Lava Network simplifying access to blockchain RPC nodes

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have year klepper founder and CEO of lava Network here welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you for hosting me so excited to be here you're very welcome uh let's start off our conversation with I'm curious a little bit on your background

0:21in in blockchain and technology and how that led to you starting lava Network and then we'll dive into all the lava Network details great so um my background is techy I studied Computer Engineering in a special program in the army and you know since I was young entrepreneurship was I think in my blood I founded several startups I had to exits and uh you know

0:48I was always skeptical about uh crypto it's on the one hand very interest me cryptography the future of Finance but I think that earlier um applications of crypto always seemed like a fake currency pump and dumps uh stuff like that but I had strong face uh I had really strong uh friends in the space and um I always heard also good stories so

1:18one and a half years ago I decided to step in with my co-founder Gil and we started by doing nft sniping Mev um so both us we we both has a very strong you know background in cyber security and we realized that once we doing that um the promise the values and everything that brought us to web3

1:45was not as decentralized uh it claimed to be that we thought and I think that in general not only uh web 3 is this is no decentralized claim but it's also have a lot of problems around the performance infrastructure and this is what really brought me to build lava we thought how come the core infrastructure is uh centralized and

2:15what actually we can bring from our experience our background to build something that can scale up the ecosystem great point and thank you for that background here from what I understand there are quite a few applications that are running that you know everything's touted as decentralized but there's also a lot of web 2 infrastructure and you know apps hosted on Amazon web services

2:41but even the protocols themselves uh you know each blockchain whether it's ethereum or Finance smart chain or Solana the way that they run the nodes you know they're they're all completely different and I think it's not a true blanket statement to say everything is decentralized I know you probably know more about the decentralization of each sort of network I'm curious on

3:05what exactly lava does in this and how does it increase the decentralization I think most of the things today are not decentralized and that's what I learned in the last the journey I have with lava lava is pretty new we you know founded that last April but from the get-go we realized that the term um that you know it's relevant for what we're doing what's most of the

3:34centralization point is uh RPC and I think that you know if if you look at RPC it's basically a communication uh protocol that is required for fetching data uh sending uh right or reading data and transaction from from the blockchain and you you need it for all the most basic actions there so getting account balance deploying the smart contract the gas prices everything like that

4:04um but you know in general I think you can get all the information there by Wallet balance and uh you you know you you think that um the way you do that is actually should be simple um and at the beginning of crypto it was simple because everyone was running their own node and get access to the blockchain but when the blockchain

4:32adoption grew up um it didn't make sense and impractical to run a node so basically you need to um rely on the centralized provider that actually um reduce the barrier to entry for all of the blockchain this is something very simple they said um you don't need to run the node anymore and you can trust us from

4:59fetching and bringing you the data but you know you you mentioned a bit web 2 and for us it felt like patching a web 2 solution to web3 and it's kind of not solving the problem that's creating much more uh new gaps and as I mentioned before the the the values of web 2 what about uh you know privacy uh middleman single point of failure censorship and and at

5:30the end of the day if you trust a middleman you don't know the data it's not yours first and you don't know the data is actually from the blockchain okay thank you for explaining that and it I think for people that don't run a node which is most people and or they don't really understand the details in mining it can get a bit confusing um but I think you explained it well

5:56there on not not everyone is running a node like back in the old days when people had Bitcoin and it was easy to run your own node so you're sort of relying on the people that have the infrastructure they already have a node and from what I understand with RPC you know the r is a relay where you relay information from those nodes that are set up they're

6:17saying trust us we'll we'll do the decentralization we'll do the node part you just get some of the information on what you need is that how it works so uh RPC almost relay it's a remote procedure call and it's a simple API that used to interact with with with the computer it's used to interact with the network obviously in order to run a node you need to receive the consensus you need

6:44to do a few um infrastructure things that takes a lot of resources consumes time and as as we already agreed doesn't make sense you want to focus on your business you don't want to focus on maintaining an infrastructure whether you had small dub picked up or medium one you want to use your resources not by trusting several centralized providers you want to trust a single provider that

7:13you sure the data is reliable and that's what we hear so many times now since we came up with the test net one month ago we heard that this need is actually met into reality it's not even every second app it's it's everyday they so they are in general two different Trends right now um RPC um becoming a commodity so there's a lot of providers if two years ago you had

7:42five big providers now you have hundreds of providers and um it's becoming a commodity and the second trend is that dapps do not trust the infrastructure they run few in parallel they do benchmarking they do load balancing backups for the time that some of the centralized provider is down what do you do how you give service how do you see the

8:08um your wallet balance right so if you cannot give a good service to the user they will not use you and this is the big discrepancy that we believe lava is solving um so when a user starts to use lava network does it actually spin up a node for them or what how does the technology increase the decentralization in Trust

8:36so let's talk a bit what what is lava we we look at lava as kind of a decentralized network of top top tier RPC and API providers and developers can subscribe to get access to any top provider which means access to any blockchain and we look at that as a One-Stop shop we are a network we are L1 that anyone can join permissionlessly to the network uh providers need to stake

9:05lava so it's the first time that they are held accountable for the infrastructure and for not manipulating even someone so for example if providers takes to create these guarantees that they will offer high quality of service we believe that this is actually a the right equilibrium to maintain such benefits of of the network and because

9:35every anyone can join the network permissionlessly so you received a couple of benefits that um you never had before you received a high Network redundancy that leads to almost 100 uptime for users if one provider is down adapts automatically paired to a new provider and this is how they don't need to think or even implement this kind of component in their infra by the way

10:04they're doing today you any provider can join so um basically it's a community-led protocol and offer to access any chains via any API lava is a free form and this is the second great benefits the the third is that the network creates um a market dynamics between the provider so user can get the best price from the provider

10:32and they don't need to start doing market research provider will start competing between themselves to offer the best highest level of service because they know they're constantly being scored on that because they know there is a transparency about how was their service that's what they meant to do from the get-go and this is what lava enables them to do okay great

10:58explanation and when you say they can connect with any chain I'm curious on what is the most in demand and you know out of all these different blockchains they have different consensuses and different ways that they're running so what are people most looking to connect to I'm curious out of all the different protocols you mean like what will what what

11:22changes we see yeah so you know eventually the highest volume you have on is on ethereum currently um but you see a lot of activity obviously on the other uh evm based chains l2s um and there's a lot of hype around several other um you know uh blockchains out there um we we're just getting started and

11:51eventually lava has been been built on Cosmos SDK tendermint and that's our home so we started on supporting all the chains and projects on Cosmos uh so we're working with them they invested in us but eventually we said we're gonna support any evm based chains since we first launched um we see a huge demand coming from everywhere coming from non-evm chairs

12:19coming from l2s as I mentioned before and I cannot mention right now a certain activity because the ecosystems we support the multi-chain right we support wherever adapt wants to find a home we're going to allow them to get to this home without the need to spin up a note think about us as the Uber for nodes so we're connecting dapps which are the

12:47users uh the passengers to the taxes to the node provider to the node infrastructure and constantly scoring the service so the vision is to give them reliability uh good pricing obviously it's a bear Market indexing and reach apis and obviously privacy that they don't get it today with the centralized providers if you're a Dap usually you start in one

13:13chain and if you want to expand to other chains you can do it with one subscription you're already in lava lava supports today 20 chains and in the future we support all web free so we want to have the immigration process to dubs that wants to expand to other other chains seamless as possible that's a great analogy that the Uber in blockchain I like it here and you

13:40mentioned at the beginning that you know you guys are fairly early on and there's still a lot of connections to make to different chains and and to grow into the mainnet I'm curious on where you guys are at right now and what are the next steps that are need to be taken to reach the mainnet launch so you know as we are early in the process um we bringing a lot of knowledge

14:07from our past experience in uh open source in developer Tools in building successful startups selling them even in some in some cases and I thought I I think that uh we are I never experienced what is a community I never experienced what is this super high Pace growth that we're experiencing right now so we founded lava in April and during half a year we were already passing 30 people

14:37today with 38 people 25 Engineers the best team I ever worked with bringing so much talent of people that actually we have 9x co-founders and ctOS in lava and this is so exciting to see such a strong people believe in the vision believe in what they're building and see the huge potential that that is here um we so we launched our test net and

15:06the production ready service one month ago we currently onboarding adapts that want to test for the test net for the testing environment and at the same time we are paying debts for the services that really want to experience you know a high reliability and all the benefits that we bring here in lava currently we're building 24 7 towards releasing our lava SDK and

15:37maintenance in the second half of the year we our world map looks like you know we have on-chain subscription which I mentioned a bit before this is it is super important um concept that we bring in kind of the SAS from web 2 to web3 it's a One-Stop shop that we know on the one hand decentralization is very seen as difficult to use uh and people don't

16:07want to always use a token so we made it Easy by letting any currency being paid on lava but from a decentralized service so that's what I mentioned is bringing SAS to Lava we're looking about rich apis so we don't we start with RPC because it's the core element but obviously today there are a lot of demand about caching indexing nfts apis and we're working on that and the last

16:36thing is the love SDK which is a bit more technical but imagine that every dap doesn't need to go through a system that connects him to the driver if we're talking about the Uber imagine that your phone is actually in the back end connect from the browser to all the best providers to all the best chains but in a One-Stop shop and this is I think that

17:03the real vision of lava well I'm looking forward to that to next steps for the launch what is the best way to follow along for uh the updates as they happen and to learn more about what people can do when they connect with lava Network so I think um you know we have a great Community that's formed more than 10 000 members already people translated that to more

17:28than 11 languages we're in this court so the main socials you know we use the Discord and different channels I try a great podcasts like uh what we're doing today um you know we're trying to be very attentive and

17:56um be like 24 7 available uh the team is spreaded all over all around the world so time zone it's it's not an issue and we are welcoming developers to join we're gonna announce a voyager program for dapps that we are able to support them their growth from a small dab and give them deveral support give them better uh CU pricing and do a co-marketing strategy

18:24um at the same time we are going to announce about bounties that you know developers that really wants to do pull requests and help us build the vision help us build lava love after all is a community-led protocol it's a public good everyone can contribute and this is the Paradigm Shift uh we're doing here so I'm inviting everyone who's watching that approach me

18:49um even LinkedIn I know it's a web tool but I'm there uh so any any any channel uh is reached out sounds great yeah and I can leave the the links to the Discord and just the platform and socials as well uh for to connect with you uh in the description box below all the best with these continued efforts I think this is a great uh contribution towards

19:12the web 3 ecosystem looking forward to the steps towards the main at launch so let's definitely follow up in the near future perfect then if I can just finish with the key messages that I want to leave the audience I think that what we're building today in lava is the most reliable provider on the market by using this centralization and align incentives

19:38so we're not just an RPC we're an open source that can support any API and we building the the support for multi-chain everyone using a one standard to build eventually on in any chain and thank you so much for hosting hosting me here and letting us continue spreading the world thank you here