Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Dr. Alan. He’s from the Gorki Network.
He has vast experience as a petroleum engineer and a software developer specialist. He’s also worked in the data science field and he’s added a lot of value to the energy industry. That is where, that is his core focus.
Now he is a part of the Gorki Network and a Gorki Network is a blockchain and it can not be categorized as an L1 or an L2 because it’s trying to solve for both and we had a very, very interesting conversation. They have their DevNet live right now, their TestNet is going to go live in just a few months and overall a very exciting development for the ecosystem as well because we have all of these new chains that are coming up that are actually trying to solve the problems posed by the legacy chains. So a very, very interesting conversation indeed.
Please do check this out. I can’t wait for you to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Alan, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? I’m doing really well. Thank you.
Thanks for having me. Awesome. I’m really excited about what you have been building and you have a really exciting announcement as well that’s been there with Gorki.
So can you first, let’s talk about a little bit about your background because you’re mainly from the petroleum background and how you got into Web3. Tell us a little about that journey. Yeah, so my background is mostly in the energy industry.
I’m in the software building side of things really, but working towards solving problems with integration and that was kind of a core concept of the company that I’ve come from. We built digital twins which are effectively a kind of a distributed system in a sense. You create a mirror image of your system on a computer and you challenge it with algorithms and calculations and you hopefully come to an agreement about how these things are happening in the field.
There’s a lot of maths involved, a lot of optimization and a lot of challenges in terms of communicating between different systems. I think that basically led me towards the Web3 world really. I think there’s a lot of synergy between these concepts and what we’re trying to do in the Web3 world.
Right, I do think that it’s valuable because you were dealing with a lot of data and then Web3 making an entrance there seems very organic. But then again, just for our audience, can you explain a little about how you got around to being the head of product and technology at Gorki Network? Well, basically I’ve been following the blockchain space for a long time. I’ve been working to kind of boost my skill set and develop the apps and things like that in my own spare time.
So as part of that, I got involved in a bunch of different groups, following projects on Discord, joining conversations and doing courses on various different pieces of technology and trying to get an understanding of where they come from. And basically in April 2023, I was kind of pointed towards a group of people that were building this technology and I was interested in talking to them. So I just reached out and we got talking and I felt that my skill set in the technical side of things and also kind of from a strategic point of view in terms of managing a product, managing a platform could help them.
And we basically started collaborating and working together towards raising funds and building out the strategic direction for the product. I think one of the things that a lot of people get focused on in the Web3 space is maybe some metrics like transaction speeds and all these kind of total value locked and all this kind of stuff. But actually, I think that the value proposition of the Gorki network is its core functionality and the computational horsepower that it has behind it.
And that leads towards approaching verticals and industries that might be a little bit shy of blockchain and Web3 technology right now. And so I felt that, you know, we could help drive that in that direction. Yeah, that is absolutely true.
And, you know, with your kind of expertise that you bring in, you can strategize and pull the product in the right direction. If you had to perhaps surmise what Gorki does in one or two lines, how would you put that across? So Gorki is a powerful distributed computation system. And what it does is, what it does best is it orchestrates things.
It connects things that would otherwise be separate. And it allows these things to work in a distributed computation environment. That’s what Gorki does.
That’s its kind of main use case. Okay. So then, you know, it’s a little like a layer one solution.
Would that be correct? So yeah, I mean, yes and no. The concept of a layer one and layer two is an interesting concept to us because effectively, the layer two in the solution is usually the one that does the work. And then it kind of aggregates things together.
And the layer one is the one that provides the security. But it needs the layer two because the layer one has a bottleneck in its system. So where Gorki sits is actually Gorki can be either of those.
It effectively is simply an orchestration layer. So Gorki has the computational horsepower to be a layer two. It can orchestrate things.
We’re building something to be asynchronous and things to run concurrently. So lots of processes all happening at the same time means that these things can all, we can integrate lots and lots of technology and they can exist together and work separately in that sense. So as the layer that does the work, Gorki can function quite nicely.
And everything can function through the smart contract and actually integrate directly through the smart contract. So you can integrate into the layer one of choice for whatever your preferred security protocol or mechanism is and have a very, very powerful and very secure system in that sense. But also Gorki can function, like you said, as a layer one because it also has a leaderless consensus, which is very secure.
And once we get up to the status of being fully decentralized, we’ll have the additional and security mechanism of that. So as a layer one, it functions very, very nicely and allows other blockchains and technologies to integrate into us as a shard of Gorki, which would be a very powerful way of integrating many, many different layers into the system. So we’re kind of agnostic to where we would be put in the layer structure of things.
But what we’re building is something that can function in any of these scenarios. Okay, that’s wonderful. That is like taking it a step further, making it agnostic.
So, you know, recently, you decided to merge with the Big Sur DAO, right? Can you tell us a little about that particular announcement? No, no, that is not, that is, yeah, so that there’s a, there’s a question that unfortunately, we can’t, we can’t answer. The Big Sur DAO is a group of people who have decided to claim that they are related to the Gorki network. And we’re currently working towards stopping them from making that claim.
And that is not something that we have done, unfortunately. Yeah, all right. So all of this, you know, it’s, it’s for nothing that that is online, because I could, I could read a lot about it.
So moving on, then perhaps, what is like the, you know, main, perhaps pull for from you guys to be able to get and entice developers to build on the Gorki network. So the development experience for Gorki is one of the things that we’re really, really working towards making very, very smooth, seamless, we feel that it shouldn’t be anything more than simply having like a, like a Visual Studio code plugin, or even directly from a web browser. One of the main advantages of Gorki is the, the architecture that what we’re building allows you to work with code and data on chain in the exact same manner.
So deploying your smart contract to the node is, is the only part of the development process you need is actually run directly from the node, there’s no compiling binaries or anything like that. So not only is it very secure, but it’s it’s a one step kind of development process in that sense. So we were building a very, very smooth and very flat development structure.
So onboarding developers should be very, very easy. And learning to use the the smart contracting language is, is trivial, because it’s actually a very, very sort of sensible structure to a language and actually very easy to pick up. Okay, that’s wonderful.
And what are the kind of initiative or what are the kind of activities? Do you guys have planned to onboard these developers? And on the same breath, like I would love to know how many developers right now are a part of, you know, the Corky network, and they’re actively developing? Okay, so we have five core kind of people developing on the tools. And we have four lead developers, four developers leading the way in terms of the actual protocol and the consensus mechanism. And in terms of bringing more developers on in the ecosystem, so hopefully in the next few months, we’ll be planning a bunch of kind of more ecosystem focused events and sort of starting to build out a hackathons that that bring people into the project.
And the idea is that we’re once we get the development environment out, we should also we’re also be having a bunch of tutorials and a platform that allows people to just simply use the programs and, and build as soon as they as soon as they can. And that’s kind of the core, core fact part of any blockchain project being getting people to build on you is the main the main part. And hopefully, once we demonstrate the power of what we’re building, that’ll attract a lot of people who are looking to execute ideas that they might not be able to do on kind of some of the other players in the space.
Right. So can you tell us a little about perhaps the niche that you are catering to, if you could give us a use case, I think it’ll be easy for the, you know, listeners to be able to relate. Well, so in terms of the use cases, we have all of the traditional use cases are for a blockchain are, are what we’re looking at building.
So I mean, obviously, we’re, we are looking at DeFi, and some of the aspects of Gorki being this kind of orchestration layer and being very easy to interoperate with other things mean that bridging is a very powerful use case for us. So hopefully, that’ll help bring people on to the network. And so but all of the kind of traditional kind of DeFi NFTs, that kind of stuff is something that, you know, obviously, we want to try and encourage being able to host your data on chain is a very powerful concept, especially when you’re looking at the these kind of media focused aspects.
In terms of the kind of specific cases that Gorki is looking at building, we’re kind of trying to push towards some quite complex use cases from a kind of like a Gorki project point of view. So we have some white papers in terms of use cases for decentralized healthcare. And we really feel that there’s some real benefit to humanity in general for decentralizing a lot of the healthcare applications around the world.
But also in terms of ESG and supply chain management. So that’s another aspect that we’re looking at building out a significant offering in. And we also have this plan to kind of use the main powers of Gorki, this ability to execute lots of calculations and the ability to handle lots of data on chain, we think that we can build out a very useful API for generating marketing content on chain, which will allow developers to access a kind of another revenue model, which we hope will be a much more sustainable revenue model, if they can have like a banner ad that is paid for by content providers, and that will help to reduce the kind of fee for use within the kind of the communities, you know.
Right, right. So these are wonderful use cases. They are like use cases that deal with big data.
And what are the kind of applications that you’ve seen so far being built on Gorki? Well, I mean, in the past, we’ve seen some very cool use cases for things like gaming, we’ve seen gaming SDKs, which have integrated into some of the bigger open source gaming engines out there. There have been applications that have been built to share large files, chat applications, even some attempts on this technology to have kind of like music streaming services and stuff like that to really take advantage of the data on chain side of things. But I really must stress, I mean, Gorki at the moment, we’re in DevNet stage.
So we’re hoping to release test soon. And but so no one’s kind of building on us yet directly. But certainly the technology has been the use cases that have been demonstrated for the technology in the past have been very, very powerful.
Brilliant. So you’ve mentioned that, you know, you’re in DevNet, and you’ll be pushing on the testnet very soon. When would that be? Do you have a timeline for that? Well, hopefully within the next couple of months.
I mean, Wow, brilliant. That would be the goal. But yeah, I mean, you know, when we’re ready to do it.
I mean, testnet is obviously a testnet. And, you know, it’s like you’re beta released. So obviously, things need to be, you know, it needs to be nice and stable to do it.
But I think, yeah, it would be nice to be in a position to release testnet within the next couple of months. Brilliant. And what about the token aspect? So, you know, you do have your own native token, correct? Yes, yes.
The Gorki network has to have a utility token. Yes. All right.
And so for the primary utility of that token would be for computational access? Or is there something else as well? So yeah, it’s used for running smart contracts to pay the fees on the network. But also there’ll be, you know, you’ll be able to stake your tokens in validators once we open up to external validators and to receive rewards for, you know, from participants in the network. Okay.
Wow. Brilliant. And in terms of, I’m sorry, in terms of just where this token is particularly listed, can you tell our listeners a little about that? No, no, not yet.
And listing, our kind of listing strategy is to try and aim for a couple of exchanges. We have some connections with some of the big exchanges and some of the smaller exchanges, which we feel are, you know, very good, honest, trustworthy people. We’ve been working with the CoinStore guys.
They’re a great bunch of people and a great exchange. I’d be looking to maybe hopefully list on them. But also we’d like to aim for some of the bigger ones as well to kind of spread as wide as possible.
All right. Okay. Wonderful.
As someone who’s deeply involved in the product and the tech aspects of Gorki network, could you elaborate? I know that you’ve done a little already, but on the unique features and capabilities that kind of sets it apart, especially, you know, vis-a-vis, you know, scalable chains that scale in a linear fashion. How are you guys different? Well, Gorki is aiming to be able to scale in a linear manner. That’s the aim.
And the reason that we feel that we can achieve that is because we are building a programming language and a protocol built on top of this programming language that really takes advantage of what we call concurrency. So concurrency is the concept of allowing lots of different processes to run at the same time. So we’re trying to build an asynchronous concurrent blockchain and what that means and also a leaderless consensus mechanism.
So the aim of that is to get to a point where you can scale in a linear manner. So every validator that you add to the network simply increases the network’s capacity. And we’re seeing that we do have the ability to add more validators to the network and we increase the capacity of the network.
And what we’re driving towards in terms of our development is to be able to get to a point where we can do that in a linear manner. And the way that we’re building the protocol and the way that we’re building the technology is all designed to achieve that goal. So we won’t have the same bottlenecks as some of these other people who have to maybe choose a leader or maybe you have a queue of blocks waiting to be validated by some sort of coordinating node or something like that.
So that will not happen in Gorki. So that’s how we aim at getting towards this kind of linear scalability. Wonderful.
Can you tell me a little about the challenges that you are facing in the context of, you know, because the blockchain space is constantly evolving and because you are setting this up right now, you’re in DevNet. Have you faced any challenges in setting up a chain and in the context of linear scalability and how do you navigate this, these dynamics basically to stay at the forefront of innovation? Well, I think, I mean, the main, so there’s two main issues with developing technology in any space at the moment, whether that’s in the AI space or in the blockchain space. I think, you know, I’m kind of seeing a lot of the same things in a couple of different industries.
And one of them is access to talent and, you know, having the people and the talent that’s required to build these things. It’s quite difficult. There’s a lot of people out there, but there might not necessarily be a lot of people who are able to dedicate the time and energy that’s required, but also maybe not necessarily with the right skillset.
And similarly access to funding. I mean, like the, we are in a, we’re coming out of a bear market in the blockchain world. And it’s pretty obvious that a lot of the people that are flashing around their kind of, you know, the funds and the VCs don’t actually have any capital available that they say they do.
And therefore the, it’s interesting when we’re trying to approach the kind of funding life cycle that a lot of people kind of talk to you, but maybe don’t necessarily have any interest in investing. Not necessarily because the technology is not fantastic, but also, but mostly because they don’t actually have access to any funds themselves. And we’ve seen that I’ve seen that in the traditional kind of energy industry, you know, a few years ago when the oil price was low, people were still advertising jobs, but they weren’t actually hiring.
Yeah. Yeah. That is what, yeah.
There’s a lot of noise around it, but there’s no actual execution happening at the moment. Yes. So now you’re taking a step back from what you’re building and it sounds absolutely fantastic.
I can’t wait to try out the test net. I would love to get your take about the market in general. Like, you know, you’ve touched upon how there is a liquidity crunch in the capital market and you know, founders and builders are facing a bit of a roadblock there.
So as somebody who’s very closely working with building a new chain, how do you manage to circumvent this or how do you keep building despite these obstacles? Well, I mean, at the core, all the credit really has to go to the developers on this technology. They’re a very passionate group of people and they are building this because they love the technology and they want people to see how powerful it can be. And so that’s kind of, you know, a lot of this is driven by having a very passionate development team and then being very, very capable at what they do.
You really can’t, from a startup point of view, you know, I’ve been involved in a couple recently and you really need the passion as well as the ability to get these things through. You know, funding is important and certainly, you know, the publicizing and the hype around a layer one blockchain require a lot of capital. But again, the cynic in me thinks that a lot of that is because what has been built up till now is not really capable of moving forward on its own without paying for projects to use your technology and without kind of publicizing crazy rewards in the early days for people to adopt.
I think I’ve seen in my own career sometimes taking the more methodical and slow route towards success and avoiding some early hype that might not necessarily be able to live up to can give you a longer path to success through the course of time, you know. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think sustainable growth is a way to go.
And it does, like creating a L1 in this day and age does require a war chest. And but, you know, if you’re creating valid use cases and the technology is feasible and as fantastic as, you know, you are saying it is, then there is no reason why you can’t sustain yourself and make it to perhaps the next bull run. So coming to that particular aspect and touching a little about that, again, you’ve been someone who’s been around for a while in this space.
What is your take on the market currently? Like, how do you feel about it? What do you what do you think would be perhaps your advice to fellow entrepreneurs who are building in this space? I think, yeah, I think we’re in an interesting position in the market. Obviously, there’s a lot of hype moving towards the beginning of April and people are talking about the halving in Bitcoin, the onsets of these ETFs being released in the US. I think, you know, there’s a lot of favorable energy and people are feeling a little bit more optimistic.
And I think the from a builder’s point of view, I feel like the best advice for a builder is to really kind of focus on your project and focus on your tech and kind of put blinkers on to the status of a market. I mean, if you go back to some of the wisdom of some of the early like traditional investors, like Warren Buffett, and that if you buy when other people are selling and you sell when other people are buying. So, you know, in theory, you should be building in the bear market as much as you should be, you know, trying to promote and build in a bull market.
So I feel like for a builder, the market should be a secondary concern. Obviously, like that source of a lot of liquidity and a lot of income for these projects. But really the core, you know, when you look at some of the successful and passionate people around the projects that really kind of have some real kind of kudos behind them, you know, even all the way up to the founders of the Ethereum blockchain and, you know, even more recent projects like the Agoric guys.
These are passionate people that are, you know, good at tech. And I feel like it’s there’s a pedigree in there which shows you that they’re not that interested in the kind of like the hype and the swing trading and all that kind of stuff. It’s just about building.
Certainly the market coming up is a, I think, I think that one of the big things with the ETF approval shows that maybe the governments of the world are going to be stop being as cavalier as they have been with regulation up till now, because it’s been manipulation. You know, the signs of manipulation are pretty clear in this space. So avoiding that and as a builder is a key part.
Yeah, I think I totally agree. I feel with the harbing coming up as well as with the recent approval of the ETFs, it is looking up moreover, you know, it does give you a little idea about how governments are perhaps thinking about this entire space. And as you said, they can no longer be, you know, cavalier in their attitude towards creating perhaps robust regulations or, you know, any kind of basically a mechanism, a system for these, the builders who are working in this space to give them a little more support.
So that is good. And I totally concur. I think entrepreneurs should be building in bear as well as bull market.
You know, bull market is when you really go out and sell and bear is when you keep your head down and try to build something that that will really solve for your potential user in some way and add value in their lives, which is what gives these platforms or any kind of a network you’re building its stickiness. Absolutely. So in terms of, you know, just the outlook that you have towards the market, we’ve talked about the government and the ETF coming in and how the builder should respond.
What according to you and personally, would you feel which niches would really work out very well or will be the ones to pull out the market from this, the bear that we have currently into a good bull run? Are there any niches that you are betting on? I don’t know if I mean, I’m not the person to talk to you about kind of like trading and stuff like that. That’s not my forte. I think I’ve seen a lot of, there’s been a lot of talk about layer twos in recent history.
And I feel like, you know, despite the fact that their existence kind of talks, you know, is demonstrates the flaws in some of the layer ones that are out there. I feel like there’s a lot of really, really interesting things happening in the layer two space, you know, in the kind of optimism and, you know, all those guys. So they’re a really interesting space.
And I think one of the things about that is because when you see what people are building on them, you kind of see what people wish they could do on a layer one. And it’s a lot of interesting gaming applications. I feel like, despite the fact that we’ve seen a lot of GameFi go on and not really very many long-term successes in the GameFi world, gaming is a massive industry.
I think it’s the biggest in the world. And I feel like if the web three world is, was able to kind of move towards the gaming industry in a sensible manner and provide them with a platform that they could use to develop on, that would be a very, very powerful use case. Now that would require interoperability to be able to communicate with legacy systems.
It would require the ability to move data around on chain and it would require the ability to execute robust contracts. Like these are not just sort of changing balances in a wallet. These would be actual computational contracts that would need to happen.
So a blockchain that is able to address that would really be able to hit the gaming world and provide value to it. So gaming is certainly something that’s very interesting as well. Yeah, it’s very promising, I think.
And it’s one of the spaces that has kind of done well, despite the market behaving the way it is, or the capital market not having enough liquidity. Because it’s an actual real use case, I think, for users to be able to play these games. And the played one was big at some point, but not so much.
But nevertheless, gaming, I think, there are so many DAOs and they’re doing wonderfully well in this space. And this particular niche is very, very exciting. And I concur there as well.
Yeah, definitely. So, because you mentioned interoperability, I would love to ask you, how is Gorki Network potentially, and right now, obviously, I know it’s still early days and you guys are in your DevNet, but how are you guys approaching interoperability? Are you looking at, because you mentioned that you are ultimately chain agnostic, how does that really work? Or how will it work in the long term? Well, so one of the things in use cases that we’ve talked about is this concept that other chains could operate as a shard of our system. And having a very powerful virtual machine is very useful for us because we can implement functionality in our smart contracts that can maybe call other chains directly through it from the smart contract.
You could include a bash script or some kind of jar file that can contact a database or communicate directly to a Web3 portal and then talk to another blockchain directly from a smart contract. If you have a powerful smart contract engine, these are things that you can do. So you can almost, if you think about what a bridge is for cryptocurrencies, there’s this quite complex dance of moving tokens into a particular wallet and locking them and then telling the other blockchain that they’ve been locked and then minting tokens on the other blockchain.
But these things are traditionally quite vulnerable and everyone’s seen these hacks that happen and people lose a lot of money. But if you’re able to do these kind of communications straight from the smart contract and they happen before there’s any chance to have any kind of attack or they’re done through a mechanism that would detect if there was a problem, like a consensus protocol, for example, then you have very, very powerful use cases there. So interoperability, what we’re talking about when we talk about interoperability is really tight integration into smart contract execution for other systems and other blockchains potentially.
Okay, and can you tell me whether these blockchains, if they want to become like a shard on your network, do they have to be EVM compatible or are you agnostic there as well? Yeah, so we’re not using the EVM. I mean, the virtual machine that we’re building is far more powerful than that. So that’s kind of why we’re building it.
But we wouldn’t have any constraints over what happens on their blockchain to have them interoperate with us or integrate with us. That would be as long as they can kind of communicate with us and provide the information that is necessary for whatever kind of integration they would like to achieve, then yeah, we have no kind of constraint in that sense. Okay, that’s wonderful.
That’s wonderful to know. So can you tell me a little bit more about, apart from your testnet, is there any other bigger milestone that you’re waiting to hit as a team? So we are just about to kick into a funding round with a large group of investors. I’m not going to say who, unfortunately, until we can kind of close it.
But over the next two weeks, we’re going to be building some more funds, which is very exciting. And hopefully, we’ve got another couple of groups that we are in the process of talking to. And we’re hoping to make some announcements over the next couple of weeks about how that’s going and close that process off.
So things are looking up in that sense. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful to know.
And we’ll all wait for your big announcement to come through. I think what you guys are building sounds really exciting, like I mentioned before. Can you tell us a little bit more about the team behind Corky Network? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
We have ourself, and we’ve been working by my brother, actually, John has been working pretty tirelessly over the last couple of months to build the kind of structure of the project. And the ethos behind the project is that it is open source. And we’re building an open source technology.
And we want to build a kind of a community governed, you know, system that is not owned by any kind of one entity, you know, this concept of decentralization really runs to the core. So we’re going to try to put in place the sort of nonprofits and organizations that will run the project and then hopefully hand it off to the community, you know, as a DAO or something in the future. And the core developer is Anton has been working very hard with the in terms of building the consensus protocol with Dennis, they’re two very talented.
I think you can kind of call them mathematicians, really the kind of stuff that they do. And computer scientists or logisticians, I don’t know how you pronounce that. And then one of our early developer, Tomislav is a very, very experienced guy in terms of architecture and system design.
And it’s a real privilege to work with him to kind of see how he puts these applications and Web3 sort of strategies together. And another one of our other more talented developers as well, Stas, he’s been working very hard. He’s kind of a workhorse within the team.
I think people, you know, you get Stas a project and it gets done kind of thing. So he’s a very talented developer. And, you know, they’re building using kind of very modern software architecture.
And it’s as a more traditional software developer from the sort of C++ world, and even actually some sort of Fortran 77, unfortunately. I find a lot of these newer technologies quite difficult to get hold of. But my own preference is to move towards Rust, but you know, we’re not quite there yet.
So we’ll see. That’s wonderful. Now, you know, again, taking a step back from Gauraki, we can maneuver it again there.
Tell me a little about what do you think seems to be working according to you in the space in Web3 currently? And what do you think is definitely not working? And this is like your general observation that, you know, you’ve had so far. And if there are certain things that, you know, you think are definitely not working, or they’re not going to work as we move forward in this ecosystem, what can be done to, you know, fix it or change it? What seems to be working is I think people are moving towards building real stuff with blockchain. So there’s a lot of people out there who are talking the right talk, in my opinion.
If you look at what the ICP guys talk about, and the DFINITY guys, and this sort of concept of putting real calculation and doing real stuff in a distributed manner, that message is very powerful. The Agoric guys have got a fantastic kind of approach to, I think, what they call is orchestration. And I really think that is a critical part of this.
And if we kind of move into the future, I don’t necessarily see that there is a one chain to rule them all. I really think there is space out there for a lot of chains and their particular use cases and communities and to be used. Some of the things I don’t see working, there are some chains that sort of try and close things off.
And, you know, there’s some chains that kind of focus entirely on business and have tried to sort of, you know, be permissioned. I think the permissioned part of the blockchain space is not necessarily viable, in my opinion. It’s kind of the antithesis of what we’re trying to build here to have a permissioned decentralized system, in my opinion.
And I think some of the things that are not working in general in this space are some of the metrics that everyone is using. So, for example, you know, claiming that you can do a billion transactions a second or whatever you want is ludicrous if that transaction is merely changing the state of a bit in memory somewhere. Because that’s not a valuable transaction.
That is a, you know, a simple, you know, change of a piece of information. Like a valuable transaction is something that does something. It communicates with a system or it computes something real and then eventually, you know, moves some real data around.
So what I feel like it needs to happen is a little bit of maturity in the space in terms of the metrics that we use to apply to some of these blockchains and say, okay, can this blockchain actually do what’s needed? Or is it just claiming to be, you know, doing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, but those transactions have limited scope to provide value for the real world? Yeah, I think that that is like absolutely hitting the nail on the head. I think that’s very, very true. A lot of these layers, they claim to be able to process x, y, z number of transactions.
But again, as you said, where is the pie? There’s got to be some meat in it. So yeah, that definitely doesn’t work. And moreover, you know, what you said about permission blockchains is something I feel very, very strongly about as well.
Because ultimately, when you’re working and building in the decentralized space, it somehow seems to be completely at odds with the very ethos of decentralization. Definitely. Keeping in mind, again, just like talking about decentralization, and I’m aware that, you know, we are running a little short now and we’re coming close to the time we have to sort of wrap this up.
But I do want to ask you, how do you feel about, you know, just making sure that projects that are building in Web3 stay true to the ethos of decentralization? And how is Gorki able to do that truly? Well, I mean, decentralization is critical for the security aspect of the system. Because it’s kind of, you know, a lot of people focus on the consensus algorithm and stuff like that. But what makes a lot of blockchains really secure is the fact that, hopefully, there’s lots and lots and lots of nodes out there that are functioning.
And it would then become economically unfavorable to try and attack a network. And so then the problem lies in that is the scalability problem, right? Because then you’re kind of having to orchestrate lots and lots of communication. And, you know, with lots of nodes comes lots more communication.
So the chatter on the network becomes kind of more problematic. Now, some protocols will call that chatter a transaction and then claim that they have a huge transaction value. But that’s not something that we’re interested in doing.
With decentralization, we’re hoping to make a really low barrier of entry for the ability to run a validator node. And that’s kind of one of the key aspects of it. So we hope that there will be a very low barrier of entry for someone who wants to participate in the network.
And similarly, one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past is having potentially lots of different shards that are maybe optimized towards different types of transactions. So you can have a shard that is built with lots and lots of storage. And, you know, that can be a shard that is built to handle lots of data.
And now for that to happen, you would probably obviously have to have quite a lot of memory space for your nodes and stuff like that. That’s not for everyone. You might want to optimize a node that is simply built to handle lots of small pieces of data.
So, for instance, in the IoT space, you know, IoT devices don’t move data around typically in terms of information about their systems. They chatter to each other, but they don’t necessarily kind of send volumes of memory. So you might want a low latency, high frequency shard that can be optimized towards that kind of protocol.
So really, we’re kind of trying to decentralize the decentralization by adding the ability of the system to kind of have lots and lots of different kind of flavors of itself released into the network. And ultimately, that kind of brings a much, much broader range of adoption. And with that decentralization comes more security.
Right. That’s a wonderful way of putting it. Now, to perhaps, you know, my penultimate question, what would be some resources that you would want to perhaps recommend to our listeners who are builders or who are just perhaps curious about Web3? And, you know, these can be resources or thought leaders who you feel you follow as well.
And because we’ve talked about noise, right, there’s a lot of noise in the space. At times, you need to go to the right place to be able to really get the hang of things as well. So are there any recommendations that you would like to give? Yeah, I mean, the best thing to do really is to follow people on on spaces like Twitter.
You know, these projects have to be vocal because they have to tell you what they’re doing. And there’s a lot of really cool stuff. But people posting some interesting things on Twitter.
So like the Agoric guys, I believe, are talking the right talk. I think the DFINITY guys are talking, they’re saying the right things about how they want to achieve and real compute on chain. And, you know, there’s there’s a bunch of people writing books.
And I got I spoke recently to a guy called Jamil Hassan, who’s building some interesting things. And he puts out some interesting content. And in terms of advice about about stuff, I think, you know, just get get involved with the technology.
A lot of it’s open source. And it’s, it’s, you know, it can be quite easy to pick up. There are lots of really, you know, good courses and open source material for for things that the easiest barrier to end the easiest one to get into, in my opinion, is Ethereum, because you can just kind of use the solidity and, you know, just build on in your web browser and stuff like that.
So it’s actually really easy to to work with, in that sense. So just begin using building the apps and, and, and see how it goes. I think that is the right path to take, if you are like really curious.
And if you’re building the space, you have to get your hands dirty, get the right experience to see if the space is for you. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
So now I would like to ask you one question that I ask everybody, and you’ve kind of covered it a little bit with your answers already. But nevertheless, for the audience, I would love to ask you, you were somebody who made a leap from petroleum and into Web3. What would be your advice to somebody who’s perhaps in the same similar predicament and trying to make a decision about whether they really want to be a part of this Web3 revolution? What would be your advice or the, you know, top two things that you would like to say to them, so that they can start living on blockchain? And I think, I think, building your own skill set is critical.
You know, I’m one of these people that kind of is always looking for, and what am I going to learn next? And, and I moved from this sort of working in data science and AI and, and the open source nature of that world with the all the Python libraries and stuff like that, is how I found my way into the Web3 world. Because effectively, it’s kind of got a similar ethos, you know, people kind of publish stuff on GitHub, and there’s an active debate in a lot of these forums about how things work and should function. That collaborative environment in the data science world and the AI world exists in the Web3 world.
So it’s kind of about just sort of jumping in and trying to start learning, because through learning, you meet people. And as you meet people, you begin to talk about collaborations. And these collaborations come projects that often become very successful.
So yeah, just just kind of meet people, reach out to people. And overall, I find that a lot of the people in the Web3 world are really, really approachable. You know, even some of the big guys that run the massive funds and have lots and lots of money.
And you know, you can just send them a message and they will reply, you know, these are people. So they might not be able to offer funding because of because, you know, you might not be able to convince them that your project’s worth it. But they’re they’re still great people to speak to.
Yeah, absolutely. People are very open in this space, I think, because the ecosystem is small, perhaps because, you know, as an industry, we are still in its infancy. I do think that this is something that I give as a suggestion to builders and entrepreneurs as well, that, you know, just reach out and in all probability, you’ll hear back from them.
And I have reached out to folks who were like, you know, building huge platforms and that are doing really well. When we had just started off and several years ago and everybody kind of gets back to you and they will give you, as you said, if not capital, they will give you at least a response. So, you know, you can move forward.
Yeah, definitely. OK, thank you so much, Alan, for taking out the time to speak to me today. This has been such a No, thanks for spending the time to talk to me.
It’s been really interesting. It’s been nice to cover a real range of topics. It’s good.
I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Alan, once again. Please take care.
Have a good one. You too. Bye.