How Syntropy is fixing internet infrastructure with a programmable approach

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have jonas siemenovicius the co-founder and cto of syntropy jonas welcome to the show and it's a pleasure to have you here today thanks so much for having me you're welcome i'm really excited for our discussion today on centerp if we could just kick it off

0:22with a little bit of your background in the space and how that led to you co-founding centripe and then we'll dive into the details sure so i have a background in software engineering as well as financial markets working for investment banking firms like jp morgan and royal bank of scotland as well as entrepreneurship afterwards and then we started neuaya

0:44nearly two years ago we started as a distributed content delivery network effectively trying to deliver data from the closest location to the user uh but we found the core internet problems along the way which led us to develop internet routing technology and synthropy at the end so happy to be doing internet routing and related technologies ever since

1:08definitely and can you dive a little bit deeper into syndropy just giving a brief overview and the goals of the platform for those who aren't familiar sure so synthropy is a thin distributed layer of technology on top of public internet enabled by blockchain so it gives an intelligence and sort of a bird's-eye view for the current internet uh and uh

1:34you know we often refer to it as the waze for the internet so you know however most much like when in heavy traffic without an intelligence system uh there are local roads under utilized roads which could be taken uh but you just don't know about it and what would happen so most cars are happy to take the highest congested highways at the peak times

1:56or when accidents happen so we also believe uh every packet sent on the internet should be encrypted by default and a current internet fails to do that so we already offer a platform for all developers uh to build applications with secure and optimized internet out of the box and we'll also soon have a technology for decentralized applications and decentralized world uh to start

2:22using this technology and all these features as well very interesting and yeah there it seems that as the internet continues to grow and especially in the last few years more problems are popping up and maybe you know the way that the internet was built when when the foundation was built in the 90s just wasn't ready for you know global mass adoption

2:42and that's part of the reason why centerpiece for solving these problems so could you give your personal vision and the vision of centerpiece on on and what the future of the internet would look like when all of these problems have been solved um sure so the internet is is operating on a foundation that is decades old as you've just said so the core

3:02protocols were designed just to reach the destination with no built-in security and it's not performance oriented so it wasn't meant to deal over the amounts of data we send now as well so it's plagued by connections that are slow are unreliable and insecure and and that leaves for companies and individuals to invest billions of dollars into making it secure

3:25and efficient uh and it still fails to accommodate the ever-growing demand of data and at the same time decentralized applications and blockchains in particular still have only centralized technologies to rely on uh you know thus is still failing to be truly decentralized it's and synthropy is routing protocol works on top of existing internet uh and you know to

3:49eliminate all of these deficiencies so first it has a routing uh protocol which uses thousands of servers and device devices around the world to sort of harvest and utilize all of these vast available segments to improve performance and avoid those outages and it uses blockchain technology and latest research on tokenomics to make it both decentralized and optimized so my

4:15view of the internet of the future is automatically optimized and decentralized system uh ready uh not only to be used by companies and individuals but for applications and decentralized applications internet of things autonomous cars robots and so on definitely and that sounds like the optimal solution and as we work towards there and the speed of the internet and

4:41technology and moore's law is just getting faster and faster it's growing really quickly so i think the 2020s is going to be the year for the revolutionization of the internet and you talked about there's a lot of problems with you know the foundation that was built from the internet what are some of those main challenges that you have to work with and you're

5:02not able to you know just remove the foundation that that has to sort of stay there and all the cracks in it and and how do you work around you know solving these issues without being able to just build a new foundation so like what are the main challenges that you have to solve for so i guess the most challenging part is to grasp the full spectrum of technologies and

5:26events that need to happen to enable a new and decentralized internet which is optimized for performance secure uh by default and also working on the current infrastructure so to get everything in line is quite a challenge still but we have grown both as an organization and we've done a lot of r d and technology to put all those pieces in place and you know as i said we already

5:51started with developer adoption uh business adoption and we'll start with decentralized technologies and all these pieces sort of need to tie in together and in the right order and it needs a lot of support from community open source community as well uh to make that happen so it's really a combination of technologies because internet is just such a vast technology used by

6:15literally everyone every day uh that it's really it's really quite difficult to to change it without changing you know the actual protocol but just making it better yeah and you touched on a couple different points on how you're looking to optimize the internet you know more privacy more security more scalability so it's not slow and it seems with the recent issues just in the last

6:39year a lot of this has come to light to people that aren't really familiar with how the internet works technically but all of a sudden these issues are becoming apparent to people that are just using social media and using messaging platforms one of the recent examples was whatsapp looking at changing their privacy policy to have more data collection of its users

6:59and that saw an actual exodus of millions of people from whatsapp moving to more secure messaging systems like signal for example but that actually started overflowing and breaking signals servers which i'm guessing they're on amazon or some centralized infrastructure and then all of a sudden that technology wasn't able to work so are that's there's multiple issues at

7:22hand there but is that something that through centrope these different problems will be solved and how exactly will they be solved so both issues have just men mentioned are addressed by synthropy so first of all synthropy enables developers to build applications which can easily make secure connections by default so even if application developers uh

7:45fail to protect their networks or infrastructure security uh the security and privacy is preserved because using synthropy all data transmission is by default encrypted using latest open source encryption technologies and we want this to be the new standard so as opposed to applications doing whatever and then you know the engineers making sure the infrastructure is solid

8:07we want every connection by default to be secure out of the box and uh and and secondly uh internet outages you know as you mentioned they happen every day for many applications and services you know from the biggest giants to the little applications and our technology the routing technology would automatically direct the load to less congested networks

8:30and in effect making internet more efficient as a whole and avoiding outages for those particular applications so in your example you know developers making new chat applications new data transmission applications uh they they would have such a you know a much easier job ensuring those connections are secure and once outages happen our technology would

8:54try to automatically mitigate that as as much as possible given the underlying infrastructure that's great and i want to dive into the syndropy network and where you're at right now can you talk about and i saw that the pre-launch uh happened for for the main network which is great so congratulations to that you know when did you start building the network uh and what has been the most

9:16challenging part of the process up to this point so as i mentioned we started building more than two years ago and and and there was a lot of r d done a lot of technologies being built uh as well as uh you know finding the right uh target fit uh for the businesses to adopt that technology uh so it's not only you know so it actually gets developer adoption open

9:39source community adoption and when you mentioned the pre-launch network uh we launched uh i believe in october uh or something as we were developing and we launched on more than 200 different providers in more than 600 different locations and what we found is all types of optimizations which can be done so what was super interesting for me is we found that

10:04more than 80 percent of our internet paths could be optimized and the optimizations are everywhere between a single cloud provider between different cloud providers between various different regions both geographically between different infrastructures uh they're of various sorts of sizes and and and you know time frames so that just shows that internet

10:29doesn't have like a single problem in a single area or a single company is just sub-optimal as a whole and as long as you can you know make those changes make those routing uh changes more dynamic and more efficient you can always find optimizations to be done and we're super interested to having you know thousands of nodes on our system so i can't even imagine

10:53how many different you know routes uh becomes available to to make you know those congestions go away definitely and it seems like it's a constant uh battle to increase optimization and i'm curious on in the pre-launch in october you you mentioned you already had hundreds of nodes and separated out which is great how did you solve and how do you continually solve

11:16for the optimal security and decentralization and scalability of the network and did you face trade-offs between having a more scalable network versus more decentralized network and are there the limitations within syntropy so you know there's a couple parts to it really so uh with the you know with the optimizations uh we have a routing protocol which

11:42continuously measures uh latency and other uh network performance measures between the various different routers and devices in the system which can be used as as relays uh and and and continuously choose the best path for data to travel so you know the the protocol make sure there's uh the best path always chosen are for data transmission with scalability uh you need a lot nodes

12:08and a lot of those internet segments available for you to be used and for that uh the only way to to do that is really to build a decentralized ecosystem where everyone can participate and everyone can sort of sell their infrastructure or make uh unutilized infrastructure used for someone who needs that at the moment and and and here our blockchain is

12:34really the best and only available technology to do that which wasn't available back in the days when the original internet was commercialized so you know we have a token-based ecosystem uh to incentivize that there's always enough capacity in the system and there's always enough nodes to be utilized and they always have enough incentives to to stay in the system and make it also

12:59economically sound insecure that's really interesting and i'm fascinated by the token ecosystem and how that allows anybody to actually become a part be incentivized and start growing the network as a community and now could you talk a little bit about the noya token and how does that fit in for people that are looking to help grow the network you know how does it

13:24involved in the ecosystem and does it create a sustainable ecosystem yeah so as i said we have a quantitative research team working on our new talk economics model which proves a relationship between amount of data being transferred through the network and the token value thus enabling a sustainable ecosystem where there's always enough incentives to lure in enough nodes to provide

13:51capacity to the network as well as as well as you know that uh token to be used as a utility sort of a gas for the internet as we call it uh you know to provide economic security and stability to the network so the goal uh which which is only you know being enabled by blockchain technologies is uh to provide uh actors like routers and devices and servers to

14:17connect and sell their spare internet capacity for the good of the world and as well as you know uh actors to stay in the system uh to using the token to make it economically sound and secure so that uh none of the actors in the system is you know wants to lie or cheat and and that is insured by by the economics and

14:43also there's uh you know the token can be used by both you know companies users and decentralized systems applications and blockchains themselves uh to utilize that utility because currently as i mentioned it you know decentralized applications are not able to use centralized company services like you know we we we know the cloud players the amazons

15:09uh they need to rely on those and and that's failing to be truly decentralized so the only way to have a performance optimized and decentralized internet is really by using blockchain technologies and a token economics which makes it you know economically sound insecure as well definitely and thanks for that jonas now moving forward to the future for 2021 century as you

15:36continue to grow do you have any major milestones or a big road map plan for what you're looking to release and continue to grow the network this year yes for sure so up to now it was really the homework and uh just recently when we launched synthropy stack it's now available for developers to use already there's going to be a lot of development tools made

16:00for developer adoption so we're going to engage huge open source community and also incentivize them to start building on centerpiece stack as well as building the tools to use it uh more easier then it's going to be the year of business adoption for us gaining users real traction operational experience and i guess most importantly is we'll also start having decentralized

16:24services to provide the same functionality for decentralized applications and blockchains to make them autonomously being able to create secure and optimized connections so just like you know just like data oracles are now seen as essential parts for the blockchain ecosystem like interoperable blockchains uh you know are are now inevitable for the blockchain

16:50ecosystem we think uh any blockchain and decentralized application needs to have a secure uh and optimized connection layer which can be used in a decentralized fashion to make those systems you know communicate between each other so this year uh we're planning all that to happen and and we're really excited about it big plans ahead and it looks like the internet is going

17:16through some major changes and centrope is likely to play a big role in that so all the best with all of those plans this year if there are people that are also looking to get involved either develop help grow the ecosystem learn more about centrope what's the best way for them to to reach out and get involved sure so we have a medium blog where we write about internet technologies our

17:41plans as well so it's super interesting to to to read we also have our telegram uh channel so that's the primary source of contact where we have amazing community managers who will direct you to any sources of information uh you need as well as a really welcoming community i would help new people to learn about centro pay and internet in general uh there's also twitter you can find me

18:05on twitter personally you can follow our centerpiece channels as well uh and uh and and that will direct you also to all the places you want to read about us sounds great jonas i will leave those links in the description box below thank you so much for the time for the interview all the best on center p moving forward this year and let's follow up in the near future

18:26sure no problem thanks for having me