Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Josh. Josh is working on IRYS currently.
He is the founder and CEO of IRYS. IRYS is a layer 1 solution. The idea behind IRYS is to create a scalable solution to overcome the limitations of traditional and existing decentralized infrastructure.
He had earlier founded Bundler as well which was a layer 2 solution built on top of Arweave. So they have managed to scale Bundler to quite an extent and now he is working on IRYS. He has seen a great initial traction with over 200 odd projects that were on Bundler and now similar traction on IRYS as well.
They’ve been able to encourage developers to build on it and IRYS does come with its very different set of USPs. So this is a very good conversation if you are really looking to build in the deep end or just the decentralized infrastructure play. And if you are interested in how real-time data manipulation can be stored in an effective manner, how does the TPS become better by tweaking on the existing solutions at hand.
I think very interesting conversation all in all. Very insightful, a little technical but overall brilliant insights. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this.
Let’s deep dive right in. Hi Josh, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? I’m doing well and thank you again for having me.
Excited to chat. Yep, likewise. The pleasure is all mine.
So for our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself and your career path, how you landed in Web3? Yeah, of course. So in terms of my career path, it was definitely very light but my background is I got into crypto now early 2020, so about four and a half years ago. And at the time I was studying computer science, so I’m born and raised in London.
And I was studying at a university just kind of local to London and discovered crypto fairly organically and started to kind of delve very heavily into the tech side mostly more than the financial side. I’ve been working very closely on like traditional centralized databases and blockchains are these kind of very similar foundations, similar to databases. And I kind of discovered Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
And I started building a bunch of smart contracts, kind of projects on Ethereum and then eventually discovered the data chain space, which is kind of the Arweaves, the Filecoins, the Chia, SIA, etc. chains back in kind of late 2020. And that’s when I kind of really got the inspiration to build IRYS.
Okay. So you had, like you said, it was quite organic for you, like coming into Web3 from Bundler to IRYS. It’s been quite a journey.
But can you tell us a little about Bundler as well as IRYS and then perhaps your motivation for transitioning from one to the other? And what kind of inspired you in the market that kind of made you take that leap and start IRYS? Yeah, that’s a great question. So I guess starting off kind of towards late 2020, when I discovered a lot of these data chains, the original reason I really fell in love with this side of the space is I fundamentally believed in two end games that these networks enabled. One was kind of more philosophical and tied to the messaging that you see today, which is kind of this idea that whichever data chain wins would become some kind of source of truth or way to essentially secure humanity’s most important information.
And then over time, I built this kind of second view of what a potential endgame would be, that these data chains would essentially act as a foundation for these kind of more kind of on-chain web services. And I always looked at Web3 more globally, and I saw that a lot of these applications were focused towards building the new financial rails. And the question for me was always, how do we actually bring the rest of the web on-chain? Which is how do we actually bring kind of the traditional web services on-chain? And for me, data chains and data was the foundation for a lot of these services.
So I saw the opportunity to essentially build towards that vision. So tying to what you said, I initially started what IRYSh used to be called, which is Bundler, back in April time 2021 within the Arweave ecosystem. So Arweave is a permanent data chain.
The idea is that you pay once and your data is stored forever. And one of the core problems that I saw is kind of one, I believed in the vision, but fundamentally saw that Arweave didn’t scale. It could only do eight TPS, which is like uploading to a, it’s like everyone has a shared Google drive and only eight people can upload a file per second, essentially.
So it’s not a very high throughput chain. So the goal for me was how do I actually make this one, hyperscalable, and then two, how do I make this easy to use for developers as well? Because lowering that friction is really one of the key ways that you create adoption for technologies more broadly. So we launched Bundler in kind of August time 2021 as an L2 or scaling solution for Arweave.
And then kind of on a more personal level, I dropped out of university a few months later to kind of focus on Bundler. And we took Arweave within the first two years from about 10,000 transactions a day to about 15 million a day. And then we onboarded about 300 plus projects and the, and we kind of became one, the primary way that people use Arweave as a protocol.
And we kind of scale and what the main way is that we use scaled Arweave, but also became one of the main ecosystem entry points as well. And our focus was not on just build something that scales, but also get the users to start using the scalable layer as well. So when we joined the Arweave ecosystem, we, there were perhaps five to 10 projects.
And then once we kind of eventually left, it was hundreds of projects. And that was kind of a, that was the big winner for us, but fast forwarding now to, to IRYS and why we’re doing this. So we announced IRYS as the first programmable data chain now about six weeks ago from, from recording or eight weeks ago, maybe from recording time.
And the vision for IRYS is very much the same, which is how do we actually bring more web services on chain? This is really just an expansion of that, of that vision on expansion and the product, product and protocol to really reach that vision more, more quickly. Because what I kind of noticed now when we made the decision to do this was the, the data chain space more broadly was skewing in the wrong direction. And I didn’t see the adoption curve, perhaps going the, the way that I thought it would go.
And I wanted to solve a lot of the problems that this kind of side of the space had while also getting closer to that original vision, which is how do we actually bring those web services on chain? How do we build the rails for that, for that kind of web? Hmm. Okay. So you basically saw a problem and you, you know, you are trying to create a scalable solution for that particular problem.
So your background in database architecture must’ve shaped the vision and development of IRYS and had quite an impact on your career trajectory as well. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you could abstract blockchains more broadly to kind of databases.
Yeah. Large databases, essentially. And I, I kind of did some open source work in the world of SQL databases mostly.
So I didn’t touch other forms of databases, but there’s definitely a lot of, at least when you’re engineering these kinds of systems, there’s a lot of performance improvements that you can, you can, you can take from databases. And generally that helped a lot when we were scaling our weave, because a lot of it was solving these kind of very kind of analogous problems to the ones you see in the database world as well. Because the way to think about databases is you’re essentially scaling both storage and compute.
That’s kind of the two parts of a database. And scaling a blockchain is like broadly doing that as well. If you wanted to, you could abstract it to essentially scaling storage and compute.
Right. Absolutely. Now, can you explain perhaps in, in simple terms, what IRYS is and what sets it apart from say other layer one solutions out here today, apart from obviously creating a scalable, sustainable blockchain solution where, mass adoption can happen.
What really sets it apart? Yeah, that’s a good question. So we, as I said, we launched IRYS recently as the first programmable data chain. And really to kind of break that down into simpler terms, a data chain is just a chain that is, or a blockchain that is optimized to store data.
So in the kind of the first generation of blockchains, you could store max over a few years, kind of terabytes, a small number of terabytes. And with data chains, the idea is how do you actually bring 10 or 10 orders of magnitude, more data on chain? How do we bring kind of the world’s data on chain, which is a much larger scale than we’ve, than we’ve ever seen before. And the programmable part is really where we, where we kind of differ from the rest of crypto, which is, okay, we have this chain now where you can store tons of data and that’s something that Filecoin achieved.
But how do we actually make that data useful? How do we make it programmable and how do we make it kind of this liquid asset? Similar to how Ethereum essentially made something like Bitcoin programmable and it led to this kind of campaign explosion, for lack of a better word, of kind of DeFi, ICOs and meme coins. We are essentially doing the same to the data chain and essentially making data programmable and liquid. And we’re expecting kind of a similar explosion in the kind of ecosystem and applications that you can build on IRYS.
Okay. So this is programmable data, like you mentioned. So one way, obviously that you guys are say different from say a Filecoin is that this data can be actually made executionable in some way.
Is my understanding correct? Yeah. So at a more kind of technical level, without going too deep, I always imagine IRYS as a cake with two layers, with the bottom layer, essentially being this data layer where you can store any, any amount of data on chain, but both temporary and permanent. So Filecoin essentially enables you to do this kind of temporary data, enables you to do permanent data.
We essentially enable you to do both. And then we have the second layer of the cake above is IRYS’ VM or its execution layer, where you can do all of the traditional kind of DeFi and token related kind of smart contract logic, but also read and write from that data layer as well. So you’re actually allowing you to interact with this kind of large scale data layer.
Okay. Yeah. That’s, that’s very interesting.
And so you would be perhaps the first of, of a kind, right? For, for somebody who’s doing something like this or trying to build a protocol on this particular premise. Yeah. So we’re definitely the first programmable data chain because when we, when we kind of, to qualify that as well, we’re the first data chain to enable programmability on the actual data itself.
Whereas in the world of kind of, let’s say Filecoin, which has its own VM, it’s really just around making these, what are known as storage deals programmable, which is that, you know, I’m storing some data for a period of time. I can kind of, I can program these deals, but it doesn’t enable you to compute on that data within a smart contract or any way, or enable you to actually utilize that data in any way. And that’s where we see the real kind of massive explosion of applications to be built once you enable that programmability.
Yeah. So just so that our listeners have a little more context, you know, because you’re combining data storage and execution within a single chain, how does this create new opportunities for say developers that weren’t possible with previous models? Can you give some use case examples that, that’ll help people, I think, visualize this a little better. Yeah.
So I can talk about some projects that are within our ecosystem and also some other ideas that I have as well. So one way that I kind of demonstrate what this unlocks is that essentially enables different execution orders that exist today, which is, let’s say you have some kind of DeFi protocol. Well, now what you can do is you can dump large amounts of like Oracle data and price data on chain onto IRYS’ data layer, which is, let’s say it’s a terabyte of data for a fraction of the cost than you would on other chains.
And then you would be able to essentially define smart contract logic and other kind of DeFi primitives, trading primitives based on that data. So you would be able to pull in that Oracle information that’s been stored in the data layer, and you’d be able to kind of compute on that in some way and define DeFi rules, et cetera, et cetera. And the core unlock there is you’re essentially enabling applications to store data for a fraction of the price, but also you still use that within smart contracts.
So it’s almost kind of reducing the cost of state within these kind of smart contracts as well. So that’s kind of one interesting use case. I think kind of diverse a little bit and talking about what I mean by programmable and liquid data is there’s a project within our ecosystem that’s essentially doing licensing and monetizing of data.
And the idea is how can you have a single layer, single kind of stack where you can both have the data live on chain, define all of its monetization rules and enforce those monetization rules all within smart contracts. And that’s, again, something that’s unlocked uniquely by IRYS. So you can essentially, and where does this apply? Well, you have now with the explosion of AI, you have large datasets, which needs to be monetized and sold to people.
And this is kind of where those kinds of projects and those kinds of customers can benefit from having kind of these efficient on-chain rails. Okay. These are very interesting examples.
And I think this kind of opens up an entirely new category of decentralized apps that perhaps developers can create very innovative. Yeah. This is kind of why I relate it back to this kind of Ethereum changing how you use blockchains by adding programmability.
I’m very kind of, for lack of a better word, bullish on what an ecosystem is going to produce in the next year or so just because of some of the unlocks that we’re creating. So yeah. Yes.
That’s very interesting. So what kind of challenges did you face in designing IRYS’ multi-ledger system and how does that ensure both temporary and permanent data storage efficiency? What were the challenges? Can you also shed a little light on the multi-ledger system so that our listeners have a little more context? Yeah. So our multi-ledger system is the way that we enable you to store.
It enables really two things. One is more of a technical nuance point, but first of all, to define what a ledger is, a ledger is something that essentially stores information in an immutable way. And each ledger represents data that’s being stored for a specific term.
So you have one ledger that essentially stores data permanently. So you pay one time and your data will be around at 100, 200 years time. And then there’ll be another ledger, which is only storing data for five days.
And we can add any number of ledgers such that you can have these different terms of storage essentially. And what are the two things this unlocks? One is more functional, which is that now you can store data for any number of days, years, et cetera. And this chain essentially manages the incentives and the economics for you.
And it does the magic for you such that if you come back in a year’s time, your data is still there. The second and more technical nuance point is by having a multi-ledger system, you actually enable verifiability, which is where other data chains have lacked up to now. So if you look at something like RWE today, although it provides some economic guarantees that your data will stay around, it provides minimal economic guarantee that your data or it provides actually no kind of cryptographic guarantee that your data actually gets on chain or that it stays on chain.
You can’t monitor that. So the idea behind a data chain is it should provide users the guarantees that it should keep its promise of keeping data around. And by having this multi-ledger system, it essentially enables verifiability.
It says, okay, now if a user says, is my data still stored? It can essentially prove to the users that the data is still existing on the network, which is important one, because think of it as a product keeping a promise to its users in its terms and conditions. It’s kind of sticking to the law that it’s set. And also it enables a new kind of set of applications because once you enable this verifiability, you can now use that information within smart contracts and say, okay, if XYZ is stored, perform this transfer or perform this trade, et cetera.
So you can essentially define these if statements, these optionals on chain using that verifiability. So there are really kind of two core unlocks there. Hmm.
This is very interesting. So what are the kind of challenges that you face in designing something like this? Yeah. I mean the answer is multi-dimensional beyond just the difficulty of kind of writing the code and implementing this in a reliable way.
It’s obviously always difficult, but I think what you have to weigh whenever you’re building an L1 is hardware requirements, number of miners, and essentially setting reasonable limits such that things don’t get too crazy too quickly. And we had a requirement where we actually are trying to build this very permissionless network. So we want to enable there to be 10 miners, 100 miners, or even 10,000 miners or a million miners eventually.
So we needed something that really kind of scaled far into the future. And the main kind of problem there is how do you optimize the software that you’re writing such that it can handle that kind of scale. And we’ve been able to do that, but that’s definitely kind of the continuous battle that you have to fight when you’re building a L1 blockchain.
Yeah, that’s true. That is absolutely true. I think whenever you’re building a L1, those are kind of challenges that will always come to the forefront when you’re trying to build something scalable.
So you guys are also fully EVM compatible, which is obviously a very big advantage for developers. What are the kind of main benefits of this compatibility, especially in terms of scalability and data manipulation? Because you are building something which is very new, but there are certain parts which are familiar for the developers, which is a plus. But I would love to understand how do you view this and what are the kind of benefits that you see in terms of vis-a-vis this compatibility? Yeah.
So I follow the space of kind of VMs more broadly, and I find a lot of the narratives very interesting. And the cycles are very interesting, whether it’s SVMs, new VMs, et cetera. I think the reality is if you’re honest with yourself, EVM still has the most developers, it has the most tooling.
It’s still the easiest way to develop simply because it’s the most mature, which is why we made the decision to make it EVM compatible. What I also will say is that some people will push back and say that there are obviously performance issues with EVM. And what I’d broadly say is that there’s been billions of dollars, not billions, perhaps hundreds of millions, still a lot of money thrown at fixing the performance, whether you look at new applications, new protocols, such as Monad.
We have Megareth, sorry. We have RiseVM as well, RiseChain is another paralyzed EVM. And Reth and Paradigm is going to be working towards that.
So there are a bunch of teams with hundreds of millions of dollars of capital working towards these problems. So we’re generally very optimistic that from a performance standpoint, the EVM is going to improve exponentially over the next year or so. And the main focus for us is how do we actually get adoption? And the main benefit of the EVM is how do we actually get adoption as quickly as possible? And really the solution was adopt the EVM to some degree.
So what we essentially did is IRYSVM is EVM compatible, but it also enables this custom functionality, which allows you to plug into IRYS’ data layer as well. So it kind of takes the EVM and extends it further and attaches it to IRYS’ network and IRYS’ data layer. So yeah.
Okay. This is again, I think good for developers who are perhaps wanting to jump on the bandwagon and create on IRYS. Now talking a little about that, creating or building an L1 comes with its, obviously we’ve kind of talked about the different challenges that comes, but how did you guys manage to onboard or see the kind of traction that you’ve seen so far? How did you manage to get all of these developers excited about building on IRYS? Are there offline events or online initiatives that you guys have taken? Can you tell us a little about that? Yeah.
I mean, again, a very multidimensional problem to solve is how do you onboard people? So I think number one is have a good product. That’s the first part. If you have a bad product, it does make it, it’s not impossible, but it does make it much harder to essentially sell people on why you should build on these kinds of layers.
And the core focus for us is how do we make everything easy to use and performant? And that’s what we learned from our days building kind of Bundler as an L2 on our web, sorry, is that if you make, as I kind of said, the friction as low as possible, then you will easily onboard people. You don’t even need to speak to people. You’ll actually get a ton of inbound and people would just be able to integrate without having to, without you having to speak to them.
So I think number one is have a product on the protocol that’s very easy to use, scalable, et cetera. And then number two is really where it’s kind of more of a business initiative, right? Coming from the labs teams. And the main focus for us right now is how can we support those early stage teams? So right now we are close to bootstrapping a kind of accelerated incubator program where we essentially support teams from going from zero to one.
And what that means is, look, you have some cool idea. We want to support you. We will help you get fundraising.
We will help you launch this, whether it’s marketing support, go to market support, et cetera, creating your brand, doing some design work for you, et cetera. So I’d say we really go beyond, I would say confidently 99.9% of L1s today in the support that we provide and we’re exceedingly hands-on. So builders don’t just get the benefit of building on something that is new and scalable, et cetera, and good to use, but also working with a team that is what really is actually working with you and trying to get you to the next stage that you want to get to.
So yeah, we have several teams now building on top of us and yeah, we’re very excited to kind of talk through or share these as they launch over time. Yeah, I think it’s a consistent work in progress. You have to keep putting in the effort to nurture that community and make sure that you are holding their hand perhaps while they are building on your L1.
So you guys have been able to crack that. Can you tell us a little again about the kind of traction you mentioned that you’d onboarded like 200 odd projects? Yeah. So on the L2 for Arweave side, we onboarded over 300 projects.
We did 2 billion transactions and we were doing 15 million peak transactions per day. We only started onboarding people to the new chain now a couple of months ago, but we’re only doing about 500 or 300 to 500,000 transactions a day. And we’re working with kind of over, I’d say 20 projects at this point.
Some of them are just using us to store data. And then we have like several early stage teams that are actually building whole protocols on IRYS as well. So you’ll start to see a kind of a combination of those that I’ll be talking about more publicly where some are just again, storing data and some are actually building whole protocols and using kind of IRYS VM as the core kind of primitive in their stack.
Okay. Wonderful. So can you tell us a little more about how IRYS leverages Merkle inclusion proofs of real-time data manipulation and how this impacts the performance of any dApp that is being created in IRYS? Yeah.
So there’s a story to be told there. So one of the crux or one of the big problems that you need to solve when you’re building a data is how do you prove to the user that you are actually storing data? Because that’s really the crux of it, right? It’s like you want to come back in. So let’s say you’re storing some data permanently.
You want to come back in a hundred years time and say, my data is definitely still being retained and stored by the network. And the question is how do you achieve that? There have been two approaches thus far, really. There’s one that is let’s look at Filecoin.
So essentially uses zero knowledge proofs, which is highly verifiable, but the drawback there is that it’s exceedingly expensive. So the side effect there is that becoming a miner on something like Filecoin is exceedingly expensive because you need a large amounts of GPUs, which is the core hardware required to create ZK proofs. And then the secondary kind of downstream effect of using ZK is that it makes the data, for lack of a better word, useless because you aren’t able to retrieve or use that data in any way.
And the technical reason is that you need to go through this very heavy decoding process that takes hours. And the main problem there is that people don’t want to wait hours to use that data. They want to be able to store it and then use that within their applications in some way and allow it to be composable within applications.
And that also means that you can’t do things within smart contracts as well, because smart contracts require some degree of low latency. And that’s something that Filecoin didn’t enable, can’t enable. And then you look at something like Arweave where the guarantees that they essentially don’t use any form of kind of strong proof system that allows the users to verify things.
So they don’t use ZK and they don’t essentially use any specific kind of way to prove things or track things. So it’s very hard to prove to users that the network is still retaining data. So I just kind of saw this over the last kind of two years and knew that this is one of the big problems that we need to solve because we wanted to essentially make the data kind of performant and easy to use.
And also when I say liquid, it needs to kind of be able to flow. Data needs to be used and not just stored by the protocol, but also used within applications that have stored the data as well. So the way that we essentially did that is a combination of one, moving actually away from ZK, which is kind of very reverse to the narrative that you’re hearing today because ZK is too expensive for data chains.
And then two is using this kind of Merkle inclusion proof approach plus staking, which essentially creates this accountability layer. And the idea there is, are you able to say that XYZ person who is staking and running a miner is storing ABC data? And that’s the guarantee that you provide to users.
Is someone on the network actually storing data? So that was kind of the core unlock for us.
Right. This is very interesting. Obviously, we’ve gone a little technical, but I think I asked this primarily so that developers would understand how IRYS is basically creating, you know, an innovative platform where their dApps would be scalable and it’ll be like sustainable growth.
And I think this way of storing real-time data manipulation, it only affects a dApp’s performance in a positive way. So now I want to kind of touch upon, because we’ve already talked a little about the real-world application and the use cases, but I would think that this is something that would perhaps help immensely with decentralized identity, social fi, and AI as well. What is your take here? Do you agree? Yeah, so the answer is yes.
Those spaces are very, again, multidimensional and they kind of differ from protocol to protocol. But I think a common theme across, let’s say, identity, AI, and social actually is this idea of provenance. And to really define that is to say provenance is essentially knowing who is creating some kind of content, when did it happen, et cetera.
So let’s talk about AI. In the age of AI, where there’s a ton of deepfake and AI generated content online, we’re already at the point now where you don’t know if what you’re looking at is real or fake. Well, the idea behind the data chains, you can provide this cheap way to essentially store this kind of ledger record of whether content is created by a certain person or a certain bot, et cetera, et cetera.
And that applies more broadly to identity, where you’re tracking a bunch of changes to someone’s identity. You’re essentially tracking proofs of specific things pertaining to their entity. So there’s this need to essentially track and timestamp and categorize these kind of actions that are happening on the identity side.
And yeah, so that kind of plugs very, very, very deeply. I think double-clicking a little bit more onto the AI side, though, is definitely a place that we’re very focused on now, where there’s really a plethora of problems in the AI space. I think we are more focused on the data side of the AI space more broadly.
And this kind of stems into several different kind of subcategories, where some of it is just, okay, how do we provide these public verifiable models to people? Or it could be, we have a project within the ecosystem that’s essentially doing using IRS to store models and also monetize those models as well. So how can they essentially store these encrypted models on chain and then tokenize them and enable people to buy access to those models in some way and have all of those value flows on chain? So I think there’s a lot of interesting ways that programmable data chain and IRS can essentially plug into the AI space. Right.
I would imagine so. So in what ways do you perhaps see IRYS facilitating the development of deep ends? Because I think that this can be a very good use case as well. I think wherever there is a lot of data, I think I just would be fundamentally a better choice to make.
From my conversation, that is what I’ve gleaned off. But what is your take on the development of deep ends and how do you envision that particular sector growing, especially in the context where IRYS is active and developers can build on that as well? Yeah. So my view on deep end more broadly is that it’s probably one of the categories that I’m most bullish on because it’s one of the few areas within crypto where the actual revenue and fees that these protocols accrue is actually relatively high.
You see these early stage projects that are also currently valued at like sub 100 mil and also generating sometimes over seven figures of revenue, which is more than some of these models that exist. Right. Can you share some more examples of what you might have seen? Sure.
What I would have seen within deep end from… Yeah. So there are bust-in protocols. Helium is one that’s generating a lot more revenue now than it was now two years ago.
It’s essentially onboarding massive telecom companies essentially onto using something like Helium because they can provide this both wider coverage and also cheaper coverage for the areas where it’s too expensive for them or it’s not profitable for them to cover for wireless. There’s companies like Grass that is essentially incentivizing users to aggregate data online and scrape it online and create these curated datasets that Grass can then sell to hedge funds and to other companies as well. My understanding is they’re doing at least on the six-figure side.
So still pretty good revenue on the high six-figure side. Might be seven-figure now. I haven’t had an update from Grass in a while, but I could list 50… Not 50.
I could probably name off the top of my head 10 to 50 protocols that are fairly profitable within the deep end space, which is more than I can say in most other categories within crypto. Right. Okay.
Yeah. I think that I feel very bullish about this as well. Obviously, it wasn’t called deep end a few years back, but a lot of people have been trying to decentralize infrastructure in a big way.
And we are seeing very interesting platforms that are coming up and entrepreneurs are really building use cases where they’re seeing traction as well. I don’t think that was the case. Perhaps the technology was also a little rusty at that point where this kind of technology was not available and people were trying to do decentralized infrastructure with the existing tech and that obviously brought with it its own obstacles.
So yeah, I feel fairly bullish about decentralized infrastructure as well. And I’m glad that again, IRYS can help with that. And so now I want to again touch upon the developer experience in the ecosystem.
I know that we’ve talked about it a little bit, but are there grants that you’re giving out to incentivize developers to build on IRYS? What is the kind of documentation that is available for the developers or the support that they can expect? Is there like a specific group where they can join to just check things out? And would you like to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So I will confidently say that we give no grants. I am broadly very anti-grant.
I think generally grant giving leads to adverse selection within ecosystems. But we really compensate that with what I feel is actually far more kind of sustainable support. So as I was saying earlier, we support with taking very early stage companies, sometimes first time founders from zero to one where we help them create a deck.
We’ll help them get introductions to VCs. We’ll connect them with everyone that they need or understanding of how to essentially fundraise well. And that’s what we really support.
We really support helping teams fundraise. We help teams go to market. So that means how do you have an effective launch? How do you have effective branding? How do you tell an effective story? It’s a very kind of multi-dimensional.
Go-to-market is a very multi-dimensional thing, but we really help. We’re very hands-on in every single part of go-to-market. And yeah, so that’s kind of the breadth of our support.
There’s no kind of limit to what we support on. It’s just very much whatever our ecosystem needs, we really try to fill the gap. And sorry, to answer your question regarding where one should go, if you want to build an IRYS, you want to chat, many places to go.
You can go on the Discord. I think if you want to go super direct, my DMs are always open on X. So you can always reach out to me. But yeah, we’ve got a Telegram group that’s on the website.
So we’ve got the Discord server with a tech kind of subsection within it, if you want to chat there. And for any other documentations, it’s docs.IRYS.xyz. And you can read the documentation that we have. We’re actually going to be revamping our docs within the next few weeks.
So it’ll be even better within a month. Awesome. Awesome.
Awesome. I’m very sure to link that up in our description of the podcast as well, the particular episode, so that people have easy access. So as you continue to build out the IRYS ecosystem, what kind of partnerships and collaborations are you seeking to expand the platform’s reach and functionality? Yeah.
So in terms of partnerships, we are, I’d say broadly very focused on, I would say AI and then deep end and consumer in that order. But equally, we have people within our ecosystem who are doing a much wider array of things. But I would say broadly that those are the three categories that we’re very focused on.
So how can we essentially support whether it’s AI protocols, AI applications, have verifiable data, also supporting the incentive structures they have within the network, and then similarly kind of for deep end protocols as well. So yeah, we have a few teams within all those categories building an IRYS right now, and we’re continuing to kind of expand on that as well. We’re going to start being a little bit louder about some of the things that are being built on IRYS as well.
That’s wonderful to know. Are there any particular kind of niches that you’re looking to partner with or collaborate and this can be your place where you give them a shout out so that they can get in touch with you? I like this. I think that a lot of people, I think Aether, maybe I’ve messed up the pronunciation, is definitely someone we want to speak to.
We also have a lot of interest around actually a different initiative, but archiving chain data. So how can we archive a bunch of different ledger data? So any of the big L1s and L2s, that’s definitely something that we’re focused on as well. Awesome.
Awesome. Now, a little in macro, but okay, before that, can you tell me about the next big milestone that you guys are looking forward to for IRYS? Yeah. So there’s milestones.
There are two big ones, I think. One is going to public testnet and then the second is mainnet. So we’re targeting mainnet sometime next year.
I will leave it at that, but public testnet this year. And the goal with that is to start to really onboard people onto this public infrastructure that anyone can build on, release this first permissionless network where anyone can onboard without even having to speak to us. That’s the big milestone for us.
Okay. Okay. Awesome.
And all the best for all your endeavors there. But now I want to talk a little in macro. With the rapid evolution of Web3, what are the kinds of trends that you see and you feel personally that would really take the future of decentralized data storage and execution by storm? Yeah.
So I think in terms of the macro, I guess the macro within crypto more broadly, I think the macro there are three matters right now. There’s AI, I would say Deepin is there. And the third is meme coins.
I would say you could say consumer more broadly, but I would say that 90% of the consumer applications with a lot of adoption are practically meme coin related. So I think those are the three. We actually interestingly work with some meme coin platforms because a lot of them essentially have token metadata for all of the tokens and they essentially use us as the metadata store.
So random side note there, but yeah, we’re in this really interesting position because data is, and this kind of goes back to what I was saying with the original vision of bringing these web services on chain and why we are so focused on data chains, is because data is this thing that is the foundation for a lot of these categories, whether it’s AI, Deepin, even meme coins, there’s some data component and that’s kind of part of the stack that we’re very focused on essentially tackling as a team and as an ecosystem. So yeah, but yeah, the meme coin stuff going on is kind of funny. It feels like, so originally IRYS was very focused back in late 2021 and early 2022 when we were a bundler on NFT metadata and the meme coin hype now is very much reminds me of early days of NFTs, but it’s just kind of this far more liquid form.
I look forward to one of these meme coin communities launching an NFT collection. I think that would be cool. There’s probably some interesting ideas there and interesting ways you could tackle that, but yeah, it’s at least entertaining from a sideline.
True, true. That is absolutely true. It can be very entertaining from the sidelines as long as you’re not going bust.
It’s all fun and games. But now, Josh, we’re running out of time and I would love to understand from you, what is your personal philosophy or personal financial philosophy or just philosophy in general of staying and building in Web3? Financial philosophy, yeah. It’s as of after a few years now of both running a company within crypto and also managing my own finances within crypto, I say generally try to not lose and try to not lose is actually the main thing, which also means capping, don’t gamble.
I generally am not a big believer in the gambling side of things. It’s over 75% of people lose. So I think that’s the key success for both running a startup and also within crypto is manage your runway effectively, just don’t die.
It’s kind of the meme, but I think that’s even more true in crypto where you have this very cyclical sector where every few years this industry dies and it comes back to life again and you essentially just need to be able to weather that storm. And that comes down to just not doing anything too stupid. That’s the main thing that I’ve learned from just watching friends kind of manage their own businesses over time.
Yeah, not doing anything stupid. I think that kind of summarizes what people do in Web3. But yeah, I think that is a decent advice.
Now to sort of wrap up, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you this particular question. There’s something I ask everybody who comes on the show. There are folks who still look at Web3 with a lot of skepticism and obviously you’ve been building in Web3 for some time, for four, five odd years, nearly half a decade now.
So what would be your advice for them to truly start living on blockchain? Yeah, I mean, the best way to do it is to get engulfed in it. I think people underestimate how, even now, I don’t know half of the things that’s happening in crypto and I’m very deep into the space. And I just think there’s an infinite amount of things that you can do within crypto.
And the real edge you can have is just knowing more than the average individual. That in itself will lead you to just tons of opportunities more broadly. So I’d say that’s the number one thing that I continually remind myself of.
Yeah, I think that is good advice. Knowing more can put you ahead of the curve, I think. Just having that information can give you an edge vis-a-vis the decisions you’re taking and just a space here.
So that is as good a note as any. To close this particular episode, Josh, this has been a wonderful conversation. All the best with what you’re doing with IRYS.
Any parting words before we wrap this up? Nothing specific. Other than if anyone wants to chat about IRYS, of course, reach out to me. If you want to build an IRYS again, feel free to reach out.
You can look at the docs. If I’m too scary and you don’t want to talk to me, that’s also good. And of course, join our community Discord.
And thank you for having me as well. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today.