Jonathan Schemoul - Founder of Aleph.im Ep #48

10/05/21 • 43 min

Jonathan "Moshe" Schemoul is the founder of aleph.im, a cross-chain p2p storage, computing network and first decentralized indexing provider for Solana.

00:36 – Intro & how did Jonathan Schemoul got in crypto

02:09 – What is Aleph and how does it work?

06:48 – Is Aleph database a blockchain?

09:20 – Understanding core nodes and Aleph’s economics

11:22 – How does Aleph interact with DNS?

15:29 – How does Aleph get verification of certificates?

21:44 – How does Aleph check integrity of computation?

25:06 – What is Aleph’s vision?

30:32 – Will Aleph always be project facing or will it one day be user facing?

32:28 – What load can Aleph currently handle?

39:00 – How do the economics work for people providing hardware and bandwidth?

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The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.

Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):

Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?

Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):

Well, into crypto it's a long story. I started way back in time, a bit on Bitcoin then I stopped because it was only money back then. And that wasn't the end game for me. Then I came back into crypto in 2015, 2016, and I started doing a bit of development because I saw that I really wanted to be part of Web 3, to do nice things with it. I started developing as an open-source developer for a few projects. One of these is the newest project which is Chinese blockchain layer one. I'm not really involved with it anymore.

Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):

But working with them as a community open source developer, I saw that there was some missing links somewhere that you couldn't decentralize all the stack with just layer one, it is not the one that they were building back then. So that's how the Aleph.im project is born. For me, besides that, I've been developing for a lot of companies before in the IOT space and also for big banks sometime ago. I've been a developer for a lot of years.

Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):

That's great. I mean, that's a great background. The thing that you're focusing on with Aleph is this idea that Web 3 is just a small part of the piece, but you still need UI front-ends, business logic and things sitting on top of the blockchain. How does that work?

Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):

The idea is that, okay, now you can have smart contracts on Solana, that's great. You can even do way much more on like just money on smart contracts, that's great. Now, you need to have a front-end. So you need to have storage for that front-end. That's not all because a smart contract, a program doesn't have all the data that you need. So you will need some kind of indexing to get history. You will need a back-end for that.

Jonathan Schemoul (02:37):

Most of the DeFi application that we see have some centralized back-end behind them. They're running on AWS, sometimes on dedicated servers or stuff like that that is still centralized. If a government, and we just saw something about it today, wants to shut down the DeFi protocol that is organized like that, they can. With Aleph.im what we are trying to do is decentralize the last mile, because for that last mile most projects are using AWS, so we need to decentralize AWS.

Jonathan Schemoul (03:11):

So we provide storage, as in file storage for the front-end files, database storage, because most applications are just databases and also an equivalent to Amazon Lambda, where you start small functions that will be launched on a decentralized cloud, where there is place for them and will get you a return value, and these can be written in any language and connects the web and also a PC from blockchains here at Solana obviously.

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:42):

Got it. Super Cool. S...

Jonathan "Moshe" Schemoul is the founder of aleph.im, a cross-chain p2p storage, computing network and first decentralized indexing provider for Solana.

00:36 – Intro & how did Jonathan Schemoul got in crypto

02:09 – What is Aleph and how does it work?

06:48 – Is Aleph database a blockchain?

09:20 – Understanding core nodes and Aleph’s economics

11:22 – How does Aleph interact with DNS?

15:29 – How does Aleph get verification of certificates?

21:44 – How does Aleph check integrity of computation?

25:06 – What is Aleph’s vision?

30:32 – Will Aleph always be project facing or will it one day be user facing?

32:28 – What load can Aleph currently handle?

39:00 – How do the economics work for people providing hardware and bandwidth?

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.

Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):

Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?

Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):

Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):

Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):

Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):

Jonathan Schemoul (02:37):

Jonathan Schemoul (03:11):

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:42):

Got it. Super Cool. S...

Previous Episode

Jeff "Jiho" Zirlin - Co-Founder of Axie Infinity Ep #47

Jeff "Jiho" Zirlin is the Co-Founder of Axie Infinity, an NFT-based play-to-earn online video game.

00:23 – How it started through CryptoKitties?

02:41 – What is Axie Infinity?

04:13 – Game design and constant iteration

05:52 – What is a blockchain game? A mix of social network, gaming and the start of a new economy

13:15 – Why is crypto important to Axie?

17:24 – Building and relying on your community

20:47 – Is the future of gaming the metaverse and user-owned assets?

22:22 – The feasibility of crossover between games with NFT ownership

27:35 – Where are Axies user from and what kind of players are they?

30:45 – What's Axie's endgame?

37:16 – Thoughts on competitors

41:18 – Generative art and creating an Axie

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Next Episode

Packy McCormick - Founder of Not Boring Ep #49

Packy McCormick is the author of the tech/web3 newsletter Not Boring and runs Not Boring Capital.

00:09 - Intro

01:34 - What are people building in the world of crypto / What does ‘Not Boring’ invest in

09:36 - Ownership in Crypto

16:00 - Conversation around Play-to-earn

19:06 - The regulatory aspect

22:14- How does Anatoly balance his time

23:54 - Thoughts on DAOs

29:33 - Network Effect and defensibility in Crypto

32:18 - Centralizing in Crypto

35:20 - Solana in relation to DeFi, the cultural and the metaverse side of things.

39:13 - The internet is Silicon Valley

41:12 - NFTs

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast, and today, I have with me, Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring. Hey, man. Good to have you.

Packy McCormick (17:27):

Good to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Anatoly (00:21):

So, You're an author and you're also an investor. How did you get into crypto?

Packy McCormick (00:26):

Yeah. So, I got into crypto back in 2013. I read Fred Wilson's blog post on investing in Coinbase, bought a bunch of Bitcoin, I think 38 Bitcoin, and then I went on a trip to Oktoberfest, and I felt bad about it, I had just quit my job, so I was like, "You know what, instead of spending money when I'm unemployed, let me just sell this stupid Bitcoin and I will pay for the trip."

So, because of that, because of the pain of selling then, I avoided it until earlier this year, later last year, and really, really got back into it as I was talking to a couple companies that I was thinking about investing in and thinking about the intersection of crypto and the metaverse and how an open economy just fits so much better with that vision, since then, I've just gotten deeper, and deeper, and deeper down the rabbit hole.

Anatoly (01:18):

So, you held Bitcoin because you can sell it? That's just too big of a pain in the ass.

Packy McCormick (01:24):

I felt so bad about selling it and missing out. I think at the peak, it was like a two million dollar plus mistake, and so I was like, "You know what? I'm out of this for a little while."

Anatoly (01:34):

That's funny. What do you guys invest in?

Packy McCormick (01:39):

Yeah. So, I run a small 10 million dollar fund called Not Boring Capital, and we really invest across stages, across geographies, across verticals. For the first, I'd say, half of the fund, it was really traditional investments, I'd say for the second five million in the fund, it's been pushing up against the 20% non qualifying limit. I'm actually investing in my first Solana based project this week, which is yet to be announced, so can't talk about it, but something in the real estate space and something I'm super excited about. But doing as much crypto as I can in there, but I still think some use cases are perfectly well suited to crypto and some are really not. There's plenty of things in Web 2.0 that I'm super excited about as well, so really trying to balance investing across both.

Anatoly (02:27):

So, by traditional businesses, you mean like software internet based ones?

Packy McCormick (02:32):

Exactly.

Anatoly (02:33):

Cool. I mean, I've been in crypto for like the last... I can't remember... it feels like a decade, and I can't imagine what the world is like. So, what are people building?

Packy McCormick (02:48):

It's a good question. So, today, I talked to a company, for example, that is making it a lot easier for a restaurant to order the food that they need. So, right now, if you're a restaurant and you're ordering food, you're getting a bunch of PDFs from suppliers every week that aren't even searchable, and then you're going through the 6,000 items on there and picking something. So, there are still a bunch of these huge unsexy categories that are completely ripe.

There's some security stuff that bridges into crypto, but there's one, again, stealth right now, but is also dealing with some Solana projects on the...