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Project Spotlight: @irys_xyz
Recorded: June 5, 2025 Duration: 0:57:19Space Recording
Short Summary
Iris has officially launched as a Layer 1 blockchain focused on data storage, achieving remarkable growth by scaling its transaction volume significantly. The project aims to create a data marketplace, allowing users to monetize their data directly on the chain, aligning with emerging trends in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Love it. Thank you. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love.
Be sweet, love.
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Be sweet, love.
Be sweet, love.
Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. Be sweet, love. be sweet, honey. Oh Hey, um, I don't really know why I'm calling.
I just wanted to say thank you for tonight.
I honestly didn't expect to have that much fun, but you made it really easy.
Anyway, bye. that much fun but you made it really easy anyway bye Oh, you can be sweet, Father.
Oh, you can reach me back. March into the drum of a broken heartbeat.
And the world is weighing on you, so you drag your feet.
Yeah.
One more breath until you fall into sweet tragedy.
But the battle in your heart
says won't you say Oh All right. GM, GM.
Sorry, guys,
but the previous link
wasn't able to start.
So we started off a new link,
already paying a bunch
of our community to come over.
So people will start
coming in pretty soon.
But guys, if you tune in,
congrats.
We are excited because finally
we are able to get Iris, get Josh on Spaces.
So like, retweet, before we get started,
I want to check in with Josh.
Josh, GM, how you doing, sir?
GM, GM, I'm good. How you doing?
I'm good.
You know, I was, one fun fact is that
when you were doing your, I would say, panel during Consensus Hong Kong hack season,
I was actually sitting there.
I think you were doing with Paul,
you were doing with Andrew and Igor.
And that was the first time that I saw you talking about Iris.
And just seeing how, you know,
right now the timeline is heated up with, you know,
vast interest of people on Iris.
So before we direct dive into what you're building,
love to get some context on your crypto journey to the point of you becoming the founder of Iris.
Yeah, I mean, a majority of my crypto journey has been as a founder, I think, at this point.
But yeah, I got into crypto about five years ago now.
And I was studying computer science in the UK, which is where I'm from.
And I was, to be honest, working on a bunch of random open source work, mostly actually
actually within the ethereum space in 2020 and ended up getting very deep uh kind of pivoting
within the Ethereum space in 2020.
and getting very deep into the i guess data chain side of the space so back in kind of late 2020
that was uh that was kind of rwe file coin storage i guess sia that was chia as well if people
people remember chia um yeah so i go from kind of very deep into the data chain side of the space why data chains a lot
of my background has been actually in data bases which is not the same thing but uh it all kind of
comes from the data kind of infrastructure side of computer science so that was where a lot of my
i guess skills and focus lied for many years so So yeah, I got into the data chain space.
And then in early 2021, so about a year into my journey in crypto, I started Iris.
Back then, we were actually called Bundler, and we were building an L2 for a blockchain called Arweave,
which is a permanent storage chain, basically meaning that you can pay once and your data is stored forever.
And yeah, the big problem that we identified back then was that Arwee as a chain was very
unscalable. The ecosystem was very small. So the goal for us was how do we actually make this chain
very scalable? How do we grow the ecosystem? So we launched the L2 around August time of that year.
And then I dropped out of school.
I dropped out of university and haven't looked back since.
And we took our way from about 10,000 transactions a day to about 15 million a day,
onboarded 300 plus projects.
We was doing kind of a majority of the transaction volume, about 95% as well.
So, yeah, we had a ton of success there.
And then people people probably wondering like
where does Iris come into this so we kind of decided to build our own L1 about a year and
you know maybe four months now ago uh and the real kind of driving factor there was that we
spent a lot of time in the data chain side of the space more than pretty much anyone
uh we wanted to solve a lot of the problems that we saw with
with Aoi, Valcoin, and also with the rise of AI.
There were a lot of other problems that are happening more broadly
within the data space.
With the launch of AI, data as a kind of an asset class
became far more valuable.
So one of the major goals for Iris is kind of how do we,
how do we kind of capture a lot of that value that, that data provides specifically, obviously
within the AI space is kind of where most people understand the value of data, but also like outside
of AI as well. Like we have a, I guess a broader focus too, but yeah, I guess that's my, it's kind
of the longer kind of origin story, I guess, but yeah, it's been, it's my uh it's kind of the longer kind of origin story i
guess but uh yeah it's been uh it's been it's been a long ride now yeah how many years has it been
since it's been five years yeah yeah and what was the moment in your life that you know you
you began to realize that you're obsessed with data and then from data what was the pivoting point of you getting into crypto yeah um
data i think i fell into it very organically so i'd been doing programming and engineering um you know
basically kind of 24 7 for many years prior.
And I ended up just kind of contributing
to a bunch of different open source projects.
One of them being a like SQL database.
And I worked essentially on like the insides of the database,
the internals.
And I don't know, I got like hyper focused and hyper kind of
interested in optimizing databases
i must sound like such a such a nerd right now but um that was kind of where a lot of my a lot
of my interest lied uh and then yeah i don't know i just kind of expanded from there so data chains
aren't the same thing as databases but there are definitely a lot of similarities and if you really
understand databases then you can also uh have a pretty like good like kickstart with you know building uh data chains as well so i think yeah i i think
that's kind of where a lot of my interest slide was around this kind of optimization and then
getting into crypto actually like the the funny story there is i i watched um i watched i remember
watching the video from um i'm trying to remember the name of it it's like
a math and science account it's called like on youtube it's called like three blue one brown
or something like that it might be like three blue one brown like i don't know it's like i think if
you google it like it will probably come up but i actually watched a video about bitcoin and i was
kind of very interested by bitcoin more on a technological level i wasn't particularly i didn't
really have money i wasn't really interested in investing per se um but i was kind of interested in like
blockchains more generally uh but the funny thing about that video it was actually sponsored by
filecoin uh sponsored by protocol labs so in some ways uh protocol labs never sponsored that video
maybe uh maybe i wouldn't be in crypto and um you know building i guess something that's like i guess direct man yeah so yeah i just checked it's three blue one brown um so it's like you going and watch the
video and then seeing the sponsor and then go and study the sponsor that's how you let that out no
actually no no no i didn't i didn't realize they sponsored it until like three or four years later
so i know i remember i like nostalgia like more for nostalgia, I went back and watched the video a few years later.
I was like, interesting because to me now that video is very basic, but back then it
was kind of a relatively complex topic for me.
And then at the end of the video, I saw sponsored by protocol labs and I was like, oh, no way.
That's good.
That's quite funny.
So I didn't realize to the end.
No, my entrance into data chains was more just
like i was hopping but i was like kind of researching a bunch of different chains
discovered these like storage and storage networks data chains and then just became kind of became
nerds not by that i'm really interested by how a blockchain which is usually a very what i would
say restrictive environment where you can't really do much you can't really execute much
can't really store things but they're actually a type of blockchain where you can actually store
large amounts of data you know petabytes or exabytes many many like like a huge uh huge
amount of data so that was kind of like uh where like how I got into the the uh the data chain
space got it I just love love to you know going back and seeing i think like in terms of you know
blockchain storage data chain the narrative sometimes could be sexy and then you know it
kind of like quiet down a little bit and i see like recently you know being picked picked up
with like warriors and even you guys that is doing you know this sort of narrative like it's
it's been something or it's been an issue
that people are trying to solve,
not just this year, but so many years ago.
And then right now, coming to...
It's like a full cycle of people getting interest back
of blockchain storage.
Do you think the interest is always there?
Or right now, we are able to package it
a little bit more sexy for the CT or the DGEN people
to give a shit about it
yeah so i think there are a few things i think fundamentally what data chains provide
is valuable in every single in every single kind of part of the world of every technology
like people need to store data they need to do things they need to process do things with data like they want to buy and sell data like these are all very common
things uh and whatever like the narrative is at any point in time within crypto there is always
a need for this um you know it was nfts last cycle was ai this cycle so um that's kind of why i i was
really interested in data change is that i know this is fundamentally valuable to the world,
but I also know that it's not something that's going to die with bear markets.
There's always going to be a place for data chains, not just, I guess, in the fundamental world,
but also in the narrative world, because fundamentally, everyone needs data in some form.
So that's kind of one of the really interesting things that I've observed.
So like with like, you know, it's not like I don't focus on narrative.
It's more just like I just know it comes and goes.
I don't like attach my emotions to it.
And, you know, sometimes people are kind of bored of certain narratives
and it comes back.
Like that's the same with stable coins
same with any like narrative like ai like everyone's kind of bored of ai right now to a degree
but i'm sure like within six months time you know we'll be talking about ai again um to like the
same degree as we were six months ago so uh i kind of like look beyond a lot of the short-term work
uh short-term kind of narrative um but yeah, broadly believe that, you know,
data chains are super valuable
and they will be forever, basically.
Yep.
And 100% agree with you.
I think like, you know,
with so many chains out there,
right now seeing how, you know,
vaporware products have been really phasing out.
And it's, you know, when you talk to,
you know, I host about 15 hours of spaces a week.
And when you talk to a lot of people day in, day out,
you can kind of feel like, hey, you know,
people's narrative is coming back to real utility, right?
Which people are talking about RWA is coming back,
DeFi is coming back.
And so like, I think a chain with solid,
I wouldn't call it like narrative,
but solid function of why you need this chain
is going to outshine, you know, different chains.
And it's also why, you know, we from PewCast
take an interest in, you know,
going and deep diving into Iris, right?
So I think like the narrative of, you know,
we are faster, low gas fee or zero gas fee.
These are all, you know, I would say the past kind of vibes.
Right now it's more focused on, you know,
what can the chain do different from different, other, it's more focused on, you know, what can the chain do different from other different chains.
So love to, you know, if the audience is tuning in
and this is the first time from the PewCast crew
going to know about what Iris is,
guys, like retweet the space.
If you have any questions, at the end of the spaces,
we will also read any, find some good questions
to ask Josh if I haven't asked yet. But Josh,
maybe you could share a little bit, you know, in simpler terms, what is Iris and why is it
matter for people that's tuning onto the space today? Yeah, so Iris is a data chain. So data
chain is a chain optimized to store data. So if you want to compare it to, this is, yeah,
slightly crude comparison, but if you want to compare it to, this is a slightly crude comparison,
but if you want to compare it to something like Ethereum or Solana,
those chains are very focused on execution.
So the idea is how can we execute these smart contracts
as quickly as possible in the most decentralized way possible.
Data chains are more focused on how can we store large amounts of data,
I think thousands or millions of times more data
than both of
those chains put together, but also at literally at a million times cheaper as well.
So that's kind of the big focus for IRIS.
So we essentially enable you to store data for any period of time, temporary, short term
or permanent forever for a fraction of the cost.
And then the second big focus for us, which comes from the fact that we have both the storage
network and then we also have this VM where you can deploy smart contracts. We actually have this
very big focus on not just storing data, but also what can you actually do with your data.
And the way that I kind of frame this is that storing data is a very valuable thing, but an
even more valuable thing is being able to do things with your data.
And that's why when we kind of talk about IRS,
we're focused on the value of data
and how we kind of create more value for data.
And that might mean being able to monetize data
directly on the chain.
So you can buy and sell data sets
and sell them to large companies like OpenAI
and other AI companies directly on the chain.
Or you might want to be
able to compute on the data that exists in the IRS or define some kind of validation rules.
There's a bunch of really interesting examples, but broadly our focus and the chain's focus is
one, being able to store a lot of data, but two is being able to do things with your data that
are valuable, that make you money, that allow you to, or for businesses, allow you to do something that you wouldn't be able to do elsewhere.
Yeah. And I think in terms of just hearing this whole explanation, it really keeps me interested, right?
interested, right? Because I think for the
over the past, I say, one year or two years,
we see, like, you know, big
web tool companies, for example, Facebook,
TikTok, and all of this
that has issue with data,
you know, whether the company is exploiting
it or not, but now able to
put data on-chain, utilizing
it where the creator is able to use
it, I think this is something that
really stood out, right? So could you, I
know that, you know, people are calling data the most valuable assets, because obviously when AI
is coming, it's just how much, how good of a data you have, you know, improves the AI agent and
all of the different works. So how are companies in the world right now, whether it's Web2,
whether it's Web3, monetizing the data without our knowledge oh yeah that's a that's
a pretty easy question so right now the monopolies around data are the platforms uh and the mostly
like social platforms but i'd say platforms more broadly the more users you have the more valuable
data you have is the way to think about it so that's's why Twitter, sorry, X has, I don't know how many, probably a
billion plus users. So they probably have the most data for users, along with Facebook, Instagram.
So when you think about these companies, they have a ton of users, they are constantly collecting
information about you. And I don't read the terms and conditions but i guarantee
they probably monitor your location uh and a bunch a bunch of other information that you probably
don't want to share um and my guess is also they monitor things that they even claim they don't
monitor would be would be my guess so and what they do with that data is they essentially collect
it they have a large they have these large kind of collections of your data and then they
can either use it for themselves.
So X does this by, with the merger with XAI, they train models now and all of the data
on X.
But companies like Reddit, for example, actually sell all of the Reddit data, for example,
to Google for $50 million per year.
So it depends on the company.
Some just keep it in-house for their own benefit.
And then some companies like Reddit will don't do anything in-house with it really,
but they will sell it to a company that does care about it, like Google,
who's willing to pay millions and millions of dollars.
But yeah, I'd say there's very little kind
of opt-in from users or perhaps the best way to look at it is that it's so abstracted that users
don't really like see this stuff yep and i think like being a creator as well you know we obviously
rely on different platforms to kind of rate the quality of our content, right? And, you know,
whether it's good, it's bad, it's really up to the platform to provide you the best, I would say,
source of income or revenue for it. But before I go into that, you know, we're talking about how
Web2 or Web3 companies are monetizing your data. But right now, if you put data, for example, on-chain,
how then it comes with the privacy of the data,
whether it's open source
and other people can use the data as well.
What's some of the explanation on that?
Yeah, so data on iOS can be public
or it can be private.
It's up to whoever is uploading the data. It can be fully private or it can be private it's up to the you know whoever is uploading the
data it can be fully private or it can be fully public when it comes to monetizing of data then
you actually want data to be private because if everything's public then it's very easy to
for your data to be you know essentially uh stolen or taken and you see this with OpenAI scraping a majority of the web, including
platforms that don't, who aren't really willing to share data. I'll put it that way.
So the benefit, I guess, of being on chain in that case is you at least provide a degree of transparency around,
there's a couple of things.
You actually provide greater guarantees
because nothing is stronger than cryptography,
I guess is the main way to think about it.
Like that provides the strongest guarantees.
And then two is that there's a far greater amount
of transparency and accountability
around how these things are used
and what the rules really are.
So you can have data on chain that has very clearly defined rules that says you can use this data in this way.
And we will only allow this data to be decrypted or used in these different scenarios, right?
If you pay a specific fee,
and maybe that fee is able to be distributed
to a bunch of different creators as well.
So being on chain allows for a far more controlled
and transparent way for people to get paid.
And people could be a platform,
people could be the creators,
depends on what you're optimizing for.
But being on chain is just,
it is a better place to do this stuff,
whether you are trying to monetize for your company
or monetize for the actual individuals
who are on the actual platform.
Got it.
And talking about putting data on chain,
I think one big issue that we see,
even for me, every month,
I need to just slowly increase my storage
of Google Drive,
just because of the tons of content that I get.
So how would it then compare to a traditional way of people storing data
versus using the blockchain and storing your data and having access to it?
Is it more cheaper? Is it more, I would say, efficient?
Or there is two different things that can be compared?
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, storing an IRS is always going to be the cheapest option.
It's cheaper than any centralized solution.
It's cheaper than any of the decentralized solutions as well.
So cheaper than, as you said, Google, AWS, whatever.
So, yeah, it will always be much cheaper.
But you always have to pay something, right?
It's not like you can just remove the UX of paying. but usually a lot of that stuff is abstracted by by by platforms but
those platforms can charge much less now because their costs could be much lower as well um so
yeah and in one way or another it does improve the the user experience all All right, got it. Now I'm excited.
Bro, my monthly subscription
for just buying storage
and keeping all the raw data
and videos and stuff
has gone crazy, I would say,
for the last three years
of shooting 4K videos.
So this is a function
that I would love to use it as well.
But I know we mentioned
a little bit about, you know,
Filecoin, all of this different stuff.
Love to get more insight of, like,
how Iris is different from other storage chains out there.
And, you know, what do you guys do differently
to make it possible?
Yeah, so, I mean, the most recent one,
I guess, would be Waris that launched relatively recently.
So the differences between all these chains
is, like, on a one-by-one basis. So the difference between Filecoin and Iris is recently um so the differences between all these chains is is like on
a one by one basis so the difference between falcon iris is very different to the differences between
war scenarios um but one of like the the bigger things that i guess would concern me about something
like waris is that it's 23 times more expensive i think it's 23 is the exact number times more
expensive than uh s3 which is AWS's centralized storage service.
My general view is that if you are not cheaper than S3, then you'll basically just lose.
You will have no one who is willing to pay you.
You might be able to pay people to use your thing, but no one will be willing to pay you
to actually use your product.
So I think that's the big thing.
There are some other technical nuances with Waros. The guarantees they provide you in terms of the data actually being stored
is much weaker than Iris, weaker than Filecoin as well.
And you can't do things like longer duration storage or permanent storage.
So there's kind of some restrictions around what is enabled with something like Waros.
But I think cost is actually the main
thing that actually concerns me because at the end of the day, if something is too expensive and
you price out all of your users, it doesn't matter how good your product is. It's always going to be
too expensive. So when we compare that to something like Iris, Iris is tens of times more
cheaper than S3 and it's over 100 times cheaper than
Warris. So the big focus for IRS is around how do we actually provide a very high performance data network that is much, much, much, much cheaper while also providing huge guarantees.
Guarantees isn't a very sexy topic for people, but the way to really think about it is if you want to store some data for a couple of years,
the guarantee is that your data won't disappear in that time.
You come back in two years' time
and you can kind of pull that data from the chain.
And that's obviously the main kind of function of the network.
And so it's very important to have those strong guarantees.
So that's kind of where Iris, I guess i guess shines is that we saw a lot of
these reliability issues over the years with these chains and we wanted to build a chain that's more
reliable compared to something like filecoin uh the it's a little bit different so filecoin is
is relatively cheap but the issue with filecoin is very slow so it takes about six hours to upload
some data six hours to download um so the way to think about
it is like this is yeah crude analogy but let's say you're building you know a google drive on
something filecoin it's like you press upload and then it takes six hours for it to actually be
uploaded to the drive and then if you want to download it again then it takes six hours
just to press download and for it to yeah to fully retrieve it. So I think it's just like a non-starter
and that kind of shows in the fact
that people struggle to use on that Filecoin.
Again, like when we started to build Iris,
we came with a relatively large amount of experience
from building this in the side of the space.
I've seen all of these issues for many years
and we wanted to,
that's why we built a whole chain from scratch.
Like everything is from scratch.
It was a lot of effort.
And yeah, so Iris is like everything
is sub-second latency, which means that it's
instant retrieval, instant writing.
And we can write any amount of data.
So it's relatively infinitely scalable.
Or it's so scalable that
users will users won't really uh won't notice a limit so uh and we can and we can still do that
at you know at a fraction of the cost so um yeah it's pretty cool bro you just hyped the fuck out
of me bro because when i when you know every time when i travel um Token Atlas, just uploading my stuff on the G Drive takes like 12 hours, right?
Because it's like hundreds of GB and stuff like that.
And just thinking if I would be using Filecoin, that would be super slow.
And users will be frustrated, right?
I think the whole point of this, of building out the own chain, is that whether you are in crypto or you're not in crypto, this will be a wide option for everyone.
How big of a problem is this?
Because I know a lot of people are trying to solve it.
Some has been successful, some has not been. But the general idea is that, hey, if you want to store your data, the better option would be on Iris, you know, maybe not on G Drive, not on Dropbox.
So is that the main goal of, you know, not really telling, I would say people don't really need to know that this is on a crypto chain, but it's just a more fast and efficient way to store your data. Correct. That's the way that we think about it. There are some,
you know, there are going to be some applications that really care about the properties of being
on chain, whether that's immutability, they want to, and we can actually come to some of the
benefits with the smart contracts as well. So there are a ton of benefits to being on-chain,
but at a fundamental level,
I want people to be able to use Iris
and not feel like they're using an on-chain service
or a blockchain,
because that doesn't really matter.
At the end of the day, what matters is users enjoy
or it's easy for them to use
and it benefits them in some way.
And if that's the case, then we'll be hyper successful.
So that's kind of why I look at everything kind of, you'll notice that I talk about everything
from a product perspective where it's about speed, it's about usability, it's about cost.
It's about these things that drive, like what are the things that actually drive demand
for these kind of products?
And the chain is built around those kinds of requirements.
So, but, but, but there definitely are benefits to being on chain.
When you think about the abilities, then monetize your data directly on the chain,
like this level of composability can only exist on a blockchain.
So that's why we built the L1.
But yeah, at a core level, we obviously want the data network to be very easy to use, regardless
of whether it's a blockchain or not.
100%.
And talking about, I think, AI, cloud services, this all requires a huge amount of space to
then run the servers and stuff like that.
How is it different from Iris?
What do you mean? like that. How is it different from Iris?
What do you mean?
Like, if you're talking about, for example, drives,
Google Drive, Dropbox, and all of this,
they require a huge
storage in real life to
keep all of these processes
running and stuff like that.
Whereas for you guys, would it be similar
or it's more of a lean method?
Well, no, no, no.
I mean, at the end of the day, if you need to store a terabyte of data, you need to have a terabyte of hard drives, right?
So it's not that we don't need the hardware.
It's just about the whole mechanism for managing the hardware is more efficient.
It's more capital efficient.
But basically, it's cheaper and it manages faster.
So, yeah, we still have a ton of like,
when you are a miner on the network,
you provide a bunch of hard drives.
You are still like, there is still a very large amount
of hardware on the backend, but it's pulled.
So it's a group of different people
bringing the hardware together.
And it's just far more capital efficient.
Got it.
All right.
I want to pivot over to, you know,
creators being able to monetize on Iris, right?
Could you, and I know there's a lot of creators these days.
And if you look at on the city timeline,
I think InfoFi has been popping out
and it's just a lot of people, you know,
the Iris Kaido bot has been up as well.
People has been yapping.
And so like, if we want to talk about
some ways that creators
are able to monetize on iRisk,
what sort of applications
are you thinking that people can create
to make it more efficient for creators?
For creators,
I think right now, actually,
to be honest,
we probably lack applications directly
that help creators
monetize because we've been hyper focused on, I guess, more on the, I guess, perhaps
B2B side of the stack where we focus on how do we help, you know, perhaps Web2 companies
buy and sell their data to some of these larger AI companies. So it's been less focused on individual creators.
But the reason that is actually a good stepping stone is that at the end of the day, what
we're doing with, let's say, the monetization side is we are saying that any bit of data
can be sold to anybody with a predefined set of rules, which is broadly what creators care
about. So over time that will evolve to something
where actually creators can tap into
that kind of distribution funnel and this technology
so that they can actually monetize
their own work individually.
But to be honest, our board of our focus has been more
on how do we help different Web 2 companies
or just companies
with kind of valuable data sets
and sell them to
some of these larger AI companies
so we're not there yet
but yeah
we're trying to like
take a very pragmatic approach
in terms of what we focus on
Alright, thank you so much for that
I would love to
ask a personal question as well
so obviously
PewCast is a media company and just say Much for that. I would love to, you know, ask a personal question as well. So obviously, you know,
PewCast is a media company.
And, you know, just say, you know,
general businesses out there,
whether it's Web2, whether it's Web3,
what sort of way they could take advantage of Iris,
you know, I would say,
the way it runs or stores data
to, you know, create a business around it.
Create a business around Iris?
I'm sorry, is this specifically for a media company?
Yeah, media company.
That's an interesting question.
Well, a media company can definitely leverage Iris
from a more tech perspective.
As you said, you probably have a lot of high costs
around storing media, especially if you're doing video.
That becomes super expensive.
So there's definitely ways media companies
can at least leverage Iris in order to reduce their cost. That's a very obvious step.
In terms of building a broader business, yeah, I mean, you could probably monetize.
If you want to monetize specific content that you make, you can do that on Iris right now.
Like the primitives are there in order to do it.
We apply that now to data sets, but it can be directly applied to videos.
Like if you want, if you wanted to sell the rights to your YouTube videos,
then you would be able to do that directly on, on Iris.
So there are, I guess it's not building an entire business,
but there are definitely parts of your business where you can tap into Iris to either reduce your costs in some way
or actually make some money in some way
if it's selling rights to videos and things like that.
Got it.
Just a question that pops in my mind, right?
Like, is there any, I would say,
DeFi element to, you know,
people storing their data on chain
and having yields and stuff like that?
Yeah, I think long-term, yes.
So I'll give you the very pragmatic answer.
There are definitely some projects that claim this.
The reality is that, I won't name names,
but I think I'll give you an extreme answer.
On a 100-year time horizon, yes.
Like eventually, yes.
But I think what the issue with that is,
is that there's this kind of oligarchy
where platforms are the ones who own
or have control of the value flows and the rights of data.
So you kind of need to have that system flip on its head where you
have user-owned data. But user-owned data is, we can kind of get into it, but getting to a point
where data is actually user-owned truly, like not narrative-wise, but actually truly user-owned,
it will take a very long time. At that point, then you probably, there is like a DeFi component
where your data does lead to some kind of yield. But at the user level, yeah, it's very tough.
Now, I do think at a business level, because right now the whole data world is set up for businesses.
On the business world, it does make sense because in the short term, maybe even the next year or so, it might make sense.
Because let's say Reddit, right?
Reddit has a $50 million a year data set. So over five years, right, they have, let's say,, right? Reddit has a $50 million a year data set.
So over five years, right?
They have a, let's say a $250 million data set.
Well, they can definitely, if there's kind of,
if there is validation that they have an asset
that is worth $250 million,
well, they can probably use that as collateral, right?
They can probably get, you know,
a secured loan on chain from this 250 million dollar data asset so there are definitely
are some defy components that or defy applications that come downstream of data because data is
fundamentally asset class when you have something that's worth money then there's a defy side to it
um so yeah i expect to see that within the next year or so alright got it thank you so much for that
love to talk more
you know on programming
programmable data I see like that
is a phrase that
Iris has been mentioning many times
could you share a little bit more insight on what
that phrase meant
sorry my internet dropped that
yeah programmable data
okay cool I wanted to make sure because my internet dropped there. Did you say programmable data? Yeah, programmable data.
Okay, cool.
I wanted to make sure because my internet sucks.
Where are you at right now?
I'm in London.
I'm not in like a... Yeah, the Wi-Fi should be good,
but I'm in an office right now.
It's just, I don't know.
It just sucks.
But yeah, I...
Yeah, pre-rambled data, sorry.
So the idea of pre-rambable data is that data kind of by default is this very static thing
that you just store and retrieve.
There's not much you can do with it.
The idea of programmable data at a high level is how can you actually do things with data?
How can you program with it?
How can you actually use it within your applications?
But more practically, it's actually about how, you know, if you store a large amounts
of data on IRS, how can you actually make use of that within the irs vm and within your
smart contracts like preferably you actually want to not just be able to store data but you want to
be able to bring that into smart contracts and perform some logic based off of that as well
it might be validation it might be you want to distribute tokens and rewards based on if people
store specific data there are a bunch of really interesting use cases that come out of that but the idea is that if you make data kind of programmable that
actually makes the data itself fundamentally more uh more valuable which is again like kind of kind
of a mission or a vision here is how do we actually make data a more valuable asset class
got it and and so like utilizing the storage programmable data, just back in your mind, what are some
of, I would say, interesting applications that you think will be starting to pop up
or you're getting interest that people want to build on top of it?
Could you share some light on that?
Damn, I was immune.
I was just talking to myself.
Yeah, so we've been really focused on the marketplace,
building a data marketplace, focused more on Web2,
just because that's like a super valuable kind of space.
So we wanna see that happen where we have a chain
where you can store all of your data really cheaply,
monetize it as well,
and work with some of these larger Web2 teams.
So I think that's been the focus number one.
I think we have a really big focus on how can we,
like how can we kind of plug into that distribution channel?
How can we scrape large amounts of the web
and store that on IRS and then be able to monetize that
and sell that to some of these companies as well?
So we want to, what we want to build is like different,
I guess, Legos, like DeFi Legos, kind of the,
I guess the meme, but for us,
it's kind of like the data Legos, where we have the ability to monetize.
And the next question is like, what applications can bring in valuable data?
So there might be an application where it scrapes a large amount of the web and it kind
of turns that into a valuable data set that can then be sold through the marketplace.
We have, I guess, like changing gears a little bit.
I have a lot of interest in building, this is more of a random one, but a decentralized
email protocol that is like private and decentralized.
And yeah, I think that would be really cool because you can build an email protocol that
is very fast, very cheap, censorship resistant, private, and yeah, and can be like fully verifiable
and you can essentially use programmable data
to create a degree of verifiability
within actually the smart contracts as well.
So yeah, so those are the few applications
that we think about.
There are tons more.
We also have, if people are interested
in building something,
like we also have a longer list as well.
So yeah, we can obviously like feel free
to reach out.
Yeah.
I think it's interesting that you mentioned email, right?
Because just shifting the focus,
it's not just standard users
wanting to store their data and store.
I think every business out there,
you have data.
And whether it's a Web2 business or Web3 business,
whether it's email, whether it's ticketing,
it's just using data to store and stuff like that.
Is there any focus like a particular industry you think like, okay, we want to focus on
this industry, making it big and then replicating the same model to different industries?
And yeah, and I guess you mean like specific types of data therefore as well.
Yep.
There are a lot that we focus on.
I don't know if I have like specific interests.
I think the ones that I'm excited about,
like robotics is definitely one
that I'm really interested about.
When I focus on ghost market with Iris,
I focus on growing categories.
So categories that I know are going to be
a hundred or a thousand times bigger in a few years time or five years time. market with iris i focus on growing categories so categories that i know are going to be you know a
hundred or thousand times bigger in a few years time or five years time so i think robotics is
really interesting i think it's kind of like the next kind of step within ai um is and therefore
there's going to be another kind of type of data that you need and we're already saying this so i
think robotics data is like a really interesting use case for us we actually have yeah something
that we're working on that um like an actually have something that we're working on,
like an application or team that we're working on.
So we'll be onboarding some robotics data
relatively soon as well.
But again, we work with a broad set of teams,
financial data, car data, robotics data.
We aren't just images, videos.
The modality and the type of data varies pretty broadly.
And we don't have a strict mandate, and we don't have a strict focus, but there are definitely areas that we are more excited by,
like robotics and areas like that.
Got it. Robotics. And any reason why?
You mentioned a lot about AI.
And then I think, let, okay, if you...
Let me rephrase the question.
So if you were to compare, you know,
I would say traditional business,
web2 business versus, like, sexy narrative,
which is, you know, AI, robotics,
like, fundamental,
if traditional business is all opting in for this,
the utility-wise or, youwise or the use case is really strong
and it's really penetrating into real use case and stuff.
And whereas if you compare to targeting,
for example, AI or robotics,
it's like a much more sexy narrative.
Is there something like this
or is there something that
personal interest and then you want to focus on that?
Yeah, so the reason we focus
I mean, AI is narrative
that is true
the reason AI
differs
I'll use crypto example
the reason AI differs a lot from NFTs is
in retrospect
it's very
hard to reason about why people were bullish on nfts on like let's say a 10-year time horizon
like it wasn't super clear or at least like the value prop wasn't as big as let's say ai where
it's very clear that over the next decade ai is going to revolutionize pretty much every part of
our life um so the bet that we're making is on a technology
and therefore the entire stack behind that technology
that is going to grow kind of exponentially
over the next decade.
And I think that's basically a bet or a trade
that basically every single person on the spaces
and probably on Twitter or on XR would probably take.
And so that's why as a business,
we are very
focused on ai um and our focus i guess is um specifically on the data side of the stack like
we're not just focused on every part of ai that is that that's where i feel like it kind of goes
deeper into narrative um we are focused on the data side of the stack um and we're going to kind
of remain within that kind of niche focus.
Yeah, 100%.
What I asked about robotics is actually, you know, prior to me becoming content creator in WebTree,
I actually did robotics, right?
And during that time, it's, you know, IoT 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, where, you know, it's robots,
talking to robots, but giving a certain set of data but right
now you know if you're talking about ai agents you know it's not just all right default of you
know if the mission fails you do a if it's not it's do b but it's ai that really generates the
interest and i think like from that alone itself there's so much of data storage needs to be done.
So I feel like it's interesting
because ever since I come into crypto,
nobody talks about robotics, bro.
You are actually the first person
that talks about robotics.
And I think that is an interesting industry as well.
All right.
Yeah, go ahead.
You have anything to add on, bro?
No, no, no.
I was not going to say anything interesting. All right. Yeah, go ahead. You have anything to add on, bro? No, no, no. I was not going to say anything interesting.
All right.
I know we had left 10 minutes,
so I'd love to, you know,
we understand more, you know,
where you came from,
how you started it,
you know, what some of the interests,
what kind of like the common problems
you're solving
and why this narrative
or this angle
is something that people need to care about
and i think like that just shows you know a lot of people are taking interest people are yapping
about it so that is good love to know what's next for you guys obviously now started up yapping just
began last week uh what is some of the timeline uh we could see why something that you know
maybe in q3 things that you want to double is something that, you know, maybe in Q3,
things that you want to double down on?
Is it, you know, attracting more,
I would say more creators?
Is it attracting more builders
to build out different applications?
Yeah, tell me more on that front.
Yeah, I mean, we have obviously,
like, launching an L1,
we basically have a million focuses at once,
but I guess I would summarize this.
The focus number one is getting to mainnet. So getting to a final chain that people can use in production i mean
for what it's worth we already have tens of applications using our network already but
getting to mainnet you know just means that we've at least reached this kind of pseudo milestone
so i think that's our big focus and then yeah, we're just very focused on onboarding large amounts of data.
So you'll probably say over the next month or two that the amount of data the network
stores will probably grow by a few orders of magnitude, so 100 or 1000x.
And we're going to continue to keep onboarding more and more teams and hopefully within areas
that at least we find interesting. We feel like, as said going to be valuable in the next kind of decade or so
um and yeah that's kind of that's kind of the main focus and i think a lot of the
at least comms that you'll see from us will be focused around uh yeah some of the interesting
use cases that we're seeing uh on uh yeah uh on the chain um From a more community perspective,
yeah, we launched Kaito.
We'll be doing some other things
for the portal as well.
We'll be doing probably a ton more AMAs
and just generally interacting
with the community a little bit more.
You'll notice that I'll be a little bit more present
generally with the community and on X.
So yeah, always feel free to reach out.
All right.
Thank you so much for that.
And love to know,
so just to give you guys a little bit insight,
PewCast, we do a lot of,
I would say, Twitter spaces,
especially focusing in the Asia region.
Is there any focus on,
I would say,
some of the markets that you think will be very
good to have iris branding in it yeah no we we uh i'd say we probably focus on asia uh the most by
like an order of magnitude uh yeah we have a big uh a big focus on let's say within asia uh
I'd say within Asia, parts of Southeast Asia, Korea, China as well.
We have, and other regions as well, but I'd say probably those are kind of the top three.
Yeah, we have a major presence generally, and I'm personally actually in Asia.
I'm probably spending now nearly half a year in Asia.
I'm getting there.
And so, yeah, I spent a couple months in Korea.
I'll be back in Korea again relatively soon-ish.
And then I'll be in kind of whether it's Hong Kong and Singapore
and other places as well.
So, yeah, I'll be all over Asia, really,
for at least the remainder of the year.
And I'll be doing a bunch more kind of activations
and things with them with it got it sweet you know um every time after june or beginning of
june asia is just crazy bro like we have malaysia blockchain week next uh like in july and then it's
like you know gm vietnam and then you have a Blockchain Week, you have CoinFest Bali, KBW Singapore.
So like, once you come to Asia,
it's just like nonstop events and tours.
So excited to, you know, meet you as well.
I would say maybe one final question is,
you know, how would you describe
from the moment you started out,
you know, becoming an entrepreneur
up to now becoming an L1 founder?
Like, could you describe that journey
the highs the lows and what you love about it um yeah i mean i i uh you know i have friends who
ask me about uh you know becoming a founder uh and you know whether it's a good thing or a bad
thing because they're thinking about it themselves.
The way that I describe it is being a founder
is probably the most painful thing that you can do.
And in order to be a founder,
you basically have to not just have a high pain threshold,
you kind of have to enjoy pain.
But I just find the work that I do more meaningful.
Like this is probably the most interesting
and meaningful thing that I can spend my time on.
So that's why I do this.
And I fundamentally believe
that we're building something that is revolutionary
and will actually change how people,
whether it's businesses or individuals, do things.
And that's kind of, I guess, what continues to drive me but highs and lows
i don't know man i i i don't really i don't really think about it um i think they're always
challenging times during bear markets i think are never fun when the whole world thinks that
you know crypto is dead um i think during those kind of times i i've actually been pretty desensitized to it but
there are definitely times when you know you struggle um but i for me they kind of all merge into one like i i don't really like think about specific moments that are difficult uh for me it's
just you know every week there are challenges and if i keep on solving those challenges week on week then after a year we've probably made a made a ton of progress got it man i feel like i
love to ask you another i promise last question it's you know what's the best way for you to
kind of like reset for me to reset yeah wow uh i don't reset. I don't go on vacation and I work every day of the week.
So I don't really reset. I actually don't think you need to reset per se.
It depends on who you are. But I think the main thing that matters is
having some degree of balance. And that doesn't mean i'm actually not
a believer in work-life balance that's not what i mean if if you truly uh i'll put it this way if
you truly only worked 24 7 and you had no friends and no family now that's not sustainable but if
you have you know if you have some friends that you see even very occasionally or family or or
just anything like that or you do even very occasionally or family or just
anything like that, or you do sport just occasionally, like once a week, even once every couple
of weeks, like that's all you really need.
I think at a bare minimum to kind of maintain, but if you truly do work and I mean, work
100% of the time, like there's not at least 1% of the time that you do something else
that I, I, I just don't think that is, that is sustainable.
But for me, it is about 1% other things and then it is literally 99% work.
So, but that's just who I am.
And I love it.
So I'm probably never going to stop.
Got it.
I think like if you're doing something that you love and you're passionate about,
then it doesn't feel like working, right?
And it could just go on and on and on.
All right, Josh,
appreciate your one hour with us.
Hopefully, you know,
this conversation,
you find it meaningful as well.
But to the audience that is tuning in,
I know you guys are commenting,
Hi, Riz, Hi, Riz, Hi, Riz.
Thank you so much for spending your one hour with us.
If you are new to Iris,
do follow, Josh,
do follow Iris as well.
The handle is on the,
on the title of the spaces.
Like,
we tweet the spaces and we follow Pukas as well
because we will be doing
a lot of different content
based on Iris.
And I just pinned a tweet,
something that I wrote
after deep diving
into the ecosystem as well.
So Josh,
thank you so much
for tuning in.
Hope we could,
you know,
run it back
some other time,
maybe in real life
podcast
a little bit more
professional
but till then
see you in Asia
somewhere
or see you on the timeline
take care
bye bye
thank you so much
appreciate it Could I be the one you love? In the morning, in the night I'll be the one she's alive
This is how I feel when I can't stop Thank you. See the one you love us. See the one you live a night. I'll be here to teach you guys.
