use any other RPC provider or blockchain access provider and pocket Network happens to be one of these providers that we vendor and points to 30 40 50 different blockchains many of them which are EVMS EVMS being things that will when metamask is built to work with ethereum virtual machines or ethereum in general so we support many of those I think almost all of them at this point that are public or that are somewhat have some scale and yeah that's kind of how pocket that's what you can do you can just stabilize your C

layer by using pocket which is decentralized by default and let's be clear you sent me a and I'll include this in the show notes you sent me a 60 second video of how you can do this on metamask that is how simple this is this is not technical complex at all it is 60 seconds you enter some fill up I think it was like three or four fields and you're done and so what what happens then let's say I choose pocket Network as an RPC what what's I'll give you guys collecting what's what's what does that mean Starbucks example right yeah because I guess this is what I'm gonna have to stick with let's say infuria is Starbucks right and let's say pocket network is Seattle's best whatever

whatever you want to choose whatever coffee net chain you want to choose or yeah Tim Hortons or whatever oh yeah I'm Canadian so yeah yeah yeah I I figured so I was going to try to I was trying to remember what was up Dunkin Donuts Dunkin Donuts right what whatever RPC provider you want to go to so rather than go to Starbucks and go you know you say you want to you know get buy a coffee you want to buy something through with a transaction you say you want to go to Dunkin Donuts and when you buy a transaction we teleport your transaction to another node so another Dunkin Donuts somewhere else right our Dunkin Donuts this Dunkin Donuts franchise pocket Donuts whatever you want to call it it essentially gets everything from other nodes that are not in the same same house not owned by the same company

so that's so it's the Gateway it's going through it's the Gateway where's the API Gateway yeah it's a different Gateway it's a different language it's going through pocket network but it's still the same and exactly right so a random example that came to mind this is a much better Jerusalem has seven eight right yeah you're like yeah Jerusalem has like seven Gates into the city or eight Gates right you're just going to a different gate you're still going into Jerusalem at the end of the day right right it's just like that type of thing right you can go into a city you can go through the highway from the North side or the South Side it doesn't matter yeah you're still getting to ethereum right you're still getting this is a great example so so with the highway example one Highway might charge you a toll and

correct and one Highway as part of charging a toll they might collect your license plate issue because your license plate number right because that's how they charge you the toll where's another Highway doesn't collect any anything so you just drive straight in right so correct okay okay right and yeah so so yeah so there's the right so there's a toll road which would be inferior in this case that yeah charges you a toll by taking your data and then there's our Highway which is a public good because you know we at present there's nothing that we're doing to affect your access layer so the obvious obvious next question then I I and to try to think how best to ask this why did inferior do this and why are you not

doing this what's the difference right I don't know what they're doing with this data I don't know if some they said they're not doing anything nefarious with it you you know you can only take people at their word and I again the inferior our friends I don't cannot tell you what they're doing because I don't know and I don't want to speculate because I don't think that's that's not that's not appropriate here what I can tell you is that we don't do it so here's what we do and I talk to our Engineers right before our call to make sure I'm very very specific so basically when we when an API request comes in everything we our gateways are loaded are stored on our launched through Amazon AWS so we have 20 gateways I think or maybe 24 gateways in the world we're almost everywhere AWS allows us to

be right now so we could because we're trying to we effectively you go to our Gateway and then we route your request or your request goes to the Gateway that is closest to where you're coming from so your IP address is used but rather than store your IP address for anything we just ejected like AWS just ejects it we don't do anything with that data we don't log it or anything we just set route your request what we do store is the a node that interacted with with a request the region of the world that the request came from because we're going to try to debug any the issues that may pop up so if we see something like hey things out of Singapore the notes in Singapore are slow or the requests are going down for some reason we want to know what's going on but we won't know

that a specific IP hit it we won't know anything specific about where the person is coming what a person is coming from are doing and we're not going to be able to get enough data from the data that we do store which I think we wrote in a blog post to figure out who this person is we cannot Geo we cannot Target you right right so yeah so specifically so just for being very clear what we do what we do store is we we store the AWS region we're not we the AWS region or Gateway where requests came from which which blockchain the request was trying to access because again we support 40 or 50 blockchains which node process the blockchain request and what the result

of the request was a successful or did it fail and why did it fail if it failed right and what is it trying to do so basically everything that a person was trying to do without actually knowing who that person was is what we we start and we all need to do that so we can debug the network so you can debug so you're yeah yeah and so so if I so if I switch to pocket Network on my metamask I get it does it doesn't cost me anything I get the exact same results I get it arguably I might get actually enhanced security because I'm now using a decentralized node Network and in the future as you said it's in 2023 when you launch this next version where the

the next you're you're decentralizing the whole thing right I'm not saying the language right because I'm not no no no you're saying it right and the other thing that you didn't say is will you actually get better service so we have there's a couple websites that do compare RPC traffic so RPC meter dot IO is one website that was built that shows how we compare to our three biggest competitors anchor Alchemy and fira and for the most part for most part all three of the services that are not inferior so Alchemy anchor in Pocket are better than infuria in every situation so not only so even if yeah yeah if you look at it like I just clicked if you go to rpcmeter.io so I'll just and you type in you click on ethereum you type in Miami you hit like London Paris Singapore Seoul whatever the

regions that this website tests against you'll see that like in Miami work neck and neck but if you look anywhere else we are like in Singapore we're the fastest in Seoul where not the fastest but we're like a factor of eight faster than in fira so whatever you're gonna do by switching to us not only do you get speed but you get decentralization and privacy okay and so so that that makes tons of sense I I can I I believe that our listeners should highly consider making this switch because if you don't then any transaction that you make using your metamask wallet moving forward they are now collecting your data so be be aware

of that and make you know do your own research make your own decisions this is not Financial advice or maybe this is like personal uh safety advice or wallet hygiene advice it's an opinion this is an opinion for which I I condone you for I guess okay okay yeah yeah you concur I appreciate it yeah so we don't know why inferior did this can we just break down the reasons like what are the potential reasons why they might have done this so compliance and regulation perhaps you know not that they necessarily know the compliance or regulation yet but that they're anticipating some sure coming down the line right uh they might they might know something we don't about laws

or things right the tornado cash thing made things really complicated for everyone involved in this space so there might be compliance regulation they might want to sell data in the future but not now but they're not saying they're doing that they might need to might have some governments might be asking for something specific as a follow-on to another issue but they're not mentioning it I don't know if they mentioned specifically that this is the reason or maybe it's just to cover their butts right I mean that's a complete like I said our lawyers are doing the same thing they want us to cover our Bots and we are pushing back right now saying this is what we do and this is what we don't do and this is what our Engineers approve because we we are trying to follow the where the boy you know the crypto blockchain web3 thesis

as best as possible to be as transparent as possible all of our work is in the open you can see what our Gateway does it's all the code is there if you can read the code it's in there do I expect all everyone to read the code no not at all to set up their own notes but it's there and in the open because because we don't have anything to hide in that regard right you know right and what I said like before we released our blog post I we had our I had our engineers and we have Engineers all over the world so not everyone's Thanksgiving was affected but I had them Lucky them but some of them had you know some of them were affected and everyone understands why we're here and what we're doing they all went and they looked through all the data that we

have and they confirmed like hey we are not collecting things that we shouldn't be collecting right right it was almost like so I guess what happened was everybody it forced everybody to pause and say oh my gosh where do we fall on this and correct it leads everybody to I mean these are the things that need to happen in web3 and another example of this is unit swap recently right it was about two weeks ago I believe when they announced that they will be collecting some off-chain data such as I think they said users device type or browser I can't remember exactly what else they said but they said their main objective was improving user experience do you do you remember or have any that's something that's what I read that's how

I read it right when I read this you know preparing for this interview and I you know I remember Crossing and I'm like okay I I don't I don't see anything the ferris in there as someone who's developed mobile apps for a long time and browser at websites for a while you just need to know where users are coming from and how to properly style your product if you've ever built a website you know that there are certain browsers like Internet Explorer 6 which were the bane of all web developers because CSS didn't work the right way and then there were certain versions of Firefox didn't work in Chrome and what have you and they want to know are most probably more people using them on Weber mobile are they using in landscape or portrait mode are they using it on mobile Safari or mobile Chrome or are they using mobile

Brave browser which is a version of Chrome what time of day how are they using it like maybe to adapt the experience I don't know because I don't work there but I know as someone who's been a ux or UI engineer for a long time that the more data you have to analyze how a user uses a product the better the product becomes do they plan on reselling the data like to other advertisers I don't know can they sell it sure you can build patterns about people and Target them yeah it's not my specialty I again love uniswap but I can even give it another alternative how to get around it if you want you can use a tour browser which is built into brave and you can go use uniswap or if you're not in the US you can use the Tor Browser and go use one inch because one

inch doesn't work in the US you can do whatever you want there's ways around it we live in this magical time where you can do everything in almost everything in a decentralized fashion you just have to have the gumption and the know-how to do so and it's now I think we're in a stage now where all of us who are like orange pilled red pilled whatever you want whatever Matrix Bitcoin analogy you want to use we love this stuff we're starting to learn how to do it but by no means is it common sense right you know I can't expect everyone to know how to do this but the options actually exist right if you know where to look you can figure it out and they're a bunch they're not like they're not like building code from scratch and just trying to launch something now you

literally can just push a button in Brave and now you have a privacy secure tour browser instance I'm like holy cow like I was like I've never really had to use tour before but now I want to and now I can so I use it whenever I want I can now because why not yeah yeah yeah yeah well I think that's the that's the main question here I think that comes up for all of us is as we build web 3 we all need to prioritize the tough conversations and we need to encourage all the builders and everybody in the space to really be thoughtful about the decisions we make because we are building infrastructure layer and yeah sure you say that people can do

this and you know there's this magical time and you know anything is possible but let's be real you know 90 myself included are not going to do those types of things right I'm not a highly technical person in that way I don't have that interest like I sure I also you know I think that but what I think this comes down to is it's this question of what inferior did and what uniswap did and they are different certainly in terms of what they are are collecting right but is this a trend is this necessary for industry growth because the tough thing is is as you said you need data for improving the user experience for improving your product data is very helpful you know is there certain data you need in certain data

that you don't need in your case you have clearly shown that with pot Network you don't need the same data that inferios is currently saying that they need right now we don't necessarily know the why but I think that we're just we're at this interesting inflection point where these foundational questions come up about the way we are building this infrastructure as to you know when do you prioritize growth and user experience first when do you prioritize user privacy and user safety and and user owning their own data and so I I don't know where you sit on that or where maybe current status for where you think we're going in the future I wish I had a great answer you can

answer that might sound a little bit like word solid so I apologize ahead of time to all the listeners there's always going to be data collection the level of it will differ depending on who's at the helm and what they're trying to do or what country is being built in right so I have friends who went to Qatar for the world for the World Cup and they had to install an application on their phone to have everything tracked I don't believe in that right I don't think that's appropriate you can go to China the government requires yeah that's what it is I've heard both but I've heard of that yeah the lat cutter is the it's the proper way that's what I think you're right yeah yeah yeah I'll take I'll take that so yeah they told me that that's what they were told to do I have no idea

they didn't tell me if it was like under a gun or right but the point is the data collection is going to happen now the other thing here is what are you going to do with that data right so as an example and I keep saying this because we are three separate entities that we're trying to differentiate pocket Network Inc the US company we have not been told to my knowledge that we must be collecting this information maybe inferior was told something because they're bigger and more prevalent in the industry than we are maybe that'll come down to us and we'll have to make a decision on what to do we don't know we have not been served with any papers saying You must collect and you must facilitate this information back to us that would be crazy because we're a private entity hey and I don't

want to put like I don't know yeah that's the one one thing we also don't need this data we are not trying to upsell resell our users we are just trying to capture traffic and do a public good right we're offering a public good like our whole value proposition is to underpin as much of web 3 traffic as possible because we want to be a base layer protocol our business model effectively is to go after other gateways first to have them pass their traffic to us and then when we decentralize our gate way or have the ability to decentralize access into the blockchain network meaning other people can send up gateways they can stand up their own gateways and they can do whatever the hell they want to do at that point but right now we're just trying to capture traffic and and make

sure that our Network stays performant and reliable and cheap and the more and one of those things are the way our company works is is the more traffic we get the more affordable everything gets things because things it's a flywheel right you have the more RPC traffic we have the more tokens that are minted the more tokens that are minted the more nodes that are staked the more nodes are staked the more decentralized we become the more decentralized that we are the more people are going to want to use us because we're more privacy preserving and the flywheel continues and I'm sure there's pieces in there that I missed right and as long as we're super decentralized we become even more reliable because we get more entry points from different regions in the world so you could be sending an API request from somewhere somewhere in

Africa right now which I don't know if any has anyone really has any gateways there but if there ends up being enough traffic coming out of Nigeria or Kenya or the other places or Ethiopia wherever transactions occur the most South Africa even I think there's a South African Gateway there will be more incentives for more gateways to be stood up closer to there right so it's a flywheel that continues it's like uroburus right it's the snake that eats itself it just continues to get bigger and better and network effects just kick in and right now we've found product Market fit and we're just trying to scale and for that we don't need any actual data about a user because all we need is the traffic itself and all the incentives around our protocol will will help the network grow like I said word solid to some degree

yeah but I mean so I think what you're saying is you know you don't need that data right now but you're but you're being honest that stay tuned right we well I'm not well I'm saying it because I don't know right I don't want this to come back yeah yeah I don't know I know right now we have no plans for it we currently don't do it we don't need it who knows what's going to happen in a year or two or three yeah totally so no one knows what this industry no one knows with where the governments in the world are going some are becoming extractive on privacy and some are not right cbdc is a big argument like a central bank digital currencies which I'm not going to get into but that is a huge privacy issue that comes with that with those completely completely yeah

and we don't have unfortunately have time today but the other topic that I did I want to get into not just cbdc that is very interesting but the the structure of protocol Network in terms of the corporation the dash Foundation we don't unfortunately have time so I might have to get you back for another another show in the future because that is also an interesting organizational structure that you guys have chosen the way you're building your ecosystem and as you said that structure might allow you long term to maybe make certain decisions about data collections that might be different than a consensus or an another organization that is built with a

different structure so I can give you an answer in one minute and then you can go from so basically we have a protocol the protocol is currently being built by the us-based company in the future no one should own the protocol it should have contributors from multiple companies just like multiple companies contribute to Linux and other free open source software the Dow votes on changes to the protocol the foundation executes the will of the Dao and pni or pocket Network Incorporated is the is the company that is built to the first company that stood up that is building things in the ecosystem we have other companies in our ecosystem now that have been building node running businesses are on top of our protocol the goal is to have more and more companies come in and build and everyone be founded by the fund foundation so the

Dow dictates what to do by Community vote the foundation executes it and pocket Network Inc and a bunch of other companies are people in the ecosystem that help Implement what needs to be executed that's the very basic example yeah yeah but I I think it's just to give my quick take on this I think it is a structure that we are going to see more and more we did not I think that a lot of us thought when when Dao's first became hot and everyone was oh Dows and oh my gosh this is going to change change everything everyone's gonna work for a dow I think we thought that like it would be Corporation or doubt but now I think we're realizing that a model that might be the most

common model might be Corporation with a dow and a foundation that manages a treasury and that those three build an ecosystem that works together I think we're going to see that a lot yes 100 okay before we wrap here and get into speed round we were chatting before the show about what is going on about at pocket Network outside of this of ruining your Thanksgiving dinner of this announcement give us give us a little update on what's upcoming a pocket Network where are you guys at uh would you like to hear a little bit more about us some exciting things that you guys have got going on yeah yeah so quite a few things so we are an entire ecosystem right we have app developers that are accessing our Network we're building the protocol itself and we actually have the decentralized network that we are

supporting so one of the things we are known for is being the first company to onboard new new blockchains so one of the new ones coming out that's pretty has a big name is sui or sui I think it's sweet but it's one of the blockchains that came out of from the folks working on Facebook's blockchain so a couple of the founders left Facebook and they built this and we they haven't incentivized testnet and we are one of the one of one of two providers of access to the test net and then we'll be providing the mainnet when that launches we've seen from the data that we have because we you know we we see which apps are interacting with us but not the specifics on the users we see that a lot of game Phi apps are access are interacting with us so D5 kingdoms

which is an RPG built on the blockchain was built on the harmony blockchain it built an expansion on the Avalanche blockchain and it's now built moved its original game from Harmony to Clayton like we support all three blockchains so we support everything with dfk or D5 kingdoms so they are we actually launch partners with them I think for every single time krobata is a game built on Avalanche so we support them too actually we validate transactions on Avalanche too because we do so much with the Avalanche ecosystem and Dark Forest is I think a game built on and I think they're one of the first games and they use this too and there's others that that use it so because we provide such reliable service and game five transactions are so plentiful we they essentially prove the use case that pocket is reliable and fast and

affordable for us to run our entire games on top of this blockchain and the last thing is we've been able to apply for Grants from things like Ave and get grants where they send us tens of millions of relays or API requests per day for people using Ave on the various blockchains that Ave is supported on which I think is like Avalanche Harmony ethereum Etc same thing with evmos so we are doing a lot we have a lot of that we have we have a whole sales team that goes out and builds these relationships we have another sales team that builds Gateway Partnerships now we're working with a couple partner gateways like realizing our vision of gateways are coming to us now and saying please please let me send you our traffic we don't want to stand up all these nodes we want to be provide access we'll do

the b2c thing where we'll find the customer and do the customer acquisition you just give us reliable cheap affordable traffic middleware you say there I love it picks and shovels that's what it is yeah totally it's drugs and alcohol whatever maybe slightly different one's the same slightly different not so much right yeah but you're not wrong to the user I mean they both have similar value yeah yeah cool where can where can people find find you online if they want to connect with pocket Network where can they find pocket Network pocket network is pokt dot Network and pokt network on Twitter we say popped or pocket but it's also p-o-c-k-e-t like pocket it's

whatever you want to call it but that's what it is pox Network or pocket Network and I'm uh my first three initials of my name my name is Arthur so art and then my last name which will be submissive as you can find I'll put a link in the show yeah you'll put a link thank you it's a long last name yeah you can find me on Twitter I'm on there all the time or Discord or telegram yeah awesome okay before we wrap here quick speed round some fun questions for you okay what's an nft you'll never sell I don't have that many at this point because I kind of got rid of most of them because I don't have the best radar smart yeah well they're also also their tax savings incentives right their Capital losses at this point which unfortunately but what I really like is a Divine Anarchy piece

that I got I mean I have it up for sale but no one's ever going to buy it for that price so I guess that's as close as you're gonna get but I currently wear a renga piece I like rang I got in early okay yeah yeah great project yeah I love their love their artwork favorite person to follow on Twitter slash who are you learning from so like for the it's like it depends I'm on a big Bitcoin kick now if you can believe it so safadina moose is is books like Fiat standard and Bitcoin standard phenomenal love those he's brilliant he's really changed how I think but uh crypto Twitter like Gabriel Shapiro he's a crypto lawyer and Ryan salkis who owns massari and on the nft space to Gentry land which is just like this crazy board eight guy just fun nft

Alpha love it okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it I think I'd write the law of abundance is real something like that it's just like you wish something into existence then you should give yourself the ability to receive it and be open to new experiences and stuff I really like that that is that's one of the one of the best answers to that question that we've had yeah I I think it's it's something I try to drop in every podcast I have to thank my wife for this one it's just a different way of thinking about the world yeah just like yeah like yeah if you want it just like wish it and see if it'll happen and you know your brain naturally starts doing things or you do start

doing things to get to where you want to be that is a great note to end on Arthur this has been a blast thanks so much for for informing us and for educating us all on what's going on in data collection privacy policy and teachers about pocket Network very exciting yeah my absolute pleasure thanks for having me on thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do

that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one