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DevHub Live 44 - Blockchain should be part of your tech stack
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 0:59:35Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation dives into the transformative potential of blockchain technology, emphasizing its growing mainstream acceptance and the shift towards integrating decentralized solutions into traditional industries. Key trends include the focus on data integrity, user empowerment, and the evolving perception of blockchain as a foundational infrastructure for various applications.
Full Transcription
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Thank you. What you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want, Welcome to the Thank you. Hey, welcome, welcome back to another edition of DevHub Live. I am really excited about this episode because we're going to dive into blockchain as a tech stack.
And I'm so ready for this.
I've been planning this for weeks.
I was waiting for a time where we had no guests.
I have no guests, so we're going to do that.
As you can see, I'm actually so excited that I'm actually standing.
I'm moving around.
We got things ready to go.
I have my projector lens set up as well.
We can draw stuff.
We can talk about all kinds of stuff.
It's going to be a fun episode.
And I really encourage you to ask questions or whatever else.
But the goal of this time and the reason why I'm doing this episode like this is because we're at a point now where crypto is becoming a little bit more mainstream.
The terms of Web3 and what that is, is becoming a bit more mainstream.
We're seeing it not just in, I'm a U.S. citizen, not just in the U.S., but also across the globe and other countries as well.
And it's a good time to remind everyone
of what is actually available to start building
and what can you actually start to do on blockchain.
So we're going to kind of talk that through.
And I really want to kind of, you know,
can take some audience questions if you have them.
But this is something where I just really want to dive into the developer side of all of this.
So let's have some fun.
Let's kind of go through all of this, and let's kind of start at the beginning and talk about how we can start to build using blockchain.
So this episode really, again, is geared towards all kinds of builders,
not just Web3. So to me, we're at this inflection point. And this inflection point really is about
saying, can we start to take pieces of Web3 and start to put it into any other product, instead of thinking just always
crypto first, we're starting to think about, can this become part of my larger infrastructure?
So some things that we want to talk about here is it's not about crypto hype. This is not about trying to just capture value. This is really much more about can we actually leverage the blockchain for what it is, what it can do, what it can't do, and start to build products around that.
And that includes, again, stuff in AI as well as just general everyday products.
So let's kind of just set some groundwork a little bit of
what we're actually going to do here. One is I don't want this to be just about the concept of
like NFTs and tokens and it's all about value and everything else there. I want it to be much more about,
it's this, you know, blockchain is this tamper-proof logbook, right? It is a ledger
and there are things that we can do there. But it's more than just that. It's the smart contracts.
It's the other pieces that go into this infrastructure that can start to fit to
maybe what you're building. So let's start there. And let's actually jump into
what I would consider here the first topic, which is it's just infra. And for me, really,
you need to understand that when we say that it's just infrastructure, it is really no different than going out, signing up for an AWS account, and putting your stuff on a server there.
Except now, maybe you have a one-time fee versus monthly.
You have much more control.
You're able to do stuff that is permissionless, which we'll talk about.
We'll jump into stuff about what does composability actually mean? How does composability fit into all of this? And
why is that actually important for what we're trying to do here? So a couple of different
things here. I would never instruct anyone to build their entire app on Excel, like a spreadsheet,
build their entire app on like Excel, like a spreadsheet, right?
Because one, it's very limiting.
Your audience is going to be small people who are just comfortable using that.
It's a weird way to do a product.
I think that also could now be said about like being pure blockchain.
Okay.
I think when you say I'm only putting stuff on chain and only leveraging the ledger
aspect of blockchain, you are limiting yourself into what you can build, what you're doing.
But if you think about it as part of your product, now it transforms what you're trying to do.
product, now it transforms what you're trying to do. So here's how we think about it, right? So
let's say you're a coffee company and you're selling your coffee beans all around the world.
Well, this is kind of like, and this is an older one, older example that has kind of been around
before. But again, think about like what goes into being a coffee company. You have paper trails.
You're going to have people, logbooks and email exchanges,
and you're going to have all of these different things.
You're going to have to go through audits, audits in different countries,
different borders, all these different pieces here that make logistics complicated.
make logistics complicated. But what if you then made a singular product that was able to
do all that tracking, verify, make sure that those, you know, what was said in that logbook
is true, simplify the auditing process by putting everything on chain. So the way it goes is you can then start
to have every checkpoint from farm to port to, you know, even to the actual coffee shop,
checking in, and you can see that trail of who handled the different things, when were those
beans first picked, you know, when were they actually distributed, all of that stuff. And now
it opens up a couple different things. One, if you wanted to make a consumer side, you wanted to give
insight to end users, which is your coffee drinkers, you could do that. Might not be overly
appealing, and I don't know how many people besides some coffee nerds who are actually going to care about that. But as a coffee distributor, now being able to have one area,
which is absolute proof, everything is checking into that. It really changes, again, the aspect
of what goes into your business. In theory, it should simplify things. It should lower your cost.
simplify things. It should lower your cost. It should provide better insight into what actually
is there. And that's just by simply implementing the ledger part of blockchain.
So again, now you can start to say, look, if I had this setup and I'm now logging all these different checkpoints,
I can also do other things too. I could have smart contracts built into that that allow for
the release of funds upon checkpoint. Hey, this delivery got made. This got checked in.
This has been authenticated. There you go. That payment is
released. It's automated. There's no more worrying about making sure invoices are paid, things like
that. It simplifies that process. It also allows those who are maybe working in different situations
where banking is more difficult, again, it simplifies all of those parts of it.
So now you have all of that.
The other side of it is as a product,
like you want to be able to have insights.
And having insights that are really clear
and that are really beneficial to your company
and to maybe people who are using your product
comes down to like
something as simple as can i extract the right data from this and now i could because i've not
been able to track how did it take from to go from the farm to the port we have all this actual
proper check-in information it's not just if somebody missed something we're kind of a limit we still need the human interaction
you still have like the app or whatever it's like the beams don't check themselves in obviously
but like this is now verifiable where you know exactly when it happened maybe then because
payment got released all of that type of stuff so it's phase one and then you can start to see how that blooms into hopefully a bigger product.
Again, let's also just take a step back with a little too, that like in this example here,
I'm trying to hit a couple different areas with something very simple as just immutable ledger of like, hey, dispute resolution.
I never received those beans.
Oh, well, they were checked in here at this date.
This was verified.
This payment was released.
Oh, I didn't get paid.
I did this invoice didn't come through.
All of that could start to get eliminated, which in the long run actually saves money so now it
could hopefully bring some costs down whatever that might be and now hopefully again it adds to
improving the bottom line for all parties involved okay so that's just like one part
when you start to think about infra the smart contract piece is really important, too, because then in the smart contract piece, I can start building in all kinds of logic that I would normally have, except I don't have to relying on the law of code to execute on that.
And so as long as those proper conditions are met and your logic is sound,
then the contract can handle that all for you.
And you eliminate, again, possibly bad actors.
Again, this is not a perfect system.
But you start to eliminate some bad actors.
You start to eliminate situations where you may have trouble, where I can't get particular payments out, things get missed,
all of that stuff. So we start to eliminate that. And again, I want to hopefully emphasize to people
who are thinking about this as a product is that, you know, you can pick and choose of where this
all fits in. So now I can still have my front end hosted wherever.
I can have a mobile app.
I can have whatever I maybe need.
I could build it into different hardware.
So I could run on my, if I have scanners,
and I have way scales, right?
It's all just code.
I can just still build an API that connects to this
and still does all that. So now something
goes on the scale, it gets weighed, it gets logged, everything is there. It starts to change how you
think about where your checks and balances actually are for something as logistic like this.
We also have this even on a smaller scale so now if you just think of
where your product is and like what things you need to prove to someone yeah like the ticketing
one is always thrown out there right like i can do tickets and sure like that's an obvious one
but we can take it even a step further right of like where now if I were able to put, you know, just something as
simple as like a loyalty card on there, right? Maybe my gym membership is built into that.
And the reason why maybe that's useful is because now there is immutable proof of,
you know, the times that I checked in or if I earned certain points or all that type of stuff.
And then the composability part means
that someone else can come build on top of that.
So this is where the synergy of having multiple products
or multiple partnerships becomes really interesting.
And it really saves on development time too.
So if you ever built something at enterprise level, let's say you're building a loyalty
program for a gym. It's not just like
oh, all right, I'm going to throw together a database, I'm going to store
this, I'll build some APIs that people
can connect to. Sure, whatever. But then like
you know, if I want to bring in a partner,
I have to make sure that like, do I have the right stuff for them to actually connect correctly?
Do I have the setup for them to authenticate? What kind of data am I serving for them? I'm now
maintaining an API for them that maybe I don't want to keep maintaining. But if I do it on chain, and now the data is
essentially publicly available, now I can say to that maybe juice bar next door,
hey, you can combine your loyalty program with our loyalty program and provide rewards,
because it's all there. And now it simplifies that process. And it's a different
paradigm of trying to build. It's not so like closed source. It is now something like where,
you know, right now everyone is like so concerned all the time of like having these moats, right?
Like you have a moat. And like the reality your moat is that your moats are getting destroyed.
They're getting destroyed by AI.
They're getting destroyed by all these different other things of accessibility or whatever else.
But for you as a product builder, if you can start to be a little bit more open and rethink how you perceive your product
and how you perceive the architecture of it,
it's a very different setup.
So I think this is the first thing where,
you know, if you are stepping outside
of what you're trying to build in a traditional sense
and think about the properties of blockchain
and smart
contracts, you could really rethink the overall infrastructure of your product. And I also think
too, part of like what is important here is going to be your generalized like cost and everything else. Because I think that's something that for any developer,
any product builder, really is super important.
But we're going to get to cost and all that stuff just in a minute.
So, all right, we just had a question.
So why is there a pen and marker?
Don't worry, we're going to get there.
Everything will be solved.
Okay, so if you're curious about that, I will absolutely, we will get to that in just a moment.
All right.
So how do you get started?
and I think getting started here is
really
simpler than it has to be
simpler than I think most people try to make it out to be
right so like right now you start thinking about like
I need to have
I need to have something
set up where I am basically having to build a full on-chain product.
And I'm going to disagree with that.
I'm going to say, look, you can make it really simple.
You can take one component of it, one piece.
So starting simple. So maybe it's something as simple as, again, logging pieces of information to chain without having to go, you know, fully into it.
So starting simple is maybe something as easy as building a course app.
So let's actually, let me talk a little bit about building like an educational product and kind of what that looks like as starting simple
on chain okay so this is where this is where it goes see my hand here okay so this
this is my course okay so i have a course that's online. And so from here, what is
the next piece is now is I need to start
being able to allow my students to verify.
So I have all my students. We'll make some little
people here. There we go.
Hello. They want to learn. So now they come in and they want to take my course.
After they take my course, and again, this could be in real life. This could be fully online,
whatever it might be. There needs to be proof of how they took it. Well, I could just send them a
PDF, right, of like a certificate.
But that doesn't really work because that's easily modifiable.
There's no real proof there or whatever else, right?
So, you know, again, I could have just a database somewhere, right?
But like, what if I go out of business?
What if I no longer want to run this?
What if things happen in life, right?
So I move on.
And so now all of those students are left without sufficient proof that they took the course.
So here's how we make it simple.
Okay.
All of this is still Web 2.
All right.
So here we go. All right still Web 2. So here we go.
All this is still Web 2.
But now I could list all the scores, if they completed or not, things like that.
So now I have a much better experience.
And all I've done is my course is still fully webbed too, right? I still, it's on, maybe it's online, maybe it's in person, whatever it might be. And that doesn't
have to change. All I've added in is something like this, where now they can always go and verify.
And this is like a super basic example, but this is something that, again, I think for people who are building, it's a great way to start to integrate yourself into Web3.
And not just because I want you just to use and build on Web3.
Like, I want to really emphasize here that I'm not saying build on Web3.2 just for the sake of doing it because it's
actually a better outcome okay it's a better outcome because here's here it is again let's
think about what goes into normally having this data if I have a course and I do the traditional way, everything is Web2, I'm going to have my database.
Okay?
Here's my little fancy database.
All right?
I'll make it look like that.
This is my database.
Now, that could be any Web2 provider.
It doesn't matter.
I don't pick and choose.
But this is now going to be a monthly cost, right?
So, fine.
That might be fine.
It could be as small as maybe $5 a month.
It doesn't matter.
The actual cost of it is irrelevant.
What's important here is it's something you have to maintain.
Okay?
If you have a product from, let's say, 10 years ago,
and it was using, like, MySQL 5.7 still,
now, like, you have to upgrade
because, like, now it's fully past end of life.
Like, you've skipped every other upgrade.
You're now at the far end of life.
Things are going to start breaking.
Your providers are going to probably start charging you more money just for you to still have it on their service.
So these are things that you have to consider.
So now you have to say, okay, I have to go back.
I have to update it.
If I don't update it, it's gone, right?
It's gone forever.
Or maybe hopefully somebody copied it.
Again, the PDF approach isn't great.
Yes, it puts the onus on the student.
But again, like those can be faked.
There's just all different issues now where it's not as properly verifiable.
And that's really, again, the part I want to get across here.
So now I have those two things.
And so we have, I'm going to put here, upkeep too.
Upkeep.
Now, the other side of this, though, that I think, again, is like, again, we're going super simple here.
We're just replacing one part of this.
I can still have all of my records and everything else in this database.
I can have my users.
I can still do my authentication
system i'm not saying you have to change that you can do authentication system through the blockchain
absolutely like that's absolutely something that you can do there's great tutorials all over we
have some great stuff in our docs down below um if you go there about using it as an authentication
system great opportunities there but something as simple as for the certification
for the class record, if I go on-chain,
we'll call it a bchain.
So on my blockchain, it's a one-time
fee for that data. It's probably pretty cheap because it's just data about people completion, whatever else.
It is now composable.
So now...
It's a lot of pressure to spell correctly on air.
And now other people can build on top of it.
And it is verifiable.
Verifiable.
Right? And it's
I guess it's
proof, which is the same thing.
Synonyms here.
But you now have verifiable data
and you have proof. And I apologize
if you can't read my handwriting, but
you get the idea. That's what I'm talking through. But now, so now you've simply
replaced that piece of it. You now have a much more robust product. You now have
something that you can feel good about that, you know, my
students' data is going to be available to them, the course
completion stuff. If I were to expand, if I were to partner,
right, I can easily say, hey, you want to see if
this person actually completed something? Here you go. You can just query the chain and it's done.
And that's like where, again, I think this is just a super simple way of doing this. And you don't
have to even include like users getting wallets, right? whole part of like oh i don't want to
say the word crypto in my stuff i don't want to have to get things people to have to
sign up for a new wallet you eliminate all of that it's all right here okay so let's let's in here. That's starting simple.
Now,
kind of already mentioned it,
right? But let's talk
a little bit about
cost, scalability.
I want to go,
I want to go,
I want to talk about, I guess, two sides of this.
One is the perception of what blockchain is today.
The perception of blockchain today might be expensive, slow, whatever else.
That is an older paradigm.
I think we all know where that comes from, Ethereum. But now on Nier, on other chains like Solana, SWE, whatever else,
they are much more inexpensive.
They are much faster.
It is much closer to real-time.
Yes, it's not quite the speed of a read-write database that you can get,
but there are ways to make it feel
pretty close, and you are pretty close. For most user examples, most situations,
it's there. You can do this stuff. So I think that is a big piece of all of this.
Now, if we were to actually think about how this fits into our infrastructure, again, I've maybe eliminated some monthly costs in this example of my educational course.
But maybe, you know, maybe there's other places that we can start to consider as well.
So let's think about something that's a little bit bigger here,
but I think will hopefully drive the point home. Okay. I'm going to use the example of,
and if you're wondering, I took notes and everything. Very diligent today.
Insurance claims. Okay. So let's use insurance. Insurance is something if you've ever had to go through an insurance claim, it is a nightmare.
It is frustrating for probably all parties, the insurance side of it.
And again, and then more importantly, the end user, you who has maybe had an accident or making a claim of some sort on your insurance.
or making a claim of some sort on your insurance, and now you have to go through that.
And now you have to go through that.
Now, here's where it gets interesting, and here's where I think if you look at the bigger picture,
and you start to see how these products actually fit into this,
and how you start to think about, again, blockchain as infrastructure, and how this starts to scale.
So let's think about what an insurance
setup and this insurance product would actually look like without blockchain current how kind of
how it is today one everything is a manual claim and take okay you could solve that in just normal
like web 2 stuff like i think there are some apps that are pretty decent now different
products i don't know how it is in some other countries but you know where i live like there
are some things that make it at least a little bit more simpler where i can maybe take pictures
with my smartphone and kind of go from there the other side of it though is there's a ton
of human intervention a ton of it uh part of it is on purpose to maybe slow things down.
But the other side of it is just that,
like there is a big issue around like fraud checks and review
and really verifying what that claim is.
Now, here's the thing where you can start to see some combination of stuff.
Now, here's the thing where you can start to see some combination of stuff.
We know AI is going to come and start doing some of this stuff.
AI, if it's not already, is going to start reviewing your pictures.
It's going to start going through that claim, that process.
Again, if it's not already doing that and giving feedback on it.
not already doing that and giving feedback on it.
The challenge there, though, is how do I know, even if I don't want to show it to the person
making the claim, if I'm the insurance company, I just at least want it for myself, I need
verifiable proof of how that all went through.
So there's a great paper that came out from the founders here at NIR
about proof of response and some proof around the AI.
That's a piece of it.
The other side of it, too, is then writing some of those outcomes on-chain.
So that becomes essentially fact, right? That kind of starts to build into
that. And then you can start to have your smart contracts built around that where it's maybe,
okay, this is a clean claim, whether it's human or AI verified, doesn't matter who it is.
Now I can actually have that claim done and and now it is verified, and the payout can happen on-chain automatically without any other intervention.
And it could even be then done in pieces, again, with minimizing human intervention, right?
What if it is something like, okay, you'll get your first part. When you submit your receipt
for whatever else, you get the next part. And what you've done is, yes, you've eliminated
some human intervention. Hopefully, you're not eliminating too many jobs. But at the same time,
those jobs right now, those things are just not the best use of maybe those employees. Whatever. That's separate.
We're not going to get into that.
But again, lower staff costs, happier users, hopefully, because they're getting their stuff processed faster, more efficiently.
The follow-up, again, for fraud cases makes it much more clear.
No more sifting through tons of records.
Everything is there.
If somebody was jumping from insurance company to insurance company, you would have all of that
available. So this is all stuff that goes into there. So that's one part of it.
But now, again, if you think about what happens here is what about like when that insurance company goes under?
What happens when, you know, there is some other incident that comes up and I need to be able to have all of that proof available of what went on in the interaction?
How do I prove that?
How do we get out of the
you know who said what when all of them that's where this starts to solve that so contract
dispute right or claim dispute is simplified right all of this stuff is there and again for
the product builder so the one who's building the insurance side of that the product it's now again
like these are singular costs the data retention not only is it better it is cheaper in the long
term okay maybe even in the short term it is decentralized so now again things get bought out people are you know insurance companies maybe
go bankrupt whatever it might be it's still there you know you're not worried about all of that
stuff you can still kind of go back to do that and i want to go back to again the efficiency and
the cost here of everything go back to the education piece here. Again, I can
eliminate some of my stuff. I can start to eliminate some of my databases, maybe all of my
databases, by doing this. I'm simplifying my cost here. What if, and again, let's get,
get real crazy here.
we could get real crazy here, right? Hold on.
Hold on.
One piece of paper.
What if it's set up like this?
So I have a login.
And my login is actually tied
to a Web3 account.
So we're going to say
I have a Near account.
But actually
it's really just a passkey.
Okay?
Or maybe just whatever.
It's my email.
It doesn't matter what it is.
But because of near account extraction, easy, right?
So I have that.
That becomes my login for my course, right?
So we're going to stick with the course here.
I'm going to show you how we're going to tie this back into my other examples here.
I have that, right?
So now this account is now also tied to my course, which then leads to my certificate.
All right.
Certificate.
Right.
So now I have that.
All right.
So I graduate.
I pass.
I have my certificate.
Okay.
So now there's proof.
This login, essentially, because, again, it's on the same chain,
could then maybe be tied into something like my insurance.
Can't see that.
And again, this is just a hypothetical example.
I understand many people have very poor things to say about insurance companies.
I probably do too.
But I just want to just show this as a highlighting example.
I can log into my maybe in my insurance company as well.
Now, maybe that certificate was something that maybe was for me to lower my, my cost of insurance.
Maybe it's a driving course, right?
That's a, that's a thing, right?
Especially younger drivers, right?
drivers, right? Maybe I went through, I did that. My insurance company can verify on chain in seconds,
Maybe I went through, I did that.
milliseconds really, that I completed that course. There can be an actual smart contract
in between here that does that verification, which then leads to
a lower rate,
which can be executed directly off of that instantly, right?
I make a claim.
My claim can all then feed into that as well.
These are all the things that if you step back
and you start to think about your product
in a whole different format of saying,
look, I want this to actually be able
to be more composable.
I want to be able to do that.
Now, again, on Mir,
what's really, I think,
pretty cool setup is because
of the chain abstraction, chain signatures,
that data can live on another blockchain.
So you're not just tied to,
like, oh, everything has to,
like, one blockchain has to win
and everything has to be on there.
Nope.
It doesn't have to be that way.
You can actually have it where it's now set up in a much different setup of being something like, again, maybe my Nier account is for my education course.
My insurance company is using a different chain.
But my Nier account can go check that other chain.
I can still log in, all that stuff.
But really, as the end user,
I have no idea that any of this is crypto or blockchain
because I'm just using my email and a passkey.
And that is so much more simple to implement.
It is safer.
It is a much better setup
for that end user.
And as a developer,
if you've ever built a fully robust
authentication system,
you know how much of a pain in the ass it is.
Now, there's tons that are like plug and play now.
The challenge, I will say,
with plug and play stuff, as you probably
already know, is
that you are now, again, beholden to somebody
else's code.
You are now beholden to something else that is
going on with that. So I don't love
that approach as a developer.
So I think that is
something that
is really key
to all of this stuff.
And again, here, where's my, what happened to my pointer?
Here it is.
Here, we'll highlight this a little bit better.
So if my login allows me to get to my course and to my insurance,
there's so much more interaction that I can do.
And it makes, again, my life as a developer,
and that's what we're focused on here, so much easier.
Let's try out the next thing here.
And this is the next topic.
Security and trust.
And we've already kind of talked about that a bit.
But I want to jump into another build case, another usage example of all of this that I think is like, it's, putting certain things into the blockchain and leveraging blockchain-related technology,
smart contracts, account model, whatever it might be, is actually a way to have safer experiences for your end users.
Okay.
I mean, it's literally built for data integrity and tamper-proof logs.
Literally what it's built for.
So, let's look at an example here of data leaks.
Okay?
So, data leaks cost millions to big companies, cost millions to users, probably billions at this point, right? Things like that.
Compliance. If you've ever had to work on a product that involves some form of compliance,
I feel for you. It is not fun. It is very time consuming. It is hard work, and it is something that you feel like you never get right, and there probably is no perfect system.
On top of all of that, we're in an age now that users are wanting to understand more and have better transparency into what is happening with their data, what is actually going on with all of that.
So let's look at this example here I wrote out. Healthcare data. Now, again, a little tricky
subject here, but let's just, again, this is a hypothetical. It's not perfect. But without a
blockchain, there's a couple of things that are available here that become potentially problematic.
But also, depending on your health care system, and again, I have some different biases related to being in America.
But wherever you might be, it's probably fairly similar, except for a few places.
You centralize medical records.
One, easy to reach target, sure.
But two, good luck having multiple places leverage those same records.
I know for myself, for every place I've been where I've moved across different parts of the country, things like that.
It is records all over the place.
It's impossible to have a complete view where you're trying to have things moved.
Actually, I know for a fact that more recently
I had to have records moved for one of my kids
and they used a fax machine.
That's right, a fax machine.
That's happening.
So insane stuff, but whatever.
But now, what if, again,
now we're making some assumptions
around how the data is stored
and encryption and things like that.
But we're not going to get into all that.
With a blockchain there,
we can have logs of access and changes.
We can know who actually modified something.
I can go in and check.
I can verify for myself,
oh, this doctor actually went in and put this in.
I can have control over that data
and be able to share it.
That's something you could build on chain
that you could
actually go and have allow your end users, right? And you have your patients own those access keys
and be able to share with other doctors, other hospitals, things like that.
Auditing those records like literally takes minutes. I mean days weeks whatever it might be so that piece of it as
well right uh you certainly can improve hipaa that way uh you know or gdpr or whatever other
privacy records you might have across you know in your country wherever you may live, for the user,
the trust between a provider and the patient should go up.
Because here's the thing.
I now know exactly what you have access to.
I can see it.
I've let you see it.
I can restrict access. It becomes such a different product when you are empowering your end user.
Again, you could build this as a Web2 thing.
But I want to continue to harp on, and we're seeing this more and more,
that these companies are now consolidating, they're being sold.
Your data is now who knows where uh like the big one
the 23andme with the dna testing like if you've done that and your data is there and still there
it's like you like they're going bankrupt who knows what they're going to do with that data
it just becomes a scenario where you as the end user, as the patient, no longer have control.
This gives you control.
But as a product builder,
this is actually a better experience for everybody
because it takes some onus off of you
and the compliance that you have to build in.
It improves that as well.
So a couple key things there.
Again, the way someone explained it to me once in talking to different people,
especially in the healthcare industry,
is something like this would actually be like version control for truth, right?
Once it's written, I know it.
So once it's been presented by a particular doctor in the record,
it's there and we're great.
A couple of things here too.
And this is some notes I really wanted to highlight too
when we talk about, again, security and trust.
It's not just about preventing hacks
because we can continue to get better at that stuff.
But it's really about, again, your entire product.
One of the things I've tried to highlight
on this show here, DevHub Live,
over the past year or so when we've been doing this
is showing products and talking to builders
that you have to think of your end users, right?
It really has to be about them.
Because even if you're solving a problem
that you think is important,
the end users have to feel that benefit.
And the benefit for them is knowing that the data is trustworthy,
that they can share their data,
right? And then they can actually, you know, feel confident of, like, it's in a safe place, and it's not going to just get bought. It's not going to disappear, right? I mean, like,
I mean, there's all these different things that go in there. And again, the thing of who changed what,
that log of who's made changes,
it's just huge, right?
So these are all pieces that I think are really important.
Let's talk about the developer experience.
So there are tons of things here
that we can actually do that I think are really simplifying things nowadays.
There are a ton of SDKs out there, and I'm going to use NIR as the example, right?
So just on NIR alone, for smart contracts, right, we have Rust, we have JS, we have Python, okay?
We have, you know, we'll call them, I guess, like API type of SDKs, right?
We have them in JS.
You could start to build them easily, you know, in any of these different things, right?
You just have to connect to an RPC, and you can build whatever you want.
You're just connecting to that.
You can run your own infrastructure easily.
I would say most chains now have a fairly straightforward way
to run a lot of your own stuff if you want to.
But there's also services out there that you can pay.
But the difference here is if I pay for a service,
okay, so if I pay for a service, like maybe
let's say an RPC provider, and they go down, they go out of
business, whatever, I am not
losing any of my stuff.
I'm just going to switch providers.
I'm going to spin up my own server.
I am no longer beholden to somebody else controlling my product.
I might have an outage because of that, which is frustrating,
maybe a poor experience for your users, but I'm not beholden to that.
So from a developer experience, I think that's really pretty great.
I also think that to get up and running,
there are so many different ways to do this really quickly.
To deploy a smart contract on Near really can be minutes.
You can have something pretty robust in like an hour, right?
So like I could go from, you know,
just even like a Python,
let's say a Python SDK
to a full-on smart contract,
you know, which then whatever,
like my, you know, then I then have my, say I have my Vercel app that then connects to that smart contract to do something.
And this is all, you probably get that up in a couple hours.
And I can now do an MVP really pretty quickly.
And all I've paid for is pretty much nothing. It's my time, right? Maybe depending
if this is testnet or mainnet, maybe then I have to pay for that, right? So let's say, right, let's
say this cost, this could cost a little, right? Let's say it costs like two an year, right? To do
that. It's five bucks. My Purcell, I have a free account, right? So now I've made an MVP
for five bucks.
And yeah, like this free stuff, like on AWS and everything
else like that. But as soon as you try to scale,
as soon as you have to go up, right, the price
just balloons. Where here,
a contract, yes,
as I add more data to it, it will
start to cost me more.
But depending, again, on how I'm storing my data,
what I'm doing,
these are things, these are one-time costs. I'm not occurring them monthly. So even if one month I have $100 of data I have to store on my smart contract, that's it. It's there. I've spent it.
I no longer have to worry about spending it again the next month. So these are important considerations when we think about what that all looks like.
Now, a couple different notes I wanted to get across
as I was thinking this through here about what this developer experience really is about, right?
Is that something like, and I'm going to use the example of like FastNear.
Something like, and I'm going to use the example of FastNear.
FastNear has done a nice job of opening up APIs
to allow you to instantly get started with querying the chain
and getting data from the chain.
And so now I don't have to build out my whole API structure.
I just have to think about the logic.
As a developer, just trying to think through the logic
is such a different experience.
Again, I know AI is helping get more code out faster.
But I will tell you,
as someone who's been building for a long time now
and is using these AI products, it really comes down to the thoughtfulness of understanding your logic, how it's going to work, that user interaction.
And when you can spend more time on that, you're going to get a better product.
So, yeah, maybe your AI could build out all your APIs.
maybe your AI could build out all your APIs.
But instead of having to do that
and worry about connecting to a database,
maintaining a database,
all that other stuff that we went through,
we can also just actually focus on
that end user experience and say,
okay, I'm trusting all this logic to be on chain.
And that's kind of how I can go.
Here's the thing.
This works whether you're in a team, whether you are solo, whatever it might be.
You start to have all of that stuff.
And you start to really introduce user-owned data.
All the stuff we've talked about so far, right?
Whether it's my insurance example, it's sideways.
My insurance example, it's sideways. My insurance example, my education example, whatever that might be, all of these different pieces.
I'm going to go over my whole table. I'm getting too excited.
Is what goes into a really great developer experience.
So where do we go from here?
How do we get started?
Okay.
So down below,
it's been streaming the whole time,
is the docs for both Nier as a whole
and Nier AI.
Really easy ways to get started.
I'm going to actually here.
Let me pull up.
I'm going to actually pull up
so you guys can see
how easy it is to get started.
I want to share my screen.
Okay.
We need to change our view here to... Let's...
All right, I've added that to the stage, and let's just go...
Boom.
Okay.
So, here is the NearDocs, just for the regular blockchain stuff.
Easy ways to get started here.
Look, you can drive into whatever contract,
everything we just talked about, right?
Building smart contracts, what goes into it,
deploying the security of it, all of that stuff, right?
And then from there, again, you don't have to even go through all this. You want to understand the protocol? Sure, great.
You can do that, but you don't have to go through all of that.
What I can see here, though, is, again, whatever language I want,
JavaScript, Rust, Python, whatever that looks like,
I can go through and I can set up my contract, be up and running.
And it's super simple to get started
from this. There is some tutorials here that you can go
through that I would encourage
you to definitely check out and see. And they're great examples, again, of what does it look like
to actually do some of this stuff? What does it look like to store, you know, my logging on chain,
my infrastructure? If I'm going to do my coffee example, right, what does that start to look like?
right what does that start to look like how do i start to build that all out okay so this i really
again i i want to emphasize that you can get started super fast it's really easy it's really
straightforward uh i want to end let's's end on here. Okay.
So definitely, definitely come reach out to us here near DevHub, near Dev.
Ask questions in the chat.
Sign up for our newsletter.
We're going to continue these type of discussions and go through it.
I really hope anyone watching this, you've got a good sense of how this actually fits in. And again,
I want to be clear of what this message was. Building on blockchain does not have to be the
whole thing. Building on blockchain can be something that is very focused on a particular piece of what you're building.
It offers a lot of great opportunities for you as a developer to get started that maybe you didn't have or maybe you have available to you but are more complicated.
The idea here is to simplify things.
It is to provide better ownership to your end users.
It is to make the experience for you as the developer and for the end user to have more
trust in the product that they are interacting with.
Now, more than ever in the time of the internet and apps and applications and software
do we need to start to emphasize more of this and the blockchain gives the opportunity to do that.
The ability to be permissionless, the ability to be transparent, the ability to actually have a
great user experience without having to maintain some
centralized service that's going to both put added stress and time and money on you, you can still do
this leveraging blockchain. It does not have to just be about NFTs or meme coins or anything else.
It can actually be about quality products that are leveraging this as a technology.
It's not a solution looking for a problem.
You are actually solving problems
or improving experience.
Forget solving problems.
Improving experience for your end users through this.
I hope you learned something.
I hope this sparks some more discussion.
I definitely want to do this more
because I think these are good things
for people to go over.
Next week, we will have a guest back.
Maybe. We'll see.
But we have a lot of great stuff, though,
coming around.
It's on our newsletter.
A lot of different things happening
in the near ecosystem around building, especially around near AI and on our newsletter. A lot of different things happening in the near ecosystem around
building, especially around near AI and things like that. We're going to have some more AI
guests here on as well. Follow up from our previous guests. There's been a lot of great
stuff happening. Definitely go back and check out our previous episodes, see what they've been
building and just kind of going from there.
Again, please reach out.
We're always here to help.
Come join us in our discussion on Telegram.
We're always happy to have new
developers and we're happy to answer questions of
how this looks, like that.
I appreciate you coming,
listening to me kind of go on about
this. It's something that I think
is important for developers to really reinforce
themselves, hopefully spread the message
to other people. And for Web2 developers,
if you are new to this, this is your first
exposure. I hope you got to
experience what it actually means
to leverage the blockchain
versus just, again, probably
what you've maybe heard in previous times.
But until next week,
I really appreciate you getting everyone coming on.
I'm Joe, and I will see you next week.
Bye-bye.
