Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Blockfrost Community Space
Recorded: July 23, 2026 Duration: 1:22:39Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello, hello. All right, let's bring people up. B and Merrick. There you are. All right. Hello. Oh,
we can hear you. But yes, we can. Yeah, it's good. Good that we got that sorted. Yeah. All right.
Let's. Yeah. Let's retweet this. Let's retweet the space, and we can get
it circulating a little bit more widely here. Hey, we got Zormtar, Stefan. Good to see you guys.
Yeah, we're gonna jump in, gonna jump into the space here in a little bit.
I'm taking you guys through the agenda too, so you know what's coming. We are gonna be doing Q
and A, so if you have any questions, like literally already off the top of your head,
possibly we may get to them, or maybe just throw them in the thread already
because that will that'll help us get to them later on, and you won't forget. Um. Yeah,
and so I'll I'll get us into the agenda in just a second here, but first, yeah, if you
if you're already in the space, go ahead and give it a retweet so that we can get it to more people.
We have five more days. I'm not sure the exact breakdown. Maybe B. I know you're watching it
pretty closely. You can maybe tell us like hour by hour. But before the proposal deadline for the
for the action, so you know, it's now is the time to vote. Now is the time to talk to your D rep
if your D rep you know is looking at this or hasn't looked at it yet because. We all know,
being a DeerUp, there's a million proposals and million votes, but obviously many of them are
very important, as no exception, of course, is is today's and is Block Frost's. So, yeah,
do reach out to your DeerUp if if you're in contact and get that conversation started. Okay, well,
I'm going to go ahead and just give us an overview of the agenda and the format,
so that we can go ahead and get into the discussion and not waste any time here. All right.
So we're going to start out, first of all, just by setting the stage. We've we've had a couple
of conversations about Blockfrost already over the past month or two, but we're going to
just like reset the stage. You know, what is Blockfrost? A reminder of the history,
the proposal itself, and what are the stakes for the ecosystem of this question of funding
the proposal that is underway for Blockfrost and that is expiring in about five days here. So.
I think that'll be very helpful. We have Merrick here today, is founder of Blockfrost,
so we can get it straight from the horse's mouth. A few of these questions about,
especially the history, the founding, funding, operations, and ownership,
and the trajectory that Blockfrost has been on, and you know
where where Europe's are basically looking and assessing it today in the current transition
from its present ownership and present operations toward this future,
which hopefully is helping to decentralize Cardano's off-chain infrastructure. Then after that,
really, the main purpose of the space today is, you know, for responsible DREPs who are doing
due diligence on any proposal, whoever it comes from. But you know, like I/O obviously being
no exception. You want to do your due diligence. You want to ask questions
and double check any key points where you may have, you know, ambiguities or open questions.
And so we're gonna, and we have a list of a few that that we've seen pop up now and then over
the last couple of weeks that we'll jump into proactively. But also, there's a chance,
like I mentioned before, if you have any questions. Yourself that are just top of mind now,
you can put those into the chat. It may be that some of them like roughly cover the same topic,
and so we'll sort of bundle those together. But if you feel like your question hasn't been answered,
do feel free to just rearticulate it in the chat. You can even say, "Hey Matthew,
you didn't answer this," and we'll loop back around. Okay, so that's the structure for the day,
and with that said, I think I will, I'll hand off to Merrick just to start setting the stage again.
Many people will be very familiar with Blockfrost, but some people here might not. So,
just like open things for us and tell us what actually is Blockfrost. What's its value? Yeah,
thank you so much. Thank you so much for having the help, everybody. So Blockfrost is an API
as a service, the leading one in the Cardano ecosystem, and what does this mean is basically.
If you want to connect to, you know, any blockchain or any open protocol,
usually have to have a node or like a client that that participates in the consensus
and and reads the chain, right? So, this can be really costly, complex to set up, and you know,
it has a lot of costs related to maintenance of that node. So if you don't want to go that route,
usually go and opt in and use one of the API providers, which Blockfrost is. So basically,
we are providing you with the access layer to the Cardano blockchain, both for read and write.
You can also submit the transaction for us. And just you know, for some overview,
how much Blockfrost is being used today, we have almost one million monthly unique users.
So this means that directly or indirectly, almost a one million different person
actually uses Blockfrost to access data or read data from the Cardano blockchain.
Just to see it from the from the you know other side, if we look at the at the developer comments
in Cardano, I just I just pulled the number before this call. Had a quick look at the number
of downloads of our JavaScript SDK, which is the most popular one, and we have
23,000 weekly downloads of that SDK. So this means different software is actually downloading
this SDK as a application to talk to Blockfrost, therefore read data on Cardano.
And the second one is the Python SDK, which is 58,000 monthly downloads.
So just like a really quick overview, what Blockfrost is, and I know that most of the people here
on this call know what it is, but you know, just for some of the people that may not be familiar
with the service. Yeah, that's that's helpful. Thanks, Merrick. Uh, yeah,
and I think um next it would be helpful to some people because essentially for the same reason
they've been around, uh, and have worn various hats in the ecosystem, will know the history,
but also a lot of people won't. So, uh, if you could give us, and it's great having you to do this,
Merrick, obviously having been there the whole time, uh, the history of Blockfrost, um,
from its founding, uh, onward to the present day, especially thinking about Funding, ownership,
and the various sort of evolutions and the trajectory that it's been on since the the early days.
Yeah, definitely. So it was really the early days. I've been around since the before the ITN.
So we were around the Byron era when it was not really decentralized and was just bunch
of the people running different testnets even before the ITN. And of course, after the ITN happened,
I I moved to Cardano full time. I founded a company called Five Binarys,
and it was mostly for consulting, you know, different projects and entities
around software development on Cardano. And during that time, we have seen that there is not
really simple to use API for Cardano, so we just decided to build one internally. It was, you know,
for a customer. We used it internally, but over the time, we actually use it in the more
and more projects, and we felt like, hey, let's try to kind of open this for people.
Maybe someone will use it, and to our surprise, I think we could have first customers
within few hours. So, so, so there has been a really need for this, and it was in 2020. Over
the next four years, we have really grown to be the, you know, the the leading API
in the Cardano ecosystem, and by being the first choice, suddenly we've become the people
we hated the most because, you know, Cardano, sorry, Bokkus was in a in a way centralizing the chain
because a lot of the applications cannot depended on it. And a lot of the traffic was flowing,
you know, through Blockfrost. Even today, more than 50% of the transaction on chain,
if you see it per epoch, are actually originating or going through Blockfrost. So that's when,
in 2024, IOG approached us. They said, like, hey guys, you did really well.
You created this awesome product, but now it's time to fix this mess and kind of decentralize this.
So actually, it's not causing more issues than it solves. So this is when, in 2024, we joined IOG,
and over the past two years, we have been Basically, working on decentralizing Blockfrost
or any API access layer, to that matter. You know, this is where we founded the the program which
we call Icebreakers, and this is where we invite SPOs and other node operators to join
a decentralized network. Basically, you know, sharing their unused infrastructure, such as relay
or some SPO nodes, with us, and in return, we are actually providing them with a share
of the revenue. So. And back to today, where we are here in front of the committee,
and we really want to take the last step in the decentralization.
We will maybe speak a little bit more about the proposal, but just I want to say the whole idea now
for the last step is to decentralize the you know the access point, which is you know which is
the product itself, Blockverse IO. Excellent. Well, okay, and I want to just double tap on a couple
of those points. So yeah, so it started out as an internal project. You know,
you opened it up because you were seeing. All of the demand, and very quickly got
your first customer. Then, because of the, I suppose, just because of, you know, I mean,
you starting that initially for yourself, just as a solo actor using a decentralized system.
So many people jumped on board with you and were imitating what you were doing that.
You guys actually became, like, in a way, the new central access point for doing things in a simple
and easy way with Cardano. Is that right so far? And then, and that's at that point is when you guys
looked at decentralizing the infrastructure so that you could solve basically the problem
while still maintaining the services that you're providing. Oh yeah, definitely. Because I mean,
let's be honest, the APIs are not going. You know, anywhere, running a node in any capacity,
it costs a lot of computing and storage space. So, and if you look at other ecosystems,
if you if you look at the top twenty on coin market cap, they have all the same problem, right?
And now we have a chance to become probably the only one to decentralize this access layer. Hmm.
Yeah. Okay. So that's that's really interesting. And so that that process started. I'm gonna know.
Like I've been hearing about icebreakers for a long while now. But that process started with
the IO acquisition, and then. I suppose this this last part. I mean, that's that's interesting
because I haven't heard about it in this way before. But you're seeing this as a sort
of coherent trajectory from the period within Io working on icebreakers
and decentralizing the infrastructure and partnering with SBOs. And then now, in a sense,
this is like the governance element of that story, where it's you know the the full the IP,
the like the governance of the protocol itself, the nonprofit, etc., is being handed over
to community. Am I getting that right? Yeah, definitely. Because I mean, at the end of the day,
it doesn't matter how many you know decentralized nodes we have, how many SPOs we have,
if the access point is being held and owned by one entity, no matter how honest
that entity can be in the ecosystem, right? Just Like from a structural point of view,
this needs to be decentralized. This needs to have a cover, like a community oversight
and like community governance. Really, if we want, if we want to be truly honest about calling this
decentralized. Yeah. Okay. Good. Well. All right. That sets the stage well. We have
more people in the space now, so I want to just reiterate for everybody: this is a Q and A,
and that's the main point of what we're going to get into in a moment. Here,
we have some questions that we sort of just pulled from seeing the conversation,
so we're going to dive into those first. But then, both as we go along and at the end,
we're going to get to the questions that are put in the chat. So, if you have questions
or comments that that you want to be a part of the conversation, Put those in the thread,
specifically under the space itself, so you can see in the bottom right-hand corner of the interface
on your phone. There's a little message bubble. Press that and put in your question. Yeah,
so we're we're about to get to those, but first we do have a little bit more stage setting to do.
So we want to just reiterate here what actually is in the proposal that we're talking about,
and I'll pass that to to be in a moment here. And then finally, what are the stakes of this?
Because You know, I mean, you can you can throw a proposal on chain. It's not.
It's actually not trivial to do. Uh, but still, that's there's one thing,
and then there's actually what your intentions are. Uh, you know, if it doesn't pass too. So,
so we'll get to that as well before we get into the questions. But first of all, B,
what is in the proposal? Um, what is Blockfrost basically offering to D reps at this point?
Ah, B, are you are you speaking? Can anybody else hear B? No, I don't. You don't. Okay,
B. You may you may need to drop down and rejoin. So I guess maybe I'll I'll just harass Merrick
and and force him to to take this question as well, if you don't mind Merrick.
And we'll get B up in back up in a moment here. We have some thumbs down from people. Oh,
and a thumbs up from people in the audience. So I'm getting mixed messages, guys.
You got you got to have a united front here. I'll look at the thread too,
so we see what people are saying. But Merrick, if you could go ahead, just articulate what's
the core of the proposal. Oh, B's back up. B, can you speak? Can you hear me now? We can. Yes.
Excellent. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. So I was starting to say that a lot of people probably remember
that we earlier this year had a our first proposal, which we were introducing something that we call
Project Haley, which would introduce slice indexing because you know we as we are moving towards
the age of layoffs, as I call it. We still need to basically prepare the chain,
and you know the amount of data that we would have to we would have to process would be too heavy
for you know the normal SPO or anybody who doesn't have the infrastructure ready to do so.
So what we wanted to do was to introduce a way where you could index and slice index different parts
of the chain. Besides that, that was a proposal, and a lot of D reps gave us the feedback
that they liked the idea of of Project Haley, but they didn't like the part where The proposal
essentially asks for subsidy of the free tier that we have now, because I think everybody is aware
that we we do have a lot of traffic in Blockfrost, and a lot of it is also derived from
the free tier that we also service. So we took the feedback from from D reps
and what we'd been received as, you know, D reps, and also on communications on X,
and we decided that the best way that we can move forward, because there was also also
some confusion about, you know, a private company offering something that should be offered as a
As a common good for the community, because that is essentially how we wanted to position ourselves.
So this proposal is built upon that feedback, and what
we're essentially trying to do is to turn Blockfrost into a community-governed not-for-profit,
meaning that we're giving up all of our code and you know IPs and everything to the community
to be governed and decided on upon by the community, so that we all. We become that public good
that we always wanted to become, and also we are able to give back to to the community, you know,
the for helping us get to where we are today. And I think it's also a great testament
to the decentralization that we have been trying to work or that we've been working on for
the past few years, where we're also now able to decentralize that aspect of it as well.
So the way that it functions is that we it's it's an 18 month period where we transition all of all
of the things that exist today, but we will keep the free tier and make sure that that is
that is preserved because that is also one of the things that has helped us bring on more builders
and developers to Cardano. So within that 18 month period, we will also elect a board,
community elected board, who will be able to decide upon what we're going to do, you know,
where we see where we want to build things, what we want to do, and also decide on pricing
and all those other things. And we're also going to decide upon a sustainability model
because that was also another thing that Deerup saw in the proposal that there was no they wanted
either a way where the proposal or the last proposal would give back to the treasury or at least.
Or at least sort of make make it self-sustainable. So we're also going to vote
upon two different sustainability models to make sure that this can actually stand on its own
and not have to be dependent on on anything else. And I, yeah, that's the main points
of the proposal. So, so you guys actually have a couple of options in mind,
but you're just waiting essentially to let the stakeholders of the new nonprofit come in
and then make that decision themselves. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct,
and I there was some pushback on why we didn't decide on a sustainability model
before this proposal. And I think the best way to explain it was that we we didn't want to make
those choices because the the models are very different in themselves,
and depending on what the community is comfortable with and how we actually want to move forward.
If we want to move in a way where we we give back to the treasury directly,
or if we want to move in a way where where we're expanding basically the the offerings
by bringing on more service providers and actually. Going directly to the people
who are servicing data today and helping them basically grow with us, and while keeping
the free tier free and or the access layer free and available to anyone
who wants to start building on Cardano, and basically having that taken care of. Awesome, awesome.
Yeah. Okay. Well, I want to get into the meat of the questions here in a moment,
but before we do that, like I said before, it is good just with these things to also have a sense
of the stakes. So, right. I mean that you know there was one proposal that was put out,
a lot of feedback, like. Like you say, be was integrated into a second proposal
that hopefully addresses the you know the concerns and the interests that are sort of arraigned here
around the use cases and the purpose of Blockfrost. But that said, you know it is it is a vote yes
or no ultimately on this mandate. And so, Merrick, what what is the you know the outcome here
if this is funded versus if this isn't funded? What's what can people expect? Oh yeah, definitely,
and we did actually put an article to clarify this a little bit on on our X space,
so you can go to the blog post on X to to see that. But basically, to to be clear,
like this is the final step in our journey. Like if you want truly to have a decent choice.
Access layer. If we want to be honest about calling it, you know, Cardano truly decentralized.
No matter that we have a great, you know, decentralized index. No matter that we have
almost three thousand stake pools. If this access layer is not decentralized,
we are not truly decentralized, right? And and we believe that this is the step forward.
We purposefully did not, as B mentioned, choose a specific path to sustainability, right?
We did not choose a specific business model. We really want this to be open to the community vote.
And for us, this is basically a mandate to execute this idea of a decentralized layer. So,
if this is not funded, we don't plan to continue with Blockfrost as a service. So,
we will wind down the operations, as we have stated clearly in that article. Now, on the other hand,
like what happens if this is funded is that the community. Will gain in their governance
this whole ecosystem, right? So, not only the IP, not only not only the treasury itself,
but also the relationships and any potential revenue that this can fit into the treasury. And also,
finally, I think a space when we can really in a decentralized way discuss different API formats
and you know different possibilities and strategies to decentralize the API network.
As you maybe know, we are already working with different data nodes
or even alternative nodes providers, such as DX5. They had a great product called Dolos.
Or Blink Labs, they have their Dingo node, and both of them are actually integrating
the Blockfrost API directly into the node. So I think that's basically value proposition
for the community to have something that is, I think, so unique in this ecosystem,
and that is the that is that we can really honestly call ourselves decentralized. Yeah. Okay.
This is interesting because it just clicked for me that in a way this is like the final step of
Like that journey and the vision that you've been on, because it's not like you—you actually need
the involvement of the ecosystem at this with this governance structure at this level
and at this point, if that story is to reach its conclusion, with having the the governance
of this service decentralized as well as well as the infrastructure. Yeah, and I mean,
it's really truly the last big boss of the of decentralization for us. Because when this happens,
we will still have an advisory role, so we will kind of try and transfer
and advise our knowledge to that board. But we are abstaining of any voting power in that board.
You know, so we are not going to actively try to steer this in the future.
But we will be always here to actually help the community to kind of you know,
because this expertise has been built over the past six and seven years. Not only on today's states,
but like you know, we we started before smart contracts. Where I think, right?
So we actually went through a lot of implementation and a lot of changes to the API to arrive at
at current state. Of course, yeah. And when you say we, there, you mean your team within IO,
or just IO as as IO as an entity? So yeah, definitely like our team. Yes. Yes. Okay. Awesome. Well,
yeah, and that actually that leads us. So now we're actually going to get into the substance
of the questions here. So this is this is exciting. Excited to get our teeth into this.
That leads nicely into the first one that I have down here. Just to frame this as well, right?
Like we have some dearups in the space actually here as well, and I think any time
that you're looking at a proposal like this, you need to do your due diligence.
You need to double check, and you know, like, don't feel bad about asking questions
if there's anything that's ambiguous, or if you know there's like any Any open questions
or things that could be interpreted one way or another? Like, I think as a D rep,
you owe it to the Ada holders who delegate Ada to you to, you know, know what you're voting on.
And so that's the purpose, really, of this space. Now that we have sort of the stage setting out
of the way, is to get into some of those questions in you know the final days here
before the proposal goes through. So we have a few that we like pulled in
from just sort of looking at the discourse. But like I've rearticulated a couple of times here,
you guys can also put questions in the thread under the space. Sometimes people will put questions
under like quote tweets of the space and different things.
So I'm gonna have to like probably go around and search and see if if anybody's question
has been missed. But go ahead and start doing that now so that we do get to it eventually.
All right. With that said, the first question that I that I had done here and it goes nicely to
where you just left off, Merrick is who owns Blockfrost today, right? And obviously Five Binaries.
Was your company in the founding of Blockfrost, and so how is it how is it involved,
or is it involved in Blockfrost today? Oh yeah, so just to put some clarification into this,
the Blockfrost as a product was founded in 2020 by five binaries,
but in 2024 this has been transferred to IOG. So today Blockfrost is owned by IOG,
and IOG is actually the submitter of this proposal, administered by Intersect,
like many of the other proposals. So just to publicly state this, there has been a lot
of misinformation about this happening. IOG owns Blockfrost, no one else. Awesome, awesome, yeah,
and I think there was, I, I think actually, possibly a comment of yours earlier. There was like,
you know, when you use the word "it," it can like vaguely refer to various previous things that
you said in the sentence, and I think people misinterpreted that. There were some like screenshots
going around. So anyway, I mean, like, sorry, everyone, as you can hear,
English is not my first language, so just like, but this is like clear confirmation publicly
from me. I do not own personally, or Five Burners do not own Block Frost.
Block Frost is owned by IOG. Excellent. All right, thanks, Eric. Yeah, it's good.
Good to just get that out of the way. All right. Yeah. All right. So another question down here.
Obviously, obviously, Blockfrost has had several productive collaborations. I don't know.
That's probably too much of a euphemism, but like with Catalyst in the past,
people will be familiar. You guys, like, you know, everybody really, for many years,
have interacted with Catalyst. But did did Catalyst fund the creation of Blockfrost,
and what has that relationship been like over the years? Oh yeah, I've seen this as a misinformation
as well out there. So Catalyst did not fund Blockfrost. Actually, Blockfrost was funded way
before Catalyst existed. I know that the project Catalyst actually did use Blockfrost as well,
and no fund was used to directly fund any, you know, any part of the Blockfrost.
Everything that was funded through Catalyst was open source tooling that was built for on top of
or on top of Blockfrost, right? So, and I even think one of the Catalyst rounds.
They have a challenge or a topic actually that said like building on Blockfrost, right?
So it was for anyone that build any cool application or extension of Blockfrost
or anything related to Blockfrost. So that was the the category itself,
which we obviously did not did not participating participate in. One of the biggest thing I think
that Catalyst funded for us was our transmission at the time to be open source.
Most of the funding was actually going to a security audit and having the developers
that actually helped us, you know, with creating a documentation and making this a product that
anyone can basically use. Before it was really baked in, connected with all different kinds
of you know software that was not really usable as a standalone, as a standalone.
A piece of software that you can you can basically run. So, just your question. No,
Project Alice did not did not found the creation of Block Frost. Awesome, awesome. Yeah.
And by the way, guys, if you if you have any like follow up questions on any of these questions,
that is to say, everybody in the space, again, feel free to put those in a thread too.
I haven't checked in like five or ten minutes, so we'll see if anybody's put anything in. Yeah.
Okay. I I have follow up question on that actually, which is. For people who are less experienced,
I mean, honestly, like myself, when you when you say that something has been open sourced, right?
Like that, a sort of basic intuition might mean, all right, well, that doesn't that mean that like
whatever value was there is like freely accessible to anybody. Like,
why should anybody ever need to pay for Blockfrost again if it's been quote unquote open sourced?
Like, what what does it mean for something to be open sourced, or what does it mean
for Blockfrost to have been open sourced? And then, how does the present proposal sit distinct from
and different from that? Yeah. So when when something is open source, it it means
that you can actually access the code that the the service is running, and you can,
if you have the technical ability, if you have the resources, to invest in,
you can run your own version, right? So, but Bookcross is much more than that.
It just not just it's not a piece of software only. It's a service. You know,
it's it's it's a API that is integrated into the ecosystem. So it's a little bit like
so you could have All the software you need to run your own mail server,
probably at home in a closet. You will have to, you know, spend resources to buy the hardware,
to buy the internet connection, to kind of maintain it. If it's going down at 2 a.m.,
you have to wake up and fix it, versus using something like Gmail, right? So,
what the ecosystem really gains by owning Blockfrost is like several things.
I will start with decentralization, right? I already said this, but I will repeat it because I think
this is the most critical one, right? We really think of Blockfrost as critical infrastructure,
and for Cardano. Other ecosystem, we really cannot afford to have this governed by
only one private entity. This really needs to be in the hands of the community,
and having it not only the control of the community but also the oversight, right?
So that's decentralization apart. The service one, as I've said, we are transitioning the service,
the know-how, the relationships, and the technical standards, right? So.
When you have something like an API, it's not that easy to just say, "Hey, this is my API.
" You need a lot of collaboration from other developers to actually adopt this API
and implement in their products and services. And this is where having a non-for-profit owning this
is very beneficial, and we can see it in other ecosystems like a Linux Foundation,
when you have like a non-for-profit entity that coordinates this space and kind of propose and have
different commercial players even collaborate on technical standards. This is like very beneficial
for for the product itself. Yeah, yeah. I was, I was actually looking and just thinking,
obviously about Blockfrost over the past couple of days as we were thinking about doing
this conversation. And what struck me was the centrality of Blockfrost to,
I hope I'm not mangling this term, but sort of the the data layer in Cardano and.
The way that various things depend on it, either essentially because it's setting standards
or because it's leading the way in working out how you do various new kinds of operations
that interact with the new features that are coming to the ledger, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's interesting to to hear how you know essentially this could become a kind
of Decentralized and open platform for collaboration between all of the different stakeholders
in this space in the Cardano ecosystem to basically have those conversations
and make the leadership of that space and quality within it a group and a coherent community project
as opposed to one that's like bound to the fate of a specific company. So yeah,
I guess just just my two cents there. It's very interesting. Okay. Yeah.
So we've gotten through two initial questions here. I have a third one, which let's just see.
I want to double check if we have any questions in the chat that are relevant. Oh, hey. Let's see.
All right. So we've got a question from Dave. Let me see here. Hey guys,
question for me if you don't mind. All right. Staff costs. In my opinion, are fairly high.
Can you please expand on this? Also, can you talk to the point of data integrity?
And would love to know, especially in the current security climate, how you enforce data integrity
in conjunction with running an icebreaker model. All right, so maybe we can take the second part
of that question first. Just to the point of data integrity and the decentralization
of the infrastructure of Blockfrost. I know we're because we're taking these lives. I mean,
this is maybe putting a little bit on the spot. But do you have any thoughts on that, Merrick?
And especially how it Sort of dovetails with the whole conversation of the decentralization
of Blockfrost overall. Yeah, I think this is this is a really good question.
It's a little bit technical, so sorry for everyone who was not looking for that. But basically,
what we do right now is because. At Bokhost, we are still, of course, running our backends, right?
We are not putting all the load on the icebreakers. So what we usually do is we mirror the traffic.
So basically, what we do is we ensure, before serving that traffic to the end user,
that basically the responses from the icebreaker kind of match or our own quorum. So
if there is a different response, that we kind of Well, most of the time,
it's not really that it's a bad actor, but it's maybe a faulty actor, right?
Like a node can be out of sync, or something happened, or it has been cached somewhere. So
if we actually detect one of those responses, we we don't serve it to the end user, right? Now,
how we will approach this, or like how we will advise the new board to approach this in the future,
is there are different ways to solve this, of course, depending on if we are looking for like
How fast to serve the queries, or like how how much you know affinity are you looking for?
But what we are thinking is the best way is to use basically trusted executed environments TEs
to create the attestation, and and this means that not everyone in the cluster have to actually run
these attestations, but you only need a few of the trusted actor to find this
and that you trust to actually validate. Okay, this response has been. Really coming from this code
and from this node connected to a decentralized network, and this has been attested by
a TTE hardware. Which is, if you think it, think about it. It's just to explain it
a little bit simpler. It's like a black box that something runs inside,
but even the operator cannot look inside. And it's, it's, it's something. Your phone has it,
so your iPhone has a TEE, so all your passwords are basically stored in a in a secure chip,
let's to say, and even the iPhone application or or you know any software that is running on iPhone
cannot access your password directly. Same a little bit with a hardware wallet, right? So
if you're using Trezor or Ledger, most of those they run in a in a secure Chip and environment,
so that's like the a little bit more technical response about the data integrity. Again,
there are really different ways how to handle this, and I think this would be
a really great discussion also in a more decentralized, you know, fashion
because we don't need data integrity only for book flows, but we need it for a lot of other data,
right? So I would really like to see this as a open discussion when the non for profit is founded.
And yeah, let's get back to the now the first part of question: the staffing cost.
There has been also like some Well, not misinformation, but something like we are only Europeans
and you know the Europors. They're like, why are they paying like such a high salary?
But this is not true, right? Like we employ staff in Australia, Canada.
We have you know people from Iceland on on our payroll because we are running a 24/7 service,
so we cannot afford to have only staffing from. From one place, and also the staff cost
is not really salaries, right? Like no one on my team is making that much. We're asking,
but this is actually the overhead that any company needs, right? We we don't only pay the developers
directly. We have to have like other supportive staff, such as accounting, legal team, HR,
and and basically everything. So when you look at the Staffing cost, the FT number is not
what the what the salary is. It's basically what we as an organization needs to spend to have that
to have that person employed and working for us. There has been, which is a little bit odd,
but there has been some deals with like, hey, but can you use like a bogus self-employment
like we do in Europe, which is basically you hire someone as a contractor, but he's working
full-time for you. And everyone says like, well, I mean, we cannot do that if we have
large customers. Like if if you want to do business with a bank. I mean,
they really demand like some higher standards and higher audit also for your staff, right?
Like we cannot afford to kind of go and circumvent taxes just to have like a lower cost
and be a serious partner to a financial institution. So that's why the the staff
costs a little bit higher than what you will see in other ecosystem or other instances. Yeah. Also,
you know, you know, if you've been say worked both as an employee and a Contractor, you know,
you you have more. It's more. It looks like more on paper for the contractor
because you're covering everything that isn't covered by the you know benefits
and the infrastructure of the company that you're working for. Yeah, and I mean, I mean,
let's let's also be honest. Like, really good engineers are not cheap. So,
I would I would rather employ five five person team for the same cost than to have ten people,
right? Because I mean, for the effectiveness, rather to have like five rock stars than
than average programmers. That's just me, and that's just how actually we're running the team,
and I think the results speak for ourselves. Yeah, awesome. All right,
so we had another question from Matt, Matt Chef, I think is the name, which is what is
the monthly cost for keeping Blockfrost running, and what is the monthly revenue? I'm not sure.
Well, yeah, we can you can address that, Marik. But I do want to get on to a couple
of other questions that we have here too. But you know, it's maybe worth just picking that up
real fast. Yeah, so like we were like long thinking about how if we should include this
in the proposal. And the problem with those numbers are actually that running block for
at the moment is a little bit different than running it as an also profit, right?
A lot of our infrastructure goes to the accounting layer, so we do a lot of you know we have strive
for a processing of cards and payments and stuff like that, and most of everything that
that is there from the revenue point is actually spent on the on the free tier
and the rewards for icebreaker. So at this point. I don't want to share specific numbers, of course,
because we are still a business and this is just a proposal. But just to say,
like we are break even, and that 90% of all the traffic we are serving is coming from our free tier,
and this is basically when the business models and path to sustainability.
Will be an open up to the discussion with the committee, right? Because, as as be mentioned,
we have proposed only two paths to sustainability that will be chosen by the committee.
We don't want to take the decision because, you know, they both has pros and cons. You know,
the treasury can participate a little bit more in the operation if they want more treasury for it,
or it can be really more commercial decentralized. So we will have like, you know,
different vendor models that is specified in that in that proposal. Awesome. And actually. I mean,
I was gonna jump back into the next question that we had just like pulled from discourse prior,
but we do have another question here from Atlas Network Transmissions,
which does follow on from what we were just talking about there with sustainability.
So I'll just ask this one real fast. So from Atlas Network Transmissions,
if the Treasury funds this transition to an open source nonprofit, what's
the exact sustainability model to ensure Blockfrost can support
high volume B two B enterprise platforms long term without needing
another massive treasury withdrawal next year? So essentially, it sounds like the question here is
like, are we just funding like a year of getting essentially what we've already had with Blockfrost
in the past, or is this like transitioning us to a new sustainable paradigm?
And what what is the model for doing that? Oh yeah, definitely. So directly in the proposal,
we have those two models explained, and I probably won't do a better job now explaining them.
So go please there and read that. But I would just say the two basic that we are proposing is
the first one is just to have the treasury. Operate the block host as a service 100%. So,
if there is a bear market, if there is not enough demand, the treasury will have to actually absorb
the cost. But when there is enough revenue, that to turn the profit, that is returned to
the treasury. Again, this is just one of the two models. The second one is something that we see in
other ecosystems. For example, if you know the block hosting platform called WordPress.
They are using this, and it's called vendor forward models. So this is where you,
as a non for profit, just coordinate the development of the software and of the standards,
and then you have commercial vendors coming in, and they can basically participate in and.
And create this free layer as a onboarding platform, but in exchange for this,
any commercial deal that is not only for hosting, right? It can be specific like custom development
or consulting, goes to those commercial entities. And in this model, the treasury doesn't have
any need for you know for any additional spend. But on the other hand, you know.
The the the amount of revenue is actually not greater than in the first scenario going from those
are just two most obvious models that we are thinking about but again this is going to be voted on
by the community again with the with the board composition as well as the path to sustainability and
the end of the year and I would really Would like to see other business model like being considered.
So, like, I really hope other people, more skilled in the community, will come
and kind of share their knowledge and propose other maybe different ventures that this can work
from. But those two first are probably the most obvious ones, right? Yeah, awesome. So,
so essentially, there. I I might get this a little bit wrong, but just to rearticulate it
because generally, the I find that the sort of conversation and repeating it back in my own words
helps. So there's either the treasury as the both the beneficiary of revenue
and also the source of funding for Blockfrost. That's one option,
and you know then it becomes essentially this layer of like a solid, you know,
strong solution that you know basically is owned by the Cardano community.
And then you have you know potentially other commercial actors offering more specialized
or like specific things. Then the second model is where essentially you bring everybody
in the space. Together and have Blockfrost be sort of what they collaborate on is like the basic,
fundamental thing and platform where they collaborate and set standards and do all of this.
But then for any more specialized use cases, there's actually go to the specific people
who are supporting. So in that case, it's not the treasury that is is the backstop and beneficiary.
It's like this consortium of the sort of leading players in the space for you know crypto APIs.
Is that right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you actually put it very well. So the the second one
is empowering the The vendors that are you know serving and and and providing the infrastructure
like a little bit like the icebreakers are doing right now, right? But in return,
they actually gain those business opportunities that later comes with it. Oh, nice. Yeah. Okay.
That's that's super cool. The the parallel to um to the icebreakers there as well,
like on the commercial side versus the um. Or the business side versus the infrastructure side,
and yeah, just like this is one of the questions I got from the DEPs a few days ago. Is like, hey,
but we don't have any vendors that actually could participate in this if it's coming.
And I said like, this is not true. We had like more than eighty different SPOs doing
extremely good job at running this infrastructure, like. The whole icebreaker program has
like 100% uptime from the point of the icebreakers for like since like for months. So I mean,
those are people who knows how to run Cardano best. They're running their nodes there for years,
and now they're running the block for zk also like for more than a year at this moment. Awesome,
awesome, yeah. Okay, so we do we have some more questions here. So you know this is this is great.
We're like we're getting a roll of of questions. So I think we'll just keep going with answering
the ones from the thread, and if we get to the other ones that we pulled from earlier,
you know that'll just be a bonus at the end. So another another question from Dave we have here
I'll just read it out in full another question from me and it's again from the security
and privilege side when transactions are submitted through Blockfrost what are the plans
or current process in place to ensure staff cannot transaction peak before block inclusion also is
the transaction submission randomly rotated between icebreakers too this one's important for me.
Yeah. So at this moment, it is like randomly distributed for the icebreakers.
We of course have a mirror itself. So for any transaction, we are we are making sure
that we are actually submitting into Avanos as well. For now, and the first was about the security.
Can you repeat that? Sorry, because I don't see I don't see Dave's questions in the thread
for some reason. So I was not able to read it in full. Yes. So the first was about integrity
of transaction submissions. Yes. So. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, when transactions are submitted through
Blockfrost, it's in the Jumbotron now, by the way. What are the plans or current process in place?
Yeah, to ensure that staff cannot transaction peak before block inclusion. And then he said, "Also,
is the transaction submission randomly rotated between Icebreakers too?" Yeah. Okay. So, like,
to the yeah. Okay, I understand the the first part of the question, and I think this is
a really great question and one that really plays strongly for the non for profit. So,
at this moment. I can ensure that we are not, you know, touching those transactions.
But there is really no technical way for you to verify this, right? Like this is only
by using Blockfrost as a customer. So you kind of put a little bit of trust in us to actually do
our job well. If we actually have a board governed by the community, the community can actually go
and, you know, request this, which is now sensitive access because you know we cannot share
our customers' data and their transactions with everyone. We are still running, you know, people.
Like depend on privacy when using blockfords as well, but if you have a board of community members,
they can actually go have and they sign and verify that everything is in order, and kind of be
that police for us for the rest of the community. Nice. Oh, there we go. Sorry. Yeah. So,
so sort of they can also. I mean, obviously that's what a board does to some extent,
but act as an oversight body too to guarantee that. Yeah. All right. Great. Okay. Um. All right.
So I'm gonna I am gonna slip back to questions that we would worked out for the agenda
because there's one here that I think uh is is beneficial and good to get to,
which is um what does the ecosystem gain by owning Blockfrost, uh like in particular, right?
Like what is it that Blockfrost um and owning it, completing this journey basically
and picking up Blockfrost is sort of this like you know long time uh gift that you've been growing
and cultivating, Merrick, for the ecosystem. Uh, why is that important in your view um
for the ecosystem? Yeah, yeah. I think I already kind of directly, directly answered this, right?
Because a lot of I think it's repetition, but I will say it again. I mean, it's decentralization,
right? It's the technical standard. It's the it's the it's the business connection
and development we have, and also you know the know how and experience we have to to transition to
this to the non for profit and to the community. Okay, good. Well, and I think that this follow up
as well is helpful to put in contrast that one. So. This is a question that I've seen once or twice,
and you know, as as sort of acerbic as it sounds, it's both a decent question to ask.
It also has pretty straightforward answers. But so that is, if if Blockfrost is worth buying for
the ecosystem, right? If it's worth taking that final step, why would Io, you know,
step away from it essentially if it isn't funded, right? So so like if it's worth having,
why aren't you keeping it? Basically, is sort of the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a good question. I mean, from for like Io and why. Why they were actually interested,
or we were actually interested in, but was in the first place is really decentralization, right?
So Cardano on-chain consensus is truly decentralized, but I mean the the on-chain is just one part
of it, right? The off-chain infrastructure should be decentralized as well, and.
Like it's pretty clear that for IO as a company, the success of Cardano is much,
much more important than success of Blockfrost, right? But not only of that. Like
if you look at what is currently happening with the decentralization of software development,
and if you look at what IO is today, it's basically a R&D and ventures company, right?
And this is not happening only with Blockfrost. Like you can have a look at Hydra, Material,
Dedalus, Cardano node itself. All of those, you know, software were kind of research and bootstrap,
but IO, but they are now put into the community hands. So, and I think that's really—it's
really important. Like, if we—if—if I would really want to kind of squeeze this ecosystem from from
every penny, they would just you know lock everything down and kind of you know increase prices
on all the customers, like shut down the free tier, like everything that really costs money.
But it's really truly about decentralization and how the ecosystem.
Should kind of really idly be run, right? Like the decentralization is really, truly the goal,
and it has immensely more value for the Cardano as a whole than for IO only. Yeah, yeah,
that's excellent. There's like a natural progression for these, and right, like I, IO as a business.
Doesn't you know specialize in everything? It specializes in like you said R and D and ventures,
and so there's a sort of natural maturation process and role that IO has in the like trajectory
of an ecosystem. And yeah, I think I mean honestly, just from from within IO
and seeing how things you know are developing and maturing, it's actually pretty exciting
for me to see like IO be like true essentially to its mission and purpose,
which is To like keep innovating and not just to like basically do rent seeking on top of things
that it you know has already done. So I don't. I'm pretty. I'm pretty excited about it overall.
And I think as well, what clicked for me, like I mentioned at the beginning of the space,
with this step not being sort of just like one of a number of potential options for Blockfrost,
you know, as we're like making that transition, but it's actually been inherently a part
of your trajectory from the beginning, which Yeah, I don't know. Just makes it makes it sit nicely
for me, you know. Whatever, dear up decides ultimately too, because I think it's been a good journey
no matter what. But yeah, okay. So let's see. Let's see other questions here. So.
So this this was actually a less prepared question. So we may be coming close to wrapping up
toward the end of the space. So I think we do have one or two further questions.
So we will have a little bit more here. But just so that you guys are aware
and you don't get cut off guard, we are coming close to the end. So if you have
further questions that you want to ask, including follow up questions on anything that
we've previously gotten to so far in the space, yeah, just add them to add them to the thread below.
I do make sure that you're in the actual space itself, because if you're like on a quote tweet
somewhere or like whatever, you're just browsing Twitter and you forgot where you were
and you drop a question into a random thread, I won't see it. So you gotta you gotta put it in
under the space, and or tag me, maybe I'll see it in my notifications. Okay, let's see here.
Further questions. Okay, from Musa. I saw the recent proposal about transitioning Blockfrost
to a community governed, not for profit model. What does successful community governance look like
to you? And how do you plan to involve builders and technical contributors from the community
in shaping the future roadmap? Ah, that's a great question. Abid, do you want to speak to that?
Merrick, do you want to? Yeah, I will maybe take this one because I actually got a question
about voting just few hours ago. So someone was asking like, how? So we said like, okay,
this will be community governed, but like, what do we mean by that? Like,
what do we mean by the vote? And I just want to clarify this as well. Like anyone will be
able to kind of nominate themselves for the for the for a seat on the board, you know,
with like a short bio and their expertise, and then it will be up to the DApps to kind of elect
this board that will be at the at the end of the end of the year. Now,
like the question about what is the perfect Commentary governance. I obviously like it.
It has to be boring, right? Like hopefully drama-free. The most boring,
because I think in that ecosystem we really breed a lot of the people that like innovation,
that are there to discuss, you know, those technical challenges, and just being open really
to anyone to kind of come in and not only to participate in in building on Blockfrost,
but anyone should be able to actually go and participate also building Blockfrost itself, right?
And this is what the What the governance should be like, really open to anyone.
With the thing about building, I think it is really open right now as well. Like if you go
and check one of the video, the last video B posted, and it's also on the Blockfrost profile.
There's like a last slide, like how many people contributed to the Blockfrost code.
I don't remember the exact number on top of my head, but it was many, right?
So that's basically what I think a successful community governance looks like to me. Maybe,
maybe B has a different answer. I think B was mentioning that she's been okay in chat
that she's been dropping. So, but B, if you do want to jump in and if you seem to have
stable connection, feel free to. So we got one more from Dave. And honestly, Dave,
you don't have to apologize because the purpose of the space is asking is asking questions.
And yeah, we have we have Merrick here. So yeah, I always. It's always it's always good to like have
an open space with a founder. I don't. I always love it. Okay. Yeah. So sorry. One more.
Dave says with the upcoming Layos scalability integration being in testnet phase, how well
or have Blocktrust already accounted for this? I know Merrick will have an answer for this one.
Also, where do you see Blockfrost going in the next two years? What are the current goals? But yeah,
let's let's just get the first one first. Yeah, the first one is a really good question
because this was basically what Project Kaylee was supposed to address.
So our initial plan was actually to get this question out of the way, build Project, you know,
Kaylee, and only then come from this last non-for-profit step. That was the first proposal
that did not pass. Actually, about, but yeah, the level scalability will be
a little bit challenging, right? And what our strategy is at this moment is basically involve
other alternative nodes operators like Bling Labs, Vingo, or Tix by Vitolos, and kind of, you know,
ride the the the boat with them because they are the ones that will have to, you know,
implement all those scalability integrations. And if we have a blockfrost API built in those nodes,
it will be much easier for us. You know to integrate with, because one just sorry for being
too technical. You know everything is changing, and we will see how the tests will will go
and what the adoption will be on the mainnet, right? The testnet will probably fine,
but how the adoption in the mainnet will actually position some of the software,
such as Cardano DBS, that we are currently using, because that that is also one of the software
that is actually now governed by by community, right? So yeah. Awesome,
and then we did have a secondary question. I don't know if I if I black not blacked out, zoned out,
or something in the middle of your your response there, Marek, or if you got it already.
But did you get to where do you see Blockfrost going in the next two years,
and what are the current? Oh no! Oh yeah, no. Sorry, yeah, yeah, I didn't. So in two years, yeah.
So our proposal actually for eighteen months, and hopefully by the two years,
Blockfrost will be have will be governed by a non for profit. That has a board
from community members of different, you know, expertise, and hopefully it will be fully sustainable
and will be able to basically work more with other API providers also on the front of, you know,
common standards and how we can actually improve the integration and how we can make
the builders' life more easy, right? Because that was the whole mission when Blockfrost started,
and that's why the free tier has always remained. So open and generous is about onboarding
new people into the ecosystem because, I mean, with a new developer entering a ecosystem,
you usually have only few chances to get their attention and get them building.
And if they don't have those tools that are easy to use and really like encouraging,
I think we are losing a lot of potential and a lot of talent that will drive Cardano to success.
Right? It will it will never be blockfrost. Like if no one is using Cardano,
blockfrost has no meaning at all. So we need those developers. We need those, you know,
new entrepreneurs onboarded into the Cardano ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, and I don't know
if people will agree with this, but it seems to me like Blockfrost itself and funding it. I mean,
I could be biased here. I'll try not to be too biased, given that I'm, you know, hosting here.
But I mean, it's it's essentially you know belief in the growth potential of Cardano. Like
if if you believe that Cardano can grow, then you want you know the best. Onboarding
and experience for adoption and for the use cases that require a service like Blockfrost,
and so just seeing its trajectory over the years, I think that's just you know sort
of the other side of that conversation to keep in mind too is that that Blockfrost is
kind of a dependency in a way for the vision of Cardano that we all want. Obviously,
people can challenge that, but you know, it's my two cents. Okay, and I'll try not
to editorialize too much. Okay, we did have we had another question from Matt Chef.
It's a little bit long, so I think the essence of it is about legal due diligence, you know,
like on the claims and the Yeah, the claims of the proposal and what it promises to deliver to
Dearups and to the Cardano community. So basically, like, how are you thinking about it,
and how can Dearups assess it from a legal perspective? I know you're not a lawyer,
as far as I'm aware, Merrick, but does that put you on the spot too much, or is
that something you can address? Well, not not really on this, but like,
what exactly from a legal point of view? Because as like, I'm I'm not a lawyer. The proposal,
like if like any IOG proposal, is basically admitted by Intersect. So, IOG is getting paid only
when we deliver the milestones, and the contract is like legally signed, right,
with Intersect as an administration, which is per the cardinal constitution. So, and again,
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not really sure, like if there is you know anything that we can do better
or more for the community to have like more trust in this. Like, if so,
like we will be more welcome. But is there like a specific angle or question that Yes. Well,
I could read the question more more in full. It may just be something that's that we need to
sort of push to Intersect because it's like an administrator question and something that
they've worked out, you know, with your people. And again, I don't want to
because you don't you don't have legal expertise. I don't want to put you on the hook for that,
Eric. But I will just I will just read the question and see if there's anything that
you want to comment on. Yeah. So Matt said, in my professional life, I'm a lawyer.
I primarily act in the context of business and land transactions. Is there anything
that's been shared with the recipients of this proposal that allow us to verify the claims
made within this space, meaning this conversation we're having right now?
I think about the ownership of Blockfrost as well as the break-even revenue status
that's been claimed. Additionally, is there any way for Blockfrost to demonstrate that there are
no liabilities being assumed by the community, such as tax or other liability? Essentially,
is there an ability to conduct due diligence? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I said now this is
a really good question, and part of our proposal actually, you know, has a budget specifically
for the legal. Costs associated with this, right? So, of course,
this new non-for-profit board should not accept anything that would be liable
for the committee part, right? So, this is a transaction between a non-for-profit business model
and an I.O.G., right? So, that's in my term is is what will happen, and I would like.
From my point of view, like I don't think it's even possible for me to go
and make claims that are not true without any liability, right? Like I would probably be
really stupid and get into a lot of trouble if I would be like inventing something up to get money
from the Cardano community. Yes, but again, I'm I'm not a lawyer, but yeah. Yeah.
So I just I feel like I don't I don't actually know. Actually, probably Matt,
you could probably tell us what sort of legal language I should use to articulate this. But yeah,
this isn't like an articulation of any kind of legal policy or intention
or or whatnot by Merck here, just informational purposes. But there's yeah. Again, like yeah,
I'm not a lawyer. We have a we have a legal team. Intersect has a legal team.
They actually working on on everything. They actually check the proposal to be sure
that actually what we are promising is that they can deliver. Right and sadly, like I,
we can get probably more information on this. If I mean, if you are a lawyer,
you probably have more like specific questions that we can answer to. Yeah,
so let's put a pin in that and direct it also to Intersect. I think is probably a good,
is probably a good, yeah, just a good way to put a pin in it since we don't really have
the resources on hand to address the question specifically here. But yeah, yeah,
I think Intersect has been running most of the proposal from last year, right,
and they are running a lot of proposals this year as well. So I think they have like.
Most experience on actually being an administrator for the Cardano ecosystem in this space. Yeah,
and the critical point there too is that any before any money is released,
it's it has to be approved by Intersect. So, sort of the the target, the the index of the question
here at a contractual level has to involve Intersect as the administrator.
Whereas what we're we're addressing is the intention of the proposal. Yeah,
that's that's one of the guardrails of the constitution, right? Yes, yeah, yeah.
That's a it's a good point too, because otherwise you would be in a, in a uh. Well, I mean,
maybe there's ways that you could deal with it, but it seems like it could get pretty messy
pretty fast. Um, yeah. Okay. Uh, so we did have we had one final uh, uh, message in the chat.
Maybe there will be more. I'll just double check in a minute from uh Ken Eric,
which I just wanted to read real quick. It was funny. Um, so Ken Eric was saying that uh.
I made a joke on a bus in Argentina with Marek that transactions on Cardano need because yeah about
how transactions on Cardano need the icebreakers that is this program to decentralize
the infrastructure of Blockfrost via SPOs because a transaction will go through but only
if Marek approves it. Meaning, essentially, by that point, Blockfrost had become so central to the
off-chain infrastructure of Cardano that, in practice, and you know, this is just the case with
off-chain infrastructure. You know, you have the blockchain decentralized; that's great,
but people using it use it oftentimes, usually through off-chain infrastructure. And so, you know,
Marek and Blockfrost, to that point, had you know a strong position there. And so, it's I think.
Yeah, just sort of resonant with the overall story and your overall intention,
even from the beginning of realizing like, oh shit, we started this, we got into this
to be decentralized, and now we're like the bottleneck that you've actually brought it to this point
of hopefully resolving that bottleneck once and for all. So, yeah, I think that may be a good place
to end it. Let me just triple check and see if we have any final questions here.
If anybody does have final questions, you can put them in,
and I'll try to get to them before we close up. Let's see.
Okay. So another question from Atlas Network. It looks like we have maybe two more questions here,
which we'll take before before closing up. One, well, at least one from here from
Atlas Network Transmissions says: Can a newly formed community-owned nonprofit really guarantee
relentless 24/7 reliability that platforms require, or will money run out
and eventually degrade B2B capabilities? Thanks again. Yeah. So like, I think
they can guarantee more than just one single entity, right? So basically,
this is this is the the in terms of decentralization, and we have seen this
with the icebreaker model. Like, the more players you have, the more decentralized you are,
the the less chance you have of of being down, right? And the non for profit is really the guardian
only of the I would say access portal, right? So. When we speak about, like, hey,
you just can run Blockfrost on yourself. It's well, you can run version of a Blockfrost at home,
but what everyone is using and what is the the onboarding path is
the the Cardano Dash Mainnet dot Blockfrost.io API, right? So that's that's
what needs to be decentralized, not only the the icebreakers, you know, after after that point. So
and now I don't remember the second part question. So like I I don't see the questions because I'm
really afraid to refresh my page and lost and not be able to join the spaces again. Yeah yeah.
So the second was like about the I think path to sustainability. Yes, let me just double check
the wording. Unfortunately, it's Atlas Network Transmissions A N T. You're X is treating you
like you're a bot. By the way, it's hiding your messages as spam, so I have to I have to dig down
to find them. But yeah, here it is again. It's crazy because these are good questions too. So this.
Second question: It was or will? Oh, well, yeah. Will money run out and eventually degrade
B two B capabilities? So it's just a question about the sustainability. And I think essentially,
if you're sacrificing anything by moving from the current model where it's one company that owns
these services versus this more open model. Yeah, and I don't think like the B two B
directly will probably never be affected, right? Because those are commercial entities
willing to pay for. What we are really carefully trying to maintain here is the free tier that
we have right now, which which is the onboarding, you know, access to a lot of new developers
in the space, right? So, like, we could just cost BookFrost to everyone and say, like, hey,
only you can access BookFrost only if you pay ten thousand, you know, dollars a month.
But that's the not that's not our point. That's not why we are doing it,
and it will definitely not help decentralization. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well,
we have actually gotten through all of our questions now. Like somebody, somebody,
correct me if I'm wrong. I think that that's. I think that's all of them. So you're missing one.
I'm missing one. Oh my goodness. Oh. Okay. I can speak now. You can speak right at the end too.
Wonderful. Please jump in. The question came from Musa. He's asking, as independent
or as indexing demands grow massively with Cardano's evolution, what's one upcoming innovation
in your stack, like Kaylee, Mandlin, or other, that you're most excited about for handling
larger scale growth, and where might external developers contribute? I'm not sure if you guys
covered that. Oh yeah, we covered a little bit with the question about layers from Dave.
But as actually external contributors, I think, like personally, I really believe in
the project Kaylee, and I really hope that under the community governance,
we will have a chance to crystallize this, because I think it would be a really nice model
how to handle scale build in the future with you know sliding indexing. But again,
this at this moment is a discussion for after we pass the decentralized point,
and it will be a discussion with many other builders in the ecosystems.
It will not only be us as an internal team in a room. We will have to speak to a lot of you know
different people on how we tackle the scalability, right? Because we cannot afford to kind of have
this wrong from the start. Awesome. All right. Well, then I want to give you, Merrick,
just a chance to reiterate finally here at the end just a summary. Again, of the proposal, and yeah,
your your pitch to DREPS to to go vote for it. I know
you've you've already kind of exhaustively walked through different elements of it,
but just for anybody who like wandered in halfway through or three quarters of the way
through the space, and to sort of set everything in our minds going into the end of it,
can you reiterate just the overall outline of the proposal and why DREPS should vote for it within
the next five days before the deadline? Yeah, definitely. So the proposal is simple.
This is the last step in blockfrost decentralization, and if we, as a Cardano community,
want to be honest with ourselves and and kind of call ourselves decentralized,
it's not only about the consensus and 3,000 staking pools. It's also about the access layer,
and this is our chance to actually finish what we started on a journey almost two
and a half years ago, and to kind of finish it and and be one of the few. Few, if not the only one,
in the top 20 coin market cap list, to have a decentralized access layer. So please go vote.
You don't have to vote yes or abstain. Just go and vote, right? I know everyone is extremely tired.
There has been a lot of proposals. It's taking hours for everyone to read it.
It's not the best position to be a D rep. I mean, it really sucks to be a D rep at this moment.
But I like. For like we are almost at the end, so please go read. Please let us know any questions.
Reach out to us. We are like more happy to answer all constructive feedback we have. And please go
and vote. No matter how you vote, just go and voice your actually opinion on chain.
That's the whole point of decentralized governance. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I love hearing as well.
Just you know, at the end of the day, the the I don't know decentralization, Maxi,
and the idealist sort of breakthrough in your voice there, Eric. It's like it doesn't matter
how you vote. Just And you're right too. That you know, I hope that things, you know,
we figure out some solutions to things like how difficult it's been for Deorps lately. But you know,
in the meantime, we need to make sure that basic elements of you know Cardano's strategic future
are taken care of. And I think we've made a pretty strong case today here that Blockfrost is a part
of that. Yeah, we've also tried here to be you know very open and to address all of the questions
and. The challenges that we've seen out there. If you know anybody here in the space has follow-ups,
like Merrick said, he and B are more than open to talk with you about those. So, I mean,
to be honest, seen one or two people out there sort of with an axe to grind,
trying to you know throw some implication that like something is being hidden or something.
But I think it's pretty clear here through the testimony of Merrick's own words and and B's
and also their openness. That you can reach out to them anytime over the next few days
as you're making your decision, and that really this has all been a part of part of the vision,
part of the trajectory that they've been on. One that I'm really excited to see come to
a successful conclusion. So, I personally encourage you guys to go out there
and vote yes on the proposal. I won't be so I won't be so unbiased as Merrick just to say to vote.
I think you guys should vote yes. But yeah. Yeah, please do go vote. And I'm hoping that we will see
a positive conclusion for the whole ecosystem. Yes, even regardless of outcome, either way,
that we'll all move forward into a successful and bright future in the coming year. So thanks, guys.
And with that, I think we will close it up for the day. I do point people to this space.
If you meet anybody who has questions and and hasn't seen this conversation,
could benefit from it. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks, guys.
