January 13, 2023

Jakub Wojciechowski: Founder, Redstone Finance and Warp Smart Contracts

Redstone Finance and Warp Smart Contracts Founder Jakub Wojciechowski joins the show to discuss his founding journey in web3 and what’s next for his projects and the Arweave ecosystem. 

Last year, Redstone Finance raised $7mm from Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Lemniscap and others to provide the highest quality cheap and speedy data streams for web3 protocols. 

In the same year, the team launched Warp Smart Contracts. Warp is an abstraction of Arweave’s SmartWeave smart contracting platform. With Warp’s sequencer, transactions are bundled for permanent storage on Arweave through a gateway that robustly ensures high speeds. 

Excitingly, Warp recently announced the capacity to run NLP models within smart contracts - a massive advance for the future of an autonomous web.


SYNOPSIS:

Building Infrastructure from Scratch

  • The seminal design decisions for building oracles and smart contracts
  • Iterative improvements on infrastructure
  • Designing Roadmaps for Projects with Definitive End Goals
  • Dealing with Existential Challenges & Vulnerabilities for Infrastructure

Growing Communities & Teams

  • How Redstone & Warp convince developers to transition from incumbents
  • Key hiring principles in web3, keeping teams motivated and providing platforms for individual growth

Outlooks on web3

  • What will oracles trend towards? How do emerging providers compete with Chainlink?
  • Outside of his area of genius, what is exciting Jakub at the moment?
  • What other key pieces of infrastructure are prerequisites for mass consumer adoption of crypto?

December 1, 2022

Bundlr COO Amélia Guertin on Onboarding the Masses and The Importance of Humanity in web3

In this week's episode, Archie speaks with Bundlr COO Amelia Guertin on a range of topics revolving around the importance of easy, cheap storage & uploads to web3 systems.

Amélia is the Chief Operating Officer at Bundlr Network. Bundlr is a decentralised network optimized to provide infinitely scalable, fast and composable web3 data storage solutions by bundling transactions to send to Arweave for persistent storage. 

Bundlr is bringing the speed and ease of traditional data storage solutions to web3 blockchain technology. They make it easy, cheap & quick for developers and businesses to store their data on Arweave from multiple blockchains.

Timestamps:

00:37 - What is Bundlr?

  • How does Bundlr work and why is it important?
  • What does Amelia’s role entail as COO at Bundlr?
  • How did Amelia get involved in web3 to begin with?

9:39 - Why use Bundlr Network?

  • How does Bundlr view the value of composability?
  • Where are the most opportune use cases for Bundlr?
  • What is Bundlr’s approach to data onboarding for traditional web2 clients?

25:33 - The Future of Web3

  • How do decentralised data storage business models differ from centralised counterparts?
  • Bundlr’s vision and endgame
  • Where will web3 be in 5-10 years and how does Bundlr help us get there?

Connect with Amélia on LinkedIn and Twitter

Visit Bundlr’s website and connect with them on Twitter and Discord

November 18, 2022

Fluidcoins Founder Lanre Adelowo on Building Economic Infrastructure for a Digital Africa & The Vast Potential of Open Banking

In this week’s episode, Archie chats with Fluidcoins CEO Lanre Adelowo about the story of Fluidcoins and its future in the context of self-custodied banking in Africa.

Lanre Adelowo is the CEO of Fluidcoins, a startup focusing on APIs to enable businesses to support crypto payments. Fluidcoins recently announced its latest product, wallet-as-a-service, which will enabl, businesses to offer crypto-powered financial services/products to customers using stablecoins.

Timestamps:

00:54 - The Fluidcoins Story

  • What problem does Fluidcoins solve?
  • How did FluidCoins begin?
  • How has Fluidcoins successfully reached merchants and customers?

17:28 - Wide Open Banking

  • What are Fluidcoins’ plans?
  • How might a token facilitate non-bank lending across Africa?
  • What possibilities does Fluidcoins unlock for the African consumer?

24:27 - Fluidcoins & The Future of Africa

  • What are the most ambitious or most creative uses that Lanre has seen a merchant give that API?
  • What role does Fluidcoins have in the economy?
  • What are the challenges that Fluidcoins face as it scales to other countries?

Connect with Lanre on LinkedIn

Visit Fluidcoins’ website and follow them on Twitter

A recipe for Amala, Lanre’s dish of choice.

FirstBatch Founder & CEO Kerim Kaya on Decentralised Recommendation Engines, AI's role in Web3 & the Future of Digital Identity

In this week’s episode of the Hansa Protocol Weekly, Hansa’s Investment analyst Archie Whitford is joined by FirstBatch founder Kerim Kaya.

Kerim Kaya is the co-founder of FirstBatch; A Proof of Interest protocol designed to immediately generate hundreds of data-driven zero-knowledge interest attestations for millions of users to assess engagement, create communities and optimize customisation & recommendations. For the layman, it is a form of ‘data backpack’ that allows users to self-determine their interests, and in doing so allow them to capture some of the value that their favourite applications derive from their activity on those platforms and engagement with those communities. 

Timestamps:

00:32 -  An Introduction to FirstBatch and Decentralised Identity (DiD)

  • What does FirstBatch do?
  • Kerim's background in AI
  • How did Kerim end up getting involved in the identity space?
  • How do social attestations differ from social graphs?

06:02 - The Role of AI in DiD

  • How can a recommendation engine work without ‘owning’ any personal data?
  • How does FirstBatch allow users to recapture the monetary value of their data?
  • FirstBatch’s role in driving dApp adoption among non-crypto-natives

17:59 - The Furthest Frontiers for FirstBatch & Digital Identities

  • What does FirstBatch look like in Kerim's most ambitious visions? 
  • Where did Kerim find the steepest learning curves in building a web3 protocol?
  • What are trends and projects does Kerim see driving growth in the DiD ecosystem in the near future?

Resources:

Connect with Kerim on LinkedIn

Visit FirstBatch’s website and follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn

October 13, 2022

The Future of Data II: Space & Time Founder Scott Dykstra on The Future for Data Warehousing, Bringing the World's Data On-Chain and Where Analytics is Headed

Scott Dykstra is the CTO and Co-Founder of Space and Time, a decentralised data warehouse for blockchain applications enabling the future of a trustless web. Having raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Framework Ventures earlier this year, they went on to receive a further $20mm in strategic investment from Microsoft this month. Space and Time plans to release the test version of its platform (or testnet) around April 2023 with plans for the mainnet to follow in September of next year. 

Timestamps 

00:31 - The Who, What & Why of Space & Time

  • What is Space and Time?
  • What are the benefits of decentralised data warehouses?

03:07 - Challenges in the web2-web3 Transition 

  • Is there resistance from traditional clients towards decentralised data warehouses?
  • How does Space and Time onboard non-web3 clients to decentralised data warehouses?
  • How limited are analytics under the current centralised data storage paradigm?
  • How analogous are web3 data solutions to their web2 predecessors (e.g. Snowflake)?

20:10 - In the Weeds

  • How does Space & Time’s Proof of SQL consensus mechanism function?
  • What possibilities will proof-of-SQL open up for data applications?

26:32 - Alpha Time

  • Are there any tools that Scott wishes to exist to make the building experience easier?
  • What analytical possibilities will Space & Time enable?
  • Best Movies Scott has seen lately?

Resources: 

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn

Follow Scott on Twitter

Visit Space and Time’s website and follow them on Twitter and Instagram

Scott’s movie recommendation:

Primer - Sci-Fi movie that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize

Watch the trailer here

September 21, 2022

The Future of Data I: Kwil Founder Brennan Lamey on the Need for Decentralised Databases, The Promise of Data Composability and the challenges in building data protocols

In this week’s episode of Hansa Protocol Weekly, Investment Analyst Archie Whitford is joined by Brennan Lamey.

Brennan is the founder of Kwil, the first decentralized & community-owned SQL database solution for building dApps and protocols. Building on KwilDB means radically faster development times, the ability to quickly execute highly complex queries across massive data sets, and ease of access to data from other applications, enabling extreme composability.

"We wanted to make sure that we're building an actually decentralized social and not just a social media that uses cryptocurrency... Being totally decentralized is our guiding mantra." 

Timestamps:

00:29 - The Need for Decentralised Databases

  • A quick rundown of the problem that Kwil is solving 
  • How did Brennan get into web3?
  • Filling knowledge gaps on the way to building complex web3 protocols

07:13 - Permanence & web3-enabled Data Solutions

  • Why did Kwil build on Arweave?
  • How do customers benefit from decentralised data systems?

11:06 - Kwil’s solution for data composability

  • What is data composability?
  • How does Kwil enable and expand the possibilities available through composable data?

15:50 - Kwil’s value proposition to the traditional web

  • Who stands to benefit from Kwil's services?
  • The challenges of transitioning web2 databases to web3
  • Toughest decisions throughout the development of the protocol

29:10 - Kwil’s current priorities and future plans

  • How does Kwil go about recruiting and team building?
  • What are the priorities for Kwil going forward from tomorrow onwards?
  • What is Kwil’s 10-year vision?
  • Brennan and Archie exchange fun facts

Resources:

Connect with Brennan on Twitter and LinkedIn

Visit Kwil’s website and follow them on Twitter

If you are a skilled Golang or Distributed Systems architect, feel free to reach out to luke@kwil.com hello@hansa.network to express interest in working with Kwil. 

September 14, 2022

Seb Campos Groth: Arweave COO on working in web3 without a technical background, running operations at a large protocol, and his approach to startup incubation through the Open Web Foundry..

In this week’s (inaugural) episode of Hansa Protocol Weekly, Hansa Network investment analyst Archie Whitford is joined by Seb Campos Groth.

Seb is the Chief Operating Officer at Arweave. Arweave is a pioneering decentralised storage protocol that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever. As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely.

Timestamps:

02:30 - Seb’s transition from Techstars to a COO role in Arweave

  • What is Arweave in 10 seconds or less? 
  • What does the COO do at a decentralised protocol?
  • What was it that got Seb into web3 and what convinced him to jump from TechStars to Arweave?

07:52 - The key things to make protocols go right

  • What are some of the key things that Seb and his team are looking at as a protocol to make sure that experiments are working?
  • How are iterations & experiments different in web3 startups compared to web2?
  • How to build community for protocols?

16:53 - How to build a successful community

  • How has the community contributed to Arweave's development?
  • What worked in building a successful protocol at the operational level?

20:46 - Staying Competitive as a Protocol

  • How does Arweave convince skilled developers to build on Arweave rather than alternatives?
  • How have things changed for protocol builders in the down market?

27:23 The Open Web Foundry

  • What lies in store for the future of Arweave's Open Web Foundry? 
  • What help does the OWF provide for early stage projects? What do early-stage web3 projects often lack that they might not realise?
  • Are there any other community initiatives in the pipeline?

Seb also discusses best practice approaches to incubating web3 startups through the Open Web Foundry, what makes Arweave different from the alternatives from a developer standpoint, and much more. Don’t miss this episode and join us at hansa.network!

Connect with Sebastian on LinkedIn

Follow Arweave on Twitter

Visit Arweave’s website

Follow Hansa on Twitter