How Crypto Fixes the Internet Monopoly | Neil Chatterjee, DAWN & Andrena

So the part that where we like to stand out and seen our ability to stand out versus even 5G and even something like Starlink is we all have cool point-to-multipoint coverage. But what we have is point-to-multipoint multi-gigabit coverage. And that is really kind of the big threshold here is we can do that at speeds that are exceeding that of existing home internet connections. So you can distribute it very effectively throughout the market.

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Thanks for having me on board, Jano and Santi. Really appreciate it. And, you know, looking forward to the opportunity to talk. So thanks again, guys.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, let's not talk crypto. Let's pause on that. Let's talk, uh, wireless ISPs and Wi-Fi. How does this— how does the system work? How does the whole— what is the supply chain of, of, of Wi-Fi and ISPs and, uh, enterprise Wi-Fi and, and routers? Like, tell us about how this whole system works.

Yeah, so it's funny because I remember, like, you know, as I've gone through the process of pitching what we've been doing, it's been really cool to be able to explain this whole thing to people because it's kind of like this hidden world of digital infrastructure that we don't— many of us don't really know about, right? The entire world is just super connected, we kind of take it for granted, but behind the scenes, if you kind of, as you said, begin to tease apart and understand the supply chain, you get to see a really interesting landscape here. Uh, Crown Castle was like really my first foray into this whole space, and you know, if you look in the TMT sector, they're known for anything from towers, but they have a big fiber business as well. And so the university in town, Princeton here, they utilize Crown Castle. And when I was looking for a wholesale source of connectivity, I found these guys. I'm like, oh, what is this company doing and how does it work? And it turns out that they have a business model of either just buying up little small regional fiber companies that interconnect businesses, but also building their own. So their whole job is they will run fiber up and down major highways in a given region like the Northeast and find a way to interconnect them for other people like cell towers, you know, enterprises, but universities as well. And the important bit is that that kind of brought me into the world of realizing that there's these kind of 3 tiers of internet providers, right? Crown Castle is a second tier. The third tier are these folks that are like Andreena, like Comcast, like Verizon, right? Our job is to distribute internet within a given market, within a given region. But then you have these wholesale guys who make a business just out of enabling the tier 3 guys and some bigger enterprise customers. Tier 1 and, you know, everything that interconnects Tier 1 is, I would think, a pretty magical place. You know, it's kind of a nerdy thing to say, but the point being is think about like subsea fiber optic cables, right? Think about data centers and the interconnections between data centers. Those are really the guys that are the Tier 1 types of folks that are bringing a whole bunch of capacity towards a given country, for example. And so that Tier 3 approach of like some level of a global interconnect to a data center some level of a regional interconnect with a fiber provider, and then a tier 3 folk that can distribute it. That's really the entire internet architecture as we know it, all the way, you know, connecting, you know, the entire world with this type of model. So it's been a pretty cool way to see where not only how it works and the technology behind it, but also the various pricing models behind it and see the various history of how this data changes over time. So I guess that's my quick little bit of overview behind there, you know, subsea fiber optic cables, data centers, and local interconnects. And then regional providers like Andreena.

Okay, so, so I'm in New York. So the regional providers are like Verizon and Spectrum and things like that. They get it from the tier 2 and the tier 1s are the ones that are doing the crazy technical work, like laying the fibers and the undersea fibers and the data centers and all that kind of stuff. What is the problem with the market as it exists today?

So the biggest problem, and I think this is one that we can kind of all relate with, is that internet prices are high and there's not a lot of competition. right? You're in a scenario where, like, I remember when I first moved to Princeton, even there is localized redlining. So, you know, they're technically, like, these providers are taking up markets and further subdividing them in a way where competition is just, you know, I don't want to, I can't, it's hard to say it's directly artificially restricted, but you're in a scenario where providers kind of like to take their own little corners of this. They don't necessarily want to overbuild on each other and replicate the infrastructure because they're not going to know they're not going to be able to compete from a cost perspective. So I'd say the biggest problem is just, yeah, it's kind of, I said earlier, right? Prices are too high and there's not a lot of competition. And ultimately it's not hard to understand why, right? Like historically it's been very expensive to bring people internet, right? If you're in a scenario where I need to run a wire several thousand miles, like, you know, that's going to be a very expensive proposition here. But I think things are beginning to certainly change as we look across, you know, the world and the technologies behind it. But yeah, that's been the kind of the core, the core problem here. And what we've seen the opportunity, Andrina, right, is building owners and residents that we work with are always looking for a cheaper, better option. And when you look at like the NPS of these guys, like consumers aren't necessarily thrilled with them. It's a very, you know, a very monopolistic business with, you know, kind of streamlining you in, trying to lock you in with long and unfair contracts. I'd say, you know, internet providers are, you know, it's due for a shakeup and We've seen, you know, incredible companies like Starlink go down the route of trying to change these sorts of models as well. So it's clear that, you know, not only is the space looking— need a revamp, but there's people that are trying to find a cool way to go about doing it.

Yeah, that's a really good point on the Starlink one. And I want to double-click on this idea of like, why hasn't it been tried before? And get your thoughts there because—

Yeah. So I'd say, you know, disrupting the last mile, I think that's like if you kind of ask the folks in like networking research ever since the '90s, people have always been like opining on like what's the best way to do it, right? Like we can see that from the cable TV days now to the internet days, that monopolistic trend has always been there and has always been kind of pervasive, right? And so wireless networking researchers and all types of networking researchers have been looking at like what are the ways in which we could find a way to disrupt this? And the best example for why this hasn't been possible or the way to change it hasn't really been around is to look at what is really the first attempt at demonstrating if something like this was possible, right? The kind of goal to keep everybody in mind here is the goal is let's team up to be able to build a new type of network that is cost effective and not reliant on a single provider, right? Like that's the vision of what the entire history of disruption for this space has been focused on. And the first really cool attempt of that was a proof of concept, and I think 2003 by MIT. They did this project called RoofNet, which essentially used 900 MHz mesh repeaters across the rooftops from Boston and Cambridge to be able to provide connectivity. And they demonstrated like, hey, you can create a municipal-wide wireless mesh network to provide internet connectivity to people across a huge landscape. Santi, to your point, the biggest issue about this was always on performance. You know, they were using the same spectrum in this scenario, the 900 MHz spectrum that Helium was using on their IoT network. So the spectrum has been around, but the underlying technology was only able to do half a megabit per second, right? Like I'm calling you on a gigabit per second, you know, you're being, you're 2,000 times off from where you need to be with this underlying technology. And so the easy kind of simple answer about like where we're going to now is we're evolving into a world where wireless actually can compete against fiber, right? Even like 5, 6 years ago when we first started Andrina, it wasn't always easy for wireless to compete against fiber. Because you didn't have the performance that you needed. And I think you're seeing this, this evolution of technology, whether it's stuff like Starlink, whether it's stuff like 5G or even the fixed wireless that we deploy, it's reaching higher and higher speeds. And I think the timing is incredibly opportune to be able to use those higher speeds, the low CapEx with a really cool model, of course, to be able to disrupt this entire thing.

Neil, can you just— you mentioned Andrina a couple of times. Can you just introduce Andrina a little bit more? Like, what is the business model? Who are the buyers? Who are the sellers? Like, what, what problem are you solving here? Maybe let's just double-click on Andrina a bit.

Yeah. So Andrina is kind of how we got into this whole space, right? Like, we started off by just teaming up with Princeton University and with the idea that like, hey, you guys have excess bandwidth with Crown Castle, you guys have a bunch of cool rooftops. Let's interconnect these rooftops and provide cheap internet to the people in the town. And that was the, you know, the start, right? Is kind of in the neighborhood that I lived in, the one thing that, you know, I could do to help. So I tried to do everything that I could to connect these towns and, you know, demonstrated that there was a viable model. So we ended up building a business called Andrina that took that model and really tried to put it on steroids, right? So we are a wireless and a fiber internet service provider, and our goal is to really bring internet to the last mile. And we do that by teaming up directly with the residents of a given area, providing them internet service that starts at $30 or working directly with the building owners to build them a full property connectivity experience. So our approach towards this is we're going to compete directly against Comcast. We're going to compete directly against Verizon. We're going to build a better product that offers a more convenient internet experience, and we're going to have a cheaper way of delivering internet to people. That's been our entire niche, right? We took the automation, the better experience, and the cheaper aspect, and we've just been teaming up with building owners, public housing authorities all across the country to be able to do this. You know, we're providing internet to a little over 10,000 households right now across 10 different states. And, you know, we work with a combination of both REITs, single-family homes, housing authorities, new construction developers. It's a whole bunch of people that are interested in, you know, not only, hey, I want to get cheaper internet, but I want to provide a better experience for my residents. And this has been kind of the niche that we found ourselves in. It's a big niche, but it's been a fun one to tackle because we've been able to see firsthand that the demand is really there, right? The demand for cheap, better internet is there. Uh, so I think, you know, as we have gotten to, you know, multi-million in revenue annually, we've been able to really kind of demonstrate ourselves and get the conviction that, hey, if you could find a way to put this whole thing on steroids and bring it to everyone, like, there's a huge opportunity here.

Let's, uh, dissect the unit economics here. Like, you talk about lower internet, like, how, how cheaper is it? Um, uh, you also reference CapEx also coming down. So, uh, yeah, what do the unit economics look like for you guys?

Yeah, so the most important thing to consider here is, like, so to give you guys a base sense, right, depending on, on how we work with the landlords We're typically in a scenario where we can offer internet from $25 to $30 to a building, right? So, and that's for, you know, high speed in terms of what you're getting.

This is like, when you say high speed, it's like fiber optic or?

No, it's comparable to fiber optics speed, right? So we've done scenarios where, you know, in some properties when we work with the landlord, we can get people a gigabit internet for $35, right? So it's a really good opportunity to give people, A, the same speed at the top of the top that they're currently getting, just at a much lower price. And I think the unit economics is kind of tells the full story of this entire thing. Like, if you want to understand the history of communications, uh, and how the world interconnects, it all comes down to unit economics. So to give you a good sense of it, right, like right now, my— I'm at home calling you guys from my Verizon connection. That Verizon connection, I'm paying $128 per month for. If you go back to a data center, you know, the tier 1, tier 2 type of guys, and you buy that same amount of bandwidth that you're looking to get for a home gigabit connection, it only costs you about 50 cents, right? So it's kind of staggering to think that like, hey, I'm paying $128 for something that's costing them 50 cents. It's a 99+ gross margin product, right? The— well, as you kind of look underneath the hood, you begin to realize, oh, the reason that they're charging me $128, it— because it's— because it costs them thousands of dollars to bring that connection to my home, right? That's the whole CapEx piece of the side equation, right? Like if they're— if they have to pay anywhere from $2,500 to $4,000 to bring that connection to my home, which is kind of a rough Verizon metrics here, you can kind of see where in order to get a sensible payback on your entire infrastructure, you have to be charging that much amount of money. And so I say kind of, you know, the way to think about fiber unit economics is like you're thinking like thousands of dollars per household. As we think about the deployments that we do in terms of buildings, we're paying on the order of magnitude of around $200 per unit. And so you can see if you're in a scenario where you're paying $200 per unit, it can be much cheaper in terms of bringing internet to folks. And that's really what wireless has enabled is that by beaming internet directly to the user instead of going over the wires, instead of it costing us thousands of dollars, it's only costing us around $200. And I think as we kind of look at really changing the space and allowing everybody in the world to participate with this technology that we've built, that's kind of a reflection of the economics that we want to create here, right? We want to be in a scenario where it doesn't cost thousands of dollars to bring internet to a household. It costs, you know, low hundreds of dollars to bring internet to a household. Yeah.

And I wanted to reemphasize what you just said. The real reason why they are charging you $139 is because they at some point needed to front the CapEx to build this grid, which is— you look at American Tower, like all these different companies, infrastructure companies have to make huge investments in CapEx upfront and then amortize that across their customer base for X amount of years. And they need to get, you know, the payback on that CapEx is like a key metric, right, that they're looking at.

Correct. And if I could, in one kind of like the only, you know, I guess the only financial or like, you know, economic insight I can offer in the space that I found like an interesting pattern on is if you look at like TMT analysis, like over the history, like the two major metrics that everybody is focused on is like what's the cost to cover a household? So imagine just running fiber down your street or putting up a wireless transmitter, right? You're providing coverage in that scenario. And then the second major cost is what's the cost to activate the household, right? Like once the household or the user wants to sign up, what's the incremental cost required associated with doing that? The biggest kind of abstraction I can give here is the past 20+ years has been defined by a history of technologies where the cost to cover has been incredibly high and the cost to activate has been very low or medium, right? We are now seeing a massive transition with wireless where the cost to cover is insanely low and the cost to activate is at a similar price, maybe a little bit higher. But that's okay because you can create that big network for really cheap. But then once you actually have the subscription, it's going to be very low. You know, you're going to recoup that investment. Right. And so that has been kind of whether you look at the two major successful wireless technologies beyond what I think we're doing has been 5G and Starlink. Right. 5G and Starlink are defined by that financial characterization where you have a very low cost to cover and then an incremental higher cost when somebody signs up. So, but you know, you're going to recoup your investment there. And I think that sort of shift in dynamics from that high cost to cover to low cost to cover, and then even increasing the cost to activate if required, is going to be the characterization of successful telecommunications companies going forward.

Mm-hmm. For— this might be a very basic question, but what specifically about 5G and Starlink, uh, has allowed to lower that cost to cover?

The biggest thing on the 5G side is like, if you look at like 5G home internet service, it's really kind of like T-Mobile and Verizon that have been leading that space. The reason why that they've been able to do that is because they've been able to use their existing infrastructure and their wireless, the spectrum that they got from, from the FCC, you know, Verizon on the 3.7 gig and T-Mobile on the 2.5 gig. They've been able to create a lot of coverage with that using their existing infrastructure. So that's been kind of the no-brainer on their end. They've been able to see, hey, we can create a lot of coverage using our existing infrastructure thanks to wireless. In the case of Starlink, right, it's costing them tens of billions of dollars to create that network. but they get to cover a whole lot of households as a result of doing that. So it's really kind of a combination of like the wireless to be able to create a lot of coverage, the underlying modulation techniques to be able to support a lot of different endpoints in a good way, but then being able to deploy in a model where you either have your infrastructure costs already covered or you're just creating so much coverage that it doesn't even matter. And I think it's like a stark comparison when you consider that in the case of fiber, You know, if I run fiber down the street for providing 10 households, that's like cost me $20,000 just to run fiber down the street and not do anything with it, you know, versus if I could take that $20,000 and make wireless transmitters, I could provide coverage for thousands of households with $20,000, if not even more.

Yeah, that's a good point. Like, uh, is it fair to say that like in the case of 5G, it's— you had to have had that there was a huge cost to lay out that network. Uh, now you're not factoring that in, it just, you're just sort of leveraging that, that already exists. In the case of Starlink, it's like, you know, putting satellites up, it has that, that cost goes down over time, but it has been historically prohibitively expensive. Um, I lay that, that question as a, or that statement as a comparison now to like what you're doing at Andrina. And I'd like to just shift a little bit of the conversation of your realization of like, how does crypto play into all of this and that shift of CapEx? Because I think the shift of CapEx, of who's fronting it at some point, is the key unlock. But yeah, walk us through that kind of realization that you had.

Yeah. And that's what Santi just said is kind of going to be something that we come back to. Like the, the point being is, you know, if you look at the where that you— so we have the history of like fiber and how expensive they are. We have wireless, which is bringing it even lower. The major unlock that we've been able to kind of tap into here is by leveraging the end consumer and the household and anybody that wants to participate to help fractionalize that cost further. Right? Like, that's how I think about it, is you're taking an already lower cost and you're spreading it out across the last mile, making it easy for anybody to participate. So to give you guys a little bit of an overview about what we do, right? So we go to the rooftops of data centers, multifamily apartment buildings, commercial buildings, and we use point-to-multipoint antennas to broadcast an area of coverage. And this category is typically— is technically called fixed wireless, and it's got a long history of, you know, companies going in the Midwest where you don't have a lot of density, renting space on top of TV towers to broadcast a signal, right? Like the most famous company for that is one in the US called Rise Broadband. That technology that Rise really kind of put a lot of demand into buying and, and building out, and all these vendors kind of following suit with them, has only gotten stronger over the past 10 years. And now we're leveraging the scenario where we at Andrina are able to deliver this coverage for only a couple hundred dollars, right? We're in a scenario where a $400, $500 antenna can create point-to-multipoint multi-gigabit coverage, right? I mean, one node can talk to many and it can do that in a multi-gigabit threshold. That's kind of the biggest milestone from a technical perspective that brings— makes Andrina make sense, but also what we're doing on Dawn makes sense, right? Because the, the biggest thing is you need to have a scalable way to grow this thing. And if I can have one node talk to many rather than the inverse of one node talking only to another node, now you actually have a scalable network where you can build where it kind of feels like a miniature cell tower almost, right? Like whenever you get a new phone that signs up, it's not like the telecom company goes back to the cell tower to install new infrastructure. They just have that work for whoever is in the vicinity. And that ability to service people with that type of model is now what we're seeing in the fixed wireless space, but also in a multi-gigabit capacity. So the part that where we like to stand out and seeing their ability to stand out versus even 5G and even something like Starlink is we all have cool point-to-multipoint coverage. But what we have is point-to-multipoint multi-gigabit coverage. And that is really kind of the big threshold here is we can do that at speeds that are exceeding that of existing home internet connections. So you can distribute it very effectively throughout the market. And Satya, go ahead.

You had a question there? No, my brain was overloaded. Like that last 2 minutes, if that's all you're going to listen to in this pod, like that to me was like the most dense, but like the most important thing. About what you're building. There's like a lot there, but I was just trying to like go slow.

Neil, I have a weird question, which is, did you see crypto like booming and you're like, I have to get into this crypto thing, let me kind of find how crypto could slot into our business? Or was it— yeah, like, how did you— what was the aha moment for like, oh my God, crypto could actually solve this?

That's a, that's a fun story because I, when I, before I started Andreener, like right as I was starting Andreener, I knew crypto. I wanted crypto to be a part of this thing. Right? This was in 2017. Like, I wrote like a HackerNoon blog post about how people can team up using this incredible technology to be able to create community-powered networks with the trustless layer and blockchain, right? Like, there's a blog post on that from 2017. But I didn't end up going down that route because I thought that, A, the wireless technology wasn't good enough, which is true, and the entire community wasn't mature enough to be able to build these sorts of infrastructure. A couple of things really changed since then. The biggest one has just been Helium, right? Like, I originally was not— like, I was not sure that you could— like, a Helium-type model could ever exist. But they demonstrated, and then this entire DePIN ecosystem demonstrated, like, hey, you can get folks to help you build out this network. You can get retail to help you build a network of professional operators that are willing to go and deploy carrier-grade infrastructure for you. So yeah, that's, that's the, that's the article. I'm glad, I'm glad you found that one. Yeah, this is, this is the birth of Andrina, right? It's— I always wanted something like this to be, to happen. I just didn't feel like the technology was there at the time, you know. Uh, and you know, I think the biggest thing that changed is, yeah, like I said, the wireless technology got good enough to be able to scale to this level of performance. Helium proved me wrong and demonstrated that a community can really go out and build an incredible network. And then I guess the final piece of that is we figured out the real trustless layer over it only the past year, right? Like if you want to build a decentralized wireless network, you need to have a trustless layer by which the nodes can interact with each other. So I know we're kind of jumping the gun here, but let me at least give the, you know, the listeners some level of an overview on this. What we've ultimately realized is that we can take the technology that we've built at Andrina, put that into a consumer-friendly form factor to allow anybody to grow networks with us. And the vision that we have for that is called DAWN. It stands for Decentralized Autonomous Wireless Networks. And it really is just a protocol for providing decentralized broadband and leveraging this hardware with a trustless layer on top of it. So, you know, not to be too deep in the jargon there, but the point being is it allows people to share their excess bandwidth. It doesn't matter whether you're a household or data center or an even internet provider like us. It gives you a very efficient way to be able to share data center with people that you don't even know and people that can then further strengthen the network and repropagate that down the road. So Dawn being the protocol for decentralized broadband, I think, is under this vision that I always like to preach here, is our goal is just to do to internet what solar panels did to electricity. The same way that consumers own their own infrastructure, they get access to a very cheap resource and they get a non-speculative ROI on their investment in their household. Without even using tokens. That's the kind of key of what we're trying to bring to this here, right? In the case of solar, you might get a 5 to 6 year payback period. But if you look at the nuts and bolts of that arbitrage, right, the $128 that I'm paying versus the $0.50, you can take that spread, give it back to the individual household, and people are now able to recoup their investment in 6 to 12 months rather than multiple years. And I think as like, that's kind of the world that we want to build, right? We want to build a world where you own your own internet infrastructure. You're part of this decentralized cloud of other people that have excess supply and you seamlessly talk to each other and grab data and sell data whenever you can. And I think it's a, it's a very interesting transformation here where it just moves towards, again, less providers and more individual households that are contributing towards such a massive market, right? We're dealing with like an almost trillion-dollar market here, right? So I think it's a very fun kind of project to be going, going down and You know, ever since the blockchain days of 2017, thanks for pulling that up again, uh, things have come a long way and the timing has been perfect to be able to execute all this.

Okay, there's a lot there, but let's invert, uh, what does it mean for a customer? So like you have an existing contract with, you know, Verizon or AT&T, you want to get set up on Dawn, how do you do it?

So what it means is pretty straightforward, right? You are currently paying about $100, right, on average for like a gigabit, maybe a little bit less, maybe a little bit more, like it definitely goes all the way up to $140, can go as low as $70, $80, right? The vision that we have here is people will own their own infrastructure, so pay anywhere from, you know, $200 for a simple box all the way to an outdoor node can be even more. But as a result, you're going to get access to gigabit internet that is $10 or $20, right? That's the consumer bottom line here is we don't want people to pay $100, we want people to pay $10 to $20 for gigabit internet. And the reason why that should be achievable is because you know that from this call that on the provider side, they're only paying 50 cents. The reason that they have to pay more than 50 cents, or they charge you more than 50 cents, because they have to recoup the CapEx. But if you are owning that CapEx and it's only, it's less than $1,000 to own that, right? Talk $200+ to own one of those nodes. You can be in a scenario where you are now getting internet for much, much cheaper because you have already covered the CapEx piece and you own it. As part of a carrier-agnostic network. So it's not like you have a Verizon modem and you're locked into Verizon, right? You have something that can work with you across this decentralized network with any provider. And that's the real bottom line here is just cheaper internet prices. If we take it to the next level, and Santi, just to be kind of quick on this one, you can then use that same box when you have excess bandwidth to be able to sell that to other people, right? So to give you guys a good example here and how this can manifest here, like my $128 Verizon connection, We're recording this podcast and I'm using like 0.5% of that total supply, right? That it's, it's insane, right? Now this call is like at best, like what, 5 megabits per second? So I have so much excess that I can use to be able to provide other people connectivity that there's just a great opportunity to be able to take that and make that a little bit more professional, right? Like how many, I've been in a scenario where I lived in an apartment, I shared a Wi-Fi network with my neighbor, right? Like there's a bunch of crazy things that can happen when you start sharing Wi-Fi networks with each other. But why not make it a little bit more streamlined, a little bit more robust with a level of guarantee in terms of the underlying speeds you're— that you're getting and just find a way in which everybody can save in the entire process, right? Like the real crux here is yes, you have the CapEx model on how we invert the CapEx model, but the kind of ongoing nature of it is built on the fact that at the wholesale side, internet is cheap. And at the household side, we tend to have a bunch of surplus. And what we want to do is find a way to leverage that to build a new type of network that is fundamentally powered by the users.

If my math is correct, the payback is less than, at most, 2 months.

Yeah, in some scenarios, right? We have some scenarios where the payback can be less than a month.

Less than a month, okay.

Yeah, so it can be pretty insane in terms of how quickly you can recoup your investment by owning the internet infrastructure process here, right? And there's depending on who, like what type of coverage you want to create, whether you just want to receive a connection from Don, whether you want to host an outdoor node and get a bunch of rewards for providing coverage in an area. But that's been kind of like our guiding line here is like use internet arbitrage to give people a sub-1-year payback without even considering additional rewards above that. And that in our mind is what we need to be a DePIN project that is going to be getting mass adoption, right? We don't want to just be something that appeals to Web3 audiences. We want to be something that can be part of every single household, right? That's what we all want in Web3. We want to figure out a way by which our technology appeals to the mass audience. And the pitch that I make to you guys, all the listeners, is what is going to be that one killer technology that brings it to every household? And my bet is it's going to be something incredibly relatable, something that people already use, and something that saves people a whole bunch of money.

Yeah, I mean, uh, so absolutely agree there. On, um, on the, on the side of the, um, buying the box, so you're saying $200, that would be for the outside?

Like, that would be, that'd be for the indoor box?

Yeah, for the indoor. And the outdoor would be a little bit more, like $500?

Uh, we're aiming, well, we're based on like what our underlying costs, like we think we could get them to around $1,000 for that type of scenario. But that outdoor bucks would give you— that $1,000 would give you the ability to provide coverage for 3 to 5 miles. So you get to really create a huge amount of coverage that way.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And by the way, on the math that I was doing is it costs you $200, you're saving $100 per month, so the payback is 2 months, give or take. Now if you add on top of that the component of selling some of the unused bandwidth it can be lower, as you said, up to, down to a month or even less, depending on, on how much you're selling. Um, maybe two, two questions. Well, I want to go deeper into like, uh, the go-to-market and all that, but maybe the listener would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, how do you get access to, to this thing? Like, this box is allowing me to get access to like the big boys' table. Uh, is there a regulatory, uh, FCC kind of thing that you guys have had to deal with, or is there a choke point here where someone might come and say, no, you, you can't access, um, you know?

Yeah, because we are going to be— yeah, because we're going to be working directly with data centers to create these connections and branch them off to the local market, really internationally, right? The cool part I was looking at is like you know, areas that don't have good last mile infrastructure, they still have data centers. And that was always the thing that kind of blew my mind, right? As looking at like Lima in Peru, for example, there's like Equinix data centers all over the place. So there's like kind of like this wholesale infrastructure to power the cloud that also has good connectivity. So the point being is that's going to be kind of like the key crux here is we're going to be working with retail to build their own mini networks, but we're also going to be working with enterprises and businesses to help meet somewhere in the middle. And so that's been kind of our strategy for how do we make sure that not only do we have these localized networks of retail working together to share internet, but then we make sure they're plugged in directly to an incredibly cheap source of connectivity.

Okay, yeah, because what I was getting at is the reliability, right? You can have the performance, but you want— also want the reliability. So you would probably want to have a couple of these data centers in a particular cluster, not— if one goes down or one canceled your contract or whatever, one makes your life difficult, it doesn't compromise the performance or the reliability of the network, right? So say in a dense area like, I don't know, New York or where you are, you would want to have, like, how does that, how would that work? You'd have a couple of relationships with data centers and then the consumer network. But how do you think about that, scaling it out to like the world, I guess?

Yeah, the most important piece of all that is, as you kind of said, is making sure that you have a topology on your network that has redundancy and multiple paths. And so as we think about what the protocol is going to be doing here, right, the protocol is going to be incentivizing people to create wireless coverage. But, you know, we know that you need more than just that as you kind of consider these points and stuff that we learned at Andrina. You want redundant paths. You want, you know, in wireless terminology or networking terminology, what's called a ring, right? You need a ring of connectivity to form. So that you have two paths towards every single source. And so not only is the protocol going to be incenting a level of wireless coverage to be created, it's also going to be incentivizing redundant paths to be created. And some of the IP that we have built allows us to leverage those redundant paths. So to give you a sense of it, like this outdoor node that we're doing, the reason why it's able to be automated and so cheap and be able to be part of a flexible network is because of that's the technology that we built at Andrina. And to give you guys a sense of what that is, it's essentially a robotic antenna system. We built an antenna inside of a pod that moves. And the necessity of that is, and you need to have a very directional antenna to get that multi-gigabit signal connection quality. But the downside of that is you have to aim it, you have to adjust it, right? People don't necessarily— who are wireless technicians don't know that stuff. So you need to find a way to make it automated so people don't have to think about it But then Santi, to your point, you need to make sure that that stuff can actually be readjusted. So if a new opportunity for a new signal source comes up, it can automatically point itself at that new signal source. And that's been some of the IP that we've been bringing to the table to help automate this entire aspect of it. And so making sure that the nodes that are the sort of big focal points of connectivity here, making sure that those users have an extra redundant path to the internet is part of what the protocol is going to be incentivizing here.

That's really cool. Was that source of inspiration, like those solar panels that look like sunflowers that like just rotate?

Yeah, that's been— that was an inspiration. Once I saw that Starlink was doing it, when they point their dishes up to the sky, it was a similar type of model, right? The— there's, there's kind of like a more standard electrical engineering way of doing it without moving parts. It's just way too expensive. Uh, this whole category is called beamforming, but the point being is this is a very low-cost way to add similar types of automated functionality. Towards whatever radio or antenna you want to utilize.

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Let's shift a little bit into— give us a little bit of context of like before, like Dawn, like how much scale were you able to get? And then with Don, like, how do you think about the next 12 months in terms of like adoption and network coverage and expansion?

Yeah, so, you know, I kind of, I mentioned it like a little bit towards the building, but at the beginning, but we were, we're providing internet to a little bit over 10,000 households now, uh, across 10 different states in the US, right? Like Texas, Tennessee, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, right? Like kind of Mid-Atlantic, Florida, Texas, Tennessee has been kind of our footprint. And it's been good, right? It's been good in the sense that we found a bunch of landlords and real estate partners that want to work with us, a bunch of individuals that like working with us on the housing authority side. Like, we work with the Newark Housing Authority, the Jersey City Housing Authority, for example. So we've seen, you know, great uplift from that. But the kind of, you know, the kind of good and unfortunate thing about this is we're still shackled by our ability to deploy capital, right? Like, it doesn't matter if it takes me 10 times less capital to deploy networks than Verizon, I still need a whole bunch of capital to go do that, right? And so I think what we've kind of learned is that by building up this technology, our vision behind it is we just want everybody to have this technology, right? We want everybody to be able to realize this cheaper source of connectivity that is more redundant, more automated, etc. And as we kind of think about the plans here, the easiest nutshell is we just want to make it easy for people to build mini Andrenas all across the world, right? It doesn't matter whether you're just trying to share internet with your neighbor and you guys are trying to save on your internet bill. It doesn't matter whether you have a business that has excess data and you want to sell that excess connectivity to your neighborhood. Or maybe you're somebody that's a cloud provider or a validator of another cryptocurrency and you have a bare metal server at a data center. Maybe you want to be able to monetize that connection further. So I think really we're aiming to be able to take this technology and use that internet arbitrage to bring it to people all across the world so that folks can really quickly build a network with us, right? That's like what I kind of said here. We want to have these mini Andrinos all across the world, and there's so many places where a technology like this can go a long way because either internet prices are too high, they're not good enough, or the last mile infrastructure is not reliable enough. So I think we're kind of looking at appealing at urban markets, but there's also a unique opportunity in rural markets. It's just an absolutely huge footprint for us to be able to go after. And I'm quite excited for it.

How do you think about the transitioning more into the network economics of like selling back or selling unused broadband? How do you think about that price? And I guess that marketplace emerging, right?

Yeah. So a lot of that stuff in this dynamics of it is like our goal from the, from the foundation, the protocol side, is not only to create the rules by which people can exchange data and make sure that you guys can't lie about the amount of data you have, right? We've implemented a protocol with Witness Chain on our system called Proof of Backhaul. And Proof of Backhaul is essentially just like a decentralized speed test. And we'll come back to that, you know, in a bit. But we've built all these rules by which people can exchange of it. And our goal on top of that is to help with the price discovery side of things. right? So we want to say, hey, if you're participating in this network, here's what we think you should charge in your surrounding area based on what other people charge as well. So I could be in my scenario where it's like, hey, I'm getting $128 for Verizon connection, or I'm getting, you know, a $30 connection from Andreena, whatever that is, right? Yeah, I'm in a scenario where I say these are the other options that are in the area. Buy this box, you'll get your rewards for providing coverage, and what we think you should do is sell your internet a little bit lower than the other options that are out there. So that somebody else is incentivized to go buy something, a similar box, and they can get access to that. So it's like, there's— it's no, you know, hard and fast rule because internet prices are different everywhere. Our goal is to help price discovery with the ultimate goal of bringing internet prices down to the wholesale level, right? We want to find a way to continuously take retail internet prices and slowly, slowly, slowly bring them down to the wholesale level.

Yeah, not exactly there because you still need to factor in that marginal CapEx, but like certainly not $130. It could go down to like— do you have like a price point of like what the lowest barrier would be? Like, is it $10? Is it like $20, $30, $40?

$10 is probably like— we'll be like— I know on our network, when, you know, Andrina is going to be one of the early operators on this network, we have 3 other internet providers that are going to be launching with us as well. Like, we're going to be launching a $10 gigabit internet plan. Like, that's going to be on the cards for us.

I'm almost incentivized to move move back to New York. That's awesome. How do you—

Wait, one question on that, Neal, is do you see— is it going to be more B2B or B2C?

It's going to be a combination of both, right? It's whoever has the ability to interconnect, I think, is going to go a long way. Like, B2B is going to be a really good way to create a lot of coverage, like whether you're talking with building owners or even, you know, big, you know, node miners that are deploying a lot of stuff. Like, look at how many people have created many micro businesses that are deploying Helium nodes and other of these types of nodes, right? Like these types of guys are a really good way to create a lot of coverage. And, you know, we love working with them because of the ethics that they take towards this. But then there's also the ability to work directly with consumers, right? Whether you want to install a dish on your balcony, whether you want to install a dish in your home and get that from your neighbor, there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice it. And we just want to kind of allow everybody to participate. And that's an important piece of this equation.

How do you think about the go-to-market here? Because if you look at the top 10 ad spenders, In the US, I think 3 or 4 of the top 10 ad spenders in the entire US by their marketing budget are Comcast, Verizon, AT&T. It's like, it's, it's the players that you will end up competing with, right? They're spending $4, $5, $6 billion a year on advertising and customer acquisition. So even if you have a $10 product a month, and they're charging $50, they're also spending $6 billion a year to, you know, to make up that difference. So how do you think about the, like, customer acquisition game there?

Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately it's, it's, it's going to be a challenge from many different directions, but there's hopefully a pretty good playbook here. Like, we've been able to see the wild success of Helium and Helium Mobile in terms of what they've been able to do. Uh, I think we want to kind of follow some similar paths and take inspiration from folks that have done it right. But like, crypto has a very captive audience of folks that believe in this underlying same vision that we have, right? Like, we all believe in this end state where the consumer is powering the infrastructure that we know. Like, that's what Deepin is. And so we want to be in a scenario where people who are buying our box and able to share internet with each other are then going to knock on their neighbor's door and saying, hey, how would you feel if we split this internet bill, or I just give you excess internet for $30? So there's going to be incentives and a big referral program that allows people and incentivizes people to go and do that sort of model. So I'd say the way that we compensate for those massive budgets is through the community and making sure that the community is getting some real value out of this. And there is more value to be gained by sharing it with your neighbors. That's the kind of model that we're going to be focusing on here.

So this sounds too good to be true. What, what, what could go wrong here? Like, what are the biggest risks? Is it someone clamping down, making this illegal? Consumers not appreciating it? How do you think about the risks, if any?

I think the biggest risk towards this is it actually comes down to making sure that you are understanding the shape of your network really well. And that's a hard technical problem. Like one of the things that's very challenging to validate, and we're still trying to figure out the right way to go about doing this, is like validating location. If somebody says, great, I love Dawn, I want to get involved in this marketplace and get cheap internet, they need to have confidence that when they buy the hardware, they're actually going to be able to get an internet connection. And in a trustless network, people can lie about where they're located. People can lie about a lot of things. And that's really what we do on our backend as we build these proofs, right? The kind of big proofs that we have is proof of bandwidth, proof of frequency, and proof of location, right? Location is one of those big ways. Where if somebody is claiming rewards for deploying in a given area, but they're just not there, you're going to get a bad consumer experience. And that's really what we're trying to avoid about this. The underlying technology works. We think the economics are incredibly strong. What we need to make sure is that it's a very, very, very simple consumer onboarding experience. And we want to make sure there's only good experiences with signing that up. So that is really kind of like our top focus is we want to make sure that entire flow has been like buttoned down. We know that there's no risk of somebody getting bad experience. If somebody buys us, we know they're gonna get a great internet experience. And this is why we, how we know that. So it's, I think it's a lot of projects that DPNs can face in general is like, how do you just validate quality of service is good? And it's not because the technology can't support it, it's because there's a lot of unknowns in a trustless environment. And being able to mitigate those unknowns is, I think, a challenging problem, but it's solvable. And, you know, we're just getting a grip on exactly how we wanna solve that at scale.

Do you have a free— potentially a free rider problem here?

Yeah, I mean, there's, I think, a lot of scenarios where either people can either lie about where they're locating, they can be in a scenario where they're selling internet to themselves and getting some outsized rewards for that. So these are all types of dynamics that are very challenging to kind of snuff, you know, like filter out. But it's as we kind of dig into like the deeper networking technical aspects of how to do it. It seems like there's ways to be able to mitigate it. I think the reason that we need to be cautious or any sort of deep-end network needs to be cautious about these sorts of problems is because you don't want to hand out rewards for people that are not providing value on the system. I think luckily we are in a scenario where people are getting a non-speculative ROI by participating on the system. So we, the protocol, doesn't need to emit as much to incentivize people. Which means that all of these problems are less exacerbated, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and, uh, yeah, how do you— on the hardware side, um, then, and like distributors, like, is this something that you'd be able to buy directly from you? You know, you go to Best Buy, you go to, you know, on Amazon, whatever, like, is it— come on, are you gonna allow other people to develop their own hardware or, you know, just kind of sell your own?

Yeah, so just to get started off with, we're going to be selling these boxes. And the reason why is because it's a combination of tech that hasn't existed in this kind of shape and form. And to kind of walk you guys through what it is, like think about it in terms of some level of wireless transmitter and some level of a software-based router. So that is a little bit of a unique thing that we haven't seen in this combination working together. So we're going to be starting this off, but we're going to be open sourcing everything. We're going to be open sourcing everything. People can build their own boxes. The underlying antenna and radio combination is agnostic in the system. So you can go buy your own, bring your own. It doesn't really matter, right? All that matters is that you can connect with somebody else in your community. So we're going to kind of have partnerships with the vendors that steers the community in one direction, but there's nothing that stops somebody from building their own box and doing whatever they would like on the hardware side of things. I think it's— there's a lot of good solutions that are out there, at least on the wireless antenna side of things, that you need to be an interoperable platform that can really work across the board. And then, you know, the second piece of that is that software-based router is one of my favorite parts about all of this, which we can kind of talk about in a second. But all of that code is going to be open sourced. And it's essentially a cool way in which anybody can even run that on their— you know, I don't know if people will be able to run that on their laptop, but they can certainly run that on like a desktop computer, something that's already on, and that can kind of replace your home internet modem and router in a way.

That's pretty cool. And the form factor is similar to a router, like it's, you know.

Yeah, the form factor is like a box that can fit in the size of my hand, right? Like that's, this is kind of the long-term vision of what we're pursuing here is like we want to build this box in your home that is kind of just a cloud internet appliance, right? Like, and we can kind of talk a little bit more about that, but the vision that I have for Deepin is every household is going to have this little black box that just participates in every single DePIN project. It doesn't matter whether it's internet, it doesn't matter whether it's GPUs or storage. You just have this little box that just sits there and like, it's kind of like your fridge, right? It's an appliance. It's a household appliance that participates in this new digital economy and this new digital infrastructure. And that's why we've decided to essentially create that software router, right? By running a high-performance routing application on a generic purpose software router, we can actually go a tangible step towards achieving that.

Yeah. Last question, and then I want to just open it up to what, what you just said lastly, which is just your broader vision for Deepin, which that last point was really interesting actually on this cold start problem that networks have, you know, outside of higher density areas. How important is the token here and the token incentives and economics to like get that, fix that cold start problem, right? Incentivize people to buy the box, uh, you know, and take that leap of faith knowing that, you know.

Yeah, so what I would say on that is like there are pro— like if the— I, I always call the cold start problem a chicken and egg problem, but cold start is apt here. I'd say we're very fortunate in the scenario that we don't have a cold start problem. Um, there are other projects that do, right? And the way that I kind of think about a little bit more is like projects that need a lot of supply to provide value to the consumers is the characterization of the Cold Start problem. But we are in a scenario where all you need is one node with excess bandwidth and they can provide immediate value in their surrounding area. And that is just because we're not dealing with a mobility-based application, we're dealing with a fixed-based application. And we're just lucky. We're just lucky that this entire model doesn't need massive amount of rewards to incentivize people to overcome that hurdle. All you need is one person with extra bandwidth and they can provide value to the consumer in the surrounding area. So I'd say of any DePIN project that's out there, you know, I can think of maybe a few that are on par. We're one of the ones that has the lowest pressure to emit for those rewards to solve that cold start problem, right? The underlying ROI on the system in a non-speculative fashion in our mind should go a long way towards incentivizing that. Now, don't mean— don't get me wrong, right? Rewards are all— I think are going to be part— a necessary part of every single project, and they will be here. But I'd like to think that that gives us a lot of comfort that we don't need to emit too much to actually grow this network to a very big scale.

Yeah. Do you— have you modeled out, like, uh, you have one particular node, and then as soon as you have 2 or 3, back to that point on redundancy, uh, and reliability and performance, like, you know, that's like that, that magic number that you need to have to, you know, make sure the consumer experience is really good and on par with, uh, their existing solution.

Yeah. Two, two is really that type of answer, right? The only thing that really kind of like messes with this and just hard to get around is like regional power outages. But as long as you have two separate sources of connectivity, you are in a scenario where you have a very, very flexible and reliable node, right? It tends to be multiple different sources out to the greater internet. So we've seen that's kind of the way that we've looked at it is we want people to have two sources of connectivity.

Yeah. Well, I know we've been talking for Don for, you know, the broader, most of the conversation. I also just want to get your general thoughts on Deepin. But is there anything around Andrina, Don, that we haven't covered that you think we should cover?

I think the, I guess, let's, the final part before we get into that is, you know, as you guys have seen with our launch, you know, we've launched a Chrome extension Extension Validator. Uh, all I'd want to do is just talk a little bit about that and say if you guys want to get involved with the network, that's probably the easiest way to get started. Uh, the validators will be at the top of the list for getting additional hardware as we distribute it down the road. So, uh, you know, we, we definitely want folks to get involved and sign up there and earn some rewards for providing their spare bandwidth on the network. So the idea behind it is we know that kind of what I had mentioned to earlier on the proof of backhaul side, right, if you want to have a decentralized speed test, you need people that are outside the network that are simultaneously probing and challenging people's speeds in the network. And that's what the Chrome extension is, right? You download it, it runs in the background, and every now and then you're selected to go challenge another node and use your spare bandwidth to make sure that those downstream nodes are being honest. So building this trustless layer is a very important first step for us. So, you know, I hope the listeners join and go download that Chrome extension, share with your friends. There's a referral code and all that kind of stuff. So that's definitely the first way that I'd love for folks to get involved.

Neil, will it slow down your computer at all or your browser?

No, no, because it's a very lightweight application. The only thing that it does is every now and then you're selected to do a challenge and then you do, you just use your excess bandwidth towards doing that. It's a very lightweight process that's running in the background.

You know, I, I remember, uh, when my internet, like I was living in San Francisco and I would, I would do this. There's these apps that you download on your phone and you could test the speed. Like, literally, I would love, like, just calling Verizon, be like, you motherfuckers, you're not giving me the speed that you're claiming to give me. It was just like, I would just do that constantly, would be like, all right, how are they screwing? Because you just know they're screwing you. And you're like, okay, they're clearly not giving me the service that I'm paying for.

And Santi, that's the value prop of, like, why proof of backhaul is so powerful, because we can implement a decentralized SLA, right? If you're buying 500 megabits per second from me, and I'm only giving you 250 megabits per second, there is no arguing about the experience. No, exactly right. So you're gonna— if you have a programmatic SLA, you almost remove the role of what the service provider is doing.

Oh God, I— yes, folks, if there's one reason why you— this particular reason, like, I mean, if it's not compelling enough, like, they're charging you $120 and it's costing them 50 cents.

Like, you know, I mean, if anyone's ever been on the phone with Verizon, this is the— this is pitch for— it's like, that's what I'm saying, just ruins your day.

It really does. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's really cool, Neil. Jano, anything else you want to ask on this point?

Not on this point. I almost just wanted to like, I mean, Santi, I thought you had really good, like, questions about just like how it all works and stuff. But Neil, I'm just reading your Hacker Noon post. I was kind of skimming it as you guys were talking. And it's like, I mean, you've been at this vision for for like several years now, going on a decade. Like, if— what, what is the world going to look like if you guys are successful? Like, and like, how will broadband and Wi-Fi and all of that change if, like, if you guys are wildly successful?

So the— and this kind of comes back to Santi's question for like Deepin and all that stuff, because we're pursuing, I think, a way in which internet is, you know, takes on a solar panel model where people don't have to think about it you just participate in this cloud and you even have software that is picking internet plans for you dynamically based on what's cheapest on a month-to-month basis. And it's just automated. It just solves your problems for you. You have your decentralized SLA, so you get your money back. Like this entire process of what we've learned at Andrina is that you can automate the internet. And that's the goal of what I want to have here. I want to automate the internet. I want to make it so that the internet is just this background utility that operates and gives us the performance that it says it's going to give us. Right, at a fair price. That's my goal here. But to kind of go on to, I guess, the larger vision of what we're talking on the Deepin side of stuff, like the vision that I have for all of this is like, I just want that— what I said, that little black box that sits in your home that just does the internet. I want to take— and when I say internet, I don't just mean connectivity, I mean cloud and all that kind of stuff, right? I want— and this is, I think, what everybody in Deepin wants— we want to take the equity value that is found at data centers, cloud companies, telecom companies, and bring that equity value to the household, right? That's the goal that we're all pursuing here. And to your question, you know, about what happens when Dawn is wildly successful on this, our plan is to use affordable internet as a Trojan horse to get that black box into your home. And now that that black box is in your home and is mining across every single DePIN protocol that's out there, you've taken a massive step towards actually achieving that vision, right? Where the internet It's not powered by Amazon. It's not powered by Google, not powered by Microsoft, not powered by Comcast, not by Verizon. It's powered by the household. And I think affordable internet is kind of the first step that we can get behind towards achieving that because it's one of the few ones that actually is a better source, a better way to actually save money and to make some money, right? It's a more efficient economic system to share internet this way. And my hopes is that this entire transition is what brings Deepin into the future. Underlying, under an entirely new technology framework here.

Yeah. Not to mention, uh, there's still a big part of the world that is dark, right? It's not covered. And so you could actually, again, I liken this to, you said it earlier, but I think of it as like how software as a service was incredibly powerful to shift what was incredibly high CapEx for every business. And you shifted that cost and you amortized it into operating expense on a per-seat basis, on a per-consumption basis. And so that allowed startups to not have to pay hundreds, you know, millions of dollars to pay for that CapEx. And it was just a very flexible shift in a business model that enabled startups to have best-in-class software solutions in their stack for like fractions and scale as they grew. And I almost think that that's going to happen with deep in for infrastructure networks. Uh, because if, if you don't have $100 million and, and by the way, that, that's creates monopolies like American Tower and whatnot. And then if you have a monopoly, then degrades a service because they're complacent. And I think now that is a total transformation. Um, and it's not so much about crypto, it's just like, it's just a shift of like transferring the, the CapEx to and distributing that to network. Participants.

Exactly. That's like, I'm, as somebody who used to work at a SaaS company, I'm kind of annoyed I didn't think of that analogy because that's a very good one. But the underlying point, what you said is right, right? You fractionalize the cost and you make it more accessible to everybody in the process of doing that. And I think those are kind of like, even if we go back to the beginning of the conversation, right, the stuff that makes wireless success companies successful is that they change that financial profile in a way that is more conducive towards scaling up early and creating a lot of growth later on, right? I think those, those are definitely really, really solid points here, and I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, well, what is, um, when can people get their hands on the box? And, uh, you know, uh, like, what are the next 6-12 months look for you guys?

Yeah, the next 6-12 months is we're focusing on everything we need to take our DevNet towards Mainnet, right? We've tested by pulling millions of dollars of our existing transactions on-chain. So making sure that we're ready to go live for, for the mainnet is going to be a big focus for us. Um, we're going to be focusing on getting hardware pre-sales out as well so that people can go ahead and, and get their spot in line to get one of these boxes. But then also, I mean, the big thing that I love to work with anybody listening here is if you want us to go start a little network in your neighborhood, like, please hit me up, right? I love working with people to help them get internet set up wherever they are. And we've already been talking with many folks that have worked heavily, as you know, with Helium miners and other types of miners that are out there. Like, there's a huge ecosystem of partners that are getting behind this vision one way or another, and I'd love for you guys to reach out and we can talk about how we bring Dawn to your neighborhood.

Uh, maybe a basic question we should have asked this, but you're built on Solana?

We are built on Solana, that's correct. Yeah.

Why?

The— well, the biggest reason is combination of A, it makes my life easy, right? I was always looking at a scenario of like you know, I don't want to deal with kind of like an L2 and all that kind of stuff. So it was like, from a raw engineering standpoint, I felt like when you consider the TPS, when you consider the infrastructure simplicity, it made my life really easy to— when we're thinking about protocol engineering on one side. The second piece of this is just because that's where DePIN projects are. And as we think about being that black box for a whole bunch of other DePINS, interoperability across DePIN is going to be a very important piece of this equation. Invasion. So I'd say one, it was the clear engineering choice for us. Two, it allows us to participate in this greater ecosystem to help achieve that black box vision.

So does that mean that you're going to give priority to, uh, Saga phone owners, uh, to buy the hardware?

Haven't figured that piece out yet, but we're gonna let you guys know if that changes. But that would be a cool way to go about doing it for sure. And I think, say, I guess one kind of like other point here is like I think part of the hope that we have here is like, if you— we would also like to see a world where the average household, like, by, by buying this black box, like, what if it was powerful for them to become a Solana validator, right? Like, right now we're living in a world where the barrier to entry for validators is pretty high and people are just renting bare metal servers to do this. But what if that black box could actually provide— be acting as a Solana validator, right? You'd get— absolutely, you'd make your super minority number look— start to look a whole lot better than what currently is. And I think that's a cool part of the vision that we're also hoping to achieve. So I think there's going to be a lot of fun partnerships with Solana down the road, integrations with Solana down the road. So I'm excited about it.

Absolutely. Like, the household itself is like a great proof of humanity and proof of like— and you can use that for validation, like lines, like all these different things. But you're right. I mean, I think for a deeper network, like the testing their reliability to make sure that, you know, because, you know, there's going to be ways that people are going to try to game it, right? And so, yeah, I think a lot of it perhaps that what you just said around like the sampling component of it, making sure that the service is there is super important because if that doesn't hold true, then, you know, you're not going to want to give up Verizon or AT&T.

Yeah. And that's— I don't want to mean to get too off course, but I think that's kind of like one of the big things that we've seen across a lot of DePIN projects, right? Everybody can kind of create supply using tokens one way or another. What we have seen that's been a little bit of a like causes demand to lag is that lack of reliability and certainty around QoS, quality of service. So by being able to give comfort and guarantee on quality of service is what you need to make something like this mainstream, you know.

Yeah.

Neil, did you look at building on anything other than Solana?

We did look at, you know, at a couple of Layer 2s on Ethereum. And ultimately, you know, it was a lot of internal discussions between the team and we were trying to figure out which way we wanted to go. But, you know, Solana was very— has been very aligned with us in terms of the underlying vision that we hope to achieve here.

If you were giving feedback to, let's say, someone from— I don't know who you looked at— like Polygon or Optimism or Arbitrum. Like, if one of them were listening to this and you could give them some candid feedback about how to win more deals with founders, what would that feedback be?

I, you know, I would say think about how the underlying partnerships with your projects look like and think about how the mutual relationships between the companies can really, you know, make 1 1 3. And I think that has been one that I've always, you know, I'm being intentionally vague here, so sorry about that. But the point being is what's one that I've always really enjoyed working with the Solana ecosystem is the entire community is really behind it together in a way that I haven't seen other communities behind, right? The Solana community wants every single project in that project to succeed. They want to demonstrate why Solana is going to be the future for these L1s, you know. And I think that level of cohesion has been like— it's, it's just not anywhere else. And so how do you go about creating that level of cohesion across your different projects? I don't necessarily know the answer to that, but I think that's my, uh, that's my biggest read on it.

What did it have?

Any— go ahead. Scream's integrated chain. I mean, it's just like you have a network where Helium is already there. You have more and more deep-end projects there. And that's— those synergies are super strong. And probably also that there's a— the, the vision is more centralized, and that's okay. Like, you know, there's a very clear product vision at the foundation, whereas in Ethereum it's, it's much more fragmented. And that's— it's not a bad thing. It's just like it's just been around for a while. And, and maybe Solana at some point reaches that, where you have multiple clients and you know, it's just harder, but right now it's very clear, right? You get a lot of attention and a lot of support from one organization and the projects building in Solana that I haven't seen anywhere else. I was like, I agree with Neil.

Neil, was there anything that they could have done to get you, like, was there anything they could have done to get you to build there? I would say, or, or maybe to ask it differently, like, did it, did it have more to do with the techno, like the tech and the tech stack or more to do with like the community, the other founders there, the like interest of the ecosystem, in the ecosystem? Like what did it have more to do with?

I'd say the tech, the tech was the first piece of stuff where I was just asking myself like in a black box, if I didn't consider anything else, what would I pick? So that was like the first validation point. The second validation point was on the community side of stuff, right? Like the part that I can't like stress enough that I always feel about this is like we already have a hard enough uphill battle to bring Web3 into the Web2 household. Like you just need a unified front if you want to have any chance of actually making some significant penetration. Yeah, it's already an uphill enough battle. Like, we got to team up to be able to do this in a massive way.

Yeah. If you couldn't have built on Solana, is there one other one that you would have considered?

Yano just wants you to say another.

No, no, because like, I think there's hundreds of, hundreds of founders, not, not like 10 founders. There's 500 founders making this right now. I think it's a real, it's one of the most important decisions you'll make, unfortunately, and it's a really, really hard decision.

So I would say if you're building a DePIN, Solana is the answer, right? There's no, no doubt about that. We did look at like some other chains, uh, early on in the process that are all building incredibly different things, and I don't know if, if they're like exactly the right DePIN approach, but they're doing incredible stuff, like everything from Bara to Base. Like, there's a lot of cool stuff that's out there, you know. I, I, it's for me, I it's, it's after, at a certain point, it's just like choosing your type of database. Like, I don't care if I want to use Postgres or MySQL or all that kind of stuff. I got to pick one that works, that allows me to go to market effectively so I can focus on building. So I would say, you know, to your point, you know, it is a really important choice. The only thing I can talk about with any confidence is if you're deep in protocol, and if you're deep in protocol, Solana is the clear winner.

Neil, perhaps as a question, do you think that that decision that you had to make goes away for the next cohort of founders in 5 years, where there's more interoperability between networks and you just don't have to think about it?

I would hope so, right? And, and if we— like, in a good example, and it's hard for me to be able to confidently say what that interoperability looks like, but I know that we're go— we're already going to be start participating in this. So like, one of the things that we've been doing with our partnership with Windis Chain here is like leveraging the ETH security base to have and reinforce the validator system on our network. So I think like there's projects like that that are doing a really good incentive for people to be able to cross-stake. And I stuff like, I think stuff like that is going to go a long way where as long as the L1 satisfies your technology requirements, stuff like that is going to hopefully in the next 5 years begin to make it a little bit more operable. So I'd like to think so. I think stuff like cross, you know, like, like cross-staking for validation, I think is going to be an interesting way. And another good group that's doing this is like Parasail, for example. So there's a lot of people that are already tapping into this sort of stuff. So I think the maturity of that ecosystem is really going to decide if that's going to be the case. Awesome.

Well, Neil, thanks for treating us with this conversation. You know, hopefully I learned a lot from how the internet actually gets, you know, works and how it gets to your house and allows for this type of stuff. Uh, but yeah, I think, uh, every listener here is gonna now think, uh, that 120 to 50 cents, it's crazy.

Yeah. And that's, that's the one to keep in mind, right? And if, if you like, I mean, what really blows your mind is if you get a tour of a data center. So Santi, when you're back in New York, we'll go take a look at a data center together. And you could see like, there's like this one cabinet in the whole area that has like a bunch of fiber spaghetti wires coming in together where if you were to let a cat loose in there, it would destroy 10% of the Eastern of the Eastern Seaports traffic, right? So there's a lot of cool stuff and fun nuances. But yeah, Sonny, your point— 50 cents, $128.

You heard it here first, guys. Uh, Neil, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Uh, really amazing, and I think our listeners really enjoy it. So thanks again.

Thank you guys. Thanks for hearing me out. Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Neil. Hey everyone, big thanks for watching today's episode. Wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar Development Foundation's 6th annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th in London. This is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing.