Navin Vethanayagam on IQ.Wiki’s blockchain encyclopedia and AI integration

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have Navin faith and iogom the chief brain at IQ Wiki Navin welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today thank you for having me excited to be here you're very welcome uh I'm excited to dive into IQ Wiki a little bit on AI how it's merging in with blockchain and I

0:25would love to start off our conversation with just a little bit on yourself personally your background and what led you to building up IQ and then we'll dive into all the details yeah so to get started basically so I'm born and raised in Canada I joined the company while I was studying in University so I was at Western and I was about to start the ivy Business School

0:46and basically it's kind of funny how I got involved is because uh I'd worked this internship at a bank and I was like okay because I really originally I thought I was going to go into Finance it's kind of funny I ended up into crypto but uh I had worked at a big bank and I was like yeah this isn't for me like I can't you know where suit and tie I can't you know do nine to five I

1:06really wanted to have something where I'm passionate about it something that where I have a real ownership stake and something that I'm really excited about every day um and so that's how you know I saw on Twitter actually they were talking about this company called everypedia and I was like wow that sounds interesting so for those who don't know IQ Wiki used to be

1:21called everypedia and the original Vision was to build the more inclusive encyclopedia so a more modern encyclopedia for the world and that really excited me because I've always been passionate about knowledge about learning I used to be a big Wikipedia reader um so that kind of appealed to me and I thought this was really exciting so I joined on it as an intern and then just

1:43over time got more responsibility and learned more more and you know how every pedia became Like You Wiki is an interesting story as well so we started out um with this broad vision of being the most you know an encyclopedia of everything but we quickly realized that there's a lot of challenges in that it's too broad it's it's challenging to have such a broad Focus so in around 2018 the

2:07crypto Market was kind of getting really exciting some of our Founders so Sam cousmeon they had always already been interested in crypto for a long time so he paid his tuition actually by mining Dogecoin so he used kind of long time long time crypto guy uh but we never really understood like you know how can we use crypto with an encyclopedia people always thought you know how are

2:27you going to do that but uh kind of the idea kind of came to us around 2018 we saw the space growing so quickly and we saw hey like there's a really a need for incentivization so that's kind of what first got us the idea of the IQ token and creating our own cryptocurrency the other big point that I think is actually even bigger than it is into incentivization is governance so one of

2:48the major issues is uh with a lot of web 2 platforms and it's been a huge controversy recently is the idea of who gets to decide what goes on the platforms right so you know and most companies really it's the shareholders a non-profit sometimes it could be even more murky it's like you know whoever's the donors and whoever's chosen by the donors oftentimes and you know for

3:10example you can bureaucracy there can be moderators and then even if you do have a clear rules you don't really have a clear record of what's being moderated so that's what I like about blockchain is that so for example the rules are voted on by the community everything's on Snapshot if you're an IQ token holder and your Nike token Staker you can vote on the

3:30decisions on how the site is run and then beyond that every edit is recorded on polygon and every edit is recorded on ipfs so that's how we create that transparency very cool and and now this transition from everopedia into IQ Wiki I feel like uh it's a great idea from the start and as the blockchain industry has been continuing to evolve with more of this

3:59Dow functionality understanding the way that governance works better and also the incorporation of AI where was that inflection point where everpedia expanded into the next evolution yeah I think it was a lot of that so basically with the blockchain industry growing we realized okay maybe it makes more sense to just focus our content completely on blockchain because we had

4:22already we had you know we'd already seen a pivot once we launched the token once we moved on chain there's already a lot of interest and quickly it becomes like everyone's writing about blockchain topics that's what's hot that's what's interesting and everyone's writing about that so we're like okay maybe it just makes sense to focus on blockchain content and really what that allowed us

4:39to do is create more interesting Integrations for example you can if you know if you go to the board apocal page we have Integrations with coing gecko so you can get the floor prices you can get the daily volumes and you can do that for every token uh which is something that's really interesting and if we just stayed in general content it's tough to

4:57do stuff like that and to do you know quality Integrations so I think that was the big impetus there uh with getting into AI the real excitement is again we saw GPT growing we saw Chad gbt come out there was huge huge usage it was something that was always in the back of our minds because we were always thinking how do we make it easier for people to contribute how

5:16do we make it because sometimes you know wikis it can be challenging to contribute it takes a lot of time even if you're a subject matter expert you might not have the time to actually do all the citations and to do everything even if you have the knowledge so I think AI tooling is something that's going to make it a lot easier for more people to contribute and that's kind of

5:34how we got the idea okay maybe we should expand into AI yeah it's uh it's been a whole Paradigm Shift since chat GPT came out and is looking at almost replacing you know searching in Google and then going through the list of results and having to read all the paragraphs yourself of course um it might be more unbiased because you're sort of able to pick and choose

5:58you know where this source is from here and there but with Chachi Boutique you can just ask a question and all of a sudden in 10 seconds you have the answer and I feel like it if you Incorporated that into a IQ Wiki or any of these encyclopedias it can give you information really fast but it might not give you exactly the perspective that you're looking for if you're looking for

6:22multiple perspectives exactly so that's kind of what we're building out as the next step so obviously we've got a great database of knowledge with IQ Wiki but obviously like anything there you know we can't have every single piece of data being in one encyclopedia so for example real-time data our goal is to integrate news coverage and we're working with

6:42Partners there and also working with data Partners like coin Gecko and stuff like that as well to make sure that we have real-time data so what we're building out in the future is something that our next AI product is going to be something very similar to chat gbt except dedicated to the crypto Market so it's going to be trained on data from the cryptocurrency community and it's

7:01going to integrate reliable sources so obviously our own database but also news coverage from the crypto industry as well as international news coverage as well and price data as well so all that data will be kind of combined as well as blockchain like etherscan data stuff like that as well so our goal is to combine all that data so that exactly so instead of having to search through like

7:22you know what is the you know what is the average price this week and then having to do all these calculations yourself or have an intern do it now you can just have uh our new product do it yourself so that's kind of what we're building as the next step very cool and you know I'm curious because in these encyclopedias some of the old traditional web 2 ones like like

7:43Wikipedia they always touted that it's a non-profit organization and we really need people to donate because we don't really have a business model how do we you know pay the salary of the management that's sort of keeping this thing alive um I feel like with the incorporation of blockchain crypto prices there's a lot of information that advanced information as well when you

8:07incorporate AI that can be very useful to people that are looking to trade or make money on it is there any business model besides you know obviously having the the token and the Dow and have people contribute to it where there can be revenues generated for an encyclopedia like this to allow it to sustain itself without having to ask for donations like

8:28they did in web 2. absolutely so a couple different avenues that we're looking at is so we have our token we have our dial of course but also we've built building up liquidity so we have long-term locked liquidity so we're on the lp fees there we have staking so for people to get involved as well so even seeing people lock up tokens and then kind of more in the

8:48future is our goal is to kind of create uh a pass that basically allows you access to IQ Wiki to edit and also to our upcoming AI tooling so that should be another good source of Revenue is that for premium features we're planning to have like you know either a subscription model or you know something with the stakers for example maybe you stake certain amount of like utopians and

9:10additional to the staking returns maybe you also get a discount to use our services so a couple different Revenue models there another very simple one actually is uh integrating swaps so one of the ways metamasks metamask has been able to make money is that they take a fee on swaps they're done within metamask itself so we're thinking of doing a very

9:29similar thing I think we're already kind of prototyping it on IQ Wiki so for example let's say you read about the hottest new meme coin you read about Pepe and imagine as you read about it you can just swap into it on IQ Wiki itself so that's another idea there yeah make it the One-Stop shop that sounds easy exactly and I'm curious if uh the the underlying

9:54technology in on the blockchain side for IQ Wiki uh with the token and the governance is there any particular you know if you're going through all the pages on IQ Wiki you're reading about all these different blockchains uh the choice in which the foundation itself has chosen which blockchain kind of Technology they're using do you have any insight into that and and the rationale

10:15behind how it's actually been launched as a Dao and what blockchain technology you're currently using for an optimal operations yeah exactly so that's one of the main that's one of our main considerations which obviously as an encyclopedia you have you know tons and tons of edits coming in Daily it's not something where you can have a five dollar gas fee on

10:35every edit that's not you know really usable for us so you know uh that's why we decided to build on polygon one of the main reasons is cost and scalability um also we wanted something that you know is very into the evm ecosystem obviously most of the major Technologies most of the major dapps uh nfts it's all ethereum ecosystem so we really wanted to be part of that and we saw a polygon

10:58as one of the fastest growing Solutions in the ecosystem so that's kind of how we chose polygon the other thing that was really interesting is that we also wanted people to be able to sign sign and edit without having to spend gas so that's why we use open Zeppelin so you actually don't you don't you can actually you know edit without even having any tokens

11:17um because you know you don't need your own Matic tokens and you don't need to spend money to just edit the site which is great that's really interesting and that's good to know about uh if you want to edit information you have to sign so does that mean that each page or blocks of text are actually on the blockchain themselves as you were mentioning at the

11:39beginning of the ipfs the interplanetary file system and that that content is on the blockchain and it can't be deleted or it can be accessed you know throughout other means besides just web 2. yes this is a great question so basically how we do it is that we store the data and the the images and the text that's all stored in ipfs because even with polygon it'd still be cost

12:03prohibitive but obviously we do want the decentralization and we do want everything stored on chain so how we do that is every edit is hashed on chain so you can go to the polygon blockchain like you can you know every edit you'll actually have the transaction hashed you can click on that and then that will give you the data and then you could go to ipfs and all the data will be there

12:22so that's kind of how we solve that problem which is like this is like one of the most common questions you know a lot of developers ask me um so how are you guys doing this like there's no way you can store videos and images on the blockchain itself so that's exactly how we do it it's good to know and and do you only foresee you know eventually people are

12:42going to want video or audio and all these other formats as blockchain continues to grow there'll probably be better versions of ipfs and decentralized storage are you planning on trying to store as much content as you can on the blockchain or is there you know uh sort of a an optimal amount for business purposes that it's like we use the blockchain for some stuff but we don't

13:08for others yeah I think I think it's a mix I would agree it's it's definitely a mix so for example we want to integrate traditional tools that people use because there's a lot of data there right so for example there's a ton of content on YouTube right so you can embed YouTube videos onto iq.wiki but it doesn't make sense for that to be stored like and for us to

13:27bear the cost for that because you know it's already on YouTube itself similarly I would say uh with Twitter is same thing but on the flip side I think it would be great to have greater storage capability on the blockchain itself maybe look into decentralized storage applications like filecoin and things like that distort for example PDFs or things that may be more controversial or

13:48you're worried about getting censored like PDF files from you know maybe regulatory filings uh you know maybe um reports that people have published that are more interesting that could I think be uh stored on a decentralized storage platform and then maybe hosted onto IQ Wiki I think that could be an interesting solution yeah that would be great you know uh

14:08actually having the original documentation um on I I feel like would be nice for people that are actually going to these encyclopedias to find the original information you know and I think that was uh I remember back in in the in the school days like going to these encyclopedias and it's like could you really trust the sources or did you actually check in the citations on on

14:31what it said originally um to have the actual documentation there on the blockchain as well I feel like would be a huge Advantage so that's really interesting um now I have a question about Ai and the GPT Integrations to make it easier but also uh the trust Factor you know blockchain is all about trust and transparency um AI I I don't completely trust the

14:53transparency and bias of uh AI to be unbiased at the moment do you see combining these two on the platform uh making AI more unbiased or in in what ways can we make AI more unbiased to get information in an unbiased way so I think cryptocurrency is going to be one of the key Tools in making AI more open and more unbiased one of the major issues right now is it's only really

15:19capable to test and train am models if you are a billion dollar organization which naturally causes things to be very centralized so I think one of the solutions that we're looking into is training AI models for example using the IQ token to incentivize independent developers to train AI models for example imagine running your own you build an AI llm or you use an open

15:41source llm and you tweak it a little bit now you can test it out on our site and maybe earn some tokens if your contributions are good and have them rated by our community so I think that's a unique Avenue for getting communities involved into AI so allowing people to profit and to get involved and also bringing in more decentralization more viewpoints into AI

16:01mm-hmm good perspective and and now if I wanted to just go to qwiki and start browsing Pages um is there a place to start that's good or you just sort of go to the front page and hey what's new what's relevant what do you guys have that's most recently uploaded yeah so I would say go straight to the home page so that's just IQ dot Wiki and we've got a lot of cool features already

16:28from there so the first thing you'll see is the trending topics of the day um so I think right now today he has been trending so one of the co-founders of Finance she actually doesn't have any encyclopedia entries about her outside of our page so it's one of the most comprehensive resources she has a really interesting story and we've got a lot of cool figures in blockchain uh We've Got

16:48You Ashton of course and we've got uh uh your show as well and then um the other cool thing that we have is a ranking so if you scroll down a little bit there'll be a ranking of the top uh 100 cryptocurrencies and you can see not only the wikis of the cryptocurrencies but we also have wikis on all the founders um and then we have a similar thing for

17:08nft so you can switch and cnfts and then at the bottom of the page we got lots of different categories so we'll have pages on nfts Dows uh D5 a lot of different topics very cool and what are some of the plans that you and your team have in the road map moving forward to the end of 2023 and into next year as you continue to grow so the biggest Focus right now is our AI

17:34product so we've already integrated gpd3 and then gpd4 into the site itself for summaries so for example you know it takes a long time to create a Wikipedia to create a page on the site but uh one of the things that's challenging has always been creating those summaries those 200 character summaries that is used by search engines so we use gpt4 to do that

17:55um in the close future our main goal is building out our own AI solution for Traders so for example if you want to learn about crypto if you want to learn about price differences and things like that we want you to be able to just ask an AI tool rather than having to do all that work manually so that's kind of in the medium term and that's coming out

18:13very soon longer term we'd like to build our own llm and have a dedicated and trained specifically on crypto data so I think that's one of the longer term goals and then like I was talking about earlier I think using the IQ token as an incentive for AI development that's kind of another longer term plan that would be really cool and if I wanted to learn more about the IQ token

18:33and how to stake it or get involved in the Dow so that I could actually edit the pages and get involved as well what's the easiest way to find out about that so the easiest place to go would be so the iq.wiki you can go to the site um and then if you click if you click that we also have a staking uh page and a page about braindow so we have a dashboard about the IQ token that will

18:55give you a lot of information about you know how to stake um you know the current APR uh you know all the important data that you need to get involved and then we've also got you know um Twitter uh Discord all that's linked there so you can get involved the community that way we're always on telegram as well um so you have all the links there sounds great and Evans thank you so much

19:16for taking the time today I'll put the link to IQ Wiki and the socials that you just mentioned as well in the description box below all the best with expanding the blockchain encyclopedia the IQ Wiki and incorporating AI I'm really looking forward to that and I will be following along with the updates uh so let's definitely follow up in the near future

19:36awesome thank you for having me you definitely would love to follow up especially once we launch the product we'd love to come here and talk about it some more thank you