Hotspotty @ DePIN: Infrastructure Without Borders

Unknown: Hey everybody and welcome back. This is the decentralized tech live stream where we

Jon Radoff: cover all forms of decentralized tech. But today it's going to be all things deep in because I have a really special guest today. I've got Daniel from Hot Spotty slash deep in hub. I love the background effect. Now I'm super jealous. I got to fix that for myself. We're going there Oscar. We got to get this figured out for next time. I'm Jon Radoff. I am one of the founders and the CEO of a company called beamable. We are launching a deep in project. We have a five year old tech stack that has about a hundred live games on it with a couple million users a month. We've got an active community of about 1.2 million people that are on the beamable network community in one form or another every month. So super active live games. We're taking all of that and building a deep in around it for the back end of games. That's what I do. Deep in certainly the thing that I'm most focused on. We're going to talk about all kinds of deep in projects today. We're going to talk about what's exciting in deep in. In fact, this is probably going to be the single best episode I've done so far for any of you that are new to deep in trying to learn about it or wondering even if you know about deep in why now for deep in. So we're going to cover all of that. But I'd love you Daniel to introduce yourself. Maybe there's one or two people here that haven't met you yet. But those who don't know Daniel is a legend in deep in already. He is connected to so many projects. And I think we'll talk about deep in hub in a moment. But let's just

Guest: start with you Daniel. I don't know. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thanks so much for the invitation for this. I'm like this bumps get excited about talking about deep in. But yeah, I've been let's say I'm a hardware engineer. I've been into hardware making movement crypto since around 2011. And it was around 2020 that I started playing with this project called Helium. And me and my co-founder Max was starting and actually I was the first employer of Helium outside of the US because I build my own Helium hotspot. You know, like I found this project that I've been playing with IOT networks in the past. When I was living in Berlin, I live in Lisbon right now. And I saw this project that was trying to build a decentralized wireless network. IOT network using blockchain.

Unknown: And then having the reward system to actually incentivize people to deploy this networks. And

Guest: immediately I was like, you know, like light bulb moment. And okay, I go, let's build this thing. I started spending all my days on discord trying to learn the community. I should was quite small. I think that was, you know, not even 1000 people on the Helium discord was actually super cool, super close community. Everybody's was building like crazy. Then me and Max, my co-founder started buying some devices. We started deploying. We spent basically, you know, six months just climbing roofs, pulling cables, installing antennas everywhere. And it was interesting because around was COVID times as well. So technically, we're not even allowed to live at home. The house and we're just like, you know, like the full bags full of equipment, just like, you know, taking a taxi, trying to escape the police. And then, you know, just getting people's homes climbing roofs, installing this. An amazing, an amazing time actually. And see,

Unknown: yeah, so many devices. This is one of, this is one of like the Helium hotspots that we build,

Guest: right? It's just like a Raspberry Pi with like a lower concentrate. Somewhere around here have the first one that I built as well. That's actually the first one that was, you know, in outside of the U.S. It was in my kitchen in Lisbon. And, you know, from there, Helium grew to one million devices all around the world. It was such a cool, cool time, cool, like, you know, history. I think it was like the fastest network ever deployed in history. Like one million devices all around the world in two years. And with that, we start, you know, having our own problem that, okay, we start deploying people's homes the way it usually works when you have, you know, like this local based dipping is that we put the devices in someone's home like your mom, your friend, my friend, my mom. And then I give them a percentage of the rewards. And in the beginning, it was fine because we had like 10 devices that could do the calculations and a spreadsheet. And then once we started like have, you know, like 50, 100 devices started getting a little bit complicated. So I decided to build on the weekend, you know, just like a little ERP system, it's just like a platform that could manage

Unknown: all those devices. And that actually, one second, we've got the decentralized physical alarm.

Guest: So if it's a small company, it's a air quality sensor. But there's a printer going on here. So it's like beeping time. You should get out of the

Unknown: PC sensor. Which I believe is a thing. Someone there are people. It is. I mean, I have, I have,

Guest: just in my office here, I have two, you know, there's a, there's weather exam, there's kayaks, there's like so many other projects that like if you go to my office here, I mean, you can really see, but I have a lot of deep ends everywhere because I'm always trying new projects trying to understand the project. But just like finish the story there, right? So with this kind of like system to build a way to manage those devices, the flitial devices, we decided, okay, there's an opportunity here. Let's launch this as a product as a software as a service. And with that, Helium grew, we grew with Helium. We actually help Helium, you know, become what it is today. Because like 300,000 users that were deploying Helium hotspots were using hotspotty every day

Unknown: to manage those devices. We managed to, from one million devices deployed, you know, 400,000,

Guest: and 40% of those devices that were being managed on hotspotty. And that was kind of like the beginning of this idea of a decentralized infrastructure. Before there was, you know, we used to call DY, centralized wireless, then there was POPW, like proof of physical work, T-Ping, token incentivized physical infrastructure. And then the final name that kind of took off was Deepin, which we used right now. But at the end of the day, it's just a name, right? Like he's just, every, we are like getting together without the builders, the players, engineers, and trying to, okay, this thing, we are like, okay, this thing that we're building, what it is. And then in the end,

Unknown: we decided, okay, Deepin is a name. I don't know if it's the best name or not. It's a name that

Guest: everybody understands. And when you know, you talk about Deepin, you know, what you're talking about. So let's just go with Deepin. And that's what it stayed for the last couple of years. And yeah, man, I love to build. I'm a hardware engineer. Like I said, before, software back and front end, anything, anything that has beats and bytes and electrons going through, I like to touch my, put my hands on it. And I think that Deepin is what I'm most passionate about because combined, you know, blockchain, combined hardware, combined software, combined everything that a nerd really likes like me. So yeah, I'm here. And then as the space start growing, basically, you know, I started getting to know the project's code. Demo came up. Emo is this project that has the car sensors, right? And then I get to know the founders, try to understand what they're doing to see how it could help them. And then there's high of Mapper. And then so on. So on to the point that we have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of projects that right now. And yeah, it's just, I feel that we're just getting started, basically. But with that two years ago, with the Syriq, it's really hard for you to know where's a good project, what's a bad project. Where can I know new projects that I can, you know, make some passive income with the infrastructure that I have at home, like I have a car, you can have high map and demo. You have, you know, house with the rooftop, I can have a gym hat, on a coi helium, you name it, etc. So with that, we build deep in hub. So

Unknown: deep in hub, think about CoinMarketCap plus the YLMA or the file, not the YLMA for deep in. And

Guest: that's what deep in hub is right now. And that's why we tried to focus our goal is to bring opportunities to the people around the world to learn about decentralized infrastructure and then can make some, make some passive income from that can help build and actually fight against, fight against the, you know, evil corpse, like this massive company is the EWS, go cloud, etc. And that's something that is very interesting that the Obo is doing. And I'll stop here otherwise,

Jon Radoff: I'm going to be talking for the rest of the hour. Now I think deep in hub is pretty much the highest

Unknown: ranked SEO ranked website about this topic. Yeah, we spend a lot of time actually building the

Guest: the website and actually, you know, just like kind of like, okay, what are the things that we think people would like, think that we actually like to to show because it's, it's think about a place that you go, there's everything they need around deep in project information. We have some like courses about like multiple deep in events. We have, you know, this is like everything that you need is in there. There's a lot of things that we're building as well. But yeah, basically if you go Google, deep in some project, we're going to be the top three every time. But yeah, it's a hard work pace sometimes.

Jon Radoff: So I'm going to state my own thesis. But I'm actually going to state my conclusion before the thesis. And then I'm going to invite you to participate. Okay, so my conclusion is that deep in is the most important category in crypto. I'll take it a little right now and probably for the next few years. I'll share my reasons for that. But I want to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about whether, first of all, if you even agree with that statement. And if not, why not, or if you do, then why? While you're thinking about your answer, though, I want to make sure that our audience realizes, this is not going to just be about me asking questions today. We do this live, which means you the community actually get to participate in this. And I see there's already over 500 of you tuning in live watching this. We're on X, we're on Facebook, we're on LinkedIn,

Unknown: we're all over the place. So whichever channel that you're on, post your question. And we will

Jon Radoff: give that to both of us. Like we, I think this is sort of a stream where I'm taking the perspective of beamable, of course, but looking at the broader deep in market, hot spotty Daniel, he's going to be talking about it broadly. So if you have any questions about deep in how it fits into crypto, what the opportunity is, what the heck we mean by supply side versus the demand side, like all of those things are going to be covered today. So you get the chance to play my job and ask questions and get them up on the screen. So please do that. All right. Daniel, my question, deep in,

Guest: is it the most important thing in crypto? I would say for what we are working on, yes. I think there are two things that I'm really passionate about in crypto. I mean, deep by far is the thing that I like the most because I think it's one of the things that can really change not just like how people see infrastructure, but I like to think that can also change people's lives. If you are deploying infrastructure, depending where you are in the world, sometimes if you play one or two projects, that can really make a difference. There are places around the world that $50, $100 a month extra can really, really make a difference, can make you step out of whatever situation that you are on and then go to the next step. I think that's something that is super interesting on the deep inside. And of course, being an engineer and loving decentralized anything, you know, like I did a lot of torrenting for just of course, by downloading Linux distros in the past and really like the way that you share this infrastructure. Then of course, joining with crypto, I do think that deep is exciting AF. Another thing that excites me about on crypto right now, it's a bit like more like a boomer topic, it's a bit of like the regarding stablecoins, because it's actually been talked a lot, right? It's outside of the deep in aspect, but it's something that can also really accelerate a lot of development all around the world in terms of payments. But I would stay on the deep inside is something that makes me wake up every day, every morning, like let's go, let's build this world, let's try to figure out something that we can do

Unknown: to change it, right? And I think crypto doesn't need more meme coins, which is like, you know,

Guest: just a money grab where people get, people get lose money and some people like some small, small percentage make money from that. I think most everyone uses money. Yeah, 99% 99.9% of people in my life. I mean, one thing that I like about deep in that's quite important is that the web three aspect of deep in is it's a small part of it, right? It's like projects trying to build real businesses where they have the incentivization layer to actually bootstrap the network. And it's different than most projects in crypto that you see that crypto 99% is like money, movie money, you need to have money to big money unless you try to gamble, which probably gonna lose money. So it's excited to see projects like Bimbo, like other deep in projects that are trying to, you know, utilize the idea of decentralization to actually enable a new pair, like a new way of looking at a business and this is super exciting to me.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, so I'll share my thoughts. Agree with everything you just said, especially the point about deep in is a set of actual businesses is a way to look at it. They're solving some kind of problem. Just on my stream alone and you have, I think, 20X number of founders that you've talked to on yours. So definitely, if you want to do the deep dive into deep in, you should just go check out the podcast that Daniel does over on, I think you can find it right on deep in hub. But like I've interviewed a bunch of them right on this. We've talked to people doing decentralized drones. We had, I mean, speaking of helium, we had a mere CEO of helium. He was here last week. We've had people doing decentralized GPS. So there's so many different, really interesting applications. Harness is sort of a unique aspect of the wide distribution of crypto to geographically distribute all of these nodes all over the world in an interesting way that is a little bit different than the way large companies often think about how to do the geographic focus of their business. So it allows, for example, people to get really good coverage with the decentralized drone tech or the decentralized GPS tech is another one in the case of beamable, the idea of having a low latency network around the world so that game servers have very fast communication with game clients. So that's a good example of where I think on the distributed

Unknown: basis, like everywhere there is a crypto user, you potentially have a

Jon Radoff: a deep in node existing in that geography. But the interesting thing that extends beyond that, though, is while I believe that the supply side of this, and we'll talk about demand versus supply side in a moment, the supply side at least today tends to be more crypto native because they're earning tokens as their primary rewards. So they tend to be people who know what a crypto wall it is, for example. The demand side is not like that. And in deep in, you're really selling a service to a set of customers. So in our case, beamable, the natural assumption is, well, it's Web3 tech, so it's for Web3 games. Actually, that's not the case. Most of our traffic on beamable is Quotin Quot Web2 games, which by the way, not exactly zero of these games consider themselves Quotin Quot Web2. We're just games doing gaming as it's always been. But in their case, they're just downloading an SDK. It works with the tools there to use. It's Unity or Unreal Engine or HTML5 JavaScript game. All of those are options. And you just build your game the way you're used to it. You don't set up a wallet to start using it. In fact, you don't even know about crypto. Unless you're one of the rare people who wants to interact with the protocol itself,

Unknown: provision servers right off the protocol, have at it. We love you if you do that. But we don't think

Jon Radoff: that's the normal way to do things. You'd be a little bit more like Daniel here when he was building his own custom hopspot with helium protocol probably back in the day. But I think the fact that most crypto applications are crypto working with crypto. So like, DeFi is literally that. DeFi is all these financial applications that are just crypto building on top of crypto. Solves lots of

Unknown: useful problems. And it's great. I love DeFi. But it isn't really the thing that grows the market

Jon Radoff: right now. As opposed to D-Pen is actually delivering a set of services or businesses to people who already need those things, DeFi does it better, more economically, more geographically distributed, more alignment between all the stakeholders in the network, like all of that. But ultimately,

Unknown: you're just selling something that people already need. Crypto is also very good at inventing things

Jon Radoff: that are like solution in search of the problem. DeFi is very opposite that. It's solving an existing problem. And I think that's how crypto grows. That's why I think when I say it's the most important category in crypto, it's because of that we're onboarding all of these non crypto users who probably aren't even going to know that they're using crypto underneath as a like a transaction layer or an incentive layer for the network. They're just getting what they want. What are your

Guest: thoughts on that, Daniel? No, that's absolutely what I think. Then a lot of projects that you're mentioning crypto like DeFi projects only are surrounded by other crypto people. DeFi is I think I like to say the narrative that's going to onboard a lot of other people into Web 3 as well. I like to say there's the gateway drug to Web 3. But also people who are going to be using

Unknown: those networks on the demand side like you're saying they don't even need to know that's Web 3.

Guest: And I think they don't need to care. That's the bit of that. Because I would say the same way that right now a lot of people talk about blockchain, OK, Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, etc. When you go to Web site, you don't care if it's hosted on AWS or to Cloud, you just want to see the Web site. I think the same thing is going to be with the crypto project. And especially if you're going to be on the demand side, a lot of projects that are doing very well, one of them that's very easy to see the difference is storage. Storage is like a decentralized storage project that they have very big differentiation between the demand side and the supply side. The demand side, they don't even mention crypto because at the end of the day, you don't care. You just want a product that works it works well. It's cheap. It's fast. And as a customer, that's what I need. I don't want to know about wallet. What's a wallet? What's a seed phrase? Is it a seed phrase a password? I don't know. I don't care, basically, right? On the, of course, on the supply side, it's more Web 3 focused. But I think that's very important for those projects to grow. And the demand side is what is difficult. And if you start talking about Web 3, a lot of companies are going to get scared as well because there's so many bad names and hacks and things like that. If I'm trusting my company information with a project, sometimes it's like, OK, so Web 3, we need a wallet and a meta-mask to use that data. That's already going to put a lot of people off. So I think companies are focusing the demand side on completely known crypto angle. I think that's the way to go for sure.

Jon Radoff: All right, so we've just been talking around demand side, supply side. So just, so it's super clear for everybody tuning in. If you're just learning about deep in, the demand side are the customers, is the easiest way to think of it. And we probably should have just called them customers and suppliers or something. But we have this real unique skill and crypto to just make things sound harder and more complicated than they need to be. And therefore, they're the

Unknown: demand side. They're the ones that are actually using the service. And whether or not they know

Jon Radoff: that there's a token involved by using it, usually there's a token involved somewhere, even if they don't see it. And they are kind of creating by pressure on that token. And that's why like they're thought of as demand side in this. So for example, for beamable, the customer is a game studio. It's someone building a game who needs backend servers to scale their game on helium. The demand side is a person who needs to connect to Wi-Fi and use it, right? They're literally just

Unknown: the user, the end user who needs Wi-Fi connectivity. The supply side is the people who supply that. So

Jon Radoff: for example, on the beamable network, you have to be a compute provider who has access to servers in pretty high tier data centers. So that could be anyone who owns a data center with servers in it who can offer the kind of compute capacity that AAA games need because they can not go down. You go down in the gaming business, you're out of business. So you're not making any money at all during that time. So they're the suppliers. Again, in the helium example, it is the people who actually own a Wi-Fi hotspot and people connect to that, but you are providing the actual hardware. So that's the supply in the advanced side. So the question here, Daniel, is you have looked at a Google ton of projects through Deepin Hub. You interview a lot of people. What are some of the common themes and feel free to go beyond demand side, supply side? There can be lots of other factors that go in here. But what is important that you have observed for the Deepin projects that have actually started to succeed? And I say started to succeed only because we know we're super early, even helium which grew so fast as you put out there earlier. Helium's percentage of the world wide telecom market is still micro. So we're all small, including the ones who have gotten

Unknown: who have been big relative to each other right now. So we'll talk with that understanding,

Jon Radoff: but with the information we have today, what do you think these patterns are that you're

Unknown: observing in the most successful Deepin projects? Yeah, I think there are a few ways to look at

Guest: successful projects. One is how much they have fundraised. Sometimes that's not necessarily the best metric. Like projects like grass, had a lot of hype around it, etc. But I see for me personally, the projects that I've been talking through that's a lot of projects. And when I see the project is going into the right direction, and then I get very confident about the founders, is when they spend most of their efforts in the customer base, like on the demand side and the customer, because actually that's what's going to make the project sustainable. A lot of projects when

Unknown: they go around talking generation event, TG, they're going to let you talk and there's a lot of

Guest: hype they're going to need to do, because in a way, crypto is a bit sad. I think the way that things are, because it's all hype-based. Sometimes you need to get X amount of people on your Discord or your Telegram or your X, and then you need to do this and that for just so it can be listening on some exchanges. But at the end of the day, this project is going to have a token that's going to be sustainable by the revenue that's been generated by their company. I really like projects that I really like I said really focus on the demand side, because if there is no money coming from outside of this project as a customer, there's no way that this project is going to be sustainable, unless it's just people buying and selling the tokens and then the tokens are going to open down, it's going to be speculation is not going to be sustainable long-term project. And one thing that a lot of deep-in project, at least the serious ones I'm trying to do, is build a business that's sustainable, that's revenue and is profitable. So projects when I see them that spend a lot of time looking for customers grown, that customer base, it's a very interesting metric for me. Another thing that I see is that projects that I like projects that do like burn, like buybacks, that's not necessarily the only way that this should work, but it's been working very well with the project called GeodNet. For example, this has this like GPS location. Mike's like an extremely smart guy, he knows a lot about the solution, like the GPS world, the article world, and they've been growing the revenue. So basically they have the network that has people climbing roofs and installing their antennas. And as the natural growth, they're actually focusing a lot of effort on getting more customers, this customer's paid them in dollars. When they receive their money in the bank, they take some big chunk of their money, go to the public market and buy those tokens back and burn. So there's a mechanism, there's like a healthy mechanism to keep the price of the token up. And that's not with this speculation. So I think that's something that I see when I talk to projects that, okay, you know, like going back to see like a lot of focus on the demand side and burn mechanism. And they've been very transparent as well, right? I think what John here is doing with Bimimbo is really nice to see like going to conferences, showing your face, surely you guys are trying to build a real business. And you know, already talk about the supply, like the demand side, how it's working. And also putting a lot of strains on the supply side as well. Because you know, if it's too easy to deploy something, a lot of times the data, the quality of the data, or the value that that unique person is giving it's also low, you know. So that's what happens with projects that, you know, you just install an app on your phone and just click a button. It's too easy. Everywhere on the world is going to be doing. So basically the value of that action is quite low. But if you deploy something, for example, you need to have a data center, you need to have a very, very good location with like line of sight of the whole city. It's not for everyone. If we need to, you know, do the work, it's proof of work, basically, right? So basically you need to, that those are the things that are going to add value because the price of the tokens is going to be how much value is probably actually bringing the world. It's the token price speculation is temporary. But if you want to try to have something sustainable on the long run, those things are very, very important and required. And one thing that I really like about BIMBable, for example, is that there's a lot of, it's a spare resource in the world, right? Like, for example, I go and build like a data center, I start selling this thing. I could have, you know, a big chunk of the data available only for BIMBable. And then maybe if other customers start coming, I can reduce the BIMBable, but making sure that I'm using 100% of the supply that I have. Otherwise, I'm just going to be losing money. So, you know, utilizing idle resources is something really interesting. You know, like HiveMapper, I remember there were stories of this guy's a plumber. He put a HiveMapper in his car and he was driving every day, you know, fixed toilets and things like that. At one point, the HiveMapper token went up. He was making more money just by driving doing his job in actually, you know, so it's a little bit exciting. That's great. Yeah. Good for that guy though.

Jon Radoff: And being able to find more. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, BIMBable has spent the last five years just building customer base. And I think that's kind of what's unique about our deep-in launch. We have the 100 live games. We've gotten way more than that. In development that's going to join the network. We've got 8,000 individual developers. It's signed up for the platform. And you're right. Like, we did that partly just the street fight going out, finding each developer, trying to talk to as many as we could. A lot of conference participation. A lot of not web three conferences, by the way, like when we go to GDC, which is the game developers conference or gamescom, you could find a web three per like they're there if you search hard enough. But you have to know kind of where to go. It's usually at some bar on the outskirts of the city and a side event. And we're congregated because they're not exactly fully welcome in the rest of the conference. So their only protection from that is being in one place where they've got each other's back at that time. But, you know, we go to game developer conference, we go to gamescom, we go to gamesbeat summit, places like that where the game developers are who don't think of themselves as web two or web three or web four web with any number after it. They think of themselves just as game developers trying to figure out how to build their game and get to market fast. And our story to them is about fast time to market. We're going to save you many months of development if you tried to do this themselves. We are going to be much more economic because we've got this global network and they're on bare metal service providers often doing exactly what you said where they've already got the data center. And they're trying to monetize this underutilized capacity. So it's not like we have to go and convince everybody to build new data centers to support beam will data centers exist. There's zillions of these things all over the world right now. And we can go to them and say, hey, you've got these servers are sitting there. They should do something with them because they're just sitting there doing nothing for you. You're you're have a wasting asset for every one of those that isn't used. So let's monetize it. So we have that ability to keep the costs low, which is what the game studio cares about. And we're building an ecosystem. So instead of it being one centralized provider like an Azure or a AWS or a GCP all of which by the way, more than welcome to be on the supply side of the network. It's not it's not like we hate those guys. We love those guys. They've got lots of capacity. Just tends to be a lot more expensive. Therefore capacity will go to bare metal service providers who are more price competitive out of the gate. So better pricing better less centralized risk to those big guys because they can change their business model. They're pricing anything versus a marketplace driven economy where you where you get access to suppliers that really want to monetize and under utilize asset. And an open ecosystem. So once you're also not on one particular provider, it's kind of like what you were showing earlier. You were able to build your own Wi-Fi node for helium because it's an open network. So that's different too. We want to encourage software developers to create code modules and build on top of the network and make new software available. So when we're talking to game developers, that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about anything about tokens. Nothing I said is about a token. And why you should have the token to be inviable. It's all about the solution that demand side. And when I spoke to Amir from helium last week, it was kind of the same thing. And he pointed out that like it is these sort of traditional business-y things that are a little bit boring from a crypto standpoint that are actually what's important for D-Pen. It's like, okay, what's my conversion funnel look like? What do I got to do on customer acquisition? What's my cost for customer? Like all these sort of number driven things that are kind of in the SaaS business or pretty much every business

Unknown: that exists. No one wants to think about that. Anywhere in crypto, I'd say accept maybe

Jon Radoff: D-Pen just because you're building real businesses and that's interesting. So yeah, we've done that.

Guest: Also, the... Daniel...

Unknown: The initial aspect is interesting. Yeah. Keep going with that.

Guest: Yeah, no, exactly. I think that like a lot of times, depending on what you need to do, it's like you need to always ask for permission to participate in this network. If I want to deploy some things, I need to go through some sort of process. And also what usually deepens a lot is like, okay, the network's building a way, it's resilient and is built for anyone that has the right, hard work, the right equipment, the right mentality to join in ad value without having to ask for permission. So it's like permission is lent networks. And I like to think also we're working with the Cher economy 2.0. What's started with like Uber Airbnb and now it's D-Pen is the next frontier

Unknown: of centralized everything. I love that comparison. It's worth spending a little bit more time on.

Jon Radoff: I often compare what we're doing at BeamVol to like Airbnb or Uber in the sense that you've got some compute capacity. And rather than leasing it to a specific customer, you can now lease it to a network and the capacity will get used when it's needed. Kind of like driving the car and someone who needs a ride, you are getting paid for just that piece of time. Not every D-Pen network works exactly that way, but that's how we do it. But the big difference versus Airbnb in Uber is what Daniel? You don't have an Uber or a Airbnb saying, okay, and here's our service. We're going to take a cut along the way and we're going to be the central provider that does everything. D-Pen is typically pretty different in that respect too,

Unknown: right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's nice because the metrics it's built on the code

Guest: the code dictates the rules, right? I think that's quite interesting. Like with Helium, for example, back in the time, as long as we have the hardware, we have the right equipment. And if you deploy the device in a wrong way, put in the basement, for example, it's not going to make any rewards because it's not providing any service, right? I just found here just for the out of curiosity, this is the first Helium hotspot that was ever deployed outside of the US. It was around 4,000 devices in the US when it started this little board that actually that I built. So the board itself, the Laura Concentrator, it was from a good friend of mine. We worked for a company called Balena at the

Unknown: time and he sent me just like a Laura Concentrator. And I was lucky enough that I already had the

Guest: hardware to build the Helium hotspot. And then he's like, okay, how can I actually get the things that I already have and build the code and then start supplying IoT Nathry for Portugal for Lisbon? So yeah, this is a little piece of history for me at least. I really value because that's why I'm here five years later, right? Still talking about this thing. So you've made some good bets.

Jon Radoff: We'll use that word in terms of which projects to support Helium, Helium, certainly being one of them. Sandman made a comment earlier that this year, and I'd say definitely last year too, we've seen a lot of things selling nodes. And I have my own thoughts on this. But his point here is you don't know which project to trust. It's just the new wave. I get it. Feels like NFT collections all over again. Which one do you know even means something? He mentions he spent a couple thousand on nodes. What do you think, Daniel? Well, like if you think of this through the lens of you want to get involved in a project, not just token speculation, but you really want to be part of the supply side, meaning you're going to operate nodes. You're providing some service back to the community. How do people, again, we don't offer financial advice on this. So this is just sort of, I see you might want to think about, but like how should folks out there in the audience think about which projects they want to back from a node standpoint? Like what should they be trying to learn early on before they even pull the trigger by a node, install a piece of hardware, whatever it is for

Guest: the project? Yeah, I mean, I think buying a node license is very similar to buying like a hardware piece, like a device itself. There's a lot of things that you think to, you need to think twice because what happened in the past, like say year, year and a half is that the node sale became like causal fundraising mechanism for those projects, which is not a bad thing. But you know, it's the same way that you're going to be buying a node. You also are buying a token, actually different to buy kind of like, yeah, an NFT because you cannot, once you buy the node, you cannot sell it that easily. And I think projects that promise things are too good to be true, that doesn't mean it's not going to be true, but do much more due diligence that you need to do on those projects than you do on, you know, any other project because once you buy that license, maybe not as easy for you to get rid of and you need to make sure to get your return on your investment, right? So make sure to really understand the project, you know, understand what the project is trying to do, understand the founders see are the founders like visible or they're like, you know, just a bunch of NFT characters that you only know their voices. I think it's too easy. My am a character, but you know but everybody knows who I am at this point. I mean, you're very easy to see or face everywhere. I think you see that down. There's a lot of projects out there. They have, you should do like a proper due diligence those projects, see how real they are, see if the founders are trying to build something valuable because there's a lot of noise, right? And another thing that I would say that is very crypto related, don't be greedy, otherwise you may, you know, just lose whatever you invest to the same way that you bought meme coins and went to zero. And I also understand the project, understanding infrastructure they're trying to build because a lot of times you buy this node

Unknown: license and you actually need to run those, you know, there's some infrastructure that you can

Guest: rent for running, but maybe you're going to have to actually have a little computer running in your house or graphic cards, et cetera. Understand what you're trying to do before purchasing and like I said, don't be greedy. Don't fall for like a lot of marketing tactics. Understand the project, get excited about the project because if you're excited about that project, you know, it's going to be like me, I was spending so much time not just like on the hype side, but actually trying to understand, you know, the problem, the solution. And that made me much, much more confident of investing in a project than just like my friends saying like, oh, look at this. This is interesting. Let's go to the moon. Yeah. So let's throw some money in it. And then I have no idea what happened. So every time that I lost money, it's probably because someone told me that it's a cool project. I didn't have time to look at I bought something. I forgot about it. And then when I looked at project was gone

Unknown: already. So spending time understanding. Node is also one of these words that starting to get

Jon Radoff: abused within crypto as well. And that in deep in a node means either a piece of software to be deployed on a server or a actual piece of hardware. I mean, it's all hardware at some level. It's just whether the software is packaged with the hardware and you're buying a unit that does that versus just having essentially a virtual hardware instance where the software is deployed on sort of off the shelf compute tech. But there's also a lot of things being sold called nodes. I see this in gaming by the way. Like fortunately, some of the worst offenders of this are right in the market that are customers, which is game companies building web three games selling a node as a fundraising mechanism because NFT collections don't really sell anymore. Not too many people want to do a ICO for a game either. So what's the new thing while selling a node and usually what it means is it's an NFT that if you have it, it just gives you a token drip of some kind. And there's no software like you don't really need anything. It doesn't deploy anywhere. It doesn't provide a service, but they call it nodes because it's sort of like the name that gives it some legitimacy. So the thing I would point out is just learn what you are actually doing. Like what is the node going to do and be able we have three types, but kind of two at least in the near term that are most important. One is a worker node and you have to have like real, you know, data center grade capacity to operate a worker node. Those are because AAA games rely on security, reliability, 99.9%

Unknown: SLAs like a lot of bandwidth access. There's also what we call checker nodes checker nodes in a

Jon Radoff: distributed or a decentralized network in our case, do a really important job, which is they check quality of service on all those worker nodes and they make sure that their work that is supposed to happen actually happens that they can get paid. So they're part of like the process of releasing

Unknown: payments to the worker nodes that have provided the service. So these two node types do actual work

Jon Radoff: on the network. They're not just owning an NFT and you're right like the software runs somewhere.

Unknown: If you're a worker node, it runs in a data center. If you're checker node, technical requirements are

Jon Radoff: much less like it could probably run on a phone or Raspberry Pi pretty easily. Yeah, but it does important work. You can't just have it run and do nothing. So you either have to have the device or you could run it or you could use network like node as a service platforms to run it for you. But it runs and you are getting paid again for doing the service on the network, not just for holding a license or an NFT. And I think a lot of people just need to get a lot more savvy about that. That just because something is called a node doesn't mean it's a node in the sense of what

Guest: deep in means by a node. Yeah, another thing that I would say is a quick one. If the project has

Unknown: node or deep in in the name, just be careful. Yeah, because they're focused as SEO strategy.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, come on. Yes. Well, so your website, which very much has deep in in the name for good reason, I think. Yeah, we're not selling anything. One of the services that deep in hub is trying to do is some amount of vetting of projects too, right? Like we ourselves did that several months back when we started talking about our deep in plans. You have the verification program. When you verify a project,

Unknown: what do you look at? Yeah, so like right now in deep in hub, we have around I think 188 projects.

Guest: There was more projects some died in a minute. We take out. We tried our best to do like a proper due diligence on those projects to the point that deep in hub right now when it started, the name of the project was deep in DD. I saw like a deep in due diligence platform. I spend a lot of my time actually talking to founders trying to understand what they're building, trying to make sure that what they're doing is actually real, right? Of course, we cannot be 100% like sure all the time, but we do our best work to try to do that. And the verification process actually, the second level of things that we decided to do is that we don't have the bandwidth to do the level of due diligence that we do as a verified project. Do it's like DD on project or all the projects. There's no project listening on this on this website that I didn't talk to the founder. So having 200 founders that are already spoke with. But then we build actually framework to really really go deep in the project, understand how valuable the project is, how real. If you have traction, it has like business case, etc. And that's when we really decided to build a verification program. And that's one that we did with BIMMable. It's like it's not an easy form that we send a massive form of information that the projects need to fill out. And it's blocks and blocks and blocks of tax that we expect from those projects. And then one of those projects passed the verification process. We're very, very confident to really push them. Okay, this project passed the verification. It's a really cool project. They're building serious business model. So let's try to put a lot of spotlight on them and try to promote them. And then BIMMable was definitely one that passed. I was a really fun, you know, the deep process to do. We go through understanding the market, understanding why disruptive deepening is in this market, for example, BIMMable in the gaming industry. It's a lot of work, but I think it pays off for us as well. Personally, I think I get very excited when I work on this verification projects and the project passes. And it gives a lot of confidence on on working on those projects, right? Because like I said, we try to be not the gatekeepers, but deep in hub, most of the projects that listed here, there's a lot of projects that are not listed on deep in hub that has to be there. We don't take money to be to add projects to the listing. We for like podcasts, we don't get paid for the podcast, for example. We try to be as transparent

Jon Radoff: as possible. Which is not the norm. It's just for people who are not on the business side of crypto. You're leaving a lot of money on the table there. You could, you know, you're leaving a

Guest: lot of money. But I can sleep well at night, man. That's that's for me. That's my priority. Like I've been in crypto for so long and I saw so many shenanigans happening all over the place. It's like, there was a podcast that I remember who was there we were talking about. Like, man, if I just did this amount of crime, I could have so much money. But I, you know, but I don't,

Jon Radoff: I don't think that's how hard it can. So it's a little bit. Yeah, no, it's true.

Guest: Just three, just three percent crime, just a little three percent crime. Just a three percent exactly. So no, fuck that. I don't, I don't think I could do that. There's all the ways to make money and being able to sleep at night is something that is very important to me. And also, you know, we work, we've been building hotspotty and, you know, deep in help for so long that I can't, you know, like tint the image of the company that we've built. We've built a company that we're very proud of or the name. You know, people know hotspotty, people know that we've been going to conferences, trying to help the space, try to make the space something real. And it's part of our job and duty to do our best to try to, you know, clear good products. There's a lot of products that sometimes they're listening, they can have them, do something shady. We take them off, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a big space. You know, some projects start well, then they can get the array of this well. And those are the things

Unknown: that usually with the verification program that we do, like we haven't had any issue yet on that.

Jon Radoff: So it's, it's cool. So that's another resource for folks here who are just trying to learn about deep in. And I would say you still have to do some of your own investigation, just as we talked about earlier, but maybe that's a good filter to apply to projects first, to even determine which ones you want it. Because you could spend a lot of time looking at things that are not for real, frankly. And at least knowing that there's some substance behind them is a good first step before you dig into the, the details behind it for yourself. So we're getting to the point in the program where I have to give out a code. Because we are doing a, we're doing a TG, we're on that whole TGE train. And the train is getting a lot closer to the, the station where we're going to get off for the next part of our journey, by the way, which is like TG is not an endpoint for beamable. We've been at this for years and certainly have for me personally, like probably a lot more than five years left to do all the things that I want to accomplish with this. So the TG is a nice stop along the way, but a lot of folks are here excited about that. You're working on the leaderboards. You are helping to amplify our message. Really thankful to everybody in the community. We've got an incredible community of 1.2 million monthly active users. And you guys have done some amazing things, not only amplified our message, but we discovered that you can even help promote the games on our platform. So I'll tell you, we're working on some thinking around how we make that be a perpetual part of what we're doing. There's, there's some way that we can get game studios to take in a bunch of beamable token and say, Hey, there's a prize pool to reward the beamable hub community with here's some tokens to go and install our game, try it out, get your friends to give it a try. So we're, we want to keep building applications on top of the deep end. It's not going to end with just like the server provisioning layer. It's all the things you can do on top of it from software modules, third party developers develop to user acquisition, all of that stuff. And it's always going to be an open protocol with beamable. So anybody could build this. So like the user acquisition thing I just said, for example, like that doesn't have to be a beamable, quote, unquote service like we would invite anybody to build a service like that on top of the protocol and work with our community. So that said, I got to give the code out. And can anyone guess what the code is today? It's, it's highly appropriate to this subject. The code is deep in DEP I N. So if you go to our discord and type slash claim, deep in, that's how you earn your reward today. So go check it out. Again, deep in DEP I N. It's on the screen right there. Go claim your reward and climb out leaderboard. Thanks again for being part of this. Okay, so Huckleberry has a question about hot spot. I'm going to treat this as a kind of a two part question because it sounds like Huckleberry is pretty familiar with hot spot already. But take a moment, Daniel, to tell everyone about like what are you solved? But like there's this hot spot mobile app. What does it do? Why do people need it? And then I think he's basically saying, what's the road map for this? What are you excited about next?

Guest: Yes, it's a very quick answer. The hot spot Konaip was part of when helium changed for the way that they onboard devices, you needed to have third party device, third party manufacturer to have their own app. And instead of people having 50 apps for each of the hotspot manufacturers working on, we decided to build one app to rule them all. But then after helium decided to move back into having their own app to onboard devices, which is decided to cut spot Konaip out. So if you have it on your phone, it still works. You can still look at your hot spots and everything. But if you're in a stall, you won't be able to install it back because we decided to discontinue that because there was no point in keeping all the functionalities that we did is run out now in the helium mobile app. So there's there's a short answer. Yeah. So there you go, Huckleberry,

Unknown: where we're at the end. But thanks for the support of it. So Sumon makes a comment here,

Jon Radoff: Deepin projects should come together and teach the world to introduce courses. So first of all, I think the theme here is educational, but there's an opportunity for Deepin to work with each other as well. So in Web 3, we have this idea of composability. Composability is essentially building stuff from other stuff. They're the oldest thing that exists. I wrote this blog post two or three years back that was the most powerful creative force in the universe because basically composability is how life works, how everything works. The thing that may be the more unique element of what it means with respect to Web 3 versus traditional, say, open-source software development, which has nothing to do with blockchain. You could pull a component in and open-source, build your code with it. Is the idea that you've also got the public blockchain for any financial or value exchange pieces? So the pieces of software not only build on top of each other, they build on top of a common set of data for financial transactions, which lets them essentially provide things like payment services or shared value and smart contracts all around us, shared sort of functionality. I'm curious what you're seeing Daniel in terms of Deepin starting the leverage

Unknown: more composability in their applications. Yeah, I know. I'll talk about this and then

Guest: I just want to show that we have a deep in academy on Deepin Hub as well. Composability is one of the most important things I see on crypto in general and Deepin particularly. When you're building one project, you can leverage other Deepins to build their own project. If you think about the way that Deepmo had a helium hotspot version of their devices, there's all the projects utilizing other projects and helping to grow this network together. I think Composability is one of the best things around Deepin and how all the founders know each other and it can help each other. For example, you can use the centralized infrastructure, centralized storage for something, it can host your service on a decentralized network. Everything, almost that you need to do to, that you don't necessarily even need to touch the big companies. That's something that's very, very exciting for me that and that's only because you can build a company that relies on all the projects that

Unknown: are trying to do the same thing and help each other. Yeah, well definitely bring up the educational

Jon Radoff: deep in academy stuff that you've got while you're bringing it up on screen. I'll just say there's a lot of compute networks out there or there's a growing number of compute networks and they all have kind of different approaches to this. There's fluents for example that is more in like data center grade capacity and then at the opposite side you've got like someone like Accurast who's building a compute network but from phones. Why? It's really interesting thesis. Fones basically have according to them and I think it sounds right. They have the best current security architecture in them. So if you want a network that actually is a trusted computing environment, you can actually do it with mobile phones. These are phones running in data centers. So it's kind of interesting. They're not phones like you're not carrying around in your pocket serving up like compute applications. Their phones deployed in a data center in Iraq where they're used for their trusted computing environment. So really interesting and the point of this is there's all these different compute networks. For us the important part of the compute network isn't us like having our fingertips on every piece of iron in the network running the hardware. It's that we have a lot of verticalized specialization around the needs of the gaming industry. There's a rich software layer. There's things like the community hub which will be driving more user acquisition things in the future. So that's our kind of value add but we can aggregate compute from other deep-in projects that meet the technical requirements which I think is sort of unique to us. Like I don't know that Amazon sources capacity from Google or vice versa for example. So you're showing deep-in hub why don't you tell people about this because it's a great coming right up in the hour in the

Guest: hours. Yeah exactly. One thing that we build is we call deep-in hub academy. So we have right now three courses and we're adding more. One thing that we did last year called deep-in revolution where we got 40 different projects for a different founders. Talk about their projects and get people excited and involved. With a total of 22 hours it was three day event that we had online. We get like I think like thousands of users all around the world and we combine everything into a free course. All you need to do is join deep-in hub and you need to sign in and then you can join we have like a thousand people that are already enrolled this course that you can learn all about all the different projects you know have all this there's like some investors there's like projects that that was a really really exciting thing that we built and something that we're thinking about still doing again because there's every month people ask about okay can we guys do a deep-in revolution too because it was so so much fun. It was a lot of work to build that but you

Unknown: can already see everything that we build is on deep-in hub. If you go to academy there's like course

Guest: about the introduction to deep-in that we build as well. So if you're curious about this there's a lot of courses there's a lot of things that you can do here and another thing that not necessarily linked to the academy that I would like to say something that we released today and it's still like a little bit of working progress. If you go to deep-in hub that are your slash projects we build this massive table that have all the deep-in projects that are interested all the deep-in projects that are listed on the platform of course Bimo voice number number one there's like we decided to discover there's a little bug on the discord number because we pointed it old one but it's really interesting because you know in one page you can have the glens for like almost 200 projects you can see what's the project with the biggest like market cap for example trading volume price token discord you can see if the their tweeters growing discord is growing also you can see you know all the podcasts that we've done here so for example like we're talking about fluents you can click here you're going to go to the podcast episode of fluents there's so many things that we've been building okay I want to talk about the I want to watch the podcast of weather exam you can see here the interview that I did so basically one page that you can see everything that's happening around deep-in and now even we are the of course adding new projects every day and getting more projects involved and it's just one of the things I was trying to do to improve the website and have be always happy to hear feedback from the community in ways to improve it

Jon Radoff: all right well you heard it that's a perfect drop to my for this stream go to deep-in hub find up register your account look at the educational materials there's probably a ton there that you'll learn super quickly we covered some of it here but you're going to get into a way more depth than we can over you know one hour stream I highly recommend deep-in hub get on there and hey while you're on there beamable is the number one most-favorited project on deep-in hub today but we are not resting on our laurels we we don't mind if you star us there we will we would happily accept a few more points at even where we are on the top of the leaderboard so head on over there follow us star us we love all of you in the community and I hope this was a super informative in fact I know it was a super informative live stream for you and you will share this with your friends and tell them that if they understand that they love this come on to the next decentralized tech live stream where every week I talk with people like Daniel who are on this space or Leica Mir who's the CEO of helium or the exec team over at Aether like that's the kind of guests I have on this stream would love you to be there next time live and to watch replays if the time isn't convenient for you that's it for today Daniel thank you so much for being part of this a really fun stream that the hour hour and three minutes we went over a little bit but it just flew on by we

Guest: could have talked for a few hours I'm sure yeah no thanks so much for having me it was really very

Unknown: really a lot of fun and I hope to see you in person in Korea or Singapore or around the world

Jon Radoff: in the next conference man I'll be at both all right until next time everybody thanks