Fabian Riewe on KYVE Network’s approach to Web3 data and scalability

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have fabian reeve the founder of kive network fabian welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today thank you for having me you're very welcome let's dive into all things blockchain data uh scalability of web three more protocols coming in and

0:22hopefully building a holistic uh you know family of communication to all these blockchains to allow them to speak to each other build apps that can work seamlessly across the blockchain industry i'm excited to hear about what's hive network is working on i know you guys are early on and there's a lot to build and just a lot to build in blockchain overall uh but i'm excited to dive into

0:45where we're at right now so let's kick off the conversation with just a little bit from you on uh what is chive network and what are some of the main solutions that your team is working on right now absolutely happy to give an overview so the whole idea of got started a year and a half ago from now it was february 2022 and it was me my co-founder working um

1:06on a grant from parody which is the team we had polka dot um and arif which is like our main like storage solution we came from and the grant was well please store the data from polka dot onto our weave because the main problem statement behind this is imagine you're building like a very traditional company right and like for every single transaction

1:24your company does you have to print it out in a piece of paper and like put it in the folder and what's going to happen is you're going to have a huge warehouse after a while right where actually you don't earn any money with it's like you have it just for all the reasons and just cost you basically at the end it cuts your profit right and of course

1:40everyone wants to stay as profitable as possible so that's like the main like problem kind of like we resolve back then for for parity because what we're doing with chive then now in a more in a bigger way is basically we're like the provider that's taking all of those folders you have like accumulated in your business load into a semi truck and then drive into a warehouse that's only

1:58specialized for like keeping all that so like you as a as a partner company you don't have to worry about how to manage cover like all your access data and then we at chi if we just make sure that we do the transportation correctly that's like the main idea behind it and then once we like show it to the parity team and tomorrow we've got some great feedback from the community and then

2:17other chains started reaching out like solana like avalanche cosmos i think we got all of the big names together quite quickly then we started out like turning this into like a protocol started to like decentralize it more and more and this is kind of the state we are currently at we launched our test net a few months ago it's finished since like two weeks

2:35so around 40 000 participants in it which is absolutely amazing and then yeah now we're paving the way for for mania because we have a lot of people actively waiting to like use everything but we'll dive deeper into that later on wow very exciting fabian and from that example you you gave it makes me think of you know having to store your transactions on piece of paper more like

2:55an accounting issue is it specifically an accounting issue or is it data overall and much more than that exactly so it is much more than that the accounting statement is just something that everyone can kind of like visualize quite easily right um and then because like on a blockchain right you have to keep track of every what we call a transaction happening but in the end

3:13it's not just an accounting sending a to b transaction a transaction is also of course like using a smart contract right or like creating an nft all of these are transactions and then even like the metadata connected with like the image of an nft and so on and so on that's all like transactional data so the same we take care of everything and actually

3:31like another cool thing about caive is what we can do as well like let's imagine right you're like a company again the whole warehouse example but you're not like a crypto company like you have just some weather data that's for example use case we have for sports game data right they were like well we need to find a way to like turn this data to be usable in web 3 and that's

3:49actually the use also kai for that so like for example like a sports betting platform right we can work with and then we say well here's a tennis match and here's the result of it but like how do now like d apps sitting on blockchains interact with that and then they use skype for that but yeah that's like another use case of it very exciting and it's great to hear

4:05that you got a grant from from parity and to work on the polkadot blockchain i have a lot of hopes for for the growth of and i'm about to see i i think we're about to see a lot of growth in that area as well but you mentioned that it's tying into our weave i don't think a lot of the viewers are familiar with our weave is that a separate protocol and and what is

4:27the advantage and why are you using our weave yeah absolutely so um is its own blockchain right and it's optimized for data storage and it works way it works actually quite easy is in a blockchain every node has to store all of the data right making it very like bad scalable so to say it's very limited in scaling because every time i would add one new node to network it has to

4:51replicate all the data and it's basically just security by like insane replication of data and this as again like right cost of money and so on so what the folks over at ah we've did is they thought well if we say that not anyone has to store all the data but if someone has a very rare piece of data and if someone other is able to then retrieve this very rare

5:10piece of data it's going to make a bigger chunk of reward for it right so everyone is kind of like incentivizing a network looking around finding rare pieces of data and then doing a copy of this data onto their system basically like this that ensures that the data will never be gone right because if it's like very very rare to find you're gonna get a lot of money for it that's kind of

5:29like how you can imagine it works and but this is very optimized for storage right well for example solana is highly optimized for speed it's like a one or the other um like optimization you usually do here you say well for speed then you have trouble kind of scaling with the data obviously with optimize for day and then it's slow so for example solano you can like do i don't

5:47know a trazillion transactions per second and on are reef it's a block time of like 10 minutes per block which is super slow right compared to other chains but for that they're highly optimized for storage and that's also like the ecosystem we came from and why we choose uh with this our like storage layer for that okay great to know and it's also great to hear that you're

6:08partnering with all these different blockchains now are i'm guessing that there's multiple ways that many many ways this data can be used but for example let's just say polka dot the blockchain or salon of the blockchain are they capitalizing on this data that's stored on our weave to make them more efficient or how does that work well this is like a this is the cool

6:30thing because we have all the data it allows huge use cases right so one is like i would say the direct impact for protocol like solana for example using us is what they can do is they can completely delete their history from their archiving nodes right so they can safely delete like block number zero for example from solana because they know it will be stored through hive and it's

6:50always going to be accessible right so that is one like big use case of it and then of course we have like some other not direct impacts which is then of course like analytics companies for example right also utilizing solana data and then running analytics of this or like protocols building like other things about for example like a multi-chain block expo first right you

7:10could build one that like fetches the data from all the different blockchains and then kind of create some value there and that's like the multiple base at the end this data lake can be used okay good to know and you also gave the examples of you know uh like a web 2 sas company or like weather data i've often heard of examples uh using you know weather data in in in defy and in smart

7:33contracts in how there's a lot of off-chain data that needs to be you know translated through through oracle's and and put into the blockchain so that it can be used in smart contracts you know smart contracts can't just predict the weather they need to get the information from somewhere is that uh uh an example in a use case of chive where you could take uh sort of

7:54off-chain data and put it on chain and then it can be used in in smart contracts in d5 yes this is exactly basically what kaivet its core is capable of doing so i can walk you a bit through the way it works it's it's actually very simple is you have um like one data source let's take the weather source as an example right and then you have 50 nodes or up to 50 nodes that are

8:16relaying the data from from a to b given one second sorry so you have nozzle relaying the data from a to b and while doing this is they are voting on if the other nodes have done a good job or not right so what i would do is we have one node that's relaying data from polka dot onto our weave right block number five and the other blocks would pull down the data the onenote has

8:38uploaded and then check it against their local copy and if it's correct they voted in favor of it and if it's incorrect they vote against it and then of course on our the kite chain we only keep all valid entries so then a user can say well this is piece of data valid yes so let's say it's an oracle system and with this you can use any type of data can be

8:56weather data and whatever else very cool and with all of this data you know say for example salon is able to delete their you know block history and because it's stored on on chive and and are weave and and kai are sort of optimized for data storage i feel like the the size of all of this information is still really large um so how does that work you know is uh is it going to

9:22be bogged down or are the files compressed to make the file size smaller um how is kai able to store you know gigabytes or terabytes of information yeah actually so we are compressing the data to make it more efficient on the storage side but that's just i would say good practice in general it's not something we do on special for archive but actually blockchain data isn't that

9:44big as many people think like a full-on blockchain like i think we have a full copy of moonbeam right now which is like one blockchain in the pocket ecosystem and i think compress is like three gigabytes or something and that can even fit in the usb stick right because actually data scalability is such a problem we never saw any big data sets yet right the biggest blockchain out

10:03there as far as i know is solana and they have massive troubles like kind of scaling their system because you have to replicate this amount of data to all the other nodes they all have to handle it they cannot make any errors so actually it could be a fair thesis saying that with coming up and like they're making data storage easier like the size of

10:20blockchains could actually grow um but also like how do we handle like the all this data is actually through our weave and making sure that they're like incentives are aligned right of course the network works the best the more data is in there so we're kind of like just bootstrapping their system and something we actually also can do is we are fully

10:36like storage back and agnostic is what we like to say meaning that if like a user would want the data from this or that storage pool to be stored on firecoin or like ipfs or whatever we can also build an integration from there just for now as a team decision we just find rv is like the most scalable more the most easy to work with solution but we do have support for other backends

10:57there as well okay good to know and you mentioned at the beginning about how chive network is currently in the test net but you have all these partners and working with this data um when the transition happens to mainnet what is the difference there or you know or what is missing currently in the test net um in terms of uh the integrity of data or how it works with the blockchains and

11:18are they able to use the information currently in the testnet or are they waiting for that upgrade yeah so basically the data now from a mathematical point of view is absolutely usable like it's mathematically proven that it is correct but because kai was a proof of stake chain um there is no like economic security behind it right in proof of stake i

11:36would say well i put up a million dollars and if i'm incorrect take away ten percent of it right and because now there is just no value to it in theory someone could have uploaded like incorrect data and they could have find consensus on incorrect data and so we don't recommend it using it in production yet but of course like for things like if you want to build like a

11:53multi-chain blog explorer for example it's just the ui thing can already absolutely start using kaif data as of for now but of course like the production use cases like in amms or something like that but then of course right you better wait for mainnet and make sure that there's also the economic security um behind the data feeds we are like validating

12:11yeah that's great to know and what are the steps that chive network needs to take uh to get to that point of launching the main net actually it's not much missing so we are building on the cosmos sdk framework right which meaning that so i can quickly like dive into that so the cosmos sdk is like a tool for developers to like super easily build your chain has a lot of

12:32out-of-the-box tooling and we are using this and then what you need to do is then you just need to do like little like additions to it right for example like the kind of logic is one edition or like we had to uh like have some custom inflation modules so that you add a custom inflation but it's much less code than it would be like really you completely own blockchain right um so

12:50we're just like finishing the last modules on that and then you need to find like people that would do the initial like genesis of a blockchain so that's something we are figuring out right now we just finalized our tokenomics so from a tech perspective it's like almost done but now it's just like a bit of like the operational stuff kind of happening but we are really

13:05looking forward to launching q4 uh this year everything works well which looks good so far great to hear and speaking of the tokenomics uh with the launch of the mainnet are you guys building in a governance token and if so how will that create a sustainable ecosystem for all the partners and help grow the network yeah so you can use the the kive token

13:27multiple ways so one would be that um you can use it like right in the governance participate there and like make sure you run out of protocol upgrades create new pools and so on and then the core functionality actually of it is the funding mechanisms what we call it so basically if you let's say you would be a protocol and you would like to use kaif is you purchase some kind of talks

13:47of the market put them in the pool as a funding and then this funding gets paid out to the nodes that are relaying your data over time and if a pool would run out of funding it pauses right and because we're always working with like data streams you kind of always incentivize right to like purchase new tokens and put them in and like it dribbles down like from the buyers to

14:06the nodes onto the market and so on and then now you can imagine you have now multiple players in the ecosystem like for example analytics company right they might be interested in also using solana data and using like avalanche data for example so like they do like strategic purchases we maybe have doubts doing strategic purchases and some of tokens

14:23and always they kind of could provide like a continuous funding service and that's like that the core mechanic of how the talk works then of course it's a proof of stake so you can stake your token you can delegate to a node like the usual like d5 stuff i would say i don't want to expend too much on that okay sounds great and in terms of the decentralization of the network i feel

14:43obviously the the economics and making the network uh sort of decentralized is important are you guys implementing or planning in the future to implement more of a dow governance or some kind of more community uh governed you know protocol for the future absolutely and this is kind of like the big like kind of ethos we have over here archivists we want everything to be

15:06fully decentralized and even in testing it already is so like we as a team only running one node in like one storage pool and one validator um and like that's it everyone else is like everything else completely community run you have a working governance out there and so i mean of course we have like some mechanisms and tests that in place to say well if you really want like this

15:25proposal to go through we can like of course push it to really go through right because otherwise it would be a bit of a of a tricky situation for us but like it is already like set up to be fully decentralized the moment we launch maine and this is our big goal as well yeah i like that approach and we've seen that with uh you know a lot of dows i feel like it's a lot harder to start the

15:45projects and sort of give it away fully to to the dao community um and and you know at the beginning as you work out the kinks and build a foundation of it and sort of have that leadership to send the direction uh you know in the right path and then sort of step by step allow the community to take over and eventually you know not be not have an influence at all

16:10as opposed to just you know besides just having like one a part of the community as you guys have your vote and everyone else has an equal vote to you exactly and kind of like this is like a bit of like a way kind of going for what we have is we start of course i mean you always start off with voting power being at the core team right and we have a lot

16:28of like developer adoption plans and grants and like foundation delegation systems in place to basically slowly by steady start diluting tokens to the correct people in the ecosystem or to the to the correct like your partners in the ecosystem right to like ensure like the smooth kind of like offloading power so to say right from like the core team into the network but like all of

16:50the like decentralized mechanisms so to say they are already in place and fully works like we have a dow that is voting of course consists of like initial investors validators the team and so on people that participated in testnet right it's really of important as a project finding the right people yeah to really kind of like dilute your tokens towards to right like making it

17:10accessible to them i think that's of course the big like milestone on the roadmap right getting that right and uh making sure every everyday incentives are in the correct place great to hear and for people in the community that want to follow along on the launch to the mainnet and just learn more about how they can participate in the dao and in in kive network what is

17:32the best way for people to learn more and to get involved yeah i would say the best way is to go to our discord just through like what we're like have the networks or our landing page right from there you have multiple links you like the discord is very active um as well as you can immediately dive deep and just do a diabetes even play around with the app

17:48with a fully working app out there where you can see everything like the archiving process this storage pool stood down you can vote on proposals there and so on and then we also have a little like demo sub two called warp dot careful network wrap docker network where if you're a developer you can already start accessing the data that has been stored with now and the cool

18:08thing is you can even do like cross-chain queries meaning that you can put in like in your ethereum address and you can say well did this address do any transactions on avalanche for example when you start like combining already it's like some rich data we should say a little demo case we have out there very cool uh great and i will leave the community links and and the platform uh

18:28links in the description box below as well fabian to make it easy for the viewers uh all the best on the road to the mainnet launch i'm looking forward to seeing uh that come to fruition and i will be following along as well um so let's follow up in the near future let's go for it thank you so much