Tate Berenbaum about Arweave and how a blockchain-based permanent storage impacts governance
22-year-old Tate Berenbaum discusses Arweave, a permanent data storage network designed to store data for 200+ years, along with his journey as a young founder in Web3. Learn how decentralized technology can preserve knowledge for future generations and the challenges of building in the crypto space.
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Transcript
So welcome on, on another episode of Democracy Innovators podcast and our guest of today's, Tate Berenbaum. So welcome, Tate.
Thank you for having me, Alex. It's great to be here.
And, I mean, your project is quite interesting. I mean, you're quite young. I don't know. How old are you now?
Is it I'm, I'm 22 now, but I think I was I was 17, when I got into our originally. Yeah.
Okay. It's wonderful. And would you like to tell us something about, the projects you're working on? I've seen also community labs, out of the computer.
Sure. So maybe just to start with, like, a a story in terms of how I how I got into this stuff. I I've been interested in crypto, for a little while now since 2017. In 2019, I I stumbled across our Weave completely by chance. I use the Brave browser, and I don't know, you know, if if many people use that, but it gives you the ability to see these ads, in exchange for for crypto. And one of the ads was talking about permanent data storage. And so I ended up clicking on it, and that led me to our weave in in 2019. At the time, I didn't have a use case for it, but I kind of realized, like, out of all of the things you could do with blockchain technology, store data permanently was a pretty interesting one. And so I kind of set it aside and and came back to it when the pandemic started in 2020. I was in school at the time, but my school was canceled, because the the school itself wasn't sure how to my migrate to the online learning environment. So I was basically stuck in my basements my basement for six months, with nothing to do except build stuff. And I just started building developer tools on our weave. I've been in Arweave and and now AO ever since. Arweave is a a permanent data storage network designed to enable you to pay a one time fee to store a piece of data for at least two hundred years. And the idea is creating a single source of truth where people can upload data and rely on it being available in full fidelity, over that period of time at minimum. So our team, now at Community Labs, that's my company, is a software development company in venture studio building out and bootstrapping different types of use cases and applications on top of our reef. And, you know, we we sort of see our job as similar to, like, explorers and new territory. Permanent data storage introduces a bunch of new primitives, and enables you to do a lot of things that you weren't really able to do with other blockchain or web two technologies before. So we're building companies around those use cases and helping them to spin out, operate on their own, and that's sort of what we do. We're sort of like a a little miniature version of consensus, like consensus on Ethereum, but for the our reef ecosystem. And then AO, more recently, is a decentralized supercomputer built on top of our reef. And it's really exciting for us because now we can build on top of permanent data storage and decentralized compute in the same stack without having to rely on some blockchains for compute and our reef for for data storage.
It's very interesting, the permanent data storage concept. And I wonder, like, which kind of technology, is used to achieve is two hundred years safety.
Yeah. It's a super interesting technology. The way it works is, essentially, you pay a onetime fee and the fee the size of that fee is in proportion to the size of the data that you're uploading at the time. That fee goes in into an endowment that is then paid out to to nodes over time for being able to prove that they're storing your data. And the reason it works is because if you look at, like, a historical graph of what the cost was to store a piece of data. Over the last fifty years, on average, the cost to actually store a piece of data has decreased around 30% year over year. And, you know, the idea behind our weave is essentially a bet on our weave is a bet that the storage for or or the the cost to actually store data will continue to decrease. And a lot of people are comfortable making that bet because it has for the last fifty years pretty pretty much. And, also, as our lives become more digital and more online, more people are using the Internet, and there are more incentives for companies to actually make it cheaper to store larger amounts of data. So that's sort of very high level, but that's sort of how our reef works and and why it's able to do that two hundred year guarantee.
Okay. This is very interesting because, you know, like, history is made with the primary sources that humans, like, humans do things, write things. And then, people of our times look at the sources that were written in the past. And now we are seeing, like, a sort of change. Like, a a lot of sources are digitalized. And, and so some years ago, I thought also in relation to generative AI that, eventually, like, someone could actually, like, with some user script, with some, AI agent, modify a lot of things and, modify them forever. Like, theoretically, like, someone could, I don't know I don't know, remove, like, the word tomato from all books, from all, images. And then for the people of the future, that thing will not exist. Of course, this is, it it's just an example. But that's why I think this project is interesting. And I wanted to ask you, like, also, there is another, like, archive.org that is a completely different project, but in some way, they share some similarity, I think. Yeah.
So archive.org is is super interesting. I think that's the team behind the Wayback machine. Isn't is that true?
I think yes, but I'm not completely sure. I
I think I think so. The the core so you're right in that the similarities are, both are trying to make sure that data that's on the Internet is is around, over a very long period of time. The core difference, however, is Arweave acts as a decentralized network where your data is stored in, you know, hundreds of places around the world, and hundreds of people are essentially competing to to make sure that is the case. Whereas with archive.org and the Wayback Machine, you're essentially you have to place trust on the team behind archive.org, to make sure that the data isn't lost. That also makes, I guess, the the other problem is that archive.org is is carrying a lot of the cost to actually store that data and maintain it over these years. And what happens if archive.org runs out of money and and has to shut down? The data probably you know, the the risk would be that the data might not be archived and or archive.org could could alter or manipulate the data that they're storing. I don't think they're doing that, to be clear, but the whole point is that with our weave, you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to be concerned of someone changing the data because if they are, they're not able to earn a payment for being able to prove that they're they're storing it.
Yeah. Thank you. Exactly. I totally agree about this centralization in archive.org. And, I also don't think that, they are, modifying anything, but the potentiality, still is there. And, so you told us, when you had, this idea that you were browsing on Internet and you saw another type. And, and I want was wondering how you how you develop the idea. Like, you said that you start developing some tools. And, like, how did it happen? You met someone that you, I don't know, inspire you, that trust you? I don't know.
So, the first the first thing I built on our weave was sort of a sort of a funny story. Both of the the two first projects that I had, they they were both influenced by people changing data or taking it down, and and it was me wanting to make sure that that wasn't possible. So, one of the first projects was called nest dot land, and the idea behind it was there was this new JavaScript runtime, called Deno that that had shortly before then, been released. Deno is sort of like Node. Js if you've if you've heard of that. And it was created by Ryan Dahl who also created Node. And so Ryan had this, you know, pretty big following. People really admired his work with Node. Js because it's kind of everywhere now. And Dino was, you know, supposed to be, like, the the better version of Node to to fix all the mistakes that he made building Node. Js. I'm a nerd, and so I kinda got into it. I became pretty interested in Deno and the idea behind it. But after I got into the the ecosystem, what I pretty quickly found out was that people were sharing code. One difference between Node. Js and and Deno is that, for Node, there's this thing called a package manager where you reach out to a package manager and say, give me this package, and the package manager returns it. And that that dependency, that code that you're now importing into your project is essentially downloaded to your local file system. Whereas with Deno, it's it's much simpler. If you wanna include code, you can just paste in a URL. You can say import from and then this web URL. And that was really cool that, like, it saved a lot of time, for people building in the ecosystem, and it made it easier for people to actually share code around, because you didn't have to, you know, share this other file that would tell, you know, this package manager everything that had to download before you could actually run it. You could just click run, and it would just run-in Deno. One of the problems with that, however, was the code that people were sharing. They they were sharing that code on links that would be changed or they would break. And so what that introduced was the ability for your code. If you were importing a bunch of links from the web, your code might randomly break because one of those links breaks. And there's nothing that you can really do about that except find another link that actually works or download the dependency, in the same way that Node did. And it was actually a huge problem. People were sharing the this code on GitHub links. So, you know, it wasn't version controlled, which means people could update it or change it or delete it, and it could break your code. Or even worse, if someone had, like, a malicious intent, they could change the code so that it injects something into your code maliciously and, you know, changes your code base, messes something up, introduces a virus. And so we needed a place that you could actually go to store code that developers could share code on, that you could rely on the data not ever being able to change or not ever going down. And so for me, when I came across Deno and I found this problem, I was looking, I was thinking about, you know, are we even and how permanent data storage is a thing now and that this technology could solve it. So spent a weekend hacking with a few friends on Discord, had some late nights just building out a a solution that essentially just built a website that you could upload your code through, and then it would give you a link that you could then use to import that code into your code base, and it would never change or go down. And and that project, that's sort of how I started building on our Weave initially. It kinda repurposed our Weave as a a content delivery network for developers and their code. And, unintentionally, it it grew from, you know, like, a small weekend project to, like, a vibrant open source community full of developers and engineers that were a 100 times smarter than me. So I was able to to learn a lot through that process and also meet a lot of the people that are actually on our team now, building out things in community labs.
Okay. That's in that is interesting that, like, yeah, we can project I think it was unexpected, to become such a big project. For sure.
Yeah. It was not the goal.
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, maybe you you or someone else can have the goal of creating something big, and then it doesn't happen. So I I think, this is an example to, I mean, always be open and try and try on new things and then something will happen. And it also made me, laugh when you say, like, working with some friend on Discord. Like, I can imagine other people that you have found that were passionate about the same topics, about the same stuff. And I and, also, this is my experience. Like, in real life, sometimes it's quite hard to find someone that is interested in, these things. While online, there are a lot of people that, yeah, actually will not sleep, that are ready to stay there and call. Yeah. And
Oh, sorry?
No. Yeah. I was wondering, like, your experience, with the different online communities, because I think it's important. I mean, if you are alone, you can build something. But if you're alone and you can find other people, then you can build incredible projects.
Yeah. You know, that that sort of is a a winding path for me. I didn't really have a process or a goal to meet people, on Discord. In in fact, when I first downloaded Discord in 2017 or 2018, I was actually quite skeptical, because I thought it was for gamers. And and I I I was a gamer, but I didn't necessarily want to talk to other gamers about games. I wanted to build stuff. I think that, you know, over the years, what I found is that, that there there are really two two truths that I had to come to terms with when I was thinking about Discord and and getting involved in the communities there. The first truth is that a lot of people seem to think that, many of the best engineers live in, you know, big tech companies or or FAANG, and are in Silicon Valley and are, you know, hacking on stuff. But but, really, actually, if you know where to look, some of the most talented engineers in the world are 14 year olds on Discord writing code on REPL with a Chromebook. The amount of talent that is on Discord is actually it's unbelievable. And and it's incredible because these people are are really talented. It's also incredible because they're really friendly people, and all they wanna do is build stuff. They're not profit driven, many of them, and they're just looking for friends too. Now I I was nowhere near the the the skill level that a lot of these people were that I was working with. But the way I I originally met them, and this is sort of the second truth, I guess, I came to was, you you have to you have to come in with something. Right? You you can't come into a community and expect it to give to you. You have to provide it something, and and maybe something will come to you in return, although you shouldn't come into it expecting that. So what I would do is I would join these communities of people that were building Discord bots at the time. And I would come in. I was I was an engineer, but I I was still pretty new to it at that time. This was, like, ten years ago, and less than ten years ago. It was probably six or seven years ago. And, I was essentially coming in and offering to do graphic design because all of the engineers were so talented and incredible at what they did. No one wanted to, like, make it look good. You know? They just wanted to make it powerful. And so I came in and I said, I'll just do graphics for free. And so I learned graphic design. I was using, like, Gimp and Inkscape at the time, got Affinity after that. This was, like, before Figma really took off. And I was I was just making logos for people. And that's ended that that ended up being how I met the people that I was working with on that project. But, Discord is is crazy. LinkedIn is not the place if you wanna find incredible talent. I I would say Discord is. Yeah.
Okay. This is super interesting. I think that a lot of people struggle in I mean, people that, would like to work on a project, people that, are like funding a new project. I mean, they struggle because, sometimes they want to do everything by themself. Well, as you say, there are a lot of talented people that maybe would like to contribute on some good project. And, and, and, yeah, I totally agree that, like, on Telegram also, like, but also on Discord, you can find the very talented people and the very interesting projects. And, another things that, I mean, during the previous interviews, I mean, the project were smaller, but, like, a lot of people, complain that finding findings is quite hard.
Sure.
What was your experience? Like, Yeah.
So so when you when you describe that, I'm assuming you're referring to, like, the the path to fundraising, and getting capital to to fund a project that you're working on, or am I misunderstanding?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, because otherwise, you will have to develop everything by yourself, and Yeah. Sometimes it's not doable. If If you don't have a community of people that wants just want to contribute on a software. Sure. Yeah. I mean,
you know, I think this is one of those things that it it it shifts and changes with time. Right now, the markets are are are not the most green. I guess that's one way to put it. And because of that, that has sort of had a trickle down effect of turning off the risk tolerance of capital allocators and investors. And and I think it's harder now than it was a couple years ago, when I was getting off the ground to to raise, to be frank. With that said, though, I think, you know, my my journey into it wasn't exactly intentional, either. My my story is kind of strange because I I really looking back on it, I stumbled into most of the things that brought me where I am today. I I didn't come into it with a goal or wasn't looking to do it intentionally. But but for fundraising, I continued building for a few months after launching that that developer tool that I was talking about earlier and went on to continue building other products in our reef, because our reef had a need and and no one else was was building solutions to these problems that we were having, because there are a ton of opportunities elsewhere. And so we wanted to just double down on our weave and build solutions ourselves. And one of those products that we built was actually the first decentralized exchange on on a permanent data layer. It was called Verto, and we we launched it in, I wanna say, June 2020, June or July 2020. And, you know, looking back on that, the process there for actually getting capital was essentially building a product that was useful to people, and the investors actually became users because they wanted to exchange things. And so we ended up meeting investors because they were using the platform itself, because this was the first time they actually could exchange value in an ecosystem like Arweave. The other point, I guess, is I I at this time, I also met the the founder of Arweave. His name is Sam. And Sam kind of saw what we were doing. He realized that, you know, there were, like, 10 people working for fun, on this stuff on a full time basis just because they enjoyed it. And he kinda took us under his wing, and he wanted to help us figure out how to make it more sustainable so that I would be able to continue building. And at this point, I was in high school, but but the goal was to not have to go to college. So he was like, look. You should you should meet a couple people that I know. You should have a conversation with them. And, you know, I kinda got on the phone, and I I treated it like Shark Tank. I thought that all of these investor meetings were were were like Shark Tank where you're, you know, using your manners saying, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, yes, sir, no, sir. I'm from the South. So, like, you know, these things are more common. And you you would treat it like Shark Tank, and you give a pitch, and then the sharks would be sharks, and they try and, you know, get your numbers down. And what I found was actually the the exact opposite. I got on the phone and, with some of these people, and they were like, do not one of them in particular was don't don't ever don't call me sir, you know, ma'am. That's weird. Like, we this is a deal. Like, this is a partnership between two people. You're giving us something. We're not just doing you a favor here. You're giving us tokens. You're giving us equity. And so I I I learned that these things are not like Shark Tank pretty quickly, but I really did just kinda stumble into it. And once we got our first investor to commit and to say that they were interested, then, you know, it branched from there. That he introduced me to to two people that became very close advisers to the company, that then also invested, and then those people introduced me to two people. And it just started with one. It started with with Sam, and kinda branched out from there. So I would say for people that are looking to to raise, you know, number one, it's important to, excuse me, to be able to ship quickly. If you're able to build quickly, you're able to learn quickly, figure out a product that works. You know, we already had a product. We weren't going to people and pitching them on the idea of a product. We had something that was already live that worked. That helped us, I think, looking back on it. The other thing that helped us was just being honest about the situation. We weren't sure you know, we didn't know what the plan was to scale that to a billion dollars. We were just taking each day as it came, building what customers had asked for and trying to do it quickly. And it turns out, you know, investors at the level, they they don't necessarily wanna see this master plan. They they wanna see honesty and transparency, and they wanna see people that are doing things for the right reasons. And, you know, I'm very thankful to the people that that took a chance on us in the early days. But I think that for me, the process was, you know, was different, because I I really wasn't doing it intentionally. It was sort of accidental. I'm trying to think if there are any other points that I would make in relation to helping.
Yeah. I really like this, how everything happened in a seems spontaneous way. And some funders, are also worried that with, venture capitalist, I mean, they will lose the control of their project. And so sometimes it's also, like, something that can stop them. So Yeah. I mean, I think
that definitely that definitely can happen if you if you sell too much. The the game, I guess, is figuring out how much you need to sell, to be able to sustain yourself and to get to that next milestone and to accomplish the goal. And if you can't sell, if you can't get by without selling too much, then, yeah, I mean, you don't wanna lose control. That's for sure. So I think that's a fair concern.
And thank you for your experience. And, I didn't really ask anything about you, and I would like to I mean, you you told us us, like, you got the idea. But, like, if you would like to say something more about you, like, you said that I'm an nerd. I'm also an nerd. But, yeah, like, what you like, what are your hobbies? Where did you grow up? Like Sure.
I don't have great answers to to the hobbies question. I think, you know, my, my hobby is my my job. I really I really enjoy what I do, and so I spend a lot of time doing it as a as a result. I grew up in in Virginia in The US, the the South Of Virginia. It was a near the closest city was was called Roanoke. And it was, yeah, pretty small town, very small town environment. I don't know if anyone's ever seen the show Friday Night Lights on Netflix, but the way that show is portrayed, in Texas was a very similar lifestyle to to how I kinda grew up in in Virginia at the time. There weren't a ton of people that were interested in what I was interested in growing up, and so that was another reason why I went to Discord and tried to meet people there because, you know, my school wasn't really when I was getting into it at least, they they weren't teaching how to code or they weren't teaching you how to build stuff. They were teaching us a lot of other things that were useful, in retrospect, but but coding wasn't one of them. And so I think, you know, for me, coding was like, writing code was a hobby, and I was fortunate to find a way to turn it into a job for myself by starting things and by building stuff. But I don't know. I mean, I think in terms of other hobbies, I I've recently, you know, started trying to get good at tennis. I really enjoy playing tennis, but tennis is hard because the courts are very crowded. There are a lot of people that that like to to play tennis or pickleball, and it takes two. You you need two people. And I I have a weird schedule, so I can't just text someone at 10PM at night and say, hey. Do you wanna go play tennis right now when I finish my work? So that's been a challenge. I also enjoy skiing, but that's again, there are some constraints there. I live in Texas now, and, there aren't exactly mountains nearby to ski. It's a bit warm here. Yeah.
Okay. Sorry. I was not able to unmute. No worries. I I was thinking that, I mean, you you have some experience in the Webtree. And how would you like, is there, like, any kind of problem that you identified in the Webtree space, generic problem? Like, I don't know, fragmentation, whatever. Like
Yeah. I mean, so I would say there's sort of, there's maybe two two buckets of of one could say problems, another could say opportunities. One of the one of the buckets is, like, opportunities that exist within web three to to build new things, to build new products on top of the technology. I spend most of my time thinking about that in the context of of are we even AO. But the other the other, I guess, bucket of of problems slash opportunities is, you know, the the structure and the the nature and the the way that people actually go about doing work in the first place in this industry. You know, I think that tokens are a really incredible invention. The idea of making it easy to to create these these reward vehicles that can be used to incentivize other people to do things with minimal management is is brilliant. It makes a lot of sense, and it's it's proving itself out with Bitcoin at the beginning. But the other slippery slope that you run into is people conflating the equity of a company with the business model of a company and then applying that idea to a token itself. And the problem there, when when you don't have a separation of those two things, the not all the time, but the risk is people turn the business model into selling the token. The business model becomes convincing other people to buy the thing. And in some cases, that might make sense with things like NFTs or meme coins. I don't own meme coins personally, but I guess I can see the appeal of it for some. Whereas for for others, then you have this, like, you know, this risky territory where people are marketing themselves as building really meaningful technology, but the technology isn't actually the product. The the product is the token. People just want you to to buy the token and say you're buying it because of the technology, even though the technology may not even exist or it may not work. There are a lot of projects that have made it remarkably far in this industry, that are that are sort of exercising that or practicing it. And it's hard. It's hard for me to see as someone who cares about technology and and likes to build stuff, and likes to see a token as as sort of a tool to build mechanisms. It's hard to see the industry be so captivated by people that are not always being honest about what the token represents. And I think that there's risk to that that that, you know, people have have unfortunately had to deal with the consequences of in the past. I don't think that those risks necessarily make this entire industry invalid or it doesn't make it worth it to come into the space and build stuff. But, you know, with, I guess, with, like, the with great power comes great responsibility, and, we're seeing that play out for sure.
Yeah. I I've seen also I think I understand what you referred to, like, that many projects are like, yeah, they just want to sell the tokens, and they describe the project. And the project is so big, but nothing is made, and they just try to raise money. And, yeah, sometimes they seems like a little bit like scam.
Yeah.
Some of them. And, I I was wondering, like, the the future of the Webtree. I mean, there is the this idea about building decentralized things, decentralized application and so on. And I wonder, like, how do you see it? Like, I don't know. Like, what are your what is your idea?
Yeah. It's a big question. You know, I I think that there there are a few a few possible scenarios that that we see play out over the next ten to twenty years. And I think one of them, the the chance of it happening is is pretty pretty significant now. Crypto and and Web three as as payment rails for the next version of the web, I think, is sort of a narrative that that makes a lot of sense. It's funny. It's taken stable coins close to ten years to to become cool, but there's some truth behind the idea of making Stablecoin payments sort of a a reality, and and ubiquitous across, the world because it's just so much more efficient than the existing systems that exist. So, you know, I I think, like, crypto as rails for the next version of finance makes sense. I do think that will happen over the next ten years. I think it's already in motion, and it's sort of too big to to be killed at this point. What's more interesting, though, for for me at least is beyond finance, what are the areas in crypto that that will take off and will remain that that aren't necessarily directly related to to finance? And I think Arweave has an interesting position in that, because, you know, one one way to think about how to how to predict the future is trying to to figure out what will change about the world in ten years. But a lot of people discount the idea, and this is sort of Amazon strategy. They forget to think about what won't change. And there are some of the things that we exhibit or or or there are several things in the world that we value that I really think will not change over the next ten years regardless of everything else that does. One of those things is valuing a source of truth for data. As the world becomes more online and becomes more digital, globalization continues to evolve in the digital landscape. The importance of having a source of truth will not change in time. I think that'll always be a need regardless of how much AI is doing things for humans, regardless of what humans are doing in general. We need a source of truth. And so excuse me one second. Sorry. I think that, you know, I think that Arweave makes a lot of sense as that source of truth, And the next version of the web will also need that type of technology to exist, both as an accountability mechanism, but also philosophically in this kind of tying it back to history, you know, giving ourselves the ability to to inform decisions for people generations down the line so that they can potentially avoid the same mistakes that we made in our generation. And and and books books are are one source for that, but books can be can be burned. You know, we saw this with with Germany. People were manipulated by Hitler due to, you know, his ability to to basically erase knowledge and prevent people from understanding the consequences of what he was doing. And our weave makes it possible to avoid that. So I think in ten to fifteen years, crypto will be the way to transmit value. And I think our weave specifically will be the way for knowledge to be shared. Any knowledge that has any amount of value and and value in persisting will be the way that that should, remain and and should be shared.
I think here also about, I mean, Webtree, of of course, money, and and finance can be done also in a decentralized way with the Webtree. And I think he also about governance. That is something, very important in the Webtree space that is also quite political as a space. I mean, except for the scams and the project that are not really projects. But the good product the good projects of the NAR, like, like, creating, I would say, like, an sort of new kind of infrastructure for many things, like some technological infrastructure, but also in some way, political. Yeah. And, like, in relation, like I mean, I think you have explored the as I said, you explored the Webtree. Like, in relation to governance, what are your thoughts? Like, if you have seen some DAOs in some organization.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think so so governance is one of the ones that I think is a bit harder for me to to think about what the future of it could be ten years from now. You know, I I think so so one of the things that really captivated me when I was getting into crypto in 2017 was was the idea of being able to create supposedly perfect governance structures powered by imperfect people. And, you know, there there's something to that. Right? The idea behind crypto, it it makes a lot of sense. And in theory, a DAO makes sense as well because it creates a structure to incentivize people to do things. In practice, I think it has some bugs that we still have to work out. I don't know how many DAOs have actually been successful at, you know, surviving without any form of centralized governance. And and the core reason for that seems to be tragedy of the commons where people on paper have this universal incentive to contribute value to the DAO, and everyone else benefits from doing so. But in practice, no one contributes to the DAO because everyone assumes that everyone else is contributing to the DAO. And so nothing happens without someone standing up and actually coordinating people and holding them accountable and getting them to do things. I think that that is one of the big that's sort of the Achilles heel from from the DAOs that I've witnessed. That's like the the thing that prevents them from actually working and sustaining themselves with time. This also comes from my own experience trying to launch a DAO. We tried to decentralize Virto and the development of Virto, And we tried to launch a DAO and realized the exact same thing, in the process of of doing so. I think there is a lot of promise behind the idea and the theory of a DAO if we can perfect the model and figure out how we can actually avoid the pitfall of tragedy of the commons in the process of creating a DAO while simultaneously avoiding centralization. But it's not perfect. It's not perfect yet. And I think that there are many DAOs that market themselves as decentralized that I I really don't know if they actually are, if you if you kinda go into it and look look at what's actually happening and how things are actually being organized. One of the products that we're building inside of community labs is actually aimed at creating a a solution, a potential solution to this problem because, ironically, the one of the more decentralized things, is is Bitcoin itself. It's the first. Satoshi doesn't exist anymore. It's sort of headless in that sense. But one of the problems that exists along with that is the the concept of, okay. Well, how is Bitcoin's code base actually governed? If you look at GitHub, there is a specific number of maintainers that are at their own discretion allowed to make changes to GitHub's code base or the code base that people recognize is like the official Bitcoin code base. And that's crazy to think about. You know, Bitcoin's been around for all these years. Satoshi doesn't exist anymore. And yet there's, like, five people that are deciding whether or not Bitcoin's code base should change. It's crazy. You know? That's, like, the most decentralized thing that exists right now, but that seems to be a problem. So one of the solutions that we've been building is, essentially creating a model where you can store your code on our weave and create incentives for people to fork those code bases if they believe changes should be made, and then creating essentially like a fork resolution system, that enables us to algorithmically figure out which version of the code base should be considered the main, version defined by what everyone else is using at the time.
Okay. This is so interesting because, yeah, I I also have seen this kind of sort of centralization in the in the code and, in in the people that can decide, if the code can change or not. And I'm thinking that, this possibility of forking and eventually how did you say, like, to,
to merge? But, like, in a Yeah. Like, resolving the forks, figuring out what the should be. Resolving the fork.
I I'm thinking about some, civic participation software or, like, software that are created to mediate between different position. So, like, conflict resolution. Basically, AI agents that has the role of a mediator. And I see these two finger associated. Like, I don't know. I forked your code, because I have a different idea from you. And then if we want to, again, to merge the code, I mean, I think we also have to talk and to understand, like, different possible positions. And, and I'm quite very excited by all this possibility.
That's crazy to hear. I guess, like, the the the thesis oh, I'm sorry. What were you saying? No. No. Go. Go, please. The the thesis of of that product specifically is that maybe maybe the best governance is creating a function for anyone to do anything, and creating rules for the best version to win rather than enabling a council to or a committee to sit down and decide what the best version is, setting the rules of the game out and letting people play it to figure out what, you know, what version is is the winner. I don't know if I would say maybe the best governance is no governance in this case, but but that is sort of the idea to solve the problem. Maybe the problem with the DAO is to focus on empowering individuals to act on their own volition rather than empowering the group to act together. But yes. Sorry. I I interrupted. What were you saying? No.
No. No. I was just adding something. But then, I mean, I was talking about AI agents, and I saw that, you were working on something similar, like, the decentralized AI agents. Right?
Yeah. So one of the products that we're working on, this is more in, like, the the r and d phase right now, is AO as a supercomputer, it gives us the ability to do some things that are pretty different from other ecosystems in crypto. One of the features is called CRON, and it essentially enables we they're they're like smart contracts, but we call them processes on AO. It enables processes to wake up and go to sleep without any human interaction. And I think that's super interesting for one. The other the other core mechanic that we're playing with inside of AO that's pretty unique is the idea of, trusted execution environments, TEEs. And that essentially creates an environment where you could store private data or be running private computations that aren't accessible to the world while still being able to prove that they're happening and and and validate that they're correct, sort of similar to, like, the idea behind zero knowledge proofs. But the interesting thing is when you combine those two primitives, you can essentially create these cross chain agents that have the ability to operate from inside of AO, but can make transactions on other blockchains, and act on other blockchains because these processes or these smart contracts are actually holding keys to to make transactions themselves independently, controlled by AO. So we're really excited about that because I think there are a lot of interesting use cases that that opens up for DeFi, for building bridges, exchanges, cross chain infrastructure, you know, increasing composability between AO and and the rest of the ecosystems. And, also, I guess, kind of positioning AO as a co processor. You could see a world where if people are trying to build really intelligent trading algorithms on Ethereum, it would actually make more sense to to put the logic in something like AO and have it execute on Ethereum if that's what you care about. And the reason for that is because computation is so much cheaper on on AO than Ethereum. You can actually run large language models inside of AO as well, which is crazy. Like, that would be very expensive to run on Ethereum if you could build it, really any other ecosystem. And, you know, we've been doing it for the last six months inside of AO. So, you know, AO is a co processor, I think, is an interesting narrative. We believe the long game is for AO to to be, you know, everything. You don't really need something like Ethereum, to be honest. But for now, I think positioning it as a co processor is very interesting for the cross chain agents use case. Yeah.
Sorry for, like, the, maybe stupid question. Like, I was wondering, like, an AI agent that is decentralized, does it mean, like, that it cannot be stopped, like, in a way if it is, like, as a smart contract, if it is save on the blockchain?
Yeah. That's a good question. There are definitely some, I guess, like, AI safety implications that that have to be considered. So so I guess, technically, you know, there there is a a threat there. But you could convince nodes on the network to not run a process if it were malicious for one. You could essentially convince them to blacklist that and not run the compute and contribute to it. And for two, these things, they, they they they still cost money. There's still a cost that's incurred. And if you're funding this agent and the computation behind it, but you run out of money to be able to continue funding it, no one will run the computation because they won't have the incentive to. So I think there are definitely some more. That's a rabbit hole. We could we could go down that because I I don't want to we don't wanna create, like, the Ultron, of this world and, like, have it live on AO. But but it is an interesting an interesting angle for sure.
And, about the projects you're working on, is there anything you I don't know. Any problem that you are struggling with, I don't know, every something you that you cannot find a solution. Maybe you cannot even find the right person that can find a solution.
You know, we're we're really fortunate, to have a great team and a great group of people that that love more than anything finding solutions to theoretically unsolvable problems. And so I I think that, I don't see many problems as as unsolvable. Maybe one of the one of the more interesting ones that's perhaps philosophical as opposed to technical is the question of, does the best technology always win? That's been something that we've considered, back and forth a lot over the last few months as we've discovered what AO can actually do. It's it's becoming increasingly evident that AO is objectively the best technology. It is the most efficient, and it enables you to do things that no one else can compete with. But if you look back in history, does the best technology always win? That's a that's an interesting one, and and it sort of comes the reason I think about it is because, you know, AO as as a technology has has many strengths, but one of the things that we're still trying to do is figure out how to talk about it because it is so different than everything else. We haven't quite figured out the way to pitch it to the world in a way that's you know, that the world really understands the the implications and the value of it. And so we have to ask ourselves, you know, does the best technology always win? And, personally, I I regardless of of the answer, I'd be curious to hear yours. I think that we should plan for the best technology not winning so that we can make it win, even if it weren't the best. But, it is an interesting philosophical debate that we've gone back and forth on quite a bit recently. Yeah. What do you think?
Yeah. Good question. Actually actually, I don't know. I mean, if we say best technology, it means that, actually, there is one technology that is better than the other. Like, I'm making a stupid example. Like, I think they some decentralized social networks, Also, the one that are not running on Webtree, like, I don't know, Mastodon, and other kind of social network. In a way, they they will be better, than centralized social network. But I see very associated with, cultural problem. So, I mean, most of the people don't know the existence of decentralized social network. And and also when they discovered them, if they register, then they are alone because all their friend are on probably Meta's platforms or or Wix. And and I think most of the time, this cultural problem that, as you said, you you don't know how to describe your platform, like, to people. And, I think this is, maybe something that in the next years with, I mean, right now, still there is some digital divide between, people that, knows a lot, that do not sleep, always stays there coding, and, and people that I also have friends that told me, like, oh, yeah. I never tried ChargeGPT or or or another LLM. And, in a way, I think that is also fine that we live in I mean, you don't have to use AI. Like, most of the I mean, from the beginning of the world until now, no one ever used AI before. But, yeah, we are in a situation in a in a in a time where if you don't know some technology there is this thing, like, they say, if you if you are not interested in politics, the politics will be interested in you. And I think the same about technology. I think, I don't know, maybe in ten years, we will see, like, a new generation. Like, also now, people are coding, like, I mean, inside schools. I I see some difference, in relation to different countries. So, like, North Europe, they are I think they're technological smarter. And, yeah, best technology always win. I I will say, but this is something said. I mean, and not not in relationship with maybe with the what we are talking about. But I will say that most of the time in history, the most deadly technology win. And this is something said. So, like, a a lot of time we develop technology thinking that, okay. Now we will be free from, we don't have to work anymore in the in the field. But then what happened is that the humans were always working. Sometime also in a more nonhuman way, like, instead of working the field at in in a open space, they started working in a, in in in a company. But what I wanted to say, yeah, I forgot. So
That's okay. No worries at all. It's a it's a tough one. I think you can sort of point to cases where sometimes the best technology did win, and and and other times it didn't. And I guess that's why the question is is so difficult. It's sort of, you know, why is that? Why is that discrepancy, apparent throughout time? To your point, I think that power is certainly a driver for things to win. What what empowers people? Another driver, I think, is experience. What what provides people the best experience? Something I I was having this debate recently with with, an old friend, and he brought up the case of of QWERTY as a keyboard layout. It it didn't win, it it it didn't win because it was the most efficient. It actually wasn't compared to the existing layout that was before that. I can't remember how to pronounce it, but it started with a d, and I think it was like Dvorak or something, or Dobrak. But QWERTY won because it prevented typewriters from their keys jamming. It was better at preventing keys from jamming than it was, at being efficient. And the pain of that increased key jamming was greater than the pain of being maybe slightly faster at typing what you were trying to think of in general. And so because of that QWERTY one on the typewriter and and now it's one on keyboards everywhere, even though the the key jamming problem doesn't exist anymore. I think that goes to say, like, the best experience or the the the the solution that offers the least amount of friction probably has the greatest shot at winning. But maybe the thing that takes it home is the network effect after. You know? Everyone uses QWERTY. No one has a reason to move away from it because now the friction of moving away from it would be so significant. You know? So who knows?
Yeah. Absolutely. When people see an advantage for them, they they want to use the platform. I mean, they want to use the product, I mean, that solution. Only things I would say is that some sometimes, I mean, in our society, our society is quite complex. So as an example, it can be that a solution that is actually effective, for me because, I don't know, I every time I go to work I mean, to my office, usually, it take one hour. If I use a certain solution, I take, I don't know, twenty minutes less. It it could be that the solution is not really a real solution because it can be like the real solution can be, like, take an office nearest my house or, like, change my house, like, the place of my house. So this is just something that, came into my mind right now. That's interesting.
For sure.
Yeah. We live in a very complex society. And, and about the network effect is actually something that I love because, many times and also your experience, like, all the spontaneous process that that you ex experience it with the project you're working on. And I wonder, like, going back to people that, would like to start something, that have a project, or maybe that would like to contribute in some way. Because, we said, like, that, people can just go on, Discord and find a community or maybe on Telegram or also Reddit, I think. Or Yeah. Or eventually LinkedIn. But as you said, if you go if you approach a community, it's better if you have something to give before having before asking something. And, I think this step that is quite, understandable, sometimes is not easy for most of the people, because it can be hard to approach a community. It's gonna be hard. Like, a lot of people think, okay. I have this, ozone idea. I want to take it. I don't want to share it because, otherwise, people gonna are going to steal it. And this is something yeah. I'm really fascinated by the network effort, by by you by the fact that that, I don't know. We are chatting now, and maybe someone else will hear what we are saying and maybe get inspired. Maybe he will contact us. I don't know. Asking, saying something. And For sure. And I think this is part of, like, knowing that we do not know. That is I mean, you were saying something. Your question about technology, if the best technology win, was a philosophical question. And I also think that, I mean, philosophy, sometimes it it is seen as something that should just be, in books, you know, something boring that you study. But I think it really affect a lot what we are doing also in reality, like, in the real world. And, yeah, I could talk forever about the network effect. So interrupt me, please.
No. No. I yeah. I mean, I think, the last thing that I'll say on it is, I I have another good friend who, kind of he he's not as much of an engineer as I am. He's he's more of a YouTuber, actually. And I was talking to him a couple years ago, and he was explaining to me, you know, I found I I I I kind of found other people that were like minded by going into Discord and by, you know, offering to do things. He found people by publishing YouTube videos. And the the videos that resonated with people similar to what you're describing with with those who might resonate with this podcast, The the there's a term that he kinda created for it that I think about a lot. The the term is called energetic echolocation. And the idea is, essentially, if you're putting things out there, it could be anything. It could be a video. It could be content. It could be a product. It could be, you know, code, or a logo. You you're you're essentially putting something out there, and that will automatically attract or or attract the types of people that would resonate with it. And it's really cool. You know? Like, people don't see the world that way, it seems. No one really thinks about the world in terms of, I can find anyone I want as long as I know what to put out into the world. And I think YouTube is a good example of this because anyone can build a following on YouTube if they're just knowing what to put out. And in most cases, they're just putting out things that they like themselves. And, naturally, people like them, also like that content and kinda gravitate towards them. I think about it a lot, energetic echolocation, because for us, building a company, building products, the whole game is creating a business around solving problems for other people. But how does one go about finding the people that you're solving the problem for? And and and his his name's Max. Max's idea is stop trying. Just start putting stuff out. And and for the people that do resonate with it, start there. Start small. Start having conversations with people. Grassroots, build it up organically. And over time, if you actually are solving a problem, that, you know, energetic echolocation enables you to find other people that that resonate with that.
Yeah. It's it's also, you know, we're related to I mean, there are different kind of concept related to power. And, one of them is, like, people that have the same intention, so that would like to create the same thing. And, and, yeah, as you say that if you produce something, if you produce a content, then you also attract other people and you create a center of power, and you can actually change reality. I I saw that, like, if you have some more time, otherwise, I do you have a friend? Minutes.
I have a few more minutes. I will have to jump soon, unfortunately. Okay. But maybe one more question or or one more topic if you wanna chat. Yeah, I apologize.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's, it was very interesting. Just, if you have a message for the people, for the community, like, both in the Webtree, both in the in the civic tech space that are working on these, mediation agents, AI that organize the Yeah. I mean
so I I've I've been a founder now for for five years, and it's been a it's been an interesting journey. I I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm very grateful. But if I had to if I had to describe what I think was most important for me across the five years of of that journey so far, I would say coming into what I'm doing, or or or surrounding myself with people, or immersing myself in work for the right reasons probably matter more than anything else. And the the reason is because if you're not doing it for the right reasons, when things get hard, you will lose the reason to keep doing it. And for me, I I I I really love Arweave. I care a lot about permanent data storage, and I know that it's a very boring thing to think about. But I think it's really powerful. You know? It's like this stuff could really impact meaningfully the the lives of, generations beyond us. And I I find it hard every time I wake up regardless of how hard things are day to day, I still can't think of anything that I think would be a better use to spend my time trying to build out on top of than than our we've, because of that that impact or that potential for impact, I guess. I think for people that are looking to get started, if if you're if you're building things, you know, putting things out into the world, I think that's the best shot at getting funding. That's the best shot at finding people that are like you, not being afraid to socialize your ideas for fear of someone stealing them. If you're afraid of someone stealing them, then maybe you should just build it or you should figure out how to build it. I guess a few years ago, it was more important to learn how to code than it is now, but now you really don't have an excuse if you have a few spare minutes at the end of every day. Log in to cursor and and have AI build it for you. You know?
Yeah. Agree. It's incredible what AI can do now. And thank you a lot. Was very interesting.
Thank you. Yeah. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate it, Alex. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.
