Evan Weaver: Not everybody. Obviously, a lot of Fauna’s features were inspired by things that we wanted to have at Twitter, and we’re forced to develop and forgo on our own. Fauna is really design for the modern web 2.0+ application world. With SaaS, in particular - I would say the majority of our customers are building some kind of SaaS app, with a business purpose. Or consumer-oriented applications. And then I think that the third category, which somewhat overlaps with the first, or blockchain-adjacent applications, things that use crypto for public transactional purposes, but also store additional data for application purposes.

The thing that these all have in common is that – you know, there’s a wide variety of customers and people interacting with datasets that interact with it in a soft, real-time way; they interact with it from the web, from mobile applications… You know, it’s all the apps you use today.

What we don’t do is analytics. We’re not a olap database, we’re not a data warehouse. We’re not a cache for some other database. The transactional consistency does have a cost in throughput and latency, so if all you want is a cache, you should go get memcache or something like that. We’re not an information retrieval system; we don’t replace Elasticsearch. We’re not a queue. You can go get Kafka or something else like that for those purposes. It’s really sort of the dream of MySQL, like - we wanna be to the serverless era, and JAMstack, and kind of the API infrastructure era the same way MySQL was to the web 1.0 era, where this is a general-purpose operational data platform. It’s very easy to use, it’s very easy to adopt… No startup costs, develop on your laptop. It does a very good job; I mean, we can argue about whether MySQL did a good job, but it was a better job than others at the time, because it existed. It does a very good job at that core, short request transactional user data, mission-critical data, constrained indexed use cases… And then it does a decent job at everything else you need to build a fully-featured application, so that you can get started without having to have a whole bunch of tools all mixed up in your tool chain.

We fundamentally don’t really believe in the classic polyglot persistence attitude where you pick the best tool for every single kind of query pattern you might have in your app. Databases are heavy pieces of infrastructure. It’s hard to move data around. You don’t wanna have too many of them. So the more general-purpose that it can be, the less you have to use. We do have an advantage in the cloud though, that we can connect and integrate more easily with adjacent systems in a way that takes the integration burden off the user. So that’s one of the things we’re working on going forward, making it seamless to link up to the analytics database you wanna use, the queue you wanna use, and that kind of thing.

Jerod Santo: Exploring a stablecoin bank

Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly:

Right now, Visa and Mastercard charge merchants egregious 2-3% swipe fees — which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe fees…. This is partly why Visa and Mastercard’s profit margins are each higher than 50%: small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and Mastercard since they control 80% of the credit card market.

A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees — rightfully so — and if they could opt for a lower-fee network that wouldn’t limit their TAM, they’d switch in a heartbeat.

I’ve long asked cryptocurrency bulls to point me to the killer apps. First it was ICOs, which didn’t really pan out (too many scammy founders). Then it was NFTs, which were a lot like the pogs of my youth (fun for a day or two). More recently, it’s been ~~prediction markets~~ gambling, which I admit is a legit app, just not one I’m interested in.

But, “knocking 3% off every transaction in the world”… That dog could hunt! Unfortunately, it’s also going to require government intervention, of which I’m a perma-bear.

Matias Pan: A lot of Lambda, mostly for – there’s many flows in the crypto and the fiat world that’s like eventually consistent in a way. So you make a transaction and five minutes later you get a call back saying “Hey, this happened. So it’s okay”, or “This didn’t happen.” So a lot of lambdas for that. And then for the – not much more than that. So a very simple app; a monolithic codebase and some lambda functions. And then a Redshift cluster connected with DMS to an Aurora database for all things analytics, basically. So a very small, I would say, footprint of infrastructure, but not controlled; small, but uncontrolled. So you will go into the AWS UI and find things that you didn’t know existed, and probably nobody knew. So that was also part of the challenge.

Mikeal Rogers: [24:02] Well, so that application was built by Dapper Labs, and Dapper Labs has their own chain called Flow… So I believe that all of those assets are on Flow. I haven’t validated that, but.. Dapper Labs are the folks that created Crypto Kitties, so they’ve been in this space a long time; they really know how to build applications. They built Flow kind of for their own use.

This is like a good segue into transaction fees and some of the problems that people have in Ethereum.

Nicola Murino: [00:31:58.20] In SSH instead we still have SHA-1 enabled as a default. There are very old devices relying on it, and one of the points to move crypto SSH within the standard library is to allow to disable SHA-1 using an environment variable, so we can make the same transition described by Roland. So in the first time there will be an environment variable allowing to reenable it, and then after some release, we will remove this environment variable. Anytime after the recent developments in crypto SSH, we now allow to completely disable SHA-1. But users need to configure themselves. In some pending work we have exposed the supported algorithm, and we divided the algorithm in secure, and supported and unsecure, if you have to explicitly enable unsecure algorithm to have SHA-1. So if you import the supported algorithm, you will have SHA-1 and the other unsecure algorithms disabled.

We also worked to improve the things in other ways. For example, we are working on exposing [unintelligible 00:33:31.07] and supported algorithms, so our user can see what device needs to be updated before disabling an algorithm, so that they can plan that update. And we also simplified finding the algorithm by exposing in the algorithm negotiation errors. With the algorithm negotiation errors you will exactly know what algorithm negotiations failed, what are the supported algorithms, and what are the recasted algorithms from the client or from the server. And this information before this change that we are still working on were available as a string within the error message. Now instead they are more structured. The error will expose a proper list that our users can search, and match with the algorithm we exported. So it will be much more easier to understand what device, what clients or servers need to be updated, and report the errors to our users.

Paul Vixie: I would like to say so. [unintelligible 00:35:26.26] ever taken on something that was going to be clearly possible… [unintelligible 00:35:31.23] And at the time, I left nonprofit service and went back into the commercial world in 2013. I was trying to do exactly what say. I was trying to figure out “Well, if there were a replacement to the DNS protocol that you could opportunistically adopt…” So you as an information publisher, you as let’s say a smartphone maker, just creating a lot of DNS requests, you’re going to fetch a lot of information, and just try to enumerate all the different entity types in the entire DNS economy, and say “Well, how could they speak both for some transition period”, which by this time is 30 years, “but anybody who was an adopter would immediately get some improvement [unintelligible 00:36:21.16] performance, less resource use”, whatever it is that would be the incentive to adopt. And in a way, that’s how HTTP/2 and now QUICK (HTTP/3) are doing it. And so I was really tinkering hard with this, at the time that I just kind of said that “That’s it. I’ve done 18 years of nonprofit service. I need to go think about my retirement” and I went back into the commercial world.

But I’ll tell you, the biggest impediment to this is that everybody wants to be the creator of that. So you’ve heard of crypto, and Bitcoin, and digital currencies… All of them followed each other along this model of “We don’t like the fiat currencies. We want to be able to have money via a matter of private contracts, without governments being able to either inject money into the economy, or control interest rates”, or whatever. And the problem is nobody [unintelligible 00:37:21.09] came in later and said “It’s a really good idea. I’m going to adopt [unintelligible 00:37:26.02] most popular.” What they did is they came in and they said “Whoever owns this is going to be a trillionaire”, and they created [unintelligible 00:37:32.20] Why would you use an existing one instead of submitting your own?

So some of those very same people have come along and said “Yeah, we could use the blockchain to encode domain names, so that takedown was impossible. So that no matter whose trademark you were infringing, or whose intellectual property you were infringing, there’d be nowhere to target a lawsuit, as you [unintelligible 00:38:00.03] There’d simply be nowhere to go to request takedown. And wouldn’t that be better than having government? I’m not sure it would be, but I’m pretty sure that that type of anarchy might do more harm than good. [unintelligible 00:38:18.25] opportunity.

Nader Dabit: Yeah. I think it’s important to 100% be clear about this not being some panacea (or however you pronounce that), that there are trade-offs. I think that’s one of the problems that you see in the Web3 space a lot of times, that people are only acknowledging the positives. And I think that that is actually not a good thing. And what you end up having - it’s people that see these discussion from the outside and they think everyone is just full of crap, because all they’re talking about is the good stuff. So yeah, it’s extremely important…

And just to clarify on the number of countries from that thing I referenced earlier… I did a quick Google search, and it said that there are at least 72 countries in the world where women can’t open a bank account, and that was written in 2019… So I don’t know the exact number, but yeah, it’s still a problem. Anyway…

In addition to some of the stuff I mentioned - yeah, I’m really interested, I’m excited about play-to-earn gaming. You’re starting to see a lot of people in the gaming industry that are really high up, like the head of Zynga, the head of YouTube Gaming, and a handful of others publicly talk about them starting to implement these ideas in their games, via NFTs, via cryptos, and maybe via some other mechanisms… But the idea is there.

When you see Axie Infinity going from almost nothing to over two million daily active users, 500 million dollars a month in transactions, 95%of that money sticking with the actual users, not going to the centralized platform - it’s a very compelling case, I think, for a lot of people to take notice.

[51:49] I mentioned accessible and stable currencies - we talked about NFTs for a little bit… We didn’t really talk about them a lot. They’re very controversial. I think that the fundamental technology that empowers and enables NFTs is really interesting. I’m not the type of person that thinks that selling and buying images on a marketplace like OpenSea, which by the way just surpassed Etsy in volume, which means that a lot of other people are interested… But it’s not maybe the most interesting thing to me for that use case. But I do think that what you’re gonna see is people using NFTs as ways to put real-world assets on a digital marketplace and make them accessible to the world, just like DeFi has.

One really exciting example that I am actually diving into and trying to figure out myself and be part of if I can are people that are doing fractional real estate. Let’s say you want to be a real estate owner in New York, but you’re making like 100k a year or 50k a year - you’re essentially just completely locked out. You have no way to really participate in that market. What people are doing now, and it’s already been done in certain parts of the world, but I think we’re gonna see more of it, is that people are buying a building or a real estate via either a DAO or some other type of organization like that… And they’re taking it and they’re fractionalizing it in the form of ERC20 tokens; they’ll attach that piece of land to like an NFT and then they’ll fractionalize it… And then anyone can buy and sell ownership into that piece of property on an open, liquid market.

So let’s say you have $1,000 to invest, you really think that this part of New York is gonna blow up in the next 2-3 years based on you living there and understanding the community… You can actually just take $100 and just buy ownership into that in an instant, and then resell it the next day if you want to… But also anyone in the entire world can do that. And I think that that implementation of what NFTs might offer is interesting.

I also think of the idea around creators and people being able to buy into a community and have some type of community ownership for a few different use cases like fundraising, like people just monetizing their work, and things like that are interesting.

One really good example of this is this artist - I forgot his name, but I tweeted about him not too long ago… He’s actually a JavaScript developer, but he created this generative art using JavaScript, and he created an NFT collection, and he sold over 3 million dollars in NFTs over the course of like a few minutes, and he gave all of that money to the JavaScript community that wrote all of the open source libraries that he built his career upon.

Now, why wouldn’t he just ask people for that money, if he really wanted to do a fundraiser? Well, it’s kind of hard to get people to hand over three million dollars. But when you give them an NFT that they can put and sell on a liquid marketplace, it provides some financial incentive for both parties… Because not only are you just handing over money to this platform or to this person, but you’re getting something back in return. If you had bought one of those NFTs at the time, it’s probably worth maybe double of what you bought it for… But it’s kind of like a win/win situation. If someone wants to help and participate and buy into helping someone else succeed, and then they’re getting something that they can kind of hold on to, a value out of it. And I think that, again, ownership - you’re gonna hear this idea of ownership over and over again… That’s pretty interesting to me.

And another thing around NFTs is definitely the environmental impact, and I think we’re gonna talk about that when we talk about the trade-offs, and also get more clarity as to what that discussion is.

Victor Dibia: [03:57] My background is a mix of computer science - software engineering - and a bit of human-computer interaction, and more recently applied artificial intelligence. I have a masters degree from Carnegie Mellon University that’s focused on software engineering, some management courses… And as part of that I did this thesis in building a web-based public key crypto system that was introduced by my advisor. That was a nice experience, it’s just that there was a lot of time spent implementing cryptographic functions in Java. After that I felt it would be nice to move away from just the technical aspects of computer science, and also look at some of the human aspects of computer science.

Right after that, I made an interesting choice… I moved to Africa, Lagos, Nigeria to be specific, and I started a company focused on making software, focused on the African market. I did that for about a year, and as a part of that I also taught at the university in Lagos, Nigeria, through some project that was co-sponsored by MIT and Google.

At that time I figured out I’m really interesting in human aspects of computer science, and I had all this experience building software tools within the framework of a startup, and also teaching at a university… And then I decided to do a Ph.D. My Ph.D. was in information systems. I did it at the City University of Hong Kong. The main focus was quantitative user behavior studies.

At some point during my Ph.D. I had the opportunity to do an internship at IBM Research, and that’s where I got into AI. So I interned with a group called the cognitive environmental lab at IBM. Most of what that group did was trying to figure out good user experiences for applied machine learning. So we spent time taking APIs built by other research groups - APIs around speech-to-text, text-to-speech and computer vision, and our goal was to use these tools and build them into interactive, in some cases [unintelligible 00:06:20.13] experiences.

That’s where all of my interests with AI started. I started out applying models, and after a while I spent time implementing some of these models in TensorFlow and Keras, and essentially made the transition to start applying some of these custom-built models in new problem spaces.

I was at IMB Research as a post-doc, and then a research scientist, and earlier this year I joined Cloudera’s Fast Forward Labs as a research scientist. It’s a bit of a journey, but this is kind of how it all went down.

Drew Wilson: Crypto will be great for collectibles, and hopefully also another spot, like through Bitcoin, the name brand crypto, will be another spot for super-wealthy people to move money, and so that way they don’t have to move it into real estate, and harm the real estate industry… In that by doing so, by buying up a bunch of properties, it makes property go up everywhere; property values go up everywhere, and it makes it harder for regular people to buy homes at an affordable price… That’s one, if we’re staying on the crypto train. If we’re not staying on the crypto train, another hard belief - let’s see… Maybe a hard observation, how about that? I still think it’s interesting that design and engineering are now a regular job. I was always the young guy in tech, and so that will never kind of go away from me. But this idea of getting into tech and it being a job, and not like a hobby and something that you want to do is still so strange to me… Especially when you get into running companies and having employees or having teams, and you start to realize that “Okay, this person does one thing, and they’re probably only ever going to do one thing.” And maybe they have aspirations of being really good at this one thing, but they don’t really want to spread out, and like think of tech as one thing, and there’s many aspects to it. They think of “I’m a designer” or “I’m an engineer” or “I’m a product manager.” So that’s the segue into my hard belief. Here comes my hard belief.

Anthony Eden: Cryptocurrency has become normalized now, right? Crypto is normal.

Anurag Goel: Exactly. Anyway, slight tangent… So yeah, so not having any of those emails, and having a work email makes sense. But we also have a lot of people using Render for specific things while working at large companies. We have people who have signed up with Meta.com, and we have Alibaba.com, and all these other… Even Amazon and Google… These are paying customers. People have signed up with their work email, who are not actually running a large thing from Google or Amazon on Render. It doesn’t make sense to do that. But they’re using – so these might be like data scientists, who want to run something in Python and they just can’t get the support they need from their DevOps teams. And this is very common in large companies, where you have enterprises where their main application is handled by the DevOps team, but then people want to build other things, whether it’s data scientists, or sales engineers… Even marketing engineers, they want to do stuff that they want to put out in the world, they want it to have a URL that other people can access, and they just don’t get the support that they need from DevOps, because DevOps couldn’t be bothered, and they’re a bottleneck, because they have all these other needs that they need to fulfill from the main application. So we get a lot of people like that.

But fundamentally, the people who we’re most excited about today are early-stage startups, because Render is a great fit for them. When you’re a startup, you want to move fast, and you want reliability, and Render gives you both of those things.

And then the second sort of serious customer segment is what we call tech-enabled businesses. So tech-enabled businesses are those where the core competency isn’t actually software. What they’re doing is something like they’re building a mortgage CRM, or they’re a law firm and they need technology to achieve a specific goal. Or they are in some cases also like a crypto company that needs something specific, and they need to host it online. But they’re not in the business of hiring DevOps engineers. They might not even be able to hire DevOps engineers. And so they are very, very happy with what Render and products like Render provide.

And then I think we’re increasingly seeing what I was talking about earlier, where there are these teams within larger companies that end up using Render because it gives them the same speed of iteration, velocity. We also just launched things like SSO, and SCIM…

Acon: One of the plushies there sold for 102 bottle caps, which is crazy. But yeah. And then after that, the value of bottle caps just massively dropped, and nobody cared about it. But… It’s kind of crypto, when you think about it…