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DePin X DeStore: The Rapidly Changing Landscape of Compute & Storage
Recorded: June 5, 2025 Duration: 1:17:18Space Recording
Short Summary
The D-PIN and D-Store X-Space is set to transform the decentralized storage landscape, with key players like Titan Network, Eigen Foundation, and IONet leading the charge. This collaborative effort marks a significant trend towards community-driven infrastructure, showcasing innovative projects that promise to enhance compute resources and drive growth in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. I'm going to go to the next video. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to put a little bit of a bag of water.
I'm going to put a little bit of water on the top.
I'm going to put a little bit of water on the top.
I'm going to put to the next video. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the D-Pin and D-Store X-Space, changing the landscape of
compute and storage. I am Ken Fromm from the DSA, which is the Decentralized Storage Alliance.
This is an X-Space brought to you by the DSAmoderator, Stuart Berman, welcome three terrific speakers
from the deep-end space.
We have Konstantin Tikkuchuk, who is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of Titan Network,
Robert Drost, who is CEO and executive director
of Eigen Foundation, which is behind the Eigen layer. And Marianne Wolford, who is VP of revenue
at io.net. So why don't we go around and introduce yourselves quickly and your organizations.
Why don't you start Stuart, my co-moderator.
Hi, Stuart Berman, long-time enterprise security architect, working on security risk and compliance from coming out of a network engineering background.
I've been involved the last five years in the Filecoin ecosystem.
Been a miner there for years and most recently was a CTO for a Web3 startup and currently a CISO at another startup.
Fantastic. Konstantin?
Hi, everyone. Also from the side of Titan Network. My name is Konstantin. I'm Chief
Rebice, Officer and Co-Founder of Titan. We are a Titan Network building an open source
incentive layer that supports people across the globe to aggregate idle resources and
power Shwasa's globally connected cloud infrastructure. Essentially, we help people to share their idle resources and we help
enterprises to leverage those idle resources for their benefit at a global scale.
Fantastic. Can't wait to hear more.
So Robert.
Yes, Robert.
Hey, hi, everybody, especially people on the Pacific time zone who are getting up early for this call at 7 a.m., including me.
So, yes, I'm happily over here at the Eigenlayer Foundation, helping out Eigenlayer with, you know, a number of things, restaking, AVSs.
And more recently, we've been talking about the verifiable cloud,
verifiable apps, verifiable AI.
So I look forward to talking about that
and how it intersects with both decentralized storage and D-Pen.
I've been at Eigenlayer Foundation coming up on two years,
closer to a year and a half.
I think I just passed that, actually.
And before that, my entire time in crypto,
since it came in in the 2017-2018 timeframe,
was at ConsenSys, where I started out working
around one particular spoke, Kaleido Blockchain,
one of the Consen the consensus spokes that has actually
become a startup, a couple hundred million valuation in, of all places, working in the
cloud. Blockchain is a service for enterprises. So check them out sometime, Firefly OS.
And then I eventually also led, for Joe Lubin and Consensus Mesh, the open source
public goods focused R&D effort, which worked very closely with EF over many years leading up to the
2.0 merger. So those have been my impacts on the crypto space.
And just mentioning a little bit on my background before that, I had a pretty long career in Silicon Valley working in infrastructure at Sun Microsystems as well as Oracle, where I did both product as well as research focused topics for those companies.
Fantastic. And I think you may share some of the same long history in Silicon Valley with Mary Ann,
who's our next speaker. So Mary Ann, are you also on Pacific Coast time?
Yes, I am. I am here a little bit early, not a morning person, but I'm going to push through. Thank you for the invitation to join.
I'm Marianne Wilford. I am currently with IONet, and we are a platform, a decentralized compute
platform traditionally in the Web3 space. But my background as a VP of revenue has been traditionally on the enterprise software as a service and now recently pivoted over to the AI space.
And we are, IONet is heavily moving into providing a platform for developers for building AI applications.
So it's been a very interesting time in this area and delighted to be on the call.
My background has been, as mentioned, I did spend some time at Sun Microsystems as well,
as well as Salesforce for just under 10 years.
as Salesforce for just under 10 years.
And the last role that I had prior to Ionet was at Cohere,
which is one of the global leaders
in terms of a large language model.
So thanks for having me on.
Well, thanks for joining us.
And so what I wanna do is,
what I always do is like to let people know
where we're going with the talk here today.
So three parts. We're going to set some context, talk about what D-PIN is, the new functionality that it brings.
Then we'll talk wider, open it up, and D-PIN's vision.
So we'll go five, ten years down the road.
And then we'll wrap it up with how we get from here to there, what the go-to-market strategy, how we get institutional adoption.
So in terms of setting context, is there something, Marianne, would you like to just describe D-PIN or Constantine or Robert, which one of you would like to sort of give us the,
tell us like a five-year-old or a golden retriever view of what D-PIN is?
Yeah, we could actually do the version of starting at kindergarten and go through,
you know, advanced doctorate students. I think, let me target the middle. So
for developers here, everybody's, I'd imagine almost everybody here is writing software. Very
few people are in the crypto space are working on the blockchain. Who do you do on mining?
Except for miners and others. So the point of Deepin is, from my perspective,
interested in other people, but it's a whole reimagining of what the public cloud looks like.
So the public cloud is something that in many ways, you know,
looks decentralized, but has actually become pretty centralized in terms of the governance
and the control, as well as the API software stack that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud offer.
It's part of the reason why it's so hard for somebody to write software once and deploy it
on all three clouds. It's also led to a lot of pricing inefficiency, and it's so hard for somebody to write software once and deploy it on all three clouds. It's also
led to a lot of pricing inefficiency, and it's also led to data kind of being stuck in certain
clouds because all of the cloud providers allow data to go in for free, and then leaving the cloud
costs about $40 per terabyte for bandwidth, which some people have estimated in the U.S. is approaching a 99% gross margin, meaning that it's 100 times the raw cost.
So, yes, so D-PIN allows us to actually move the governance all the way down to the fundamental level.
It opens up the ability for anyone to run hardware using great technology like IONet and others on the storage side,
of course.
And it therefore, like blockchain, gives us a lot of flexibility kind of taking instead
of blockchain, moving the ability to create and run almost any possible software, replacing
the infrastructure stack and ultimately the platform
as a service and software as a service stack for developers to one unified one across all
clouds, including the big three.
It's actually one big, I think, misperception about it is that decentralized physical infrastructure
means that we would not have the big three cloud providers.
They can totally play in the market.
They just have to actually operate and run nodes.
And with Eigenlayer, we're seeing that we actually have operators being run by the cloud
providers themselves for protocols.
Yeah.
And I would just add in that it is a resource, a compute resource that is really, truly global
because, again, you're not really
tied to a particular data center.
So then the workloads for AI inference, for example, you can really serve your end users
at the point of access of where they are at.
So that's really one of the key things that people come to us for. And then I would say
just the overall ability to be agnostic and to be highly flexible in terms of compute. So you're
not necessarily dedicated to long-term contracts and you're not necessarily dedicated to one particular region.
There's just a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of where the access point of compute lays.
Great. So it's basically creating a wider marketplace for compute resources is what you're saying, Marianne?
Yes.
Okay.
I think one other really cool thing is that in addition to what I think Robert rightly
points out on the developer stack of things, and then Mary comments on the customer side
of things or enterprise side of things, I think one thing which we are also sometimes
forgetting in the DPN space, that the average supplier of resources, average people around the globe are also getting the opportunity to share and benefit from the infrastructure that they already own, that physical devices, computers, data center grade infrastructure, anything could be now shared and people who own those devices can also get a benefit from it. So all of this infrastructure or DPN as a movement also enables people around the globe
to start contributing and be part of this value creation loop,
whether we talk about AI, storage, compute, all of these fascinating developments that are happening.
People are able to share their resources to do so. And companies are able to benefit from those infrastructure at the same time, which is
a very fascinating movement of bringing back the power from centralized data center grade
complexities to just people around the globe, which is amazing by itself.
Great.
Let's drill in a little bit more on that in terms of what isn't being done now with centralized
service and what NetM new functionality Deepin brings. So Robert, do you want to
start us off and then we'll just circle around? Yeah, I think the, you know, Deepin net new
functionality for blockchain is that, you know, pulling over the, you know, very important platforms of service and software
as a service middleware that developers use means that we're able to much more rapidly
build and deploy dApps. It means, in my perspective, I think over time when we're
looking at the transition, we will actually see major
software providers, software vendors in the current space, like think, you know, Snowflake,
think Cloudflare, others that start actually supporting, you know, deploying their software
entirely using blockchain middleware. I have a word that I like to use is that it's going to inject on the financial
side of blockchain real world revenue complementing real world assets. If you look at the revenue in
the public cloud space, it's, you know, you can see citations just on kind of the big three
U.S. public clouds that, you know, we're getting many hundreds of billions of dollars of
revenue. If you add in the software and others, you start looking at trillions of revenue that's,
you know, being run in the space. And just imagine all of that being settled and as well,
you know, bolstering tokens in the crypto space. So I think implications will be that we'll have,
crypto space. So I think implications will be that we'll have, you know, first time,
because we really haven't had it, valuations and crypto projects that are based on real
revenue multiples. And we'll also mean that we would have, especially in the deep end space,
in the infrastructure space, a very muted bear market, because we would actually have revenue that it's based on versus
just retail investors coming in and out. Let me stop there. I think I didn't quite hit the
question. So maybe just remind me, Ken, what did I not answer in what you just asked?
I think you did in terms of net new functionality. We were kind of drilling into
why Deep end versus centralized
sort of cloud or centralized services.
So I think you hit that aspect.
Okay.
So Mary Ann, do you want to touch on that?
Yeah, I would say that in terms of new services, I would, I would strongly say that the payment
aspect of, you know, paying for your cloud capabilities. So IUNet is one of the unique
players that allows you, you know, to pay in crypto. So, and we actually provide the ability
to have reward. So for example, many organizations that have excess capacity with GPUs can post those so they can say that their GPUs are available.
And they will get a reward from us because we are leveraging the Solana crypto network, in fact, to support resources.
So that is an excellent capability that is a unique benefit.
Fantastic.
So Konstantin, do you want to talk about some of the net new functionality you're bringing to market?
Totally.
I think one other really cool feature of functionality of this TIP in space is when you think on the ground, on the bare metal, usually we were bonded by the hardware that is available on the cloud side and the data center, great infrastructure.
So you were basically physically attached to those places for developing your compute, storage, or infrastructure solutions further down to the
customer for providing the services. Now with Dpeen, and especially with Dpeen that is more
closely related to the edge devices, those Dpeens also shape how we will design our applications
or solutions further on. Because now there is a huge difference or opportunity, so to say,
how you can design an app and where it should do which pieces of computation, where it should do which kinds of services.
Maybe there is a new world that's coming in where some part of that infrastructure will be running still on traditional data center grid infrastructure, while the other part will lean towards using the user devices on the edge or just edge devices.
towards using the user devices on the edge or just edge devices and we will design applications
in such a way where those edge devices leverage their biggest potential being as close to the end
customer as possible while the data center grade infrastructure can do the heavy lifting
of that environment and all of that together really helps us to like rethink how we can build
the applications where it should live how it should operate we can build the applications, where it should live, how it should operate.
We can have new functionalities that allows us to store content or run compute where the customer lives. And I think with the recent trends of AI or storage, having an ability to run things on edge will unlock so many potentials for AI agents and provide higher quality of services to the end customer ultimately.
higher quality of services to the end customer ultimately,
which I think is the biggest value add
which can DPN provide for the global communities
around the world if we're making it a little bit better
for the end customer than we're doing
or we're moving in the right way, so to say.
Fantastic.
Stuart, I'm going to put you on the spot here a little bit
and ask you to describe a little bit more
from the context of decentralized storage
because we're grateful to have Filecoin as a co-host
and you're a long-time involvement with Filecoin.
So can you give us perspective of the benefits of decentralized storage?
Sure.
I do want to start with kind of focus on the decentralized part
and what that value proposition actually is, right?
The core
aspect of decentralization is user control. You know, it's not necessarily about, or not entirely
about distribution. It's about who can set parameters, who can set prices, who can decide who can see my data, who can process it, who
can store it. And, you know, it's critical. And we've seen this in our ecosystem as we've gone
from storing data to being able to do compute over data. And we've tried in a variety of ways.
And I see that a lot of the speakers here have option
you know have infrastructure and options for us to do that but ultimately you know it really is the
question of end user benefit you know what are people getting out of this you know in terms of
their value for their information and so we shouldn't just think about the technology.
We should think about, you know, what that benefit actually is.
You know, if you imagine a scenario that maybe isn't too far in the future,
but certainly not here yet, is I can take sensors like my Apple Watch or information about my DNA, and I can store that in a decentralized way where I can control that, have it processed by providers that I choose that can then be analyzed, say, by AI, that can then spit back to myself, my insurance provider, my medical provider, my status.
Maybe one day in real time, tell me like, hey, what you're eating now is really not good for you
in terms of how it's affecting your glucose or your heart rate. So decentralization is absolutely
key. And then all the tools that we've talked about are part of sort of the Web3 environment, smart contracts.
You know, the APIs that are used to connect systems together become absolutely critical.
I don't think of smart contract as much technically as I do in terms of it's a business agreement or personal agreement.
You know, think of it in a business agreement or personal agreement.
Think of it in true legal contractual sense.
You can use this for that.
And I can control who has access to it
and how often they have access to it
and for what purposes they have access to it.
We're even seeing regulations now being developed
in particular in Brazil and the UAE, around data as an asset class, which gives you, the owner of the data, the information, specific legal rights versus the other way around today, which is you turn the data over to somebody and they seem to possess rights to it.
rights to it. Fantastic. Let's go with, we'll talk about the current now, and then we'll go
Fantastic.
into this bigger, wider, deep-end vision that Stuart alluded to. So a little bit to where we
are now in terms of current wins or case studies, big aha moments. I know when I was working in the
serverless space, the fact that people would be able to then spin up
a thousand functions to operate
and the things they would say
when they realized the power of it.
So anything that you guys are seeing,
I think Robbie, you mentioned earlier
how people are using Eigenlager to connect
current cloud resources.
Do you want to talk about that?
And then we'll go through to Constantine and Marianne.
Or Marianne or Constantine, do you want to jump in and talk about things you're seeing now and the big wins, big aha moments from customers where they realize the potential of your networks? Yes, I'll jump in. So we are seeing a number of really key wins,
particularly in multimodal AI applications. So again, on the inference side of the house, which we feel is a major, major use case going forward.
So we're working with a number of vendors who are building their own models, who are building voice models, building imaging models. and just to make sure that they are serving those in a timely manner to their end users.
We're seeing millisecond responses in terms of the spear in terms of what we're going to be able to do with AI applications and serving up, you know, multi-model capabilities.
But that is one of the key use cases that we're seeing just a tremendous amount of success with the D-PIN infrastructure that we have.
Fantastic. Robert, let's go back to you.
Yes, thanks.
I lost my screen for unmuting previously.
Thanks for jumping in first.
Yeah, I'm about to just drop in the chat for people.
I kind of pulled up just the number of direct projects that we see around the
deep end space that have already deployed or just about to deploy, utilizing the kind of quick
scaling security that Eigenlayer offers. You know, if people are not familiar with Eigenlayer,
it kind of has three parts to its marketplace. It allows ETH and really any ERC20 holder to
restate their tokens in Eigenlayer and direct it towards any D-PIN as well as any cloud project
that wants to have, you know, elastic security and ultimately deploy not just decentralized,
but verifiable infrastructure.
Verifiable being, you know, the big thing that you get out of things like Ethereum and Bitcoin and blockchains,
meaning that, you know, you can verify that you own your money.
You can verify that the DeFi is happening correctly, that you own NFTs like,
you know, JPEGs on Pump.Fun. And in that space, you know, doing that, what you see is that
there are a tremendous amount of these SAS projects
and then of course they support and allow you know use of co middleware with
protocols like Marian's and file coins for storage and compute and you know
together we see things that are in the AI compute space, AI and crypto being a really significant thrust. and sensorless ability for users that are using AI to, you know, avoid what happened in social media of becoming the product versus the consumer and having it be an advertising, attention-based focused economy, instead making it valuable to users for their regular lives.
valuable to users for their regular lives. So, you know, the and actually just yesterday,
no, two days ago, the World Economic Forum posted a really great thing that just in the AI crypto
space, they're expecting the value of that space to be over three trillion dollars. So three and
a half trillion dollars in a very short five-year period by
2028, which is like a 100x expansion of the space from the current kind of $30 billion
type value among all the participants that are in DPIN.
So that's a great validation and something you can carry over to any of your Web2 friends
who are kind of like, you know, decentralization.
It sounds complex. I don't understand why a cloud would go there or whatever.
We've got like one new thing in our back pocket that we can pull out.
People have to kind of listen. That's not a crypto project. That's World Economic Forum.
So in the AI space, you know, um, I'll just highlight if people want
to take a look at, feel free to also hit me up in DMs.
I'm happy to talk with people directly.
So, um, kite AI, Ava protocol, um, Aether, uh, block lists in the, uh, deep end physical
network space.
Um, some really interesting protocols like witness chain actually allows you to have
SLAs in the deep end space, you know, layering on top of machinehood you know the kind of analog to
proof of humanity um that you know this is not what we saw with that recent uh um uh developer
coding project or coding ai supposed ai coding project that microsoft had bought which just came
out uh recently that uh it was all a fraud. There were 700 engineers in India that were pretending to actually be AI engineers.
Again, going back to the word verifiability,
verifying that there's a real AI model running versus a human is actually a pretty valuable thing.
Have provenance in your, not just your data pipeline, but your computation pipeline,
which is, again, what Marianne is doing on verifiable data, which is what Falcoin is doing. So, so there's a valuable
witness chain also supports another great thing, which is proof of location. So you can actually
see that your protocols are running across all the continents and you can, you know, support
similar to proof of humanity using quadratic voting. You can actually have, you know, benefits and higher rewards for people who are supporting your protocol in entirely different remote parts of the world.
And then we have, you know, I'll just say the categories now.
And again, take a look in the chat in the second one.
I'm done talking. I'll post it. But roll-up scaling, approver markets,
interoperability and bridges, that kind of cross-chain infrastructure, security and
marketing, monitoring. And finally, something that I think all of us should really care a lot about,
which is oracles and data. Chainlink being a single failure point that's largely centralized around Ethereum is really a problem.
And I say that with love for what Chainlink has done.
And they've talked a lot about moving to a decentralized protocol.
They just haven't done it.
You can take a look at the list that I'm going to post on Oracle's and, you know, off-chain data providers coming in on Chainlink,
ZKTLS from the Web2 world.
And we've got a plethora of technologies that are coming in. And because restaking allows you to
basically post $10 billion of security to your protocol, you can be chain link sized
crypto economic security. And we also support applicable security,
which is even more powerful, where if there is a violation of the decentralized protocol,
the stakers funds are not just burned, but they are given to the participants. And so you can
actually have what looks a little bit like insurance, although it's really more like
legal restitution, that if you have losses, then you will receive compensation funds for what you lost. That's getting some big uptake. We just announced that last month.
Well, that's great. You've jumped a little bit ahead into the deep envision with
proof of location and all these other great things. So let's certainly come back to that
in the next section, because I'm fascinated with some of the things you just
mentioned.
So Konstantin, let's talk about you with any aha moments,
current wins you're seeing, things that you're, you know,
what, how you're doing things now.
And yeah.
Konstantin Kovacic Totally.
Well, for Titan Network and for the focus of Dupin that we are taking on, the biggest
aha moment or the biggest successes that we find with our customers is we're enabling
enterprise customers for the web to traditional businesses like CDN business, like storage
and compute businesses to really benefit from the infrastructure that we are aggregating
on a community level.
And I think that really shows the potential of distributed or Debian systems in general,
where infrastructure is crowdsourced.
And I think the greatest highlights of those decentralized infrastructure of past times
were torrent systems, which in addition to sharing the content without borders
and without restrictions
and control, allow to really preserve that very valuable content like music, like old
videotapes, and all that knowledge across the humanity that really brings us back to
the point of how we, as a community, can coordinate in order to achieve something better for
everyone. And I think that what really deepens start to shine for people across the globe is we're providing you a new
unique way to coordinate people around the globe with new economic incentives and with structures
that are supported by the blockchain functionalities and primitives while providing you the same
services or even better services in terms of traditional cloud
infrastructure. And that's what I think really shines with customers that Titan Network has.
For example, we're actively working with TikTok right now, and we are enabling TikTok to save
more than 70% of their CDN cost savings in Asia right now, just from the pure perspective that
they are connecting to the user devices and reuse those user devices as a CDN nodes to share the content in Asia.
And that powerful primitive is possible due to the coordination layer
where blockchain just helps you to bring the level of transparency
and reward infrastructure while the performance on the ground
is to the level or sometimes even better than traditional cloud infra.
And that's what I think where we see a lot of shift compared to previous cycles where
blockchain was perceived as something slower or more complicated to use compared to traditional
cloud.
I think now we are in that point where on the inflection point of like blockchain can do
the same things, same quality, or even better
due to some new features that are enabled by the blockchain primitives. And I think that is
super, super powerful notion that we are seeing right now that the more and more teams will see
the value in using the infrastructure that is functional and deliver them more value while
being cheaper or designed in a different way.
Because in my personal belief, whenever we talk about DPI infrastructure or DPI solutions that are used by customers, whether that's compute, whether that's financial primitives, or whether
that's storage, etc., etc., etc., my personal goal and the way we are building our infrastructure is end user or
end customer of our partners should never know whether they use traditional cloud or deep in
infrastructure. And the way you achieve that is you never harm the functionality or the features
of the final customer. So for example, with TikTok, we don't want the consumers of TikTok to know that they are watching the infrastructure from decentralized or centralized cloud providers, basically.
If we can achieve that, that means that the quality of the services that we provide is better or at least on par with traditional cloud.
And that already brings us a mile ahead in terms of whom we can service, where we can provide our services.
And I think Robert is correctly pointing out that if even the large venues or large traditional
industries start to point out like World Economic Forum that, hey, there is a movement that
has an incredible potential and having the power to coordinate people at such scale across communities, globes, regions, et cetera, et cetera,
really brings us to the inflection point where Dpeen becomes a staple
infrastructure and is able to provide services and quality that is needed by the
ultimate consumer of those services.
So that's what I think really shines and brings a lot of wins to the Dpeen
ecosystem recently.
Well, congratulations on that use case,
that case study, that's fantastic.
All right, so let's move into the next section.
Let's talk about the vision.
You alluded, several you alluded to it.
In fact, we may already be here in terms of realizing
the benefits of decentralization.
But, so let's talk about, Stuart, I'm gonna put you on the spot again, you know, the benefits of decentralization. But so let's talk about, Stuart, I'm going to put you on the spot again, I guess, and talk about maybe the vision around decentralized storage. And then we'll jump into, you know, the others in terms of how they see next five, 10 years, you know, why decentralized storage?
Yeah, I believe it was constantly, I think, brought up a great point, which has to, I'd call it the user interface, right?
And that's something that we all struggle with right now.
It's the experience is pretty horrendous.
I mean, from an IT perspective, it's fine on the back end where you have experts talking to experts.
But from my experience, dealing with enterprises, dealing with end users, these are problems that need to be solved, right?
How can we safely, easily interface?
Even something like Bitcoin, which is pretty straightforward, is a challenge for most people, right?
most people right other than those of us on the call and people like us so um i think it's really
Other than those of us on the call and people like us.
about how how these pieces are going to play together uh we often call it web 2.5 and you're
really asking about how do we get to web 3 right how do we go from kind of the world we're in which
is really cloud dominated to this really fully decentralized world that we can live
in certain providers like filecoin you know have massive capacity right we have exabytes of data
that we store in a fully decentralized fashion right anybody on the call can spin up a node
and start storing data or it can be a client and start using Filecoin services
from any one of or multiple providers across the world that's irrespective of location, right?
It can be, you can specify location or say, I don't care where it's located.
specify location or say, I don't care where it's located. So I think moving forward is going to
take quite a bit of effort to get us there, right? You know, and that vision of what we're hearing,
which is users shouldn't really care about the technology, the underlying technology,
but they should care about its capabilities, its features, you know, its ability, you know,
its capabilities, its features, you know, its ability, you know, their ability to control
systems, their ability to monetize their data to get the most amount of value out of the
information that they either own and control or are part of some ecosystem.
I think obviously the public type data that doesn't have severe requirements around privacy, access control is a good place to start.
And that's where we've made a lot of inroads.
But, you know, there's a lot of work to be done to get us there where kind of the vision of full decentralization and the promises it brings, you know, get us there.
as it brings, you know, get us there.
Great.
So we've heard a lot about, like, creating a new, you know,
democratization of compute resources as, you know, a primary.
I guess, Robert, you know, from the security aspect,
can you talk about how that's a new net benefit
in terms of really, you know,
making decentralized marketplaces more compelling.
So you had a recent tweet about that.
Do you want to explore that in terms of how the next five, ten years,
these things really begin to matter?
Yeah, I think, you know, especially around AI.
And, you know, I'll tell you how bullish I am in AI. And I kind of exposed that
I came into the crypto space, not for DeFi, you know, and originally not as much for,
you know, the DAO space. Really, I learned about all those things. I'm very pro them now. And maybe
now you'd say I'm more balanced across. But AI, you know, I've already through all my career in Web2 been really concerned about user data and the kind of data is the new oil, wall data gardens, capturing user network effects and kind of keeping them, your cards close to the chest as startups and VCs using that as the defensible moat
around their companies. It's really segmented out and been a disservice to users, the idea that,
you know, your data on Uber is not accessible on Lyft. Your, you know, tweets and Twitter
are not accessible, you know, in a fused way across, you know, all the possible social media.
So, you know, from my perspective, you know, the big thing that we're, you know, getting
here on the AI side is extremely beneficial for the consumers.
I think that when you look at what does it take for us to trust that things on not just the kind of the
value assets that crypto is provided, but allowing crypto to now secure that there's, you know,
the data that is being used in the Internet is authentic. You know, like we have really good projects now that feed into, you know, the
decentralized infrastructure protocols and storage where, you know, Sony cameras and others
do hardware verified timestamps and location stamps of photos that are being taken. If you
take a look at Dan Benet's papers coming out of Stanford from
his students, they've been building for things like the Associated Press an entire data provenance
pipeline, where by the time a picture is being posted on, you know, classical article media
online, as well as even more importantly in social media, you can get a checkmark that
essentially that data and the entire, you know, cropping, you know, there's a whole bunch of
transformations on pictures. That whole data pipeline can be verified by ZK. Super, you know,
way to combat, you know, inauthentic deepfakes and other things that are manipulating.
The reason why is it's not that people can't post these bogus things,
but really the only thing that matters is the moderation algorithm.
If people don't see things, then it's almost beneficial that we have completely open networks.
that we have completely open networks. I'm a free speech. Well, I don't want to make it too
I'm a free speech.
controversial or change the subject, but I can approximately be thought of as like an absolutist.
I think everything should be possible to say, but we should not, but everything should be
possible to attenuate the moderation and the attention that is given to it so that,
you know, a lot of kind of negative and fake things, they're recorded for posterity.
So researchers and others can see them, but they don't basically infect society and, you know,
human, you know, us individually as humans seeing radical things and fake things.
So, yeah, so I would, you know, I would kind of maybe leave it there as, you know,
the major values that, you know, we're getting out of here.
In order to trust that, I think once you trust the centralized provider,
just like when you take crypto off chain and put it with a centralized exchange,
you fundamentally hit in a critical part.
You've broken the trust of the whole reason why we're doing crypto.
And so projecting crypto, not just for how we actually run our current chains,
but really how we actually deploy all software on the Internet
and all data that we consume and all social networks that build
network effects around us so that we have crypto economic security and we can verify end-to-end
everything. That's a game changer. And I think, you know, I'm really excited for me, you know,
in the kind of latter part of my career to finally be able to go back to the beginning part of my career, which was the internet and this amazing utopic vision for humanity, which, you know, got really
subverted and captured by centralizing forces and VC capital and ended up pushing advertising
and radicalization. You know, why radicalization? Because our dopamine centers
like to see increasingly extreme things
really kind of been tearing at the fabric of society.
So I think the implications of D-Pen
really reshape society and extend crypto
to every possible nook of what touches users.
Fantastic.
Mary Ann, do you want to talk about sort of the vision
that you're seeing at IONet, you know,
five, 10 years in terms of, you mentioned AI,
but talk to us about deep end AI.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, and I love the, you know, the last commentary. I tend to, you know, look at these new developments in the broader scope, right, of, you know, the globe, globalization.
So decentralization of compute and storage and everything that gives developers the tools to unlock innovation.
Yeah, they have certainly been siloed into a couple of players benefiting, right?
So, you know, we could count them on our hands of like the players that really have driven the recent economic model for software development.
And, yeah, it's been who, you know, who's really won that battle in terms of, you know, the VCs, the hyperscalers, et cetera. And so what I think the decentralized infrastructure provides the ability to create new things.
I think the decentralized, you know, physical infrastructure, you know, might provide us
with an alternative to, say, AWS or Alibaba, you know, in the way that, you know, things like YouTube, right,
that decentralized television networks. And we can, we have many examples of this. So
I really believe that the decentralization provides the scale that's going to be needed with a very low cost upfront investment
in order to, you know, test new capabilities such as AI models.
So for example, with, you know, IONet, we host 29 of the, you know, biggest or 29 of the open source models on our platform through one central API.
So, you know, that's one build that you have to have.
And then all of a sudden you have all of these various models that you could test your applications out with.
You know, we provide free tokens, we give, you know, access to tokens, you know,
with the with an account, and we'll give you a certain amount a day with some models like Deep
Seek will give you a million tokens. And so that decentralization, you know, gets you away from,
you know, single siloed vendors who want to take over an entire marketplace and be
defined as early winners while, you know, at the same time giving the power to developers to create
new alternatives, new options, new functionality, and, you know, just bringing new things to market, which is, you know, what we all live for and excited for
and, you know, want to bring to our daily lives.
We'll come back to that.
That's a fascinating point that you bring up
in terms of reducing the friction for engagement,
you know, across the 29 models.
I can only imagine, you know imagine if you have to create,
as a developer, create accounts for all those 29,
but if we can use Ionet and just engage
in a digital manner via tokens,
that's the aha moment I see.
But let's first, let's go back to Constantine
and just if you want to add on your vision
that you're seeing at Titan Network.
Totally.
Well, from our side, what we see is a super powerful and unique feature of the DPN in general as a development and from Titan Network's side in particular.
The ability to return the power to people to benefit from the growth of AI, storage, compute, and beyond with
the devices that they already have and they already own. It's a very phenomenal change as
previously or like with those centralized authorities and powerhouses. They were the
only ones who were getting the contracts, the opportunities to benefit from the developments
that happens in startups across the world,
with solutions across the world. And I think now having this ability to share your resources,
whether you have a personal computer that you want to share, how Bitcoin allowed you to do so in
early days versus providing your mobile phone for Titan network applications to run
TikTok CDN services right from your device.
I think all of those opportunities to fit in back the people
to benefit from the growth around them
is an incredible, incredible feature that we haven't talked yet about,
but I think it will start to play more and more vision and value
that we as DP and builders will get from development of those
solutions and technologies. And having this ability to bring people back into the growth
loop on a society level will actually walk a long mile for us because with all of those fears of,
oh, AI will replace me, something else will replace me, I'm out of all the financial
opportunities and services.
Having this ability to, I'm not being replaced, but now I provide services to AI that pays
me on a daily basis for running that services, whether you run a node for Eigenlayer or
io.net or other solutions.
I think this powerful inclusion of people back into the loop is something that
we will see a lot of appreciation and value, especially if we can communicate that well on
various channels and levels. And that is, for me, a very big win for DPN in short term.
For long term, I also really hope that one of my big dreams in terms of DPN is if we can find this ability to
ring infrastructure that is run by people, like building this paper power cloud, and then bring
governments to use that infrastructure as well, when we can tap into these governmental resources
where, for example, specific government applications or infrastructure
is run on the devices of their own people.
That can help with very simple things like data localization, government localization,
but it also can unlock features like governments renting the services from their own people
and paying them instead of service providers across the globe, really enabling you to keep the value inside the country
or inside the same people that's supporting you in the first place.
Maybe in the long term, we'll see this as an infrastructure
for universal basic income or other solutions
that really taps into the notion of,
I have something that I can share, I should benefit from that.
And the more I can provide the infrastructure to the services that I'm using on a daily basis the more I am involved in the
community the more I'm involved in the growth and the more we can be more like reliant and less
isolated again than we were in the midst of 21st century with like all of this AI social networks that not really connecting us, but really
put us on the spot and make us compete with each other. So I think this is, for me, the biggest
thing that Deepin is adding. And how we are adding that, whether that's for CDN-based infrastructure
or compute-based infrastructure, that to me is a little bit of a second story. And I think there
are so many more opportunities to build and make the utilization for the DPEM that we still are just uncovering the potential of it but it already
comes exciting and the more we build it the better it will become so I'm all up for it.
Well fantastic awesome well let's move into the last section which was basically adoption
specifically around institutional adoption and and or industrial size workloads.
So I guess, Stuart, do you want to take this section and give your enterprise experience?
Sure.
Yeah, both as a former enterprise customer and a provider of stuff,
I'm really interested to hear how you all view how enterprises will adopt this or what you're doing to, you know, offer this at scale, at enterprise scale.
So, Mary Ann, do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think I do. I really feel that, number one, our true ideal customer is the developer in small teams.
And that developer in small teams that is testing new applications, testing new applications, testing, you know, new capabilities, those exist inside of, you know,
enterprises and big industries. So, you know, we interact a lot with the innovation lab side
of big enterprises. We interact with test and dev groups.
So I think that although, you know, we're new, we're innovative, we're trying different things,
there are pockets within enterprise organizations that might need, you know, speed, and they might need a really fast way to get a project up and going to prove value to the senior executive teams without potential, you know, they wanted to build out some test models of, you know,
some applications that they were thinking about.
And they just wanted to move quickly.
They didn't want to go through the internal process of, you know, getting approval.
So that's just one aspect.
But our true, true North Star and the type of profile that we want to grow our business on is really those
developers, the small teams of developers that want to innovate and deliver quickly and then
make sure that they continue to grow their applications and ideas out.
Very good. Yeah, I've experienced this
exactly as you're talking about on the enterprise side, as well as kind of the risk aversion,
you know, at the corporate level. We're almost out of time, but I do want to give Robert a chance
to talk and then Constantine. Yeah, I'll just sort of, you know, I don't know that I would do
a closing thing because I think I covered most of the topics.
But I will say on the enterprise side, you know, Eigenlayer is very much kind of a channel partner play, B2B to C and B2B to I institutions.
And so, you know, we actually have one dedicated person on our business development side who only works on this.
You know, that's sort of if you think about investments when you put money where your mouth is.
And so, you know, I kind of mentioned, well, I'll say like I mentioned before that, you know, we do have and we have increasing relationships directly with public cloud providers.
with public cloud providers.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
That does not mean that, you know, well, it does mean we're integrating together and
supporting their software stack, so it's more of an evolution.
But it also means that these major cloud providers are becoming operators inside of Eigenlayer.
We have, like, over 1,000, you know, many of them real serious data center providers
who are happy to operate on the networks.
And that is augmented, you know, by the broad, if you want to call it, public cloud of end user GPUs, end user compute, end user storage.
And, you know, then on the software kind of orchestration and simplification layer.
You know, Kaleido is a great example where, you know, you can actually, as an end user,
if you want to have more control of what you're running, you can just run your own Supernode.
And the model that that company supports is having an open source Linux foundation project that they steward, which, you know, runs, you know, essentially you can run nodes on every major protocol inside of crypto and increasingly more deep in projects.
You know, in many of these projects, you know, you are able to kind of pin your data as well as geolocate where you're doing computation for things like GDPR and increasingly the regulatory space around institutional use of technology.
And so, you know, through those channel partners, if you're familiar, I don't know, we have people in crypto who haven't kind of had careers in this space.
But channel partners are people that have relationships with the existing customers and they lead the business and kind of bring you in.
Right, right. Well, that's fantastic. Thank you for that, Robert.
And even though we're almost out of time, Konstantin, give you a shot at it and then we'll do a final wrap up.
you a shot at it and then we'll do a final wrap-up. Yeah, I think what really shines and what really
helped us to capture this institutional adoption was focusing on providing the service for an
enterprise that's complete and whole. I think we did a little bit of a mistake or like that was
just a growth of an industry in the web-free space in the beginning, where we tried to provide access to one specific resource and wasn't solving the customer problem as a whole.
Now, I think we are all maturing and figuring out that customer needs complete solutions.
They don't want to figure out how to do the integration.
They want to just get the service and run with it.
level where we're starting providing the services to those who just need this service and then
providing additional functionality on top of it for those who want to build their own infrastructure
and solutions by themselves and i think with that we're seeing a lot of more demand coming through
with titan network as well and helping those customers to build on top of titan is our highest
priority to provide the services so i think that's to my sense. Amen. That's great.
Hey, Ken, do you want to wrap this up now?
Yeah, fantastic.
So let's go around and just thank you again all for participating in this.
How do people follow you and your organizations?
So I guess let's start with Robert real quick.
Just how do people get a hold of you, follow you, and then I can later.
Yeah, it's pretty easy. We have very wide, as crypto projects do, community kind of access points. Just take a look at eigenlayer.xyz and then look at the ecosystem. If you follow
Eigenlayer, follow me on Twitter, then you'll get kind of notification as things are coming up.
Twitter, then you'll get kind of notification as things are coming up. We either directly or through
partners have, you know, hackathons at many major venues for, you know, new developers.
We have, you know, kind of an early stage grant program where we're able to rapidly support people
that are kind of needing, you know, smaller amount of money to just be able to
kind of work on projects and get them to the point that they're ready for accelerators.
Increasingly, we're going to be moving into the accelerator space as well, supporting
projects that way, and then also helping connect them with investors.
So really kind of life cycle of the new startups.
If you happen to be in a larger company or a larger established project, then we do have that kind of more formal business development project.
that are pretty strategic for end users,
things that essentially allow there to be a larger pool of funds
and a larger pool of capabilities that are brought to deals.
Fantastic.
And you are a great follow on Twitter, by the way.
So, Marianne, how do people follow you?
How do people follow you? How do people follow io.net?
How do people follow IO.net?
Yeah, so I try to post on LinkedIn.
I'm not a massive X user, but you can follow our CEO.
You can follow our organization on X.
But the best way to really understand what we're doing
and to provide access to our resources,
sign up for an account at io.net.
You can post any excess capacity of GPUs on our rewards.
And yeah, take a look at the models and take a look at the capabilities. We just released a RAG as a service offering,
and we have a container as a service.
So go to io.net and see what you can build.
Awesome.
Fantastic.
Konstantin.
And on the Titan Network side,
you can see the green logo in the speakers.
Join our channel, join our social on X and beyond.
And the cool feature that while I was speaking a lot about social and community participation,
you can go to the Titanet.io website, learn more about us,
and actually with two clicks, install and run a node for Titan Network.
You can run it on almost anything from
personal computer phone laptop or data center grade infrastructure and share the device resources to
earn a little bit from the services that we are providing to enterprise customers so you can do
it really simple and start being part of the dpn today terrific stuart how do people follow you or keep track of what you're up to?
Oh, they shouldn't.
Well, if they want to, go ahead.
I'm available in the Filecoin Slack channel.
So I think there's a link in the Filecoin.io website.
And yeah, that's a good way to reach out to me and be more interactive.
The stuff on Twitter is a little more personal and less business focused.
That's quite all right.
We have a terrific interview with Stuart on the DSA blog.
That's dsaliance.io.
Fantastic interview with Stuart.
And on behalf of the Decentralized Storage Alliance,
I thank you for attending.
And also thank you to Filecoin, IONet,
Titan Network, and Eigenlayer.
Thank you for all being host and co-host and panelists.
So thank you very much.
Appreciate everything, all the insights
you gave us here today. So thank you all. Thank Appreciate everything, all the insights you gave us here today.
So thank you all.
Thank you for attending.
Thank you, Ken.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye-bye.
Bye. Take care.
Bye-bye.
