A Deep Dive into Decentralized Data with WeaveDB.

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Millie Yeargley, aka Tim, aka Hot Mike, aka, uh, it's getting cold outside and I like that. I hate the sun. The sun hurts me. And I'm here with Ahmad from WeaveDB. Ahmad, thanks for joining the PoolTogether community today.

Thank you for having me.

So Ahmad, as we start every episode, I would love to hear how you got into this crazy world, crazy, crazy world called crypto. And also, do you even tell people who aren't in crypto that you're in crypto? Because I'm rethinking my strategy on that one.

Yeah, definitely a really good question about if I tell people if I'm in crypto. Anyway, so I was a software engineer. I was actually a freelancer and I started in the tech world when I was 13 years old. And when I was 17, I was doing a lot of projects and I was also doing tech writing for a company called Section. It's a US-based company and they wanted to invest my money at that time. So I started like doing research on the stock market and I was in Syria at that time. And if you know the entire situation in Syria because of the civil war, everything is banned there. You literally can't open a bank account, you can't have a PayPal account, you can't do anything else. So I can't invest in the stock market, I can't invest in anything like gold or whatever it is. And I discovered crypto at that time. And as you know, crypto is permissionless. So I started doing my research and then I literally just invested in some coins really randomly. And one of them was GRT, which is the native token of The Graph protocol. So at that time it was in the middle of the bull market and I did like 200% in literally a couple of weeks. And then I was like, wait a second, did I just make it? Is this how crypto works? And I wanted to dive into the Web3 world. So I wanted to dive into how The Graph actually works. So I went to their official website, started reading more about The Graph, started reading the documentation, started building my own subgraphs. And then I started basically just being active in their community. So I had a full-time job in the Web2 world at that time, and I was doing some The Graph development as a side thing. And they started asking a lot of questions in the Discord server. And after like a few months, I got enough knowledge about The Graph to start actually answering people's questions. So I wanted to give back to the community, started being active in their Discord and just answering everyone. I remember like after 5 months of being active, people started telling me that my title is The Graph Machine just because I knew everything about The Graph protocol. Yeah, after a few months, I got my first contract from The Graph Foundation. I joined The Graph Foundation to focus on developer success, basically building a dev community, doing tech writing, and all kinds of things. So regarding the other question is, so before diving into the other question, so after been with The Graph for a couple of years or 1 year and 8 months almost. I did so many things for The Graph and then I moved to Dubai and then I started getting offers from other companies, but I never saw the potential in the companies I was getting offers from as the potential I saw in The Graph at the beginning. So when I saw what problem The Graph was solving, I got like an aha moment where I realized, okay, wait a second, The Graph is solving a huge problem in the crypto space. Everyone needs an indexing protocol. Everyone needs to use an indexing solution. So like, I was literally diving into all the protocols, all the projects, but none of them gave me that exact same aha moment till I met Tomo. Tomo is my partner, one of the co-founders of WeaveDB. I met him in Dubai and he told me about the problem he's solving, which is basically all Web3 protocols relying on centralized databases, just because we don't have the infrastructure to build a decentralized database. And then he started explaining to me the storage-based consensus paradigm WeaveDB is built on and everything he was doing at that time. And I just fell in love with what he was building. WeaveDB was in a really early stage and it was actually a solution for a problem he had for his previous company. It was actually a side project. So I joined WeaveDB because I saw the potential behind WeaveDB to replace centralized databases in the Web3 world. And to answer the second part of the question, so at the beginning when I was in Syria, no, I wasn't telling anyone that, uh, I'm in crypto. The political situation in Syria is not really good enough to talk about this kind of thing. But right now I just tell people I'm in the tech world. It's really hard for the, for me to explain to them, oh, the crypto world is not only about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but if they are technical enough, I would tell them, oh, what we are doing is actually a database, which is decentralized. So I tell them, you know how social media applications you use on a daily basis, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, they are Storing all of your data in the background. So we are doing something similar, but in a decentralized fashion where there is no single point of failure. They don't sell your data, they don't control it. And yeah, that's it.

So did you go straight from Syria to Dubai?

Yes, that was almost 2 years ago.

Okay. Wow. Yeah. So you were, so, wow. Okay. But then you said you were with The Graph for a year and 8 months. So that was, you were in Dubai during the whole time you were in, with The Graph or kind of in between?

No, no, I was mostly in Syria actually. As I told you, I started like self-teaching myself when I was like 13 years old because I wanted, when I was 13 years old, we actually lost everything in the civil war. So I needed to make some money to like help my family out. So I started self-teaching myself software engineering, like coding, and I started doing all things like related to Python programming language from web scraping, data visualization. And so many other things, all of them were like kind of small projects. And then I started participating in a lot of hackathons. I started winning a lot of hackathons. And then I dived into the AI world, machine learning, tech writing. Like I did so many stuff before actually deciding to join the Web3 space.

So when's your book coming out? Because you got to write one, right?

Hopefully one day.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay. So, I mean, would love to just keep talking about your story, but I'm sure we will talk more after this episode, but I want to, I want to get into what you were talking about with The Graph. So you were talking about how you saw this indexing solution was such a need and it's a huge space and huge opportunities, not enough for The Graph to just solve the thing itself. There needs to be multiple solutions. And so you go for the database and I'll just say this right off the bat, especially now, I have to, I'm hosting, I'm doing like a concert for the Wossies on Sunday. And I have a Mac and a Mac computer and we're using VRChat. And so to be able to use VRChat, I have to use a PC. So I picked this solution called Shadow PC that my friend, one of the devs at Generation Software, told me about. And then my, that same dev friend posted today that Shadow PC's database got hacked and a lot of information got out, private information that was supposed to stay private.

Yeah. Yeah.

Don't worry. It's not the financial stuff, but you know, it's, it's stuff that shouldn't be public. And this happens all the time, whether it's LastPass. There's a feature in the iPhone that basically tells you all of this stuff that's been hacked, right?

Even Twitter got like 200 users' info leaked, which is like a multi-billion dollar company. They should have the best tech, the best infrastructure, the best engineers. So a single point of failure is a single point of failure.

So that's my question is like, I mean, the database is the treasure trove. Look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? Look at the passwords and logins complete, you know, like this is the main target or a main target. Um, and so you want to get into the database business. You want to get into the thing that everyone's targeting. So how, how can WeaveDB help with this, I guess is my question. But my, the question behind the question is, Why are you doing this?

Yeah. So why we are doing this? So this is how WebDB actually started. So my partner was working on a project, which was a blogging platform for the Japanese market. And he was using Firestore, which is a NoSQL database by Google, and it's a centralized database. And then when he was doing this, he realized, oh, wait a second. How can I call my protocol decentralized if I'm using a centralized database for everything? And he started working on WeaveDB as a side project. So WeaveDB was literally a side project at that time. And then when he built the actual product and he shared it with some people in Singapore at our Weave Day, they asked him to spin this out as a separate company because they saw the potential behind it. So every single Web3 protocol, you know, right now is using centralized databases, not because they want to, it's because we didn't have a decentralized database because All blockchains are not scalable enough to handle a large number of transactions. So every single blockchain we have right now is good enough for token transfers, for NFTs, for basic DeFi interactions, but nothing more. You can't build an actual web application on top, like social media or whatever it is. And with WeaveDB, we are separating computation from storage. I'm not sure if I can dive into the tech details if you ask me to, but if I can, like, it's just like a separation between the computation, which happens entirely on the client side, and it makes it infinitely scalable and free. And we use Arweave as a permanent decentralized storage solution. So with this concept, WeaveDB as a decentralized database is possible for the first time ever. And Web3 protocols can for the first time ever use a decentralized database and actually call their applications decentralized.

Okay. And as far as like computation versus storage, are you saying that like with Web2 centralized versions of this, Those are packaged together. Like that makes sense to me, right? So like with WeaveDB, it's the storage of the, you know, the cells of the different, you know, the records, the rows are all stored, but then you're hooking up whatever interface that you want to WeaveDB to query those, that, that information. That's what you're saying, right?

So with the separation of computation from storage, we are actually solving, solving the problem of not being able to build a database on top traditional blockchains. So for example, when it comes to Ethereum, whenever you are doing a transaction, the computation needs to be happening on-chain and you need to pay gas fees for the miners to confirm your transaction, right? With WeaveDB, that's happening on the client side. So there are no miners in the middle and that makes computation 100% free and 100% scalable because it's handled by the client side. But if you want to compare it to that Web2 world, actually It's totally different. So in the Web2 world, if you are using like Firestore, for example, you are hosting your own server and then you need to set up that server and maintain that server. With WeaveDB, everything is happening on-chain. You don't need to maintain any, anything. Also with WeaveDB, we are trying to, to provide seamless dev experience. So WeaveDB in itself is a smart contract, but you don't actually know that it's a smart contract if we don't tell you. So the SDK is separating everything and the query APIs are exactly similar to any traditional NoSQL document-based database in the Web2 world.

So then why does, why is on-chain necessary? And this is like a traditional debate within crypto is like, or at least a current debate is like, not everything needs to be on-chain to be Web3. I think decentralization is one of the main tenets. I mean, why on-chain? And why not just be decentralized?

So there are many answers to this question. So one of them would be social media applications. So when it comes to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever it is, you need all of that information to be permanent. So you need a decentralized storage solution and you don't need your info to get hacked, right? So even when we, when I gave the example of Twitter earlier this year getting hacked, if they used, for example, a decentralized database and they use like a protocol, like a protocol, for example, to encrypt that data before putting it on chain, there is no way on earth that data can get hacked. And this is the first one. The second is, for example, when it comes to NFTs. So all of us remember FTX. When FTX went down, all of their NFTs basically just disappeared because they were hosted on their own servers. And when FTX went down, they just shut down their own servers and the NFTs disappeared. Okay. Really down right now, but they can represent ownership. And in the future, when we have actually, actually useful NFTs, we want them to be permanent on-chain and accessible and available at any time and anywhere for us to access. So this is just a couple of examples, but there are so many other examples, like for example, gamified projects. So all of gamified projects, all the games in the Web3 world are relying on centralized databases. Instead of centralized ones.

So, okay. That, that makes sense. You want things like, there are some things that need to be permanent. There are other things that don't need to be permanent, but it, this is just me learning here. There's not a need to have like, basically, so everything is on-chain is what you're saying as far as storage goes. And my, I guess my question is like, does it have to be, or it's fine that it is? 'Cause I know that chain, like blocks, Block space is very rare, is, comes at a premium, right?

So when it comes to Arweave, at the current price, it's really, really cheap. And if you are going to store your data for more than a year, it's way cheaper to use WeaveDB with Arweave to store your data permanently than actually paying to store it for a single year. So if you want to store your data for less than a year, it's like WeaveDB is definitely not your solution to use. But if you want to store your information for more than a year, WaveDB on Arweave is optimal. Also, what I wanted to mention that WaveDB is relying on Arweave as a storage solution, but in the future, at one point, we can also support other centralized solutions like Filecoin, for example. So with Filecoin, you can choose to store your data for like 6 months, 2 months, or whatever, however, however you want. So if we support Filecoin at one point, you'll be able to choose between Arweave with storing your data permanently, or just for a couple of months on Filecoin.

So that gets into like WeaveDB and like future plans. What other things are you thinking about in expanding the feature set for WeaveDB?

Yeah. So WeaveDB started as a NoSQL document-based database. It's exactly like Firestore in the Web2 world by Google. The query APIs, everything like is exactly like Firestore, Firestore, sorry. And we recently announced in Singapore at our Weave Day that WeaveDB is a modular database now. So we can support other databases on top, like relational databases, vector databases, GraphQL APIs on top. So our future plan is to support all the databases and make WeaveDB a general-purpose decentralized database.

Is there any connection with like zero-knowledge proofs with WeaveDB and like any sort of advancement there?

Yeah. So we actually get asked this question a lot. So since we use Arweave, no, we don't. do any ZK proofs on top because everything is verifiable on Arweave. But yeah, if we ever choose to do ZK proof, it should be with other solutions other than Arweave.

Okay. So let's take PoolTogether as an example, as like, and me not being a dev and you being the Graph machine, being a, you know, a literal genius here. If you could just walk me through You know, a DeFi protocol, it doesn't even have to be pooled together, but just how they would use WeaveDB to deploy and yeah, how would they interact with WeaveDB?

Yeah. So the first use case of a DeFi protocol would be order books. So all of them are using their own like centralized databases for order books and they can just use WeaveDB for that. And all of that can be public for people to access. So instead, like, for, for example, I, I know a lot of DeFi protocols that actually using, uh, their own solutions and then they are providing APIs for other devs to access their own order books. But if they are using WebDB directly, then that database is accessible by anyone. Any dev can literally just connect to their database and read that data, retrieve it back.

Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I was Googling order books for a second, but then I'm like, oh, I get it. No, I understand.

I understand what you mean. Yeah, it's buying and selling. Whenever someone is ordering, like, I want to buy 1 ETH at this price, That's like a recurring order.

Very cool. Very cool. So, okay, Ahmad, what's your, what's your growth strategy? Because I mean, really, it's adoption for you, right? Like, are you going around to hackathons? Are you, I mean, because it's really, even for crypto, right? It's very difficult to, when the priority is to build for devs, it's just like, we got to build, we got to build. And then devs go into their toolbox and it's really the easiest, quickest, fastest, most accessible tools. And, you know, they're going to Firestore, right? They're not going to, they're not looking to change up their database game. And so you're having to, you're having to sell to their crypto values, right? You want to get them in their crypto feels of like, hey, are you truly decentralized? Like, are you checking this? Are you going, are you taking the easy way? Or are you taking the crypto native, true to our values way? Is that how you go about selling? Or is there another thing like, this is actually better It's a better solution. It's easier for you in the long run if you just do this. How do you, how do you convert people?

So it depends on their use case, but let me give you a couple of examples. So there is this app called NFT Canvases. It's basically on-chain verifiable NFT prints. So if you have an NFT, you can verify that you are the owner. They will print an NFT, add a QR code, and anyone who will see it at your house will be able just to scan the NFC, just like put their phone on that, on that NFC chip, and then it will verify that you are the owner of that NFT. So all of that is built on top of WeaveDB and they needed to use WeaveDB. They were actually building their own solution to do that. They were building a decentralized database by themselves. And then they discovered WeaveDB and they found out, oh, it's like the optimal solution for them. Why? Because they need to have a database where they can keep a record of all of their users and verify that Each one of them is actually the real owner of this NFT. And they need all of that to be public on chain. They need to allow anyone to go to their website and be able to search for the owner of a specific NFT. Another, so that's not possible using centralized databases, for example. Another use case is on Lens Protocol, there are so many apps that are doing something like, like, like a playlist. So, you know, when you are on YouTube, for example, you like a video, you add it to your playlist. That's not possible on Lens protocol directly. So there is this app called LensPlay. I'm pretty sure everyone heard of it before. What they were experimenting with WeaveDB, and they are going to release the feature soon, is that it's a playlist feature. Anyone will be able to just add or bookmark a specific video. And this database is available to anyone to access. So literally any applications on top of Lens can just connect to this database and retrieve back the specific playlist someone made on Lensplay. So these are just a couple of examples on top of my mind, but a decentralized database can be really important for Web3 applications. And that's what we are going to focus on for some time. When we are ready to scale, we can also go target Web2 applications and show them, oh, Web3 is decentralized, it's scalable, it's cheaper than Web2 solutions. We are solving these issues your database is having right now, but we already started by providing a seamless dev experience. So like for the listeners right now, if you go to our console.weavedb.dev, even with zero tech experience, you can deploy your own first database, like literally in 3 to 5 seconds, you can add documents and play around with the database. And every single transaction you are making is a smart contract transaction, but you don't know it and you are not writing code. It's really seamless and easy to use.

So what are some unique challenges that, you know, a Web3 database brings. I see some things on your website as far as, so, so I want to hear it from you, Aman, first, like what, what are those challenges? And then I have some, I've imagined some of my own that may or may not exist.

So the biggest challenge we had is that if an application is doing basically a large number of transactions and we can't handle it by ourselves because like everything is a smart contract state. And at the beginning for the first, like, 8 months to 10 months. WeaveDB can handle like a small application, but it can't handle large-scale applications when it comes to, for example, social media apps. So what we were building is a rollup node and we are going to release it really soon. We already made the announcement at our Weave Day in Singapore. This rollup node, you can think of it as an L2 solution and it's an app-specific rollup that focuses on databases. So whenever you deploy a database, you connect to this node. It solves all the scalability issues we had before, all the scalability challenges we had before with WaveDB. And WaveDB now is ready to handle large-scale applications like social media apps that can do hundreds of thousands of transactions a second without any issues. Also solved some of our latency challenges we had at the beginning. So because we are using a decentralized solution, our latency was insane. Like it was more than 300 milliseconds. And right now it's, the rollup node is basically lazy evaluating the entire contract state for the clients. And the latency is less than 200 milliseconds, which is even faster than Web2 solutions.

That's awesome. I would assume that cross-chain would be a challenge, but then it sounds like the rollup, that's where you would resolve any, like all the database business goes on the rollup. And then, but is cross-chain an issue?

So, so the rollup, you can think of it as a way of bundling transactions before submitting them on Arweave as an L1, and then lazy evaluating the contract state before giving the result to the client. So the burden of the computation is not happening on the client anymore. It's happening on the rollup side. But when it comes to cross-chain authentication, there are 2 sides to this question. The first side is if you are talking about supporting the authentication of other wallets. So we have, so WeaveDB is built on Arweave. You can use the Arweave native wallet, or you can use any EVM wallet with your MetaMask, or you can use also Intmax or internet identity, and we can support basically any chain with, with any wallet. So the authentication of deploying database, interacting with any database can be done using any chain, any, any wallet. But if you are talking about serving the data of WeaveDB to other chains, after all, WeaveDB is just a database and it can be used by any protocols on any chains. It's chain agnostic. And in the future, we are also doing some research on, on serving data from WeaveDB as a database on Arweave. to other smart contracts on other chains, which is not, which has not been achievable before in the Web3 world. We have already achieved building a demo serving data from WeaveDB to Cosmos, but we want to do the same also from WeaveDB smart contracts to other smart contracts on Ethereum or other chains.

That's awesome. Yeah, so that's what I was, I think that's what I was getting at. Thank you for answer— for giving me possible answers to the question. But no, that was it. It was like, if there's a smart contract on Cosmos and then you're trying to, it's trying to interact with the, the WeaveDB smart contract on ARweave, how are, how is that happening? And so you have a demo up, which is awesome. And that also answers, I think, my question about the EVM versus, you know, non-EVM chains as well, right? It's the same. There, there's that, you're, that, that's happening as well.

Yeah. Yeah. You can literally use any wallet with any, uh, chain to interact with WeaveDB to deploy a database. And yeah, serving to other smart contracts is not like possible yet as a product. We have like our team doing research and building that product in-house, but it will take us like at least 1 to 2 years to serve data from a smart contract, which is the database on Arweave, to other smart contracts on other chain. It hasn't been achievable by any protocols yet in Web3.

Got it. And Ahmad, also, I'm, Digital identity is like a big topic as well. And then WeaveDB would be a part of that, a part of that conversation, right? Like as, as you have records, as you have CRMs, you know, people like, people have information that needs to go with them that, that creates their identity. And I know like disco.xyz, they're doing like credentialing and then it's off-chain, but it's still decentralized and that sort of thing. So could you walk me through just WeaveDB and digital identity and how that, that could work?

So DID is one of our top use cases, but we didn't see any protocols building on top of WeaveDB with DID yet. Hopefully soon, but most of the apps we have been seeing recently are social media apps, also authentication-based apps. Other use cases other than DID, social media would include also indexing protocols. So even The Graph, by the way, can use WeaveDB at one point in the future. So, you know how The Graph is, is The Graph has graph nodes and they index data from different blockchains and then they store all of that data on, on their indexer, indexer nodes. So each piece of information indexed is duplicated across multiple nodes on their own network. So instead of doing so, they can literally just index data and then put it on, on WeaveDB. And we already have our query API, our NoSQL database. And in the future, if we support also GraphQL, which what they are relying on at this time. So instead of duplicating the same piece of information on multiple indexers, they can just use a single permanent decentralized database that is 100% reliable because of our Weave and save money and resources. Not only the Graph, but all indexing solutions can use WeaveDB as an underlying database.

Okay. So this is great. I would love to know, Ahmad, what, I mean, you had success with that 200x investment. Early on in your crypto career, where, so, so you obviously can see the future. What, where are we headed with crypto right now? What are the new themes going to be? You know, what are you excited about even outside of databases?

So that investment was only 200, not 200x, 200%.

Oh, sorry. Sorry.

2x.

I love how my brain went there. Sorry. Still, that's still good. Still good.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of prices or in terms of tech?

No, no, no, no, no price, no financial advice. But I mean, you could totally if you want, but I, yeah, I was just asking about like, you know, there's a lot of talk about moving from infra, like the infra is there, which it's not, but it's, I mean, people are saying it's basically there, right? This year or next year, it'll be there. So let's build more. What are we doing? So that more of that. You know, and everybody also talking about a wider adoption, which just seems impossible to me, which is why when I say crypto, 50% of the time when I tell people I work in crypto, it's anger. And the other 50% of the time it's, ooh, can you tell me what coins to buy? You know? And I'm like, I don't even do that. I just build. So anyway, yeah. Where are we going?

Yeah, exactly. All people outside of the Web3 world think that Bitcoin and Ethereum are just like Coins move up and down in prices, and that's it. I've never met someone that actually knows that Web3 is about the tech, and it's like revolutionary decentralized world, all of that. Anyway, so regarding the next bull market after the next halving, hopefully in 2024, but regarding the tech side, I still think that we are in a really early stage. The crypto market, the Web3 market is still immature. They are saying that the infrastructure is ready. It's not. I'm telling you, like, I've been trying all the protocols. I've been trying to dive into all the protocols. And we are still in a really, really early stage. Even before WebDB, even with WebDB right now, if you take a look at the infrastructure, it's not ready to handle like web tool-like applications. That's why we didn't see like, for example, an application killing Twitter, for example, or Facebook or WhatsApp or all the apps we use on a daily basis. DeFi is revolutionary, but till this moment, every single day there is a hack happening. Every single day there is a protocol getting compromised. Every single day there are people losing money. I think The amount of money getting lost in crypto is like absolutely insane. It's in billions of dollars every single year. So that just tells you that even DeFi protocols, even the DeFi sector, which is the top use case of the entire blockchain market at this time, which is the only useful like use case in the market, is not fully ready yet. We are still getting hacked. We are still losing money. So I think we need like, I'm really bullish on the decentralized world, but everything takes time. I think we need like 4 to 5 years minimum for all the infra to be ready. And after that, we need like 5 to 10 years for actual applications to be built on top.

That's good. That's good. It's also depressing, but it, but it's very good. It's on it. It is, you know, you want it to be here right away, but even like with the iPhone, you know, like when we got the first iPhone, I was like, this is, I'm not using this. And then the App Store happened. I'm like, Okay, I might be using this. And then now using like smartphones and just seeing, but it's taken 10 years or it's taken, I don't even know how long it's taken, but the same thing with crypto. It's like when I got in in 2019 and 2020, I just got so mad because I couldn't do anything. And, and I should have stayed, but I didn't. And then I came back in 2021 and I feel like there's more to do. But even, even looking at Twitter, I've seen like big names who are in DeFi saying that they're scared of DeFi. And so as we're launching PoolTogether V5 this next week, even, you know, we're very much limiting our vaults. Even though you can deposit any token into any yield source, the ones we launch with are going to be USDC and DAI, or sorry, USDC and wrapped ETH in AAVE, because that's the tried and true. And we don't want the, we don't want the hacks, you know, because the hacks are coming. The bigger you are, the more vulnerable you are. So, okay, so we got 4 to 5 years before I can tell everyone I told you so. What about, you said you were in AI though as well. Why crypto over AI? Because that's a big thing. A lot of people left crypto to go to AI recently. Sellouts.

So before diving into this topic, congrats on your future launch. I'm really excited about that, by the way. And

thank you.

And yeah, so even big DeFi protocols are getting hacked. I think probably Aave is the only one that's really secure, hopefully. Like, I really hope so. I don't want to lose my money.

Knock on wood. Yes.

Every single big DeFi protocol got hacked and every single, like, even games, even bridges, like every single bridge got hacked in the last 1 or 1.5 years. Ronin Network, Wormhole, like all of them lost hundreds of millions of dollars, like billions of dollars in total. So we are still really, really early. Sorry, what was your question? AI versus Web3? Yeah. So when I started, so if I have to be completely honest with you, when I was doing like all things related to Python, I was doing so many side projects as a freelancer. And when I was diving into AI and machine learning, it was taking literally my, my whole time to learn about stuff. So it's known that if you are an engineer or if you are a coder, you need to learn like 70, 80% of the time and actually code only 10, 20%. So it's mostly about learning, but when it was about AI, it literally took most of my day, more than 90% about learning. And every single day there is something new. Same thing goes for cybersecurity, by the way. Cybersecurity and AI, in my opinion, are the hardest 2 fields in the tech world. And why I moved to Web3, just because I realized that crypto is permissionless and because I like was in a condition where I, where I couldn't use any products, like for example, GitHub, PayPal, having a bank account or anything because of like sanctions on Syria and how I saw that no one is like banning me from using Uniswap or owning a cryptocurrency. That's how I fell in love with the crypto. But that doesn't mean that I'm not really bullish on AI since like I was literally a kid. And when I saw people like just jumping from Web3 to AI, I saw so many companies just rebranding everything from Web3 to AI just because of the hype happening in the market. I think these protocols, these companies, or these people jumping from, from a field to another will fail because they are doing it for the hype. They are not doing it because they have experience. They are not doing it because they are passionate about it or, or they want to build actually something meaningful.

I love that. 90% learning and everything changes. And I feel like within you, there's this builder, right? You want to be able to like 90% learning and 10% doing stuff is For somebody who wants to make stuff is not very attractive. And so to always be learning new stuff every day, that's very interesting. And yeah, cybersecurity and AI, very fascinating. And even in crypto, you have that cybersecurity kind of aspect to it. But my question for you, Ahmad, is why found something like why you went from like super contributor at The Graph, The Graph machine even, to I want to be a CEO. Because for me, I love ideas. I love executing on ideas, but like, Founding a startup just seems like, I don't know, I feel like there's a special breed of human for that kind of thing. Was that you or did you just see the need and you're like, no, I'm going to make it. And you weren't even thinking about like, I want to be a startup CEO.

Actually, I always wanted to build something of my own, but I didn't have the resources when I was in Syria. I didn't have anyone to support me when I was in Syria. And also the The environment I was in was totally different. So when I was in the tech world, or even when I was diving into Web3, literally I didn't have anyone to talk to about that in my own environment. No friends, no one knows what crypto is. No one knows what the tech world is. When I first moved to Dubai, everything changed for me because as you know, Dubai is the Web3 hub of the entire world and I love to change. I always try to learn about new stuff. I always try to see what works for me and whatnot. And since I was a kid, I was always jumping from a field to a field because I saw the potential behind something else. So when I was like 13, I was focusing on freelancing. I was focusing on web scraping and then moved to like kind of all kinds of things related to data science from data visualization and so on. And then when I like discovered the tech world, the, sorry, the tech writing world, I fell in love with that. When I started doing tech writing, I fell I love and I felt passionate to a level that after 6 months, all of my content ranked on the first page of Google search. Every single article I wrote for some companies like Section, for example, is the first search result on Google and even above official websites like, for example, the official website of Linux. So when I move to something new, I just, I don't do it randomly. I think about it and when I feel passionate enough, I I put all my energy to build that. So anyway, when I was at The Graph, the main reason why I was only a builder, because I was in that environment. And when I moved to Dubai, I started attending more events. I started meeting people that are like-minded that I only met on the internet behind the screen. When I started going to events, going to meetups, conferences, and then seeing how beautiful the 3D world in Web3, I fell in love immediately. I realized that I want to be on a stage. I want to represent someone, something. I want to represent a company. I want to be able to build a network and basically just move completely to the BD world. And when I met Tomo, I saw the opportunity because Tomo is one of the, probably the smartest guy I've ever, like, I've ever met in my entire life, but he's super technical. He likes literally to be on his laptop in his room building all the time, 24 hours. And he wanted someone to represent the company. He wanted someone to be like the monkey on stage and to build a network, to build the community, to, to handle the entire company. And at that time it felt right for me. So I just joined them after like meeting Tomo for literally a week. Hope this answers your question.

No, it totally answers my question. But so you, but I'm also noticing that from builder, there's also this whole business side of things that also exists, right? You want to make cool stuff, but then you need to fund it and you need to, you know, operate it and you need to care about legal things and you need to. So was that part of you as well? Is that part of the learning where you're, you're like not only building something, but you need to learn about the business side of things, or is that something you outsource?

So when I was at The Graph, I, I started doing some sort of dev rel and I started learning how to talk to clients, how to bring clients in. How to do sales, basically. Actually, a lot of people tell me that if I'm not in Web3, I should do sales because I'm really good about selling a lot of stuff. Anyway, so when I was doing like developer success/dev rel, I started learning about how to build a network, how to attract people, how to sell a product. And when I moved to WeaveDB, there are so many things to be learned every single day when it comes to investor relations or like building community or like doing like business collaborations, I'm learning about something new every single day. And I'm always like asking people around me, people who are more experienced than me, how does this work? What should I do in this situation? What should I do in that situation? So it's always a learning curve and also having technical experience helped me out to manage WeavedDB as a company because WeavedDB in itself is an actual technical product. So imagine if I don't have technical experience, and I'm trying to sell this product to anyone else, I wouldn't be able to do it. If they have like technical questions, I wouldn't be able to answer them. Uh, when it comes to workshops, events, I'm also talking about like a lot of, like giving a lot of workshops, talking at a lot of events, going to meetups or like jumping on calls with investors. All of them always have technical questions and my technical background helps me a lot when it comes to this.

Well, that's awesome. This is great. Well, Ahmad, thank you so much. First of all, before we leave here, I want to know, was there anything else that you wanted to talk about, promote before I wrap things up?

I would say Jotz. So to showcase how powerful WeaveDB is, the new rollup node, we built a fully decentralized social network called Jotz. It's still in private alpha at this time. It's being tested by 50 community members from the WeaveDB community, but it's basically a combination of Twitter and Medium. So Jotz is fully built on WeaveDB. Every single transaction is a WebTV transaction, but you can follow people, post articles, comment, and do all of the stuff you can do on Twitter and Medium. If you're interested, you can go to jots.social and sign up for, for the waitlist using your EVM wallet. Hopefully we are going to launch it to the public in the next couple of months or so.

Yo, that's great. So a mix between Twitter and Medium, jots.social, J-O-T-S dot social. I've posted the link in the chat. And you can sign up for the waitlist. This is, I love it. You got the product, but then you're like, hey, let's build the things. How did that, how did you, how did this get built? You guys just got free time. You're like, hey, we're going to build something extraneous.

So actually we built Jotz for a reason. So as I told you, we are providing a seamless dev experience. WaveDB is not only a database solution. We have all the dev tools in one place, but we wanted to understand how our clients, what are our clients' needs? And since WebDB is still in an early stage, we don't have really like big applications using WebDB. So what we did is basically we started building Jotz as a side project to see what features are needed by our database solution. So whenever we are building like the likes feature, the comments feature, the posting articles feature, whatever it is, we see, oh, this is needed. So we add it to our SDK, we add it to our database so WebDB can now support all the features needed by, by an application to be fully decentralized. So anyway, we started this as a side project and then we saw, wait a second, we just built a fully decentralized Twitter and Medium. Like you can do anything on top of it. You can follow people, you can post articles and it's extremely scalable. And at the same time, we are also integrating, we are integrating biometrics authentication. So you will be able to sign up and use Chats using your face ID. So every single person in the entire world. has a Face ID or a fingerprint on their own phone. So you have an iPhone, you have Face ID, you can just like log in into Jots and use your Face ID to generate a wallet and then use Jots immediately. So with this scenario, we are just breaking the barrier between Web2 and Web3, between the Web2 world and Web3. So you don't need actually to maintain your own wallet. So yeah, Jots started as a side project, but it's fully decentralized social network and we didn't really actually announce it yet. We already have like 1,000 signups for the whitelist. Get more users.

Yeah. I just signed up and I just tweeted it. I just did like the little tweet for Jotz. Yeah. Gotta rep the brand. I love how you justify scope creep. You're like, hey, we're going to build this and then it's great research for the main product. Right. But now you're going to have, what if Jotz takes off? And it's like, but I mean, you still need to, it's powered by WeaveDB. So you still have to build the thing, but that's so cool. I love that.

WeaveDB will still benefit from Jotz. So Jotz is built on the rollup node. And once we start charging for our, for our rollups, Yachts will be paying WeaveDB for that.

This is great. Okay. Well, if you're listening, sign up for that. That's, that's awesome. Check out WeaveDB because you could spin up your own decentralized smart contract database lickety-split, like under a minute, something like that. But Ahmad, thank you so much for being here and for talking to the PoolTogether community. This is, you know, I love learning too. And then when we start getting into databases, I'm like, oh, I haven't talked about these on crypto yet. So I learned so much from you. I appreciate it. And I see that you're well-traveled looking at your Twitter. So I'm sure we're going to bump into each other at one of these events here soon. What are you going to DevConnect next? You doing that?

No, actually I'm not going there. I'm currently in Southeast Asia. So between KL, Vietnam.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Well, I'm not going either then if you're not going to be there. Cool. Well, we'll connect soon. IRL.

Hopefully. Hopefully. All

right, Ahmad. Take care.

Thank you for having me. Have a good day.

Cool. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.