Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing

[AUDIO] David Rhodus: Building the Future of Streaming: Pipe Network and the DePIN Revolution

• Peter Abilla

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Summary

In this episode, David Rhodus, founder and CEO of Permissionless Labs, shares his journey from AWS to Web3 infrastructure. He talks about launching Pipe Network, a decentralized content delivery network (CDN) designed to tackle video latency using a network of incentivized node operators. David breaks down the role of the POP client, explains how tokenomics will drive adoption, and reflects on building a two-sided marketplace that serves both streaming services and infrastructure providers. He also hints at future plans to go beyond video and support other data-heavy use cases like AI.

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Takeaways

— David’s time at AWS shaped his approach to building hyper-resilient systems.

— Pipe Network addresses video latency by using a decentralized CDN model.

— The POP client lets everyday users contribute bandwidth as node operators.

— Token incentives are key to driving participation and long-term network growth.

— The team is focused on product execution more than hype or community right now.

— Feedback from streaming companies helps iterate and improve the service.

— Web3 enables new coordination models that are ideal for global infrastructure.

— The vision goes beyond video—future use cases could include AI workloads and more.

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Timeline

(00:00) From Amazon to Entrepreneurship: Lessons Learned

(03:01) The Journey into Crypto: Early Experiences

(05:57) Building Pipe Network: Addressing Video Streaming Challenges

(08:57) Innovating with Blockchain: The Role of CDN

(11:56) Hyperlocal Edge Nodes: Reducing Latency in Streaming

(14:55) The Multi-CDN Strategy: Competing in the Streaming Market

(17:57) Incentivizing Node Operators: The POP Client and Tokenomics

(21:05) Ensuring Security: Zero Knowledge Proofs in Streaming

(23:51) Future of Pipe Network: Permissionless and Global Impact

(25:22) The Power of Streaming and Community Nodes

(29:26) Innovating Beyond Video: Expanding Use Cases

(32:18) Tokenomics and the Burn-Mint Equilibrium Model

(35:44) Becoming a Node Operator: The Onboarding Process

(38:04) Preparing for Full Production and Revenue Generation

(39:57) Skepticism in Web3: A Different Perspective

(43:20) The Role of Crypto in Coordination and Innovation

(44:28) Targeting Node Deployment: Meeting Customer Needs

Follow me @shmula on X for upcoming episodes and to get in touch with me.

See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.

David Rhodus founder and CEO of Permissionless Labs and contributor to Pipe Network. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. You know, before the show, you and I talked about how we both worked at Amazon. You were at AWS. I was on the Amazon side. Maybe we can start off with that. I'm curious about your, like, I guess, what did you take from your time at AWS that you are now using as a, that's helping you as an entrepreneur? And then from there, maybe you can tell us how you got into crypto. Yeah, we had built some pretty amazing technology for processing video in the cloud and got very lucky and AWS acquired us and it was an amazing learning experience. feel like from like an engineering perspective, I think it's like going through like the military. So like they train you on how to make things like hyper redundant, highly available. you know, monitor for any kind of glitches and try to automate as much fail over as possible. um like I, I knew a lot of things going in, but boy, they just pushed it and ingrained it into like your blood, like how to build and, uh, make things like hyper redundant. So How, uh as an entrepreneur, how has that helped you as you're building out Pipe Network with your team? It's been great to think about those principles and, you know, cause we're building like a massive distributed system, you know, around the globe. It's got to be, you know, highly redundant, especially we're focused on things like video playback and um trying to make essentially this system deliver data faster than any other system out there. So. A lot of those principles are very key to shift workloads around slow links or slow hardware if it gets bogged down with different issues. um Before we get into pipe networks, that's going to be the main topic. Tell us how you got into crypto because that's always an interesting thing uh for the audience to hear how people get into crypto. We're a strange bunch. it's yeah, tell us your story. I've I guess there was like two two points in my life with it. I've been an entrepreneur for a long time and I think the first time we touched it I was at a at a very small video streaming startup and some like college interns were telling us about the shopping site, you know, you can use Bitcoin on. So it was like many years ago. We got some and we bought like coffee, coffee beans for the office and ground them up is really cool. Yeah, with Bitcoin, we had to buy it off of eBay at the time. There wasn't Coinbase wasn't around. And then expensive coffee beans, bet, if you go back to how much you spent. is a great experiment. When I was at Amazon, Ethereum was kind of like going through this fundraising period. So a lot of my colleagues there were like super pushing like this programmable blockchain. And I was very skeptical of it. You just had seen like Mastercoin and Colorcoin and just all this like craziness over the years on top of Bitcoin and so I was very skeptical and you know in the end after Ethereum launched we did a bunch of experiments internal Amazon like digital rights management things none of it ever like saw the light of day but we did a lot of experimenting with that technology so that's probably my really jumping into the swimming pool with crypto No, that's great. Yeah, I love that about Amazon, how it's, you know, so many teams. I was part of a couple of different two pizza teams. I don't know if you had that at AWS. um But we did lots of different types of experiments. One of the experiments that we did um with crypto was on the supply chain side, um which... which really didn't amount to much, but it was an experiment nonetheless and we learned from it. But now I think crypto has gone, blockchain has progressed far enough to where latency is less of an issue that um it might actually be worth trying out again. um If anyone at Amazon's listening, that might be something to look into. Now tell us about a pipe network. um What is it? What problem are you guys solving for? And let's start there. Yeah, so I've spent the majority of my career building out video streaming infrastructure over the internet. So I thought that was one of the hardest problems like 15 years ago and just went really heads down into it. And it's still very difficult today. So for example, when we integrated our video technology into Amazon video, right? they use half a dozen different CDNs to get adequate coverage. So there's all types of cities where you need to switch to different CDN to provide high quality video. So it's CDN's content delivery network. OK, go ahead. like a proxies the data. have typically they're about 150 miles from the individual users. So they bring the data a little bit closer. A traditional like hyper-scalar data center is about 350 miles away. So the further, the more latency it introduces. Content delivery networks have been around since I think 94 was Akamai, a bunch of super MIT brains. And it's super common. We're probably using a CDN right now. Daily, like about four billion people use CDNs. So any app or website that hits like basically more than a few hundred users, they'll plug in a CDN to handle that load. Got it. um So tell us more. So tell us about this, the problem and then your development of Pipe Network to solve that problem and then the blockchain aspects. Yeah, we were really curious just how to like innovate and leverage blockchain, even though we've been a little skeptical over the past few years. I think there's some pretty significant explosions of some companies, but generally as innovators, you want to get on new emerging technology. So we were looking at storage and You know, there's already like Filecoin and other systems out there. So we did some experimenting with that and essentially that tech is inside of the CDN today. But the real interesting component is like with the coordination, coordinating with blockchain and these like amazing web three users, like we can get. these cache nodes or point of presence, pop nodes for CDN term into like individual neighborhoods. And that's really amazing from like a math perspective. So we look at these two formulas called a bandwidth delay product and a bandwidth throughput equation. And the closer the server is to the user, like the bandwidth delay product goes so much slower. So you can put so much more data in that uh bandwidth pipe, essentially. And so for example, if we look at Akamai or Cloudflare today, from my home, I'll see 80 milliseconds of latency on average. And depending on where we've got coverage, like if I'm testing in the Bay or in LA, we're seeing like five or six milliseconds of latency. So what that does, it makes like the video instantly load, uh essentially removes all the buffering. And one of the issues too, with like traditional Netflix and those folks, like they're trying to push out like 4K, like really beautiful video to your TV. And typically it'll run for like a minute and then it will fall back to like a lower quality. So they have like, they still have a bit of a delivery issue, all these companies. we, tried to build something that would like, a, we could go out and say, give me a list of your worst performing cities and let us prove ourselves in the, in the worst conditions, know, deploy us into a bandwidth war, you know, and uh Then from there, like, give us LA, you let us prove we can do 4K, 8K, 10K video, the other CDNs cannot. So we essentially just went from a math perspective and know, blockchain's great because we can coordinate with these nodes. We're very light touch on the blockchain for the most part though. Okay. How do you get close to the neighborhood or to the user? Are these actual, em what is it called, uh decentralized physical infrastructure that's like an actual device that's in people's homes? Tell us more about that. um About the product. So, so the product, it's just a, it's just a client software we release. Um, I think there's a lot of like still questionable legal issues with selling, uh, physical devices and connecting it to a token. So what we do is we try to just leverage like latent bandwidth and latent hardware. like, if you have a, have a Mac book around or windows, you can install this pipe client on it. then you're in your neighborhood automatically so you can service the neighbors. And most people, like, they're not maxing out the bandwidth all day. Maybe at night, they're like doing Netflix or some people are not for sure. So when the user has more bandwidth available, we essentially just kind of reselling it in a way, you know, but to your neighbors. And that's where you get this like hyper low latency. And essentially we call these like hyper local edge nodes. there's within 50 to 20 miles of the user on average. We've been really blessed. Like we've got over 200,000 installs at the software today. I think people are super excited. think they, some, someone told me they like go and Google the market cap of existing CDNs and that gets them really excited for what we're building. It's really amazing. We have three people who are so clever, looking at the market in different ways. Super excited to collaborate with all these folks. Going back to the key insight then, even though Netflix and all of these streaming services, there's ubiquity right now. Almost everyone is a short of Netflix, right? But there's still some streaming issues and latency issues in some geographies. Is that one of the key insights you're trying to solve for? Yeah, there's still tremendous issues around the globe. Even in the US, there's a lot of remote cities that have, Amazon will serve you a much lower quality video than if you're closer to a metro. Around the globe, there's a lot of countries they cannot service due to... CDN not having any Footprint there or even the hyperscalers having no footprint There's other issues like for example in India so we used to service like I think it's like called cricket or this really popular sport and The bandwidth available was so low and we're we have like a billion people watching it in one country. So we had to lower the quality, I think one megabit per second, which, yeah. So it's a lot of issues there. Like we really are excited to go into like areas where it's like a massive concentration of people and they're getting a little bit lower service than they should. Yeah. So you have a really interesting business because so it's a piece of software that you just install on an idle machine, right? um But then, so you need people to install it and then, but then you've got kind of the other side of the market of getting, working with, uh I guess networks to, would they route their content through pipe? Yeah, essentially what we've seen is like any video streaming service with more than about like 10 million paying customers, they're already multi-CDN strategy. So when a user opens like a title card and says, this is James Bond or whatever, um it will perform some latency checks at that moment and say, Akamai or CloudFront is the fastest and hopefully Pipe in the future. um For that particular title and what CDN's already got it cached, then they'll route the user to that. That happens in the video player itself. um We're really blessed they already have these super sophisticated workflows and they can just plug in a CDN and let the math just churn through. There's no like favoritism. It's really beautiful from like an engineering perspective. So it just routes. So this multi CDN approach, if I'm a streaming service, I probably have a partnership, let's say with five different CDNs. And then depending on where the end user is, it'll do a bunch of different checks and then it'll route through the fastest CDN to that user. And pipe could be one of those. Got it. Okay. over time, as we get like a much larger saturation of nodes in different areas, uh math is really in our favor. So like, you we're already seeing like five or 10 X lower latency than traditional CDNs. So uh over time, they'll either like try to cooperate with us or... basically will just out-compete them ah from a technology standpoint. I could see a situation where it's, you know, some of these CDNs would be in co-opetition with Pipe where they use you, right? And you have some kind of, uh I don't know what the revenue deal is in that kind of partnership, but I could definitely see that happening. Yeah, I think we'd love for the other to work out, but I think there is a model you can reference is like Helium today. So they're doing like AT &T offload and certain areas. So it's a very robust model already implemented by one of the most tech conservative companies on earth, like AT &T. Yeah. So each of these uh machines that install the Pipe network software, they're called nodes. And they're installed in people's homes. And you have some requirements for that. imagine it could be just a simple laptop, right? Yeah, we try to make it so it's like a permissionless. ah Anyone could come in and run the nodes, right? ah There's different advantages, like if you have more RAM, you can cache more content. So you're more likely to get more traffic in those situations. ah So there's different requirements. And I think the Web3 folks are I see a lot of experimenting and discussions and you know I did this and I got more traffic today so it's really fascinating to watch how clever everyone is. uh Now, what's the incentive for me as a node operator to install the pipe network software? that what it's called, by the way? Pipe network software? What do call it? We call it the pop client. So traditional CDNs, they call the notes point of presence, which I think in blockchain people get really confused as like an identity project maybe in the past. uh got it. So if I installed this point of presence pop client on my machine, um tell me about how you're incentivizing users to do that. Yeah, so essentially we look at it and it's been framed as like what we're doing is like proof of work essentially. the operator will install it. It'll open some ports up so that like Chrome and regular video streaming software can connect to it. And the operator, the node operator is incentivized when they perform. bandwidth egress. So they send out data, typically video, but there's a lot of other like LOM stuff happening now. And we have a way to verify that. uh There's like two loops we use. We do just like a traditional Web2 collecting a lot of metrics. And then we also, we do some like kind of wonky zero knowledge proof stuff uh where we perform Zero knowledge proof over the TCP session. We'll look at the timestamps that are incrementing and then take a hash of the data and publish that for verification. then, you know, traditionally in a licensed video streaming workflow, they'll also put in their own verification in the player itself. They'll put like an HMAC for each user. And so there's like triple verification of the bandwidth. Yeah. Let's go back to the ZK stuff. Why are you doing that? Because that could be quite costly to create a proof for. What are you creating a proof for? Yeah, so there was multiple reasons. We were very concerned about self-dealing, so like a node coming in and downloading from their cell for sending a lot of traffic that's not legit to the node to basically exploit the protocol and get a lot of tokens. We looked at this other technology called ZKTLS. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of talk about that right now. It was interesting. mean, in a sense it can fit the requirement. The issue is it's like it uh does like a ZK for every handshake and it introduces in our workflow like 100 milliseconds of latency. So I think there's a lot of workflows that it's super helpful for, but. We're optimizing for latency, trying to get it into single digits. So we went back and just toyed around how we can do this async in the background. And the verifiers can come along, and then the nodes get the rewards once things have been verified. So it doesn't affect like. any of the workflow itself, it just happens in the background. And ZKTLS is like right hot in the front of the user and the browser. And um it's an amazing like pioneer, I think. We probably wouldn't have come up with this little widget if it hadn't been for them. oh Yeah. I've been speaking to a lot of ZK projects recently, and I'm seeing some really unique and novel uh applications of ZK. um that's why I'm curious how you guys are using ZK um at Pype. But it sounds like um ZK kind of, you create a proof for... um for when there's like a streaming handshake between the user and the CDN. And then you double check to make sure it's verifiable, it's real data. They're not self-dealing. It's not fake packets that are coming through. They're actually watching something or downloading something. um Let's see. I think like all of D-Pen needs to probably over time implement something like this. So we're talking to a lot of projects to try to help them with it. ah Just in the passive time. It's not like a core product of ours. It's just a security feature we had to innovate, essentially. it's brilliant. think it's really, um and could reduce latency. mean, especially if you're able to batch these transactions and then kind of verify them later and then throw out the garbage and then keep the good stuff later. um That makes a lot of sense. Tell us about the, um so you're incentivizing users to download, to install POP. point of presence in their machines and they become a node. And then how do they get incentivized? Tell us about the token part. Yeah, so today we're in like a testnet period or I think we'd call it like a beta software period in traditional software. And we're looking to go into production very soon, sometime in the next quarter, I think. So essentially main net is Web3 calls it. And so right now, not everyone can become a node. You have to kind of accept them into the program or... No, just like the name of our company. So, permissionless, anyone can join. We love everyone. Like come in, provide bandwidth. Right now we're doing like a points mechanism in Testnet, which will convert to some really nice rewards in the future. Yeah. You know, it's really bizarre because essentially like we have to price it in US standards because that's like 70 % of the global bandwidth revenue. And that's going to work out really great for a lot of people around the world. Like we've seen ah just like talking to some node runners and understanding their like, mainly we're just trying to understand their cost to run the node. And lots of them will tell us about, you know, where they live and. This could basically, know, more than fund their entire household. oh I imagine, especially the experience you shared about the billion viewers of cricket, which is, those numbers are astounding. mean, I don't know anything about cricket, but I knew it was a big sport, but a billion people, I did not know that. Tell us about that deal. So I see, I see pipe really as a, it's really, I was going to say it's a two-sided market, but it's really, there's It's more than that because you've got to incentivize, you've got a growth will come from having more nodes in the market, right? Or folks installing pop on their machines, that which creates more nodes, which means that latency is going to be like the user experience will be very good, especially in more kind of in neighborhoods where there's, you know, the connection's bad. And then And then on the other side of the market, you've got to have uh CDN relationships with these streaming services, the Netflix's of the world. And so it's like, on the one hand, you've got kind of a community effort creating more nodes. And then you also have like a business development effort in working with the Netflix's of the world. So that's a lot of work. tell us kind of where is your focus right now and how are you? How are you spending your time as you look at this two-sided market? Yeah. So we, we've essentially got a very robust offering for streaming video today, uh, as far as the delivery side. So, um, we're reaching out to our old network, um, at this point and getting large companies to start testing and, um, you know, the feedback's great. think. Unfortunately, there's a lot of like concern about blockchain and trust. So. These guys are very cautious and want to test for many weeks at a time, which understand. I imagine some of these deals get stuck in legal for months. Yeah, I mean, again, we're really blessed that like AT &T has done some types of deals like this, so it's helpful. They also have like annual cycles typically for CDN. So they'll go into like a one-year contract typically towards the end of the year. So, you know, trying to get any type of like, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars deals is like a Q3, Q4 arrangement. Mm-hmm. And we're just really blessed. like we come from the streaming video industry. So ah like before we even built this out. I reached out to some directors I know personally at Amazon Video and said, am I nuts? If VACC provides you with this lower latency, would you trust this system, even test it? And they all said, yeah. You're the mad scientist. You built a lot of stuff before, so if you're building stuff again, we'll definitely try it. That was great. We wanted to understand where we were at with product market fit before we even started the code. today, streaming video is like 70%, 80 % of traditional CDNs. I think that's likely to change in the next few years, So we have a very robust roadmap we're getting ready to release about. expanding the technology to support like different gen AI services and things like that as well. Got it, got it. So going from, so if the atomic unit is some kind of packet and that packet can contain video, now we're also looking at different types of data. Got it. a lot of like, we've got a lot of entrepreneurs testing with like chat bots and things like that. And being able to cache responses has been super helpful for those folks. And some of them have told us like, they're seeing like, it's still high to us, but they're seeing like 50 milliseconds in the chat bot latency. So it makes it feel much more real time to the users. You if you go to like, ah a lot of these bigger chats, like OpenAI, it's considerable latency. So it's pretty fun to innovate in a field we're not familiar with. Yeah, no, that's really fascinating. And the opportunity, the total addressable market grows as you're looking at different use cases like that. So it's not just video anymore. But video sounds like that's where you and your team have expertise. And so you're starting there. But I mean, we're just talking pipes, right? And you can send anything through a pipe. I love being an innovator. Part of me is like, let's just go all in on AI. then from a rational business operator, we don't want to leave a couple hundred million dollars of revenue on the table right now. So let's just finish building out and see what we can sell in the video space and then start pushing the envelope on the AI. Going, looking at the business, as a, a, you become a CDN partner for a big, a big brand, they pay you in US dollars. So you actually receive real revenue, like revenue and fiat. And then, um and then node operators right now during test net, they're, they're earning um points to provide a service. I imagine when you go into main net in full production, those points will convert to something that they can do something with. um So this is what I find fascinating about decentralized physical infrastructure business deep in, is that you're actually earning real revenue. But then you'll have this other thing, it's typically a token that helps to coordinate kind of activities and assets and collateral. And um so as you're looking at kind of the, if you step back and you look at this business, um what is the flywheel that tells you kind of what the scoreboard is, like how the team is doing at all times? What does that flywheel look like for Pipe? I think there's like a web two perspective where we look at like internal latencies and uh revenue, things like that. And then I think if we look at it from this like new like crypto web three side, uh we really like this model called burn mitt equilibrium. So essentially, let's just say customer contracts with permissionless labs or even better, they don't like they just go straight to the chain. In that sequence, they would acquire this like token, you know, it's and when they are ready to, you know, use the bandwidth, they will burn this token and then they get bandwidth credits basically. God. then those bandwidth credits are burnt as the nodes are servicing the bandwidth. And then the nodes are compensated with new emissions. But it's really, really cool. This model typically has a fixed supply. So it's almost like a more harsh Bitcoin in a way. it's like the supply just actually goes down over time. as more bandwidth has been serviced. Yeah, that's really interesting. How did you come up with the tokenomics? Because the whole coordination piece is really pretty fascinating and it's one of those things you just kind of just don't make up. mean, it's got to service the life of this thing for a long, long, long time. Yeah, very candidly like that. That was not our invention. uh We've been blessed. Like our lead investors, MultiCoin and I'm pretty sure Kyle uh invented this burn mint equilibrium tokenomics model. we've also seen it play out in helium and some other. uh GPU, different experiments, and it looks very solid. All the teams had a lot of great feedback. then, know, being able work with Kyle himself, like how to tweak the knobs on the emissions and different things like that. um You know, it's great to have like such a such an expert partner in this like Web3 side. m that's awesome. Yeah, Kyle is, he's one of those contrarians, like voices in crypto that for some reason or another, it seems to be always right. You know, it's actually kind of annoying because he's like, you know, he's like, all the voices are one way and he's like the lone voice on this side. And he just turns out to be right. It's like, man. He's been great to work with. think, you know, we're both, we're both like really nice guys, but I think, you know, business were harsh. So people frame us as like a ruthless Buddha and. That's cool. Well, so I'm on the Pipe Network website and I just click through to become a Pipe operator, node operator. So I fill out the form and then tell me the process after that. I submit it and then what? Yeah, so we've got two networks running today. We've got DevNet and the client's just ready to be downloaded. And then we do have a testnet where you just fill out a little online form and then you'll receive an invite code. uh They're sent out, I think, a couple of times a day. Mainly just doing that to help build up the community so we can, I think the primary thing is get your Discord username so we can, as you start to perform, uh different bandwidth or if you have like super low latency, you can get like really cool Discord, uh well, things added to your username. Yeah. what's the most base requirement for a machine to download POP? And be able to add value to the pipe network as well as to the user. Yeah, our lens is always skewed as technologists. So we try to ask for people to come with 16 gigabytes of RAM. um We have. much any machine these days, At least. so, but we've learned there's a lot of 8 gig machines out there. So we're definitely accommodate them, but you know, 8 gig is going to cash a lot less. you know, if you look at like an HD stream, they're typically going to be like 12 gigs. If you were looking like a modern, like John Wick style movie and We want nodes to be able to service a full length video if possible. But that being said, there's a lot of other objects like the chat bot stuff, images, if you go to uh Fox News or CNN, there's a lot of just static images there that those nodes can service very well. Yeah, I wish you hadn't said John Wick because now that's all I'm thinking about. ah Yeah, this is cool. This is really cool. So you're in Testnet, DevNet, and then you're going to full production at some point in next, let's say, couple of months. ah What does that look like for you in terms of preparing to go? ah the full production. I think for us, we mainly want to get a very strong revenue base and kind of prove the technology out. I think we see a lot of projects go into production with low revenue. And it feels like that hurts the project and the community. So we're out hustling greatly to generate. I think for blockchain considerable revenue, you for us it's pretty negligible. Like, you know, if you look at something like 10 million a year blockchain, that's quite a bit of revenue. uh But if you look in, you know, global CD and TAM, like it's billions of dollars. So it's very small. Also talking to some more friends, you know, like, is there any parts of the system we need audited, different things like that? Mm-hmm. Um, you know, luckily there's, we're super familiar with like Qualys and CrowdStrike and, know, these, these guys that can come in and provide like superb audits. Um, the, the web three stuff's interesting, but, um, they seem to be more focused on these smart contracts and things that aren't as applicable to our business. Yeah. How did you, so throughout the conversation, haven't, uh you've kind of described Web3 people as separate than you. Yet you're like smack dab in the middle of doing something really innovative inside of Web3. Tell us what's going through your mind that you see Web3 people different as you when we see you as kind of one of us. Yeah, I think the team's just highly skeptical of blockchain in general. I think it's excellent for payments and coordinating these nodes, using payments and putting out bounties when we need nodes in Wyoming or Philippines, just different regions. So think that's great. It's just... There's lot of like uniqueness of blockchain. think our, our team doesn't have like, uh, we don't think about for good or bad. We don't really think about communities and things like that. We, we think more about the product and the end customers. And, um, so we miss a lot of things like that. Um, the team is very small. It's five people, all engineers, no marketing. Um, so we're. We're definitely under the radar. We've been really blessed that like a couple of really smart engineers retweet us and things like that. em I'm not sure anyone would know about us in Web3 if it wasn't for those folks. Yeah. Yeah, that's the, when I've talked to technical founders, that's typically the, and you want that, right? You want the founder to be focused on the product. But what often happens is once you have a token that becomes kind of the center of gravity that coordinates users, the product, like everything, that becomes its own product. with its kind of different ways of kind of promoting it and marketing it because it becomes a key security kind of component, right? Because as the price of that token goes up, like it kind of lifts every, all the boats, right? So it's, uh so, but yeah, it's definitely new for, um it's a different approach in Web3 for sure um that requires kind of a different lens. Yeah, I think if you look at like a traditional company like Palantir or something though, like, you know, they go out and they do shareholder updates and present market revenue updates and things like that. But at of the day, they're focused on the customers, know, the government and the price of the stocks reflected based on those actions, not on look at my profile image of some type of NFT, things like that. No, you're right. as a founder, mean, you can, you you're focused on the product and that's great. You could always hire for the Web3 crypto stuff, you know, to help compliment. um there's a of great people with a mindset of building these communities and pushing them out further that I think we will definitely start to engage as we get, especially more demand from the customer in areas we're missing nodes. So little bit of human coordination will drop in for sure. Yeah, and that's where I think crypto is very good at. Like really in coordinating, you know, people, assets, collateral, technologies, actions, behaviors. I mean, it's the whole game theory behind it is pretty special. So, well, we tried to build this without crypto and we could not figure it out. Yeah, yeah. And that's the key insight, right? Like you're trying to, building something that's different and it turns out that crypto is an enabler of it. So it's not like the center thing, but it's like, it really enables a whole new set of uh innovation that wouldn't have existed without crypto. And that's when you know you've hit something special. Yeah, it's been great. I I would have never imagined we'd have so many nodes at this point. So it's very magical. And I look forward to more builders coming over and leveraging this coordination technique. Since you brought that up, I'm curious about the go-to-market and the rollout of the nodes. uh You mentioned getting nodes in areas where the latency is high. I forget what you said, but how are you prioritizing geographies and zip codes and all of that to get nodes? um What's the approach there? I think it's two-fold. Like right now we're just trying to see where the organic node runners are. And it's been overwhelming. Like if you look at, I think a dashboard on our site, it shows like India is very saturated amazingly. And then, know, secondly, you know, we're trying to get feedback from these companies, what they're willing to share, mostly confidentially, like where they're... most troublesome areas are. And then we'll go out and try to incentivize like uh different types of reward bounties to like spin up nodes there. So very targeted on the needs of your client or customer. Yeah, it's been fascinating, like watching people, you know, they'll even like call other people to run the software. We've seen some people like set up Starlinks. just, people are so clever and innovative in this space, you know. That's really, I love that. I mean, because you're meeting a need, If I'm a video streaming service and I've got customers in one region, but it's just the experience is bad. Like you're actually solving a real problem for them if you can get more nodes in that area. Exactly. you know, there's so many like, I think 48 % of people just in the US alone live outside of metropolitan areas. So there's huge demand and need to service these areas better. And I think a lot of people forget that, know, especially those that live in, you know, big cities in the U.S. It's like if you drive cross country, it's mostly country. Yeah, yeah, it's great, know, it's like very diverse, you know, I think you go to England and place like that, it's very similar to you drive out. It's beautiful, yeah. Wow. This is really cool. Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us, telling us about Pipe Network and what you guys have coming up. For those that are interested in becoming a node operator, you can go to pipe.network and then all the information's there and you can run your own node. and be part of the pipe network. We really appreciate anyone come out and run the node today, help us grow the network. Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Cheers.

People on this episode

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Peter Abilla

Host
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David Rhodus Pipe Network

Guest