Igor discusses Rivalz Network’s abstraction layer for AI agents

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with eigor CEO of Rivals Network eigor welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time great to meet you man awesome stuff yeah likewise excited to dive into ai ai agents abstraction layers how Ai and blockchain fit in together and and where the industry is headed I'd love to start

0:26off with an overview of what you and your team have built at rivals work and how it relates to that and then we can dive into all the details awesome no that sounds that sounds great so um I'll start with like why we are calling ourselves the world abstraction aay and then we'll go into the the N gr of bit right um we're building a lot of different infrastructure that is core to Ai and

0:57agentic functionality right but this will abstraction layer um is about our mission about a global idea of making the way Ai and agents interact with the world extremely seamless right that's why we say World abstraction similar to like blockchain abstraction if you heard about that right so the premise is um there is this world of humans right in

1:28the real world where there's a a lot of resources such as computational devices data intelligence uh Services uh data uh different types of intelligence whatever right just a bunch of resources right that these Ai and agents want to tap into right or we can say um by accessing these resources right the functionality and the ability of such AI systems and

1:57agents would just grow massively right so in very short what we're trying to do is we're trying to allow humans to provide those resources right and then connect Ai and agents to those resources right thus creating value acru for both and creating new systems new economies etc etc right this is a very big Vision big mission and one that we're excite we're

2:27extremely excited about one that kind of drives us um but the underlying infrastructure is US literally creating um let's say five different modules that each one is really the size of its own uh of its own project right but it covers everything we need to get to this like big big Vision big mission right so um I'll just touch upon it

2:58right now there's we need need a data layer so we've built that right now we need a way for um agents uh to communicate with each other and we need a way for uh AI to pass on itself in a verifiable fashion on chain that's already built as well uh in a sort of like version one uh point we need an identity layer that's

3:28being built and we need need uh a layer of orchestration tokenization management of all these resources that I that I mentioned in the beginning that's also uh being built the fifth part is not so crucial but acts as uh a way for us to showcase the tech that we built to the real world and this is uh a module of allowing people to build AI applications

3:56on top of our infrastructure um we call it like an a application Builder uh and that's already uh that's also built um and going to be launched like all of this stuff is going to be available actually this week um we've been kind of cooking some of these things for over a year now uh some of the're shorter some of them longer but it's been uh an incredible uh

4:20Journey already so very very excited about that yeah that's a great intro eigor and there are so many moving pieces to this to be able to see that end result of having AI agents working for you with you effectively and efficiently uh but the infrastructure of course there's a lot of moving pieces and it does sound like it's could be five distinct uh projects altogether uh

4:46that your team is is working on so it's pretty crazy um and with all of those pieces I feel like right now the there's a lot of Po so much potential for the AI agents to take the next step and I feel like this substraction layer is one of the missing pieces and the fact that it also ties into decentralized networks I feel like is a nice bonus because I feel

5:12like that's where the monetization and the tokenization part comes into play as well um although that's not necessary uh in the beginning but it sort of is to make it into a business oriented interaction exactly exactly I I think you're you're totally right um you're totally right uh it's it's I think for me it all goes down to uh it all goes down

5:42to being able being able to control right these different faucets of value creation within uh Within These uh Within These big systems right and as we are kind of really really pushing forward on some Frontier functionalities um it was really valuable and important kind of uh in our

6:10road map right to sort of kind of slowly evolve right um to to to get there right and I think the space currently is is is incredibly nent still right we still have a very long way to go um so that is also kind of prime for all the like collaborations and um and and seeing how this different functionality um Can can emerge really

6:39right um and great to see obviously right now how the market is very very positively reacting to this uh really I guess first um at least very attention driven um AI approach uh with with these AI memes and um yeah yeah MH yeah it's very exciting and with those five modules that you mentioned some of them are in the works some of them are

7:07in the future I know that right now there's the the rivals test net to get all of these features tested before it launches to to to the main production can you talk about the progress so far in in the test net and if the community is already able to test out different things as well so progress has been uh pretty incredible so we've achieved now I think

7:32over 55 million onchain transactions um uh on on our test net and um we initially kind of the first module that went uh live is called ocin this is the the data piece or data layer whatever um and this specifically focused on making the centralized storage AI native right so you can think

8:00about like an AI version of uh filecoin um that does much more and it's like more more uh privacy Centric and has a lot of additional functionalities right that put it in a very like put us puts us in a very particular uh way for for Value acrel right and this has uh what we started this in May and we've grown to over two and a half

8:30million um clients which are Community nodes uh registered and I think currently we have over 200,000 uh that are active daily um total data provided uh to the network is close to 34 exib bytes which is huge number uh and uh is just growing right that's that's all growing so uh what we wanted to establish right right

9:00is this uh initial uh way for the community to participate uh in building out uh this early layer of like what kind of resources they as users humans right can provide to this uh future uh of agentic functionality or AI functionality whatever and from there really we also kind of saw how we can evolve that right uh not

9:30only getting people to provide data but to provide compute to provide their PCS in the form of uh virtual machines that they can share to to as as as a resource which I haven't really seen been done before so that's pretty exciting and it also kind of uh unlocked our view that we can um we can go into other verticals such as mobile we can go into uh extensions

9:57we can go into uh multi mple aspects of this to grow the amount of resources uh resource of the whole network and it just made more and more kind of sense as as time went by there was also a lot of great reception on how people wanted to get a deeper understanding of uh just agents in general right uh was a lot of a lot it was very exciting to see a lot

10:23of like belief right in how this could really uh change the world and I think a lot of people even when they don't understand AI they're not knowledgeable about it right they feel something is coming right and I I think the more and if you're somebody who like studies and digs into it you're like you're going to feel a sense of uh Singularity a sense

10:46of that this is a technology right that is advancing at such a high speed right that you're losing the ability to even fathom right what it can do so not I'm not even talking about like your technical capabilities right but there I like H I have a strong feeling that um at some point right most of us that we're just going to lose like the

11:12ability to Fathom of what kind of abilities right this could have and um where this could go so this to some people this creates excitement such as me right for me this this the more the more we build and the more we ship it uh kind of um just builds up so much energy in the in the team and in me of um how much there is to conquer how much there there

11:39is to to Really build and um how great the time is really right for other people it's fear right of like just oh you know this sounds scary dangerous right which is which is normal but um yeah that's that's that's kind of a little bit of my thoughts about it y yeah no it's uh I think it's at a Tipping Point where there's a lot of people that they see

12:03the potential but they may not understand exactly how it's going to get there or what's going to happen I think the abstraction layer is is a great uh next step to have that infrastructure to make those things happen and with the community nodes that that you mentioned uh running on on the test net since uh just Bitcoins last all-time high just before the summer those are great

12:27numbers for uh people that are interested at this such an early stage of blockchain and AI together and now you mentioned contributing to the protocol so if there was somebody that they're interested in AI or they're interested in learning more but they don't know a lot would it be correct to say that two of the main ways they could help contribute one would be the data or

12:51input and just communicating with the AI or feeding it information and the second would be processing power whether it's giv some of your graphic GPU power or or mobile device maybe as you mentioned um to help speed up and and bring more information that that AI can use to better itself so we started with the data space so initially you could just provide data

13:18space right and now we're kind of reaching that over to uh computational resources and stuff like that uh there's not really a way for um I would say we don't have like an incentivized program uh for for people to provide data but we have uh the developer resources are uh just recently this week actually uh went Fully live um but by I think by the time

13:44this comes out this is going to be like public information publicly accessible so you you can just go set yourself up as a developer get some free credits and start building right and uh we we've seen a lot of interest from the close to 100 partners that we have already and um this is what we focus actually on with the projects that are inside of our

14:07incubator that we closely work with and provide this um there's really massive demand for um kind of AI native data storage that's also private and that's focused on um you know these these these uh cases where uh it's important that uh the data security um is is very and very simple example any personalized AI SK that you can think of they they

14:36they basically need us right uh as as as as an example right so if you're using you know sort of like an AI on The Daily right that you're sharing you know personal information with that makes sense right if you're if you're basically using anything right where you're sharing that personal information you want it to be secure and what's also interesting what was interesting kind of

14:56for us to find out right is projects hate to store that data themselves right so they just see that as a potent it's a huge potential risk uh for for themselves to store that person they don't want to do it so if they have the ability to not even store it themselves store it in UNS that they can then just tie in their AI to to to be using right amazing right so so that's that's

15:22kind of um that's kind of available on testnet and later this week later this week uh we're also releasing um are adcs which is this connectivity piece and the and the and the Oracle Network piece that uh basically allows smart contracts to connect directly to uh AI uh and send transactions uh basically send requests to receive AR responses um funny enough

15:54we actually this is a a little bit of an Insight but uh we kind of originated almost our own agentic framework while we were building the the Oracle Network which is really exciting but uh we'll we'll kind kind of like keep that on the on the low for now uh and we'll just focus on kind of uh looking at what interesting use case can developers uh build using this

16:21additional functionality for their smart contracts but I think we've ended up with a very very interesting kind of concept so you can think about this as sort of like uh an AI chain link and I generally feel and chain link also our partners um we're part of the build program uh it was very important and exciting for me to also work with these guys kind of early on to understand

16:44deeply how how they work right how their business works and how we can learn from that because I feel in a lot of ways we are doing you know uh we're kind of like channeling back in like 16 or 17 right where like D5 wasn't a thing back then it was obvious that you need this these connectivity pieces right on chain but the use cases were just not there so I

17:09feel in a lot of ways it's it's about us shipping fast and hard and then getting developers on board so this is actually also a huge thing that we're uh focused on right now we're launching uh our hackathon this week with uh an with offline events basically with like an offline track in Philippines as well so you can participate globally but there's

17:33going to be an additional offline track and we are going to be extremely focused on on building that out uh getting a lot of people to participate sorry like I ranted a little bit off your question uh but uh I think over time um the most important piece initially right for us was to establish how we can orchestrate such a huge amount of resource right

17:57that was the most and crucial important important point because we literally are kind of we grew to one of the largest deep ends over like six months uh time which is huge and this involves uh you know huge amounts of of development right now where people will be able to participate more and share more and uh be more active is I think later in q1 we're going to be unlocking this like

18:25identity identity layer which will pre-emphasis the users providing additional information providing and mapping potential even resources they have um and that's going to kind of unlock this piece of um connecting everything together and uh users having a larger way to to establish uh presence um within within

18:55our network uh but it's all come coming together I I I feel it's and it even though we're like uh in hackathon mode and have been for a long time I feel it's still kind of organically falling in the right places which is really really exciting to be honest yeah yeah I know it's really exciting and I'm glad you explained all that because it makes sense that you have the infrastructure

19:19layer and the operating system so to say and then you have an app store and you're going to need all these different applications uh your team's not going to be able to build every application uh in the world for these AIS to use as well on top of the layer so it seems like Rivals is helping incubate those fund those build strategic Partnerships so that you can actually have applications

19:43once the infrastructure is perfected correct yeah exactly I think in a lot of ways you know even though we are um so we we we ourselves we're going to have actually two chains we have a dimension roll up and we have U an arbital L2 right so this way we're covering like both Cosmos EDM worlds um Etc but you know in a lot of ways we think about ourselves almost as like an

20:12L1 blockchain uh because there's just so much infrastructure Tech that we're shipping that we need developers to to get on board with and all this Tech is extremely synergetic right with each other right so um this also kind of creates these additional flywheels so we'll see how it evolves but uh I I I do think like uh we are you know good good place good amount of product shipped

20:43great traction and and good timing actually great timing potentially I think as um honestly like I didn't even expect such a big boom on the front of of of AI memes right and as somebody in the trenches for very long time on the on the AI front right uh came as a surprise but um this makes my life so much easier that's what I'm really excited about

21:10right because like previously I was even afraid to say some of these you I was you know we were sitting with our advisors and investors I was saying like you know I just want to call us like the the you know the agentic world abstraction ler and these guys are telling me like oh no no don't don't do that people will think you're some kind of agency or something like that they

21:31don't know like they they just don't know about agents and I was like yeah I guess you know you guys are right right like um they don't they don't know right so we'll just make the wrong impression so we also try to kind of keep it likee right like World abstraction for AI and agents but at the end of the day all of this just brings people to our level

21:53which I'm very excited about right and paints a better better picture right because like you can envision how this is if this is what it's just starting from what if there's millions of these agents what if all of them can create a much higher value output if they have direct access to like Ashton your computer your devices they they amplify you and they create additional

22:21value with you so you become like a vessel right for their Max performance for their Max output right and you can see how this how this clicks and how there could be you know millions of us right providing this additional value right um you know it's kind of like sometimes they say we're really building the Uber for AI agents but but really the humans are the cars the humans are

22:49the cars right the and and and the the world right is is is um and you're basically driven right by the by the agents right which is kind of like a probably a Corky way to say it but um hopefully kind of Paints the picture of where this can go right and I think for people this was very difficult to like understand you know even like four or five months ago right and we've been

23:15building this for for for uh close to two years now right um and now with this big boom I think people are finally like understanding what Rivals can be like what this vision can uh can achieve which you know uh makes me super super happy really yeah definitely eigor that's a lot um it's it's it's a lot of work to do and I feel like right now people they hear about AI agents and

23:45they think okay you know what exactly until they actually have ai agents getting things done for them personally uh they they won't fully understand but then I feel like the term will be uh something that's used super commonly be before our conversation I hadn't heard of a gentic um but it sounds cool and I I understand it um abstraction layer um also people are thinking okay what

24:12exactly you know it makes more sense you can hear about uh the infrastructure and and how it works but I feel like that term will it only be used more often after this so I'm glad we're using it here people giving people an understanding of what it is um I I feel like it's in the beginning of of Def or some of these other use cases of blockchain where people they heard

24:33about it but they they didn't fully understand the capabilities of it until it be got it got so simple that they realized they could just put their Assets in and and start earning a yield or lend it and then it clicks in their head oh okay this is exactly what this functionality can do that will be similar to what happens with AI agents as the apps become available once the

24:56the layer is ready the apps are there they start using an app they say oh my gosh I can't believe I lived without this is is making my life so much easier uh and then it will just explode yeah it's definitely it's coming right like agentic is just like an agentic economy right like sort of full full full of these agents uh I think if you look at any like predictions right

25:21uh and people that positive like if you what's interesting if you look at people that are positively and negatively are looking at this that's right they're all saying that uh this technology is going to uh create another Industrial Revolution and it's going to change the way people sort of just interact generally with their jobs with uh with the with the web and um with technology

25:46in the world right so um I think this is like from an infrastructure standpoint right where what makes me excited is like where we can play a crucial part where we are on the convergence between technological innovation decentralization tokenization right and creating of these new uh value Cru pipelines right that's where we went

26:15right and all of these pillars kind of allow us to get there right because like um I think the fir the first the first wave of that was uh you know stuff like aash or uh you know IET or ather right this was like decentralized compute right makes sense makes total sense right you're just optimizing kind of the the compute available in the space right

26:41but I think I will I always try to think like where is that like additional value at right from like a very large economy standpoint right and how can we get the person that doesn't want to do know anything aside from like spending five minutes with us right to participate right and how we can organize them getting value right uh and as time goes by we're unlocking more and more of

27:10these potential use cases um which I think makes makes a lot of sense right so this also you know also from like a betting standpoint gives us more room right to make uh to make bets right on on different Tech right what's going to play out uh really helps we have currently we have close I think it's 18 or 19 developers in house which is three dedicated teams um really focusing like

27:38on on the different modules we have on the different pieces so my dayto day is like really really like hardcore orchestration of of a lot of this of a lot of this strategy going forward uh but this you know uh the big idea here right is that technology is changing very very very quickly right we need to be extremely um quick on our feet right to to to move and to identify value of

28:06Craw right and to ship aggressively in there um and that that that's basically what we're doing yeah yeah yeah it's going to be I don't know if hard is the right word but hard to keep up with uh the progression of AI speed um and so you just got to keep working if there if only there were more than 24 hours in a day oh man oh man for sure yeah so so so

28:33moving forward then part of the next steps for the protocol I know there's so many moving pieces I saw one of them is the Z nodes which I'm guessing help secure and uh diversify the the protocol can you talk about that and whatever else needs to be done so uh I'll just put it I'll just put it simply there's three large networks that we're going to need to

28:58build one is uh resources the other one is um data and AI provision within the Oracle Network and the third one is going to be uh for resource uh orchestration and management there's going to be a separate uh we call this Rome all all roads lead to Rome this is like the Pinnacle of of what we're uh what we're building in any case you have three imagine you have three networks

29:27right each one is going to consist of thousands if not millions of actors right each one of these networks needs its own validation decentralization stability uh validation uh and basically a set of different protocols right that make sure that this set of actors um Works in a way that is uh going to work for a very long time

29:56right people get rewarded uh for the right reasons right and for the right incentives right um and it's also very interesting from and why we need like decentralization validators we as a company we want to lose Authority right so this is what you'll find kind of in a lot of decentralized out like decentralized projects right is that you don't want to be a centralized Authority

30:23right so how can you give up centralized Authority you need a of trusted uh validators right that are going to continue doing their job right that you make sure that they're doing you know basically their setup nicely um with both with good good incentives right a good counter measures as well and that's exactly what we're doing with our uh

30:52validator Z node sale right so we are selling uh validator zode licenses to people uh at this at this stage and inviting people to participate early become you know a core part of this you know agentic future the core part of uh what we're building and within this premise you as a validator become kind of like a guardian right kind of like an

31:23observer right uh and um somebody that secur during the network right somebody that's getting rewards for that and somebody that punishes people in the network right or mal action and there are many like each of these modules is have is going to have its own fly wheels of of rewards right but uh the most simple one that I can kind of talk about

31:51is uh slashing rewards right so just to give you a simple example we're going to have the amount of these validators Z noes is going to be fixed right that's going to be like at the end of the sale so you have a lot of on one end you have a lot of these validators right but they're not in the millions right we have like a total of 35,000 uh licenses

32:14we're projecting maybe there's going to be 15 to 20,000 potentially uh participants right now on the on the network side from the community participation you might have millions right like like right now we have for for for for our system right you don't trust all these millions of of participants right um so you give them little rewards right because they can just go offline

32:40at any point right so what do you what do you do in this situation right you tell them as a community member you can upgrade your upgrade your system by staking right so this is classic sort of um potential stake potential reward but if you are a bad member and you do do not do what you're promising to do you're going to get your rewards slashed from you right so you're not going to

33:05get your rewards who is checking the activity of these Community nodes that have been upgraded it's the validators right who's getting who's getting these uh some of these sorry who's getting some of these rewards right from the slashing it's the it's the validators right and a similar system right work across all of our networks right uh in some it's more

33:31reputation Centric in some it's more um kind of continuous uh continuous service provision uh Focus right but in general this is a very I think a very simple way how uh how to imagine right how such a large infrastructure as uh Rivals needs this set of decentralized uh validators right which play a crucial part obviously within our

34:00system and they ACR value over time right and this is not even counting like the the the token emissions right that we're giving them and stuff like that right but it makes a lot of sense know definitely yeah no thanks for explaining that and I I love the way that you put that we want to give away the authority um because you want to have a decentralized network and but you still

34:24want to maintain uh the core vision of course as well and it sounds like the community is uh it's grown quickly and early and they understand the vision so I like where it's going um it what's the the the sale of the the xenotes to get involved when when does that happen and then if you miss it can can you get involved after or you know is it like now or never how does that exactly

34:53work so this is going to happen uh I don't know when when your video is going to come out but uh Thursday so this's a 21st of November 1M UTC so uh uh for me for me it's already like kind of 1:00 am Wednesday um but um so very soon it's it's launching right uh at that point uh and during the sale there's only one tier available

35:20this is tier three uh tier three uh price is not that far away from uh from from the other tiers right the previous ones were just sold out in like a wheless phase and by participating early right you're getting yourself uh into uh an airdrop you're getting yourself into these all these emissions right you also have time before tge which is also going

35:48to happen pretty soon uh but you you're going to have time to set it set yourself up very well um is this the the nodes themselves they're they will be non-tradable for the first six months then they will become tradable right so you will be able to onboard yourself as a validator there's going to be some very exclusive rewards to the Val validators outside of these uh

36:13admissions such as uh we recently announced our incubator already un boarded um five pretty big projects there and they're also going to be supporting our our validators are also going to be doing rewards to our validators and I think the system is going to grow substantially massively um over the coming years so that's that uh but yeah so you will be able to become a

36:40validator later on right uh but for the time being this is your best chance uh at getting at our native token um Rivals right and becoming this part of the OG Rivals Community yeah yeah sounds great eigor thank you for that information and and uh F the insights into the agentic world and the potential for AI agents and what kind of infrastructure is

37:06needed to make it all happen I know there's a lot of moving pieces I'm sure uh we could go on for much longer uh I'm guessing there's more information um available on the site or in the socials in the docs of of how people can dive into this more how best they they can help contribute uh or get a part of the the test net and of course the zde I can also leave those links in the show notes

37:31below um is there any other go-to place for people to join the community or to learn more I think if you just go to rival. right so that's it rivals. you you'll find all the information um you need uh we have a lot of docs to to read through if you're interested in that um also for some people I think might be even easy

37:58better to just check our hackathon and go to the application in like use cases I I think I think because I I real I was writing all this a couple days ago and I realized like that's the only place where we really have like some really formulated use cases um and that's going to be literally kind of live I think by by the time you publish so uh also an

38:23easy way for people to check like what what's what can you actually cook with this infrastructure right at this at this stage right you got to also got to remember this is sort of our like version ones of of everything but it's already really really exciting yeah definitely yeah there's a there's a lot of work to go and uh I feel like the time is perfect uh with the growth of ai

38:45ai memes the merging of AI and blockchain and uh the compute power needed to power the a gentic world uh I'm wishing you and your team all the best uh with with the zodes with with the further uh growth of the the test net and leading to the tge and the main net um thank you so much for all the information eigor uh would love to follow up in the near

39:08future awesome thank you so much Ashton bye bye have a great day