[00:00:00] Luke: From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

[00:00:28] You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Phil Mataras. Phil is the CEO of Permanent Data Solutions, a company building Web3 apps and infrastructure that power the Arweave permaweb, a permanent internet. PDS’s suite of products include AR. io, a protocol and incentivized network of decentralized gateway nodes that provide services for reading, writing, and indexing the data on Arweave and R drive storage products.

[00:00:52] Phil and I discussed what permanent storage is, and why it’s important, how permanent storage is useful, and use cases where it’s less useful. [00:01:00] What are the missing links needed to connect adoption with the permanent storage and the permanent web and how AI and permanent storage can work together. And now for this week’s episode of the brave technologist, Phil, welcome to the brave technologist.

[00:01:16] How are you doing?

[00:01:17] Phil: I’m doing great. Luke, how are you? I’m doing well. Thanks for coming on. I’ve been looking forward to this one to kind of set the table a bit for the audience. Can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up doing what you’re doing? Was it a keen interest or kind of fortunate chain of events, or

[00:01:31] Yeah, I would say maybe a bit of both.

[00:01:34] I think any founder who’s successful probably has a fortunate chain of events in there. Somewhere, you know, my background has been in enterprise it, you know, I went to school for computer science. I wasn’t much of a programmer outside of school. I was more someone who could explain the technology to the business or the customer.

[00:01:51] I mean, I ended up doing a lot of enterprise architecture work for one of the big four accounting firms. I’m, you know, building really big systems in the cloud and on [00:02:00] premises. And, you know, I think it was. 2017 or so I started hearing about Ethereum. My brother was talking about it. I saw that Microsoft had this Ethereum enterprise alliance partnership, something or other caught my eye.

[00:02:14] I was like, okay, what is this? Oh, it’s a world computer. That’s really interesting. And you know, my background being more in the systems and infrastructure side was like, all right, well, I’m not an investor. I don’t really have money to invest, but I was like, well, maybe I could, you know, participate in this world computer and, So that’s really what got me into the whole like crypto blockchain rabbit hole.

[00:02:33] Like I went really deep, really fast, put together a seven GPU ETH miner, tried mining all kinds of non Ethereum coins, both high, low market caps, you know, got burned, lost wilds, went through, you know, all of those experiences that you might have. And then, you know, ended up in a telegram group. With other like minded crypto individuals who are like, Oh, are we’ve this new ICO?

[00:02:58] It’s really hot, [00:03:00] but in the U S like, Oh, I can’t participate in that because us investors weren’t allowed, but you know, it’s data storage. So something different than what a theorem was promising. And it was something that to me was a little more. Tangible right here. My background was in a lot of systems like collaboration platforms.

[00:03:16] Email is like this is something I could use. I was running this a theory of minor like I wasn’t really using a theorem for anything other than just. Tokens, right. Sending tokens in like a money, but are, we’ve really struck me. And the thing that really struck me was the payment model, right? So it’s pay once store forever.

[00:03:33] So that sounds like, wow, this is really, really interesting. So I started mining, are we, if I kind of. grew with that community. It was really small at the time. You know, growing up, I played lots of video games. I was in lots of online communities. I kind of liked being in a chat room and learning different anonymous people about them and, you know, kind of growing it.

[00:03:51] So it had all of that. It had like the technology and like really early community growth phase that just really attracted me. And it stuck with me for a few [00:04:00] years. And then coronavirus. And I was like, all right, you know, I wasn’t too happy with my job. I wasn’t really working on anything that I felt was truly innovative.

[00:04:08] Meanwhile, the, our weave, you know, the, perma pill had been completely digested and, you know, I was so deep in our weave at that point, I was in a Dow for our weave, I was helping other people out with mining, building some things, bringing back the programming skills. But yeah, I think it was. You know, again, like chain of events, I don’t know, coronavirus happened.

[00:04:26] It was maybe the last straw that made me say, Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur. You know, quit my job, went in the first open web incubator that the are we’ve team, you know, the foundation was running and then, yeah, it got my start, so it’s a lot organic kind of to a degree, but yeah.

[00:04:42] Luke: The space has a way of, biting you and pulling you in completely, right?

[00:04:45] Like um, I think, you know, totally resonate with the whole community element of It is kind of infectious and it’s one of those places where you get people working together and you can see things happen pretty quickly. So let’s dig into this whole idea to buy once [00:05:00] and store forever. Like what, what you guys are offering here, because I think, I mean, like, I think it’s a pretty important thing and it doesn’t really get a ton of attention outside of the space a bit and, you know, our audience might be kind of familiar with crypto, but less into the weeds on like the infrasight and like the actual benefits of what you guys are offering to the market.

[00:05:17] And so maybe we can dig into that a little bit. What is this whole concept of, of buy once and store forever all about?

[00:05:23] Phil: Yeah. So it’s definitely a nice marketing catchphrase, right. Right. But it’s, you know, really. Meant to symbolize, I guess, the core protocol, core incentive model for our weave, right? So figure our weave is a purpose built blockchain for storing data and it could scale really big.

[00:05:42] You can store millions and millions of billions of things on it. And it’s all based on this protocolized endowment. So it’s like just pay once, meaning when you upload your file, you pay the gas fees. And that’s going to cover the cost of storing that file for 200 plus years is [00:06:00] what the team has kind of worked out the math for that and enshrined that in the are we’ve code itself.

[00:06:06] So it’s like buying something versus renting. No, when you upload your data, you’re buying that block space for hundreds of years. And that protocol endowment. Basically draws down money, draws down AR tokens to pay for your file storage and all the other storage on the network. So, you know, that’s really the key thing, right?

[00:06:26] And these are, we’ve nodes are incentivized to store all of this data because if they don’t, they won’t have a chance or they’ll have less of a chance to receive. The mining rewards and the fees paid for transactions. So it’s just a very hyper focused protocol on storing and replicating data. So really interesting.

[00:06:48] And yeah, it opens up a lot of interesting things.

[00:06:50] Luke: So if I had something I wanted to store and it’s basically as a person trying to store it, like people can then go access this or I could go post it, file somewhere [00:07:00] for people to see, like, I’m really dumbing it down, but I think it’s. important, right?

[00:07:03] Because right now you’re seeing people getting censored online certain types of content not being allowed to be shown in a place where, you know, free speech is pretty important.

[00:07:12] Phil: Yeah. Am I wrong with that statement No, you’re absolutely right. I mean, and that’s the beauty of it. You upload something on our weave and now it’s part of the perm web, right?

[00:07:21] And you can access anything that’s on our weave, just in your browser, like you would access. Any other page, picture, music, whatever it is, you could access it by its transaction ID, like some long, hard to remember thing, or you can use the R weave. Name system, right? Which is friendly names for these ugly transaction IDs.

[00:07:41] So it’s really easy to access that picture file, web app, DAP, whatever it is. Just like you would something on like the normal web.

[00:07:49] Luke: Awesome. That’s cool. What are you guys seeing? Like a lot of early interest in this or people using it

[00:07:55] Phil: yet, or is it still too early? Or. The Arweave network has just reached its [00:08:00] six year anniversary.

[00:08:01] Billions of pieces of data have been stored. I feel proud to have been a part of it so far, right? Cause there’s just so much information already on there. And it’s some things that you might expect lots of NFT data, right? So whether it’s Ethereum, Solana, or other platforms that represent the tokenized aspect of that NFT, lots of people recognize.

[00:08:23] Are we even this pay one store forever, immutable, permanent storage as a place to keep picture or whatever is associated with that token. So I think that was one of the first, maybe bigger use cases that took off. We’re also building an app called our drive which is like a web three dropbox, which makes for the storage of data on our, we’ve really easy and you could, you know, share your drive and.

[00:08:47] You know, make it public or private. So like that use case of just personal storage, things that you want to maybe pass down to your children or keep secure for really long periods of time or important records. So there’s [00:09:00] certainly that, that use case and those important records even lend itself to.

[00:09:05] Things that leverage are we for censorship resistance, right? So we’ve seen things like the apple daily news get uploaded to our weave before the Chinese government had censored it and taken down that site. So it’s archived forever immutably before it could get taken down. So there’s use cases like that that are out there that I, personally find are like the most powerful ones.

[00:09:27] You know, lately we’ve been seeing more and more AI development leveraging permanent storage as well. So there are a few teams that are building AI products on top of our weave. And that’s, you know, maybe leveraging permanent storage for the synthetic data used by AI to better train their models or record decisions made about AI.

[00:09:50] I’m all getting stored on our weave. So we’re seeing that. You know, happen more and more because again, are we provides this record of Providence, right? So, you know, who uploaded that piece [00:10:00] of data and when, so that is super useful for a lot of AI applications. And yeah, it’s interesting to see where that’s going to.

[00:10:07] Luke: Yeah. I mean, just, kind of thinking out loud here and we’ve had some guests on, we’ve talked about these things before too, where. crypto and AI will kind of converge. And there seems to be a lot of consensus around this notion of like, okay, I can prove my authentic self, with a blockchain.

[00:10:21] Right. But I could imagine that using our weave, you could also potentially like store some type of a proof or some media of you saying it’s you or something. Right. Like, I mean, we’re even seeing, you know, all sorts of interesting records being put online, even as recent as this week. And so I think that, you know, it’s super cool.

[00:10:37] Like, I think It’s one of those things where even though you say six years, I think people get so caught up in how fast the cycles are, but six years is not that long when you’re developing infrastructure, right? Like, and, and it’s almost like you guys are still ahead of the curve a bit on like the use cases are still, people are starting to realize, okay, these use cases are super powerful.

[00:10:56] They just haven’t hit that mass market yet.

[00:10:59] Phil: [00:11:00] Our mission as a company is to get permanent storage in the hands of everyone. Right. Because I really feel that it is something that anyone could use in some way, shape, or form. But yeah, getting that mass appeal in a specific industry sector. I think we’re still trying to navigate that.

[00:11:15] Luke: If you can wave a magic wand and say, look, like all the hurdles are out of the way, like what vertical or part of the market would you love to see just go all in on what you guys are doing? If you could get that adoption curve from any one space, would it be something like content creators or, is there a certain area that you’d be like, Oh man, this is so perfect for this space.

[00:11:36] And they just don’t know it yet.

[00:11:37] Phil: Yeah. So, I mean, just talked about AI. That’s, that’s pretty new. I think there’s. Just a lot of growth that’s going to happen in that space, but it’s already turning out that permanent storage can be useful. I mean, a lot of, of AI applications, right? Even grayscale, they just wrote an article.

[00:11:53] I included, are we specifically about like, yeah, decentralized storage, like is powerful. So sure. That’s one of them. Yeah. Content [00:12:00] creators, musicians, that’s been near and dear. To me, I think from the perspective of just even the little guy storing and timestamping their records, music forever. I think that’s really powerful ranging up to, you know, the bigger players.

[00:12:16] I think using our weave as a means of distribution could be really interesting, anything that you store on our weave. Can have other metadata associated with it. So you could attach licensing information, like you can use our drive and attach your creative commons licenses to your files. So I think that could be really powerful from a content creator perspective, musicians, artists, digital creators.

[00:12:38] You know, we’ve been trying to, yeah, crack into the, maybe the kind of professional archiving industry. Cause there’s, you know, lots of museums out there that have all these records that You know, they can’t or don’t want to store and just need a good cold storage way for people to access them for really long periods of time.

[00:12:55] So, yeah, I think maybe that’s probably a few industries that I think could [00:13:00] take on. Now, we’ve certainly talked to medical industries, health sector. I think that’s where it starts to get tricky because it’s a decentralized network and there’s a lot of, Regulatory needs specifically around health data, personal health information, where it can only be stored in a certain place or kept under certain custody.

[00:13:21] And that’s really where like the Rweave network, you know, the RIO network is not that this is open permission lists it’s around the world. So, you know, it’s not every industry who will be able to utilize it or every part of every industry. There’s certainly some fundamental things that, Just might not apply for your use case.

[00:13:39] So we like to be real about that. You know, we don’t try to just stuff everything in there just because. But yeah, a definitely a few things that could give some power to some different industries.

[00:13:49] Luke: It’s awesome. I mean, I was just reading about I guess there was this like ancient like Greek Herculaneum library or something, and it was like burned in some volcano and they’re using machine learning to kind of translate the [00:14:00] fragments from this thing and like, what better place to store something like that forever, right?

[00:14:03] Like it could be. And, but, but also, I mean, the creator piece is like important, you know, I think we’re at a place where artists, the whole industry around music and creativity has been so disrupted already, and it’s like music isn’t ingested the same anymore. And, you know, there’s not a lot of options for career.

[00:14:22] I mean, there’s sometimes there are, but there aren’t, what do you think is a missing link here? Between, you know, you’ve got this powerful infrastructure. Is it the lack of applications or just more general adoption of crypto? What do you think the thing is that’s kind of getting that you guys need that missing piece that needs to connect for more folks to get on board?

[00:14:40] Phil: Yeah, I think from the creator perspective, you know, they like to, you go to NFTs, right? Oh, creators need NFTs permanent storage exists. Even outside of the concept of, NFTs, right? So I think for creators to understand that there are these storage networks that exist, they go beyond just NFTs and tokenizing your [00:15:00] stuff.

[00:15:00] Because I feel like unless you were one of the people that benefited from like the NFT kind of hype wave that might’ve happened to, you know, a couple of years ago. You’re probably a creator, an artist who’s looking at that just has a negative vibe from it, right? They might think it’s, it’s not real. So it’s overcoming maybe some of those perceptions.

[00:15:17] I think for something like NFT storage, it’s, really affordable. You know, again, if you’re a creator doing really big videos, HD quality, you know, we had someone do some documentaries depending on the size. Sure. It could get Costly and cost is maybe a factor in adoption in general, right?

[00:15:34] Not everyone can afford buying, you know, paying for their permanent storage for hundreds of years. But I think it’s just the perception that people don’t. Or aren’t aware that these networks exist. They aren’t aware that they’re so easy to use. You can just pay with a credit card and access your stuff in the browser.

[00:15:52] Right. So a big part of it is just that basic. Basic education. So I think more and more that happens and as more and more people are [00:16:00] de platformed or their data goes away or something happens with their digital identity. Or X number of reasons, you know, that could happen to your data. Like that also helps educate people as to why a permanent web can maybe fix a lot of those problems.

[00:16:15] Luke: Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, and I think your, your case too, around the anti censorship bit or censorship resistance. is like a huge one too. I mean, like, I mean, the information space has gotten so radically different so quickly where, you know, these are real concerns now for the broader public, especially if you’re trying to get information to people and what better way than a browser to do that.

[00:16:35] I know we talked a lot about, the pro, what, what differentiates are we from like other data storage options out there? I’m in a boomer in this space. So like, I think about things like storage IPFS, right. That were from that 2016, 17 era. What differentiates are we from some of these other options that are out there?

[00:16:52] Phil: Yeah. So maybe a couple of things. So one is the incentive itself. So the pay once store forever, permanent storage. There’s no [00:17:00] contractual basis. It’s not temporary storage, right? So that’s a big differentiator between our weave and many of the other decentralized storage platforms out there, which you could argue maybe at this point, it’s like, it’s got a good lead on everyone else.

[00:17:12] It’s kind of proven. Maybe a little bit. Six years is okay. Track record to start. I’d love to get to 10 years. I think that’s really when it’s like, wow, this thing is can survive, but that incentive I think is, is one of the biggest pieces, how you build on it. It’s also very easy. I know a lot of other platforms like to tout that, but you can use the common languages on the web that you find today to build on it and, you know, you can obfuscate away some of the painful things.

[00:17:40] About it, right? So for example, there’s only a thousand transactions per block on our weave and there’s a block every two minutes. So you figure, well, probably want to upload a lot more files than a thousand every two minutes. So there’s already these pieces of infrastructure that are built on top of our weave to help it scale to the amount needed to really support, [00:18:00] you know, the activity of, of the web, right?

[00:18:02] So, yeah, I think it’s, got some benefits like that now comparing to IPFS. That’s really interesting. And we. Talk about IPFS a bit. And obviously hear a lot of feedback from that community. I don’t know if people realize, but way back when the are we’ve node shipped with an IPFS node.

[00:18:17] Luke: Really?

[00:18:18] Phil: Yeah. So it’s really these two protocols standards, whatever can kind of be married together, right. And it’s already been married together from the sense that nodes could run IPFS pinning services. I don’t think any are we’ve noticed doing that, but you could write. It was the right. The are we team thought of this way back when and tried playing around with it.

[00:18:37] There’s. I mentioned any piece of data on our weave can have metadata. So there’s apps like our drive and others that allow users to automatically hash their file and apply the sid as attack. So now you have a piece of data on our weave with acid as a tag that you can easily find and reference. And that’s because I PFS is a [00:19:00] content address.

[00:19:00] It’s not the actual storage of the data, so it’s It could be really powerful if you kind of marry these two things together. And we do see some apps and, you know, some SDKs that that try to do that and we’ll see where that goes. Maybe the integration becomes even tighter in the future between some of the infrastructure that supports it as well, right?

[00:19:19] So you still couldn’t, for example, access your file by its IPFS hash. So maybe a little different than what you might expect.

[00:19:27] Luke: Yeah, but still, I mean, you know, having kind of this robustness, even the capability cool. I think like, especially as things kind of mature a bit, 10 years is great. People might forget like yesterday, I know I’m dating this episode kind of, but like yesterday was with the ninth year of Ethereum, their ninth birthday was yesterday, so I think, you know, things move, it hasn’t been that long, people, you know, but the amount of work that’s gone into this such a short amount of times, it’s fantastic.

[00:19:52] Fantastic. We talked a lot about the upsides of this stuff. are there any cases where like people think about these things as kind of a mutable, right? Like permanent [00:20:00] storage, are there ways to take down content once you have it up?

[00:20:03] Phil: Yeah. So maybe you could consider that a downside of the whole platform, right? Is that there’s no delete button, There’s a standard that basically a user can submit a transaction to the network that says, please stop hosting this. But as I was saying before, the Rweave network, the incentive protocol says to every miner, like, Hey, you better store as much as you can, or you’re not going to get reward.

[00:20:23] So the network kind of works against anyone who’s trying to delete something. And I think this is definitely a benefit. This is pro not a con, right? This is by design, each minor on the network, each RIO gateway, right. That’s serving this data. They get to decide, they get to moderate the content on their own, right?

[00:20:43] It’s not one single board or corporation or regional jurisdiction around the world. It’s every single one of them. Right. And there’s hundreds of nodes and a bunch of our reason are we’ve nodes and gateways that all. Might respond to moderating a piece of content differently. Maybe it’s something that is [00:21:00] like a fake outlook.

[00:21:01] com site. It’s trying to get passwords, right? Like sure. Moderate that. Nobody wants to serve that or something really bad content that like universally around the world, nobody will want to serve that keeping in mind the are we’ve protocol doesn’t differentiate any of it. Doesn’t know what the content is.

[00:21:19] It just says, Hey, minor, you better store this content. Do you have it? So it’s a really fascinating setup. This kind of. Decentralized, almost democratized content moderation, and yeah, really make sure that the operators of the network, the other ones that have a say, not some, you know, single board or corporation.

[00:21:35] Luke: Well, and I’m sure the application layer 2 can kind of if it’s important enough to store forever or worth the cost of storing forever store forever on this on the protocol, right? Like, but otherwise, you know, just temporary do it or something like that. You can hide

[00:21:48] Phil: data and there’s all ways to not show the stuff that.

[00:21:51] At different layers but the core principle of decentralized content moderation has been in there since day one.

[00:21:57] Luke: And I’m just drilling into this because I think that [00:22:00] people are, don’t really understand how powerful this is. If I go into Google photos, for example, they’ll want me to pay a yearly storage fee, then I get the benefit of backing up my photos.

[00:22:10] You’re backing them up to Google servers. So if you get false, positively flagged for something or lose your account access or whatever. And I’ve had this happen to me, like personally, where back in 2018 or something, I got SIM swapped and like somebody got my Google. And if I didn’t know somebody at Google, I would have been out of luck.

[00:22:28] Like it took months to get my credentials back and my photos of my kids are on there. Right. Like, I mean, imagine. If we had something where I had control and access over it, are we, where I’m there’s my stuff, like, and it’s there permanently, like, you know, it would have solved that problem. But I think those are those cases where, Hey, we’re using them right now.

[00:22:45] And it can be very useful to have without big tech kind of getting in the way. We’re even seeing, I mean, more and more of this just intermediation. That’s just pretty alarming. but yeah, no, that’s fantastic.

[00:22:54] Phil: Yeah. I mean, even if, Oh, you uploaded your data to our weave and let’s say you lose your wallet.

[00:22:59] Or [00:23:00] someone steals your wallet. They still can’t take down your data. Right. Right. So it’s still there, you know, it’s still downside, right? Like owning your truly owning your digital identity. You know, it’s another education piece. Like there’s downsides to that, right? Crypto. If you lose your wallet, your Bitcoin wallet, well, there goes your Bitcoin.

[00:23:17] No one else will be able to access that. So the same concepts apply to data. And then it’s like an educational piece that might take someone a bit of time to fully understand that, what that means.

[00:23:27] Luke: Yeah. At Brave, we have the token, right? we’ve been in this space for many years you know, both with products that have Web3 technology integrated into them and then also with having our own token and navigating working in this space around things like regulation or regulatory uncertainty is kind of a tricky thing.

[00:23:43] How much has that impacted what you guys are doing or how much are you concerned about this area of the space right now, if at all?

[00:23:51] Phil: Yeah. I mean, let’s put it this way. I’m not. Super concerned with it right now because we have an excellent legal counsel who has been giving us really good guidance. [00:24:00] But this is certainly something that’s been on my mind since day one of being a founder in web three, right?

[00:24:06] You know, the RIO network, we are planning for a token. We have a test net now with a test token out there, but this whole time of fundraising and communicating anything relating to the token. I mean, It’s been a challenge, right? It’s been a lot of overhead to make sure you’re saying, doing the right things, because that’s what we want to do.

[00:24:22] We don’t, we’re not trying to skirt any laws or do anything that we shouldn’t be doing. But I think that the problem is like, well, this industry is innovating so fast, right? Like I think it’s next to impossible to expect really any traditional corporation or government to catch up in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

[00:24:40] Right. So as much as I wish that would happen, it’s like, Let’s just be real people. Right. And it’s in the USA, so yeah, there’s a lot of potential eyeballs on. What we’re doing and the token ecosystem that we’re building. I mean, it’s been super clear to me the last few years that, you know, we’ve been under this whole, there’s no rules, right?

[00:24:58] Like you kind of figured the [00:25:00] rules out yourself, right? Mindset that I guess the regulators have been having where they’re really providing no clarity outside of whoever they sue. Right. So it’s like you learn based off of whoever they sue. So it’s unfortunate crypto blockchain networks, permanent storage, like it could be a real positive.

[00:25:16] National impact for, for the U S right. From financial utility perspectives, you know, and I know lately, especially like, Oh, we’re seeing politicians start to champion Bitcoin and that’s great. But I think it’s really clear that they’re just doing this to get votes. It’s really clear that these systems are pretty much an opposite of.

[00:25:36] What traditional politicians want, which is control. So hopefully the regulations improve. There’s more clarity in the future, but not this giant list of rules you have to follow and fees you have to pay and all that.

[00:25:48] Luke: Right, right.

[00:25:49] Phil: That’s another thing I’ve learned being an entrepreneur is like, yeah, it’s running a business in the US.

[00:25:53] There’s a lot of, a lot of stuff, regulation, things you have to go through. So hopefully a token doesn’t [00:26:00] become like, The next IPO where you have to go through that level of rigor to do a token, right? Let’s not see it get too over regulated, but I’m definitely no expert in any of this stuff, but it’s certainly been not the kind of thing I thought I’d have to pay attention to when I jumped into any of this, you know, almost four years ago.

[00:26:16] Luke: It is wild. Like you, you end up being part lawyer, part accountant, part, you know, all of these things, right? Like engineer sleuth or whatever out of, out of all this. But yeah, I totally agree with you too. I think, you know, politicians aren’t or politicians. The tech, I mean, not going to slow it down, like not in this space.

[00:26:33] I think that’s something that’s kind of been underestimated is like, people think that, you know, the people that have been very hostile to the crypto space have tried tactics that don’t work when you have people that can kind of write out their portfolio dying to 90 percent in love, you know, like, and it’s not.

[00:26:47] Still be building amidst that, that’s just a whole other level of conviction that the space is underestimated, I think. But I mean, I think that’s is what makes me excited about what you guys are doing, right? Like, and, and this is what we’re really excited about at Brave, is when [00:27:00] projects have like actual use cases that are, are meaningful and you know, are building something real.

[00:27:05] Is there anything that we didn’t cover today that do you want the audience to know about what you guys are doing or anything in particular?

[00:27:11] Phil: Yeah, I think maybe important to just cover a little bit about how the RIO network really makes the permalib happen. Right. I know we were talking about our weave and how it’s this incentive to store and replicate data, but it doesn’t really do all the things for a web app or website.

[00:27:27] Right. When you access your file on our weave, you know, you’re going to a link in your browser, that’s actually served by a gateway, right? And these gateways make up the RIO network. So, you know, like to describe the permalab is made up of different layers, right? So you have our weave, that’s the hard drive.

[00:27:45] Stores and replicates data. There’s a compute layer, which that can kind of be met by different decentralized platforms. You know, I mentioned before, we’ve seen people make NFTs on Ethereum or Solana and store their data on [00:28:00] our weave. Right. So it’s like the compute is provided on a, on a different platform, but it leverages permanent storage.

[00:28:06] I don’t know if it’s crossed your, you know, your XFeed yet, but there’s a new platform called AO that’s being worked on, which is also like a decentralized compute that uses permanent storage. So it’s a bit more tightly integrated. So that compute layer does like this additional logic that apps need. And then you have like the web layer and that’s really the RIO network and that’s going to cache all of that.

[00:28:27] The data, it’s going to have an index for apps to query for their files, pictures, whatever. It’s going to render the pages or the full websites or apps. And it’s going to provide the friendly domain names for any of the perma web data as well. So it’s kind of fitting in all those additional pieces that the hard drive itself doesn’t do.

[00:28:50] And this is really important, right? Because. And it just kind of dawned on us maybe a year or so after I started our drive, right? That’s how I got started in the [00:29:00] ecosystem. It was like, Hey, well, it’s great to store your data for 200 plus years. But if it’s really slow and unusable and you can’t access it, what’s the point.

[00:29:10] Right. So that’s kind of what inspired the, the RIO network to really fill in those gaps and really be that front door for the rest of the permalab. So, yeah, I’m really excited about that, especially the name system. I mean, I’m a big DNS. Geek. So for data that you can access across every domain on the, on the network, I think is super cool and really resilient and powerful.

[00:29:29] So

[00:29:30] Luke: it’s huge. Like it’s that thing you can remember. Yes. You talk about missing links. Like, I think you just explained two of them. One is that layer you guys are providing, right? Where you know, it’s the front door. And then the second bit is just remembering where to send the thing. Like, I mean, you can remember what domains, right?

[00:29:44] Like that’s,

[00:29:44] Phil: what people are used to. So what if we only had IP addresses, right? Like go to google. com notes, like go to, you know, one seven, five dot whatever. So it’s a really important piece that I’m excited for and ties in with the token that we’re building as payment for names. And so, yeah, you know, I [00:30:00] think of course we’d love to, to talk more about that.

[00:30:02] There’s lots of documentation online, docs. ar. io, which is ar. io slash RNS. If people want to, to learn about that. But yeah, it’s been awesome to chat with you.

[00:30:12] Luke: Yeah, likewise, man. And one last thing, like, where can people find you if they want to find you and follow what you’re doing online?

[00:30:18] Phil: Yeah, so my Twitter handle, X handle, whatever.

[00:30:22] Violenarios, V I L E N A A R I O S discord is also really good. I mean, you could basically DM me on discord or Twitter or even telegram. They’re always open, always interested to hear from people. We’re doing a few events later this year, if it was gonna be a permission list in October. And then some of us from the team are in the tri state area.

[00:30:43] So we’re thinking maybe there’s gonna be something in New York. That’s always a great place to get permapilled, right? Coming to an event, whether are we’ve RIO, you’ve learned so much, meet the And yeah, it always means a ton to us to, to do those kinds of things. So yeah, looking forward to hearing from anyone.

[00:30:58] Luke: Yeah. Yeah. No, Phil, man, [00:31:00] it’s been really great to have you on. Love to have you back to, at some point to do another check in and see how things are going. And yeah, I hope the audience really enjoyed this one. Thanks a lot for coming on.

[00:31:09] Phil: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Luke. Appreciate it.

[00:31:10] Luke: All right. Thanks for listening to the brave technologist podcast to never miss an episode.

[00:31:16] Make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave. com and start using brave search, which enables you to search the web privately. Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the web.