Hi, Anantha. Thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? I’m good.
How are you, Tarusha? I’m doing wonderful. Thank you so much for asking. So, you know, for our listeners, they would love to know a little about you and your background and how you got into Web3.
Can you tell us a little about that? Sure. My background, I was initially part of the initial team which built Oracle. So I go a long way back and initially worked with databases and building databases and stuff like that.
Then I was with Anderson Consulting, managing how to use technology and how to use technology effectively to help businesses. And there was a partner with Anderson for a long time and moved on to Accenture. And got started on this journey around 2017.
And the primary purpose was to really see how you can use this technology to add value to businesses, enterprises and users alike. That’s the genesis of my interaction in 2017. So the excitement was around the ability to provide people with the ownership and control of their technology in a way which is decentralized.
So the ability for the organization to customize their experiences the way they want for their users. And finally, even governments and regulators to manage and provide services to individuals and customers in a personalized fashion. That’s what got me looking to this technology.
Awesome. So you go a long way back and you worked through this throughout the spectrum in web2 as well as web3. So what kind of drew you more towards web3? Like you’ve already mentioned how you want the users to have that prerogative.
Can you elaborate a little more on this? Because this is something that I find very interesting. How do people take that leap from the place of web2? There’s everything known and there’s always the discourse is already there and to web3 which is a pretty much a very new space. Yeah, so the way I looked at it, at least was just to go back and look at how technologies work.
So if you look at how technology is all early on, it was used more like an utility or an automation tool. In the 1950s and 60s, you had technology printing stuff. It was more like an programmable calculator.
So it allowed you to print payrolls. It was more a very accounting, automation, efficiency centric model. So computers were standalone at that time, if you want to think of those mainframe databases, even before databases, mostly individual machines and accounts and there was no recognition of a customer or a participant in that setup.
Then in 1970s, around that time, you have this whole idea of TCP IP, which came in. So what that did was really to have computers were able to talk to each other. Two computers were able to talk to each other.
And that opened up a lot of new capabilities. So once you think of it in a very simple way, if Tarosha was in one computer as one account, doing a payroll in a payroll application, and you were in a different machine and a different IRP application previously, they can talk to each other, the program couldn’t recognize you on both the machines. Now the TCP IP now, you could be recognized on both the machines.
So the idea of a customer and network of computers came in. And that’s where the whole idea of networking and web started. So the ability for computers to talk to each other.
So that opened up a lot of customer centric applications, because account centric and it became customer centric. So what it did was now we were able to support newer and newer capabilities, which supported supported new things, which moved away from just automation efficiency, right? We started communicating through computers. So it was getting closer and closer to our lives.
So if you think of it, web one and web two, computers were becoming more of a supporting artist, not an automation artist. So it’s getting more and more and closer to your life. And fast forward to maybe the last 10 years or so, and maybe much faster in the last five years, computers have become much more closer to our lives, we no longer connect by technology, we operate with the technology.
So this whole notion of we eat by technology, we read by technology. So you’re getting to a model where computers are no longer supporting artists, they’re becoming a main artist in our life, digital is becoming the way we live our lives. So this is what intrigued me.
So the use of technology has changed, but the technology is not changed. So when it gets closer and closer to a human being, primary need is personalization, privacy and control. And if you look at it, in the early stages, customers were not even recognized.
In the next maybe 30-50 years in web one and web two, customers were recognized, but still the control is with the enterprise or the platform. And now you’re doing more intimate and personal and those are things you live your life through technology. So the control needs to be with the individual and that’s where web three is taking us to.
That’s the reason web three is becoming very relevant. Absolutely. I think it’s become very imperative and a lot more people are talking about this now, I think as against, you know, perhaps like, even five years earlier, a lot more people are talking about how users should have control over their data and what is exactly going to stay online.
And that’s an interesting turn. I think that is just how technology is evolving. And I think it’s a very important place where, you know, a lot more user interest is also forming, not just builder interest.
Yeah, because the use of technology has changed. And so I need to be able to use the technology in my everyday life, and not just as an offline tool that I was using before. And what we call it as in 2017, I coined this word called a digitally interacting world.
So we’re moving to this digitally interacting model. And so different people’s different preferences are different, and different situational preferences are different. That’s how we live our lives, right? The way you talk in a community forum is not the same way you would talk in a coffee shop, it’s not the same thing that you talk in a personal room.
So it’s all very different. And so human beings operate in a very context aware and situational manner and technology gets closer to how we live our lives. Absolutely.
You kind of hit the nail on the head, I think, and that kind of brings me to and I would love to know more about server labs, and you know, my own internet protocol that you guys are building, because I thought that was very, very interesting. And obviously, for our listeners, I would love to give them some context here, it seemed to be addressing the inefficiencies, perhaps in the current protocols. That is something very interesting.
So could you elaborate a little more on that? Yeah, very heavily. I think today’s web3 protocols, if you want to think of it, it started with Bitcoin. And even before that, right, we had some peer-to-peer systems like Napster.
And so this peer-to-peer system where you don’t have a centralized controller, all this web3 revolution started, right? So previously, for client server, you’re on it. So this peer-to-peer networking is where everything started. And so we have made a lot of progress.
So the infrastructure is kind of decentralized now. But then the problem is, it’s a very system-centric model, right? So although the network is peer-to-peer, your interactions and your data and your trust models are still systemic and non-personal. So you look at, so the example I typically give is the way you, the amount of trust and how you want the network to behave and pay for when you want to drink a cup of coffee at Starbucks is very different than when you want to interact and buy a house in, say, Beverly Hills, right? The kind of trust requirements, the kind of experience, the kind of time delay that you can take is very different, right? So today’s networks don’t do that.
What they do is they’re very systemic. They’re not participant-centric. So what we mean by that is they don’t allow foundation differentiation.
It’s not just about user ownership and control. It’s about foundation differentiation based on context, on what level of trust I want, where do I want to store my data, who all need to be part of my interaction to finalize the value that’s being transferred. Those kinds of decisions are completely systemic today in the three systems at server labs and in my own internet.
The protocol is trying to make it very participant and user-centric. So the first time kind of in the last 50 years, we kind of built a model where the competition itself is very participant-centric. So that allows you to kind of manage the environment the way you want.
Today, probably even in web 3, while the infrastructure has been decentralized, still these systems control you. The network is a controlling entity. With Moai, we are trying to make a network an enabling entity.
What I mean by that is it enables the user as opposed to controlling the user. So another example that you can think of is the way you want to deal with your vacation photographs, maybe very different than the way you may want to deal with your legal documents. So today, that level of control doesn’t have either for the developer or for the end user.
Obviously, it’s all going to be driven by developers, but then they don’t have the freedom to make the network behave the way they want. And so what we have done is we have fundamentally changed, probably this is the last transformation that needed to happen in the digital world, fundamentally changed the competition to be centered around the individual. So if you want to think of it today in all of competition, you are just an identity.
What identify in the network. So you are just an attribute of the competition. So that is what we have done is the idea of contextual compute.
And we have redefined how competition works, whereas you are understood by the network. So you are able to enable the competition and not just an identity of the competition. So everything becomes participant centric, because everything is participant centric, your competition is participant centric, your trust management is participant centric, your infrastructure is participant centric.
So it kind of enables the true human-like interaction that you can perform in today’s world. So the digital interaction, that’s what would be required is our thesis. And the MOI is based on this whole idea of contextual compute.
And we have built a new model called interaction state machines, which primarily drives around peer-to-peer interactions, and allows user ownership and control. So it is a very participant centric model, as opposed to a system centric model. Okay, so just for our listeners, and for me to understand a little better, how is that different from the validator nodes that usually protocols set up? Very good question.
So obviously, you need validators in our network too. So let us understand, why do we need these validators? Maybe then it becomes a little bit easier to explain this. So when you do a peer-to-peer transfer, assume you and I do a value transfer, that’s what happens.
If both of us do this transfer, and nobody else needs to recognize this value, we both can write that in your notebooks and go home. We still connect and talk, we don’t need anybody else to, we don’t need anything more to be done. The reason why you need validators is because you’re trying to recognize that value in the network, or somebody else can refer that value and do another transaction, if you want to make a fiddle.
So to do that, then you and I alone should not be able to agree, not agree on the value, we both agree on the value, but a lot of other people need to write it so that other people, it’s like you do a transaction and there are people who come as signatories, witnesses who come and sign. So you want to think of the validators, it’s the value transfer happening between two participants, but then there are other people who really recognize that value, so that that value becomes a benchmark for future transactions. That’s why you need validators.
The question is, we also have validators, the question is, who in the network is to be part of your interaction so that this value can be recognized by the entire network and their community? And that’s the question. Today’s network, what they do is Web3 networks is the entire network needs to be part of every interaction. And that’s a large problem.
So if you want to think of it, if you and I are doing a transaction, a majority of the validators in the network need to witness that, so that they can write it in all their notebooks, so that the verifiability for future use is available. That’s the model. Now that becomes an albatross around the neck when the number of nodes go up.
If you have 50, they do two-thirds, two-thirds of 100 is 66 nodes, but two-thirds of million is lot more. So the amount of people who need to witness and participate in this, the validators in this value recognition becomes a problem as the network grows in size. But the whole idea of Web3 was to make an internet as more and more people part of it, that’s where the security comes.
So it becomes a conundrum. So today what has happened is people have made the network smaller, they’ve created layer 2s and layer 3s, roll up chains, where the number of people who decide on this validation or number of validators to solve this problem. So who decides this is a very tricky problem and that’s what affects scalability and security in the Web3 network.
That’s been the challenge, that is the lacuna and that’s the problem that you’re facing today as more and more transactions come in. And what we have done is we have taken a completely different take, we have created this idea of participant-centric networking. So you have a bunch of validators who are like your own notary public and I have my own notary public in the network and we do it in a very effective way.
But then they’re all validators like any other validators, so a bunch of validators come with you, a bunch of validators come with me, not the entire network. So we are able to achieve and these validators keep changing, so we make sure it’s random, it is not gamed and all that good stuff. So what happens is you get the impact of the entire million node network on each interaction but not the entire network of validators need to come in.
So this is what we call as a context. So every participant based on their behavior because you are executing a lot of transactions, I’ve got a bunch of validators associated with them and I have a bunch of validators associated with me and they come together and finalize. So this way I’m able to do concurrent finalities, so it becomes truly peer-to-peer when you and I are doing a transaction.
Susan and Alina can do a transaction at the same time because the idea of validators is centered around the participant and not on the network. So the same set of validators, I hope the idea of validators is the same but how do you associate it is where the difference is. Today’s networks, it is very network centric, entire network needs to validate it.
In our case, it is very participant centric. So you can think of each participant having their own network and those networks come together dynamically to finalize the value. So basically think of like your network behaves a little like a lever perhaps, you know, pushing off the like a lid of a pot instead of perhaps using a screwdriver.
Like that’s a weird analogy but that’s how I’m thinking of it. Yeah, the way to think of it is concurrent, right? So today’s problem is it’s so much network centric that the entire network needs to be part of every interaction. So the only thing you can do is what they do is they pack so many interactions into a block but then you can only pack so much, right? It is very difficult.
Whereas what we have done is we have split the network itself intelligently so many interactions can concurrently happen at a peer-to-peer level. So because every interaction is independent, now you can think of the points I made before, right? You can go and customize the interaction the way you want, you can choose where you want to store because every interaction is independent whereas because it’s very participant centric. Whereas in today’s network, everybody it’s one size fits all, right? So it’s a bunch, it’s a block which has got 100 interactions, all of them finalized, all of them needs to be verified by the majority of the network, whatever the majority means, right? So you’re not able to split it up and make sure that it can work concurrently.
So the way they’ve gone about technically and done this, you’ve got the short chains to bake the entire network but still it is systemic, it’s not participant centric. So it has got the same set of problems because you put on a lower chain but the lower chain can only go so far, right? Then people are already talking about L3s and N4s. So the complexity builds in.
So we have taken a completely different route and I’ve said that everything is centered on the participants. So every participant has got their own set of validators which they don’t control, it is the same set of, it’s from the same network but then with that assignment, it becomes very easy for us to manage this in a very user centric and participant centric fashion. So as the network grows, actually throughput and performance grows in our network.
Very counterintuitive, right? Whereas in today’s most of the network, system centric network, it will fall because that’s the way you have designed it. So the size of the network becomes an albatross around the neck of performance while the size of the network is important for security, right? So the idea of going to a web3 world was to have millions of nodes to provide security, there are so many people and that kind of becomes a problem because when the network grows, the size becomes a model like the performance. So you got a trade-off between performance and security whereas in our model, that trade-off doesn’t exist.
Right. So this is very interesting and it sounds very path-breaking. How is it different from zero-knowledge proof? Like I understand like a bunch of validators and there are individuals who have validators and it’s not the entire network that is getting in sync.
But again, zero-knowledge proof is obviously it’s not the same but it’s a little similar, right? The entire network is not. So let me, very good question. So in our case, the entire network syncs.
It’s not that it doesn’t sync, the power of the entire network available in every interaction in a very smart way, right? If you want to think of it, it’s a basic stochastic process. So it’s like your exit polls in an election, okay? So let me, it’s not opinion polls, exit polls which are fairly verifiable, okay? So it’s a fairly well researched mathematical idea. So the entire network gets the final data, the entire network’s entropy or the, when you say network, it is just the entropy of the network, right? So the randomness of the network needs to be in every interaction.
We make sure that happens. So it’s happening. So it’s not a walled garden approach.
So that is when you go to a zero-knowledge, ZKP roll, ZK roll-ups or a short chain or a side chain, they’re walled gardens, short chains a little better, meaning the validators in the lower networks have got not, have no influence on the higher network, right? So they’re walled gardens, they’re layers. So for example, if I have a layer one network and I have a layer two ZK roll-up networks, the validators in layer one network have no influence in the finality other than verifiability of the layer two network’s final answers. So they’re walled gardens.
In our case, it’s one network, right? So it’s not a, it’s a one flat network. So it’s a foundationally a better model because in a ZK roll-up model, while the final answer can be verified, the process of getting to the final answer can never be verified because the validators in the higher order network will never be part of the roll-ups in the lower network. I hope I’m making my point.
So let me give another example. In New York, in Port Authority, there are bus stations. You’ve seen them, they’re bus based, right? A lot of buses come in and park.
And there are many bus based like that. So you can think of the bus spaces as roll-ups, okay? And the bus station as the main net. Now, obviously, when the bus comes in, when the bus people comes in, when the station can verify the trip sheet and figure out how many people traveled in the bus and how many tickets were issued, so which are like the final roll advances.
But the conductor in the bus station or the bus will never be able to verify how the bus behaved on its journey, right? Whether there was the process of whether they left off some people, whether they stopped in all stations. So the whole idea of the process by which you got to the final answer can never be verified. Only the final answer can be verified, which is a very, very weak model, right? This is not the promise of web 3. The promise of web 3 is, hey, I not only verify the answer, I also make sure your process is democratic and decentralized, right? So it’s a wall garden approach.
In our case, that’s not the case. So if you have million nodes, the number of anybody can be part of any interaction. So you can, you have potential opportunity to be, to verify that, right? So, so foundationally… The foundation is so strong that this opportunity to scale is higher with your network, correct? Correct.
So it’s scale is very high, but we don’t have to compromise on the security. Today, it can scale while maintaining security. So today, if you go to the lower chain, the lower chains are wall gardens.
So they have 100 nodes, 200 nodes. And obviously, the consensus mechanisms have got their own limitations. You cannot scale beyond a certain point.
That is just… And so how do you do that? Yeah, that’s just a mathematical problem, right? It was a quadratic problem. After a certain number of communications, number becomes very large. And so how do you do it? And so we are very flat network like today’s internet is what MOI is.
Whereas the end state that we are envisioning is millions of nodes like today’s internet, but people transferring value in that network. So today’s internet does it very well, but it transfers only information, it doesn’t transfer value, right? You can send an email, but you can’t send money in today’s internet. And so what MOI is trying to do is make it as democratic to participate as it is in today’s network, which is like anybody can come in and become a validator.
And it is flat, you can be part of any interaction, you’re not a wall garden, you don’t have to be in a layer 2 or layer 3 chain. And so it acts like today’s internet, but for value transfers in a very like a flat million node network. Plus, it eliminates the centralization problems of today’s internet around the platforms by making the whole thing peer-to-peer.
So if you want to think of it, it’s today’s internet like structure on which you’re able to do value transfers without the centralization challenges that we have today. So it’s a peer-to-peer global value network is what we call it. Brilliant.
So, you know, this particular MOI or the network protocol is testnet live, like can users go and test it out? Is there a sandbox? Oh, yeah. So we had our very large Babylon testnet launch happened last month. On the 22nd of June, so people can go check it out.
It’s very interesting. People can go build on top of that as we speak. There will be actually three or four major applications being built up.
There is one infrastructure adaptive data management application called Moibit, which is very interesting, which is built on top of this. We have built in digital asset management platform called Mint Valley, which has been built on top of this. So it’s a very differentiated take.
It’s very user-centric because we are user-centric and participant-centric and peer-to-peer, meaning not only does it make it humanized and personalized, but also solves some of the engineering challenges that we have today. But the goal is not just to solve the engineering challenges. The goal is to really create a network where it is personalized and user-owned and controls the environment.
And the offshoot of that is it solves some of the scalability and security problems that we have. Awesome. Because this is an entirely new protocol and you’ve mentioned about these exciting applications being built, how are you incentivizing more developers to build on your protocol and obviously to test out the testnet? So we have an incentive, the testnet test today is not incentivized.
So actually, I don’t know about our protocol, we have allocated about 10% of the tokens only for the community of developers and the validators. So 10% is for the people to try it out, 10% of the entire token pool. So it’s a very incentivized testnet.
So people can go and test and try on top of that. And as they do that, they get incentivized. So that’s one benefit.
The other benefit for developers specifically is it’s a very low-code, no-code environment. What I mean by that is it’s not a very smart contract-centric model. We have a lot of protocol level capabilities.
So one of the largest problems for people getting into blockchain today is you need to be very careful when you write a smart contract so that there are no security vulnerabilities. So there is a large barrier to entry. So in our case, most of the digital assets are all at a protocol level.
So for example, if you build an application, there are application tokens and those application tokens get the same order of security like the protocol token. So to contrast this with something like maybe Ethereum today, in Ethereum, you have ETH as the network token, which is highly secure. It’s a protocol level token.
But many of the application tokens are available, are hacked, and they’re at the smart contract level. They don’t get the same security of protocol token. In our case, all the digital assets and application tokens are protocol tokens.
So there’s a high degree of security. And more importantly, many of the asset creation, token creation, token transfer, and all of that can be done using almost no code. Whereas in many of the other protocols, you have to write smart contracts for it.
For example, to create a token, mint a token, manage a token, you will have to write at least 150 lines of code in a protocol. So here, it is all built into the protocol itself. So that eliminates a lot of security challenges for early adopters and early developers.
And so they’re able to confidently build on top of the protocol. So that’s another, although it’s not a direct incentive, which allows a lot of people to get on and try. So they can actually do most of the asset management in any language that they want.
Today, they can do it in JavaScript, if they want to creation of the asset, and they don’t have to write smart contracts, they can write their code in JavaScript and do the asset management by making calls, which is very easy for developers. Okay, so this is like sounding more and more interesting as we talk more about what are the kind of like partnerships that you’re looking at in the web3 space to make MOI like the go-to protocol where developers are building? Yeah, so one is obviously we are working with some infrastructure providers to build support for validators. So our target is to have at least 10,000 validators by the end of the year.
And our goal is to have about 500,000 validators in about 24 months. So we want it to be a very large network. So there’s a lot of support that needs to happen for that.
So we’re partnering with quite a few infrastructure providers. And we are looking for other people who can come and help us do that. The other one is we are also a GDM where we work with schools and specifically colleges, college students who we choose, we go and partner with them.
We have a program called MOI Nation, which allows students to be part of this, we go create some knowledge sharing sessions. And basically the idea of contextual compute, which is the foundational idea here and our model is called interaction state machines. And on top of which MOIS has been built.
So we teach them those ideas. So there’s a lot of ground up work that we do. So there is enough people which we train.
So that’s the other program that we have. The other one that we have is we have another program called MOI Shakti, where we want to specifically help entrepreneurial women to come and try on this new technology and build web 3. So that’s another partnership that we’re working on. And we also are working with quite a lot of community creators, people who help build communities.
So I don’t want to name names, but we’re working with quite a few of them to help community, create communities, because without community, there’s nothing. So that’s going on as well. Awesome.
So right now, as you mentioned, the testnet is kind of light. So any user can perhaps, or developer can go on your website and take the test. Yeah, so there is, obviously, you can go register, there’s a process, you can become a validator.
So anybody with even a Raspberry Pi, right? So it’s a very, can become validator. It’s a very interesting model, you don’t need special purpose hardware. At this point, you don’t even have to stake anything.
So you can go become a validator. So I would highly recommend anybody to go become validator. It’s an incentivized testnet, and try it out and also collect some more tokens.
Awesome. That sounds wonderful. That sounds like a good opportunity.
Awesome, this is brilliant. Tell me a little about, okay, so this is something that I’ve been asking people of late, because you know, AI has become so big. You know, there’s a lot of noise, like there was a lot of noise about blockchain, a few years back, now it’s about AI.
How do you see these two technologies, you know, merging or perhaps working together? Do you see that happening at all? What is your view? Yeah, so if you look at my first paper, I wrote in 2017, I call this model as ICP, right? Intelligence, Communication and Trust. That’s where the digitally interacting world is going. So what is happening is the communication is going to happen around all these new devices that’s coming, right? You’re getting a lot of devices, every device is going to have a chip, they talk about cars being validators, the phones being validators, right? So every device is going to, so that’s the communication aspect.
So then you need a trusted layer on top of this, which manages the data and value, right? The intelligence can work only on a trusted layer of data. So the trusted layer is probably going to be blockchain, so it’s highly complementary. And then AI intelligence is going to sit on top of that.
So we call it as the ICT model, intelligence, communication and trust needs to come together. So blockchain becomes this trusted data management layer, because you’re going to work and develop intelligence from anonymous or non-human, a lot of non-human sources, right? Every device is going to transmit its data. So it’s all the more important in AI, which relies on this data, relies on a data from a layer, which is trusted and blockchain potentially is going to become that layer on which AI can work on.
Yeah, it’s like a take that I’ve heard from a lot of people and I feel I have a similar take, because AI is creating all kinds of content and all kinds of information and misinformation, blockchain would have a huge part to play. Absolutely, AI and blockchain go hand in hand, you need the data infrastructure for AI to work well. So actually we have a very interesting project that I’m writing a paper now, which is around using AI and blockchain to solve some of the problems around DeFi.
And so use in MOI, because all assets natively sit at the participant level, the assets never leave the participant and go to a smart contract, it always sits at the participant level. So we can use AI to do price discovery and the matching will happen through AI, but once the matching happens, the transfer directly happens in a peer-to-peer level, we call it a safe DeFi. It’s like today, if you look at something like Uniswap, which is a very good platform, but then the discovery or the order book is inside the smart contract, your asset needs to move in there and that creates all such problems.
So we are building a product which is called safe DeFi, where the assets primarily sit with the participant, never leaves the participant, but the order book is driven through AI. For example, you say that you want to trade thousand tokens of some token X and I’m willing for some price and I want to buy it at another price, that intelligence is managed through AI, but really you don’t have to pledge your tokens until you really trade in a peer-to-peer fashion. So that’s a very specific use case of AI and blockchain that we are bringing in to solve some of the problems in DeFi.
This is very fascinating and I feel that stuff or use cases like these basically make it even more encouraging for the end-user to perhaps look into it more seriously, because it’s solving their problem. Because when you transfer today, smart contracts are great, they have become the intermediary now. So our idea is to make the participant intermediary and have the code just help him do what he wants to do in a peer-to-peer fashion.
So that kind of takes the stress away from the developer because the assets always sit at the participant level and they focus on writing logic, which makes it kind of a little bit more easier on the security standpoint. Because frankly, some of these smart contracts are the largest banks in the world today. Because all assets, it’s inside them.
So it’s decentralized and it’s good, you just have a high degree of lens in the security aspects of it. So using AI and participant-centric asset management, like what Moi is doing, we can reduce quite a bit of the risk. Yeah, that’s awesome.
So we’ve talked a lot about what MOI is trying to build. What is the next big thing for you guys? Like when do you guys plan to launch the mainnet? Yeah, so we have a couple of more releases before the end of the year. So the mainnet is slated for the first quarter, actually January of 2024.
So we have built the entire stack ground up. So we have written our own networking layer, we have written our own language, which is called CoCoLang, which is very specifically built for digital asset management. We have built our own execution environment.
So the entire stack is built ground up. It’s fully new. So we have multiple releases.
We have been doing this over the past, actually, year and a half. We had a release last year, which was called Indus, which was Indus testnet that’s been running for almost nine months. So we had the Babylon testnet, which added new features in June.
And we have a couple of more releases coming between now and December. And the mainnet is with all the capabilities will be ready in January. Having said that, people can build quite a lot of things today on the network, because it is just more sophistication, more testing that needs to happen between now and December.
So it’s a continuous process, but the TGE and the mainnet launch in a formal fashion happened in January. Awesome. Very exciting.
It’s a new protocol, it’s a new way that you’re thinking. It’s like a new token, like to give perhaps another analogy, it’s like a new token standard altogether. Yeah, so we have a new digital asset standard.
So we have taken the idea of, if you want to think of it, we are taking participant and put them inside computing. So look at it, today compute drives the participant, we are making the participants drive compute. So that’s what it is.
So it’s a foundationally different take. And we believe that’s what is required for a digitally interacting society to humanize the network and support the kind of heterogeneous needs everybody wants. Brilliant, this is absolutely awesome.
Moving a little away from and zooming out from your product to the market in general, what do you feel would bring on the next bull run? What would be the factors in what you believe would actually pull the market from this bear run to the bull run? Yeah, one thing is obviously, we like to make it a lot more simple for people. I think there is still blockchain is considered very complex. So I think that shift from an engineering focus to user focus, probably is one big thing that is required.
And two is probably make it work with existing systems. While everything can become web 3, web 2 is real, there’s a lot of investments that’s been made. So how do you practically move from web 2 to web 3? And those are two big things, I would say, are required for us to really move the needle.
One is make it simple. So users, it becomes very easy for users to kind of keep all the complexity at the back. And two is allow enterprises and businesses, show them a path to practically move from web 2 to web 3. And because if you don’t do that, I think every application cannot, every application today, which is in web 2 or the use case, cannot one fine morning move to web 3. That’s not what happens.
So web 2 and web 3 need to coexist. And we need a practical path forward. I think those are, you know, wonderful insights.
I feel pretty much I concur with both of them. I think, you know, right now, user onboarding is very, very tedious when it comes to web 3 and that needs to change. And only once that starts changing slowly would we see more people coming in and perhaps the market will become a little less volatile with more people.
And, you know, substantial solutions and solutions that are actually effectively solving a user’s itch in some way, that is essentially going to pull this market out from there. Yeah, so I call it as at least that’s what we focus on what is practical change management. So I’ve been around this space quite a bit.
Great technologies are good, but then change management is always the tough part, right? And so we need to figure out, we as a community and as part of the industry, we need to figure out how we practically allow people to progress from web 2 to web 3, right? That’s on us. Practical change management will be key. So you can’t go to enterprises and demand everybody move to web 3. People are still working on mainframes.
That is what I was about to say that, you know, it just doesn’t happen like that. Oldest technology, which we call ancient perhaps, but people are still working on that. So process and you need to make it a little more far-reaching and easy.
That is the most important. You know, it’s been such a lovely conversation talking to you. I was so curious to understand what you are building, that I almost lost track of time.
We are running out of time now. So I’d like to perhaps wrap up but not without asking you this one question that I ask everybody who comes on the show. If like you, somebody is from web 2 and you know, perhaps peering into the web 3 world, what would be your top two suggestions for them to start living on blockchain? Blockchain is real and it’s useful.
That’s the first thing. And two, be patient. Things of this magnitude take time to happen.
So people are, those are two top suggestions I would give. It’s real. It had tremendous value, both the user and the businesses.
And that’s been demonstrated and there’s a lot of value. That’s one and two, let us be patient. Changes of this magnitude take time.
So it’s not going to be an instant win, but then obviously, it’s a foundational shift. It is going to put your user in control, it’s going to give them flexibility, it’s going to provide privacy and transparency. So all the good things that you’re looking for to provide to an enterprise end users blockchain can enable.
So if you want to think of it, it is like the TCP IP move where we move from individual machines to machines which are talking to each other. No, it is that big. So obviously, yeah.
You owe it to yourself to learn a little about. Yes. Yeah, it’s a really, really interesting idea.
So it’s empowering, foundationally it empowers individuals. Absolutely. That’s always a good thing.
Right. Absolutely. You’re all for empowering individuals.
Thank you so much, Anantha for taking out the time, you know, to speak to me about this. This is very interesting because it introduced me to this new protocol. And I’m going to try it right after this conversation.
I’m going to sign up. You know how this is, because the way MOI is coming across, it seems like a paradigm shift in the way protocols are right now working. And that is always interesting, like going from zero to one.
So definitely going to try it. And I would encourage, you know, the listeners who are developers and builders to please check it out, especially because, you know, they have a no code space as well. And it’ll be easy to deploy without taking too much of your time.
So before we wrap this up, Anantha, any parting thoughts? No, I think what we’re trying to do at MOI is to empower the individual and create an internet which is person, place, user own. So this journey cannot be, cannot happen with everybody participating in it. It’s not just about the technology, right? It’s about making sure that digitally interacting society is going to be equitable and sustainable.
So that’s the higher order growth. So I think I would really request everybody to try it out, participate and give us the feedback. So MOI is just the technology which is trying to make the digital society more equitable place.
So welcome everybody’s participation. Awesome. Awesome.
I’m sure that, you know, our listeners would be vying to check out your website and the protocol itself, especially considering, you know, yoga, it’s going to be quite lucrative for them as well. But apart from the financial incentive, I think getting new technology is such a paradigm shift when you bring in any protocol at a protocol level. I think that’s worth testing out.
And with your vast experience, I can only hope for really good things for your protocol. And I wish you all the best. Thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me.
Thank you, Darsha. Appreciate it.