🚀 Web3 for Developers Roundtable

Hey everyone, Kristian here, Developer Advocate on the Cloudflare Developer Advocacy Team, and I'm here with Jon talking about Web 3 and all things sort of, well, Web 3 for Cloudflare Birthday Week. So Jon, you want to introduce yourself real quick? Yeah, I'm Jon Kuperman. I'm also a Developer Advocate on Kristian's team. And we're also here with Nader Dabit. Do you want to introduce yourself, Nader? Hey, thanks for the intro. Yeah, I'm Nader. I've been working in Web 3 only about five and a half months, but I have had a lot of fun experiences and I'm looking forward to talking about them. It's been a busy five months for you, I feel like. Yeah, it does. It feels like you're a staple in the community these days. Yeah, it's wild because it is, you know, still fairly like new, you know, compared to the Web 2 community, a new community. So a lot of the people are new. So, yeah. Awesome. So I thought it'd be cool just first to talk a little bit about you and what you're up to. So could you tell us a little bit about Edge and Node, the graph and kind of, yeah, what's going on in your life lately? Yeah, so before I joined Edge and Node, I was actually at AWS for three years. And really, for the last six months, maybe 12 months, I was kind of keeping my eye open for other opportunities. I had a few really cool opportunities that came around for DevRel stuff. So Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, a handful of like, you know, interesting startups and stuff. I had pretty solid opportunities there. But nothing really looked like it was going to be kind of a real, you know, improvement to my life monetarily and also personally and, you know, maybe even mentally. So I was kind of looking, like a lot of these opportunities were kind of like lateral moves where I would kind of like go from being a senior principal level person at this company to being that at this company. So nothing was like exciting to me. So I just stayed at AWS, which was a great team. And out of kind of nowhere, I started diving into the rabbit hole of like what people are calling Web3. And this was kind of like late 2020, early 2021. After checking out something called the Graph Protocol, which, you know, in the past, I've been into crypto from like 2015 as an investor. But I've never really thought about the technology itself. I kind of like just dismissed it. So never really looked past really the overall like overview that you would get maybe from their website or something. But since the Graph Protocol was using GraphQL, and GraphQL was something I was extremely interested in, I kind of started wanting to understand like, why are they using GraphQL? And then one thing led to another and ended up diving into their like, you know, blog posts and stuff like that, which then led me to like maybe a dozen other different protocols and all these different blog posts and Twitter threads and all this stuff. And I kind of became excited about something in technology for the first time. And, you know, I don't know, maybe the first time in like three or four years or something like that, like this excited, maybe since, you know, getting excited about serverless at the time and cloud computing. So it was like three and a half years ago, maybe. And, you know, I was like, you know what, this might be a space where I want to work. So I was like looking around at a few protocols to kind of like submit my application to. But I had zero experience in the space. So I wasn't sure if anyone would like take me seriously. But I decided to just shoot my shot. And I actually ended up applying at the Graph Protocol and Edge and Node, which is kind of like they're two separate teams, but they work closely together. And I had the interview. And I learned in my interview that there's so many people that are kind of moving into this space from the web to space that it's fairly common to kind of come and then just learn while you're here. As long as you're, you know, a good fit. Maybe if you've been a software developer, you'll be able to ramp up fairly easily just because you understand how to program already. And there's just so many opportunities right now open that they're literally just like looking for qualified people. They gave me an opportunity and I kind of took it and it's, you know, making I'm making less money and almost half as much money as I could have at like Coinbase or one of these other companies. But I'm getting more equity in the actual, you know, tokens and stuff over time. But it's actually just so much more fun and I'm so much more happy, like my quality of life. And that's really all like, you know, of course, like I want to be working towards something that I feel is making a positive impact. But my mental health is so good. And I think part of it is because I do truly believe that the stuff that we're working on is actually doing that as well. Like we're having, I think we're having a positive impact on the world. I'm having fun. I'm learning. I'm getting paid. You know, it's just been great. Yeah. And this has been six months. So who knows six months from now, I might hit it. Like, we'll see. Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome. I was wondering, I wasn't sure about it for the segment, but could we take maybe a minute to talk about what is Web3 before we dive too much deeper into it? So for me, also pretty new. I think that I first heard the term from a talk that Juan gave over at Protocol Labs. And so he had given a conference talk on like, you know, I think it was like Web1 was like, you know, like this, like information, like static, you know, HTML information that would get shared. And then Web2 was like these interactive applications, you know, your Ubers, Facebooks, Twitters, you know, all these cool things, but they're very centralized, right? And so then I guess in that kind of context, what do you see Web3 as being like, what are the distinguishing, you know, markers of a Web3 world? Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting because I also saw some videos and stuff from Juan Benet. Also, Yaniv Tal, who's the founder of The Graph had a pretty interesting talk that was one of the things that really got me interested as well. And of course, if you kind of like Google around, you'll find a lot of literature and things like that, and papers and stuff about, you know, what is Web1, Web2, Web3, and you'll even find things that kind of like have conflicting definitions of like what this means. And, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't know, I can't like sit there and say, oh, this is like what it is. I can tell you what it is to me, maybe. I actually wrote a blog post called What is Web3 on FreeCodeCamp. It's been read by like 60,000 people and it keeps on being shared and people seem to like it. And I updated it not too long ago. So you can just Google what is Web3 and that should come up in the top one or two results. But I think that people are using like this term like Web3 to just encompass a bunch of like new ideas that are enabled by a couple of new protocols or a couple of new pieces of functionality that are now, you know, able to be programmed into decentralized protocols of the web that we just didn't have 10 or 15 years ago. So when we think about the web, we think about, you know, going to websites and maybe if we're a developer, building a website and like uploading files and stuff. Well, all these things are enabled by protocols that we've just known to be able to use because they just work and we don't need a centralized intermediary to make them work. So HTTP, FTP, SSH, TCP, there's like a dozen or so protocols that we're just so used to using. But there were a couple of protocols that were really not there. And therefore, we built centralized systems to make them work. And those two pieces of functionality were state, which you can think of as like data. And then the other is payments. So therefore, what do we have to kind of to make that work to build out the applications that we want to in Web2? We had databases on AWS, GCP, maybe in our bedroom. We also had PayPal, which, you know, was revolutionary. But when you look at how complex it was to make something like that work, and you actually listen to the people that built it, it was a nightmare. And then you have Stripe and all these other companies that are kind of like the improvements upon that. But to actually make the functionality of native payments work before, you know, these new functionalities were introduced, which is essentially, you know, blockchain, to make a payment, or let's say I wanted to send money. Let's say I turn 18. And I want to send money from the United States to my friend who also turned 18. And he lives in like South America, or in my experience, like Palestine. Okay, how do we do that? Well, first of all, we both need to go to some office somewhere and get a driver's license or some identification. We then need to take that identification and go to a bank that is open at that time. We then need to take paper currency and deposit it into that account. And who knows how long that will take, maybe they'll open the account right away, maybe it'll take a certain number of days, we have to provide, you know, a bunch of personal information to get these accounts open, we then need to go to a computer and create an email address, we then need to go to one of these websites and create an account, we then have to verify our account, and then we have to link our banks together. Anyway, like this is a lot of work, right? It's like, you know, it's definitely not something that's accessible for a lot of people in the world. But it's just also a lot of work. And I think that technology abstracts away things that are hard to do. And by nature, how easy it's become to be able to basically create digital scarcity with blockchains, people are, you know, taking advantage of that. And what we now have is the ability to literally go to Chrome, download a wallet, and then receive money within a few seconds from anywhere in the world, and be able to kind of like use that money, however we'd like. So web three, if we want to kind of really make it just super, super, you know, boiled down, it's the introduction of native payments and native state via blockchains. And it's also the idea that we can now build decentralized experiences and applications, because of these new pieces of functionality that we have at our disposal. I love that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's been something for me, I've like, tried to wrap my head right, obviously, like the payment aspect of it, I think, like, that's kind of a lot of people's introduction to the, you know, to web three, generally, like back, you know, 2015, 2016, like seeing Ethereum and seeing Bitcoin and stuff like that. And understanding the state aspect of it for me, and just like what the potential is, there has been a really big, I mean, reading, reading, like your blog posts, and, and then just like, spending all day on Twitter, reading posts of people talking about this stuff. It's like, Oh, yeah. And this week, in particular, there's been a lot of, or actually, in these last two days, there's been a lot of like, you know, very polarized discussions going both ways, which has been interesting. Seen some, yeah, see some hot takes on Twitter the last couple days. Yeah. But I mean, for me, this is something that we actually wrote about in the blog post that's accompanying this, this open source thing we launched today, like, basically, that the idea is that, like, you have like a wallet, which is kind of like the interaction, like, that's a thing that you own. And like, there's things stored inside of that, like, money, right, but then also like, tokens and things that can, like, verify your identity or give you access to like, communities and things like that. And then like, you know, as opposed to that being stored, like you said, I'm like, I don't know, Twitter's AWS database or something like that, like, you have kind of the ownership of that. And then the, you know, the programs that people deploy on the blockchain are the ways that you can do that, you know, interact with other people or things like that, right? And interact with their data and stuff, too. I think that that's been like a big, you know, for me, it was like, Okay, I understand, like, the high level stuff, but like, what does it mean for me as like a developer, right? And I think that's been like a really big piece for me to understand that. That's been huge. And then the all the data just being there, like the idea of being like, Oh, I wish ether scan did this. And I'm being like, Well, wait a minute, that's all like public, like data in the box. Like I just build my own UI and call it like Jacobs ether scanner, like no problem, right? Like, or even like seeing the API calls they make, and then knowing I can make the same ones. So it's all, you know, it's all open. It's all like, that's like the idea I saw, I can't remember who it was, but I saw a tweet about the idea of like companies competing for the best UI over the same data set is so exciting, like, you know, a social network, like, you know, with one set of data, and then all these cool people innovating on like, well, if you love photos, use mine, you know, your data is already there. And if you love videos, use my or if you, you know, want, you know, just all these different ways that you can interact with the same bits of data. It's like really exciting for me. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, you know, so many interesting things that are happening right now, because of all this stuff. But there's also the idea that you don't have to participate in this at all. And it's really not going to affect, in my opinion, like you in your day to days. So a lot of people are, you know, seeing a lot of discussions around it. But I also feel like, you know, you can literally continue working in your day to day role in it. And the opportunities that are kind of coming out are not going to be replacing all the things that we already have today, they're just bringing out new ways to do things that we have been doing. And over time, they might, you might see introduction of a new way of like doing a social network. But I don't think you're going to see it destroy like all the other social network, right? It'll just be like, Oh, this is a cool thing, I want to do this. And you'll see like, a billion users maybe go to this new app. But you'll still have all these people using all these other apps. And you're gonna like have now just a new way of doing things. And I think that's the way I kind of look at it. A lot of times, you know, even me sometimes when I talk about stuff, but in general, the web, three people are just like, really hand wavy and kind of like, you know, really say cryptic things sometimes. But I don't think that's healthy. I think we should be more, you know, I would say grounded in how we talk about stuff, because there is a lot of awesome stuff. And people are getting excited about it. And people are building like new revolutionary things. But that doesn't mean that you can't continue doing this stuff. And there is important stuff still, that's going to happen that has nothing to do with blockchains. There's still like, you know, the same valid use cases we've always had for all this other tech. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of stuff like coming from like a JavaScript background, like the like bundler authors, and they'll be like, on Twitter and giving talks. And it's so good that they're excited, right? Like, it's awesome that they're excited. It's awesome. They're collaborating. But I see people feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes they're like, I don't even know what and it's like, it's totally okay to just like mute those topics. Like, that's no worry at all. Like with your, you know, still on your like, you know, I don't know, like your grunt or your gulp app, and it's working awesome for you. There's really just no need to get in unless you want to get in. But yeah, I think it's like on one hand, it's awesome that people are so excited and enthusiastic and want to talk about it. But on the other hand, yeah, I think it can feel a little bit like, like the FOMO or a little hand wavy or a little, you know, whatever. And I think that can get on top of people sometimes for sure. So maybe as a sort of like last question, we can wrap up. I'd be curious, like, you know, you have an interesting perspective coming from like AWS and doing DevRel stuff there. And just you, I think, I agree with you when you said that there's a lot of like Web3 stuff that can be a little hand wavy. And I know that it's well intentioned and it's exciting and stuff, right? But I'd be curious, like, what, for your perspective that, you know, is very developer focused, like, what do you think are sort of the biggest like barriers or sort of like hurdles that people, developers specifically need to kind of understand or to get started, right? Like, say someone listens to this and they're like, you know, oh, hell yeah, this sounds awesome. Let's, let's go do it. Like, what are the things that like, where, maybe not even barriers, isn't that what it is? Let's, where do people start? You know? Yeah. Let's talk about where to start. Let's talk about the trade-offs and the negatives as well. I mean, when I started diving into this headfirst, like I was coming at it from a perspective of a web developer on AWS. So I was thinking, okay, what is the stack? Like, what is the Web3 stack? So for me, the Web2 stack was like identity. I'm going to build out my own identity system, or I might use Cognito or Auth0. A database, I might use RDS or SQL or NoSQL or something like that. And then you have storage, I might use S3. Anyway, so you have like all these different pieces that make up like a Web3 application or Web2 application. So my question was, okay, what is the Web3 stack? You know, what do you build out these decentralized applications or what do you use to do this? And that's one of the big, you know, I would say challenges right now is that like, you have certain parts of the stack that are not only there and mature, but like, you know, they've been in production for a couple of years, like a blockchain, like Ethereum, for example. But then you have a bunch of other things that are not quite fleshed out yet. So you have discussions around identity. You can implement decentralized identity or self-sovereign identity yourself, but there is no specification like laid out for you. There are a couple of interesting protocols like IDX that uses Ceramic, that's just a combination of two protocols, Ceramic and IDX, that kind of provide maybe the first version of what this might look like. It's pretty solid, but the developer experience and the user experience isn't as pristine as what we're used to. Like, you're not going to just have like single millisecond, single digit millisecond latency or anything like that. It's going to be like a couple of seconds to authenticate, right? Because you're like writing to this decentralized network and has to come to consensus. So like, the biggest challenge, I think, for a web developer coming into this space from a background where everything just worked is that everything doesn't just work. There's a lot of work that still needs to do to kind of figure out all these things. And you hear people like Juan Benet and even Yaniv from The Graph, their future goal is like full decentralization, but that is not possible today because you still need centralized infrastructure to do a lot of things. So you can't do things, there's just a lot of things you just can't do right now. So I think the idea is the idea of progressive decentralization where you kind of like use the things that are there now in different ways to kind of implement some of these Web3 ideas of ownership and stuff, but you can't have a fully decentralized infrastructure until you have all these different components there. In the way that these different pieces of infrastructure, like ideally would run for like Web3 people are kind of using decentralized protocols. So for instance, for storage, instead of using S3, which has a kind of like a single bucket or a single point of failure, you might have actually two or three regions that you can replicate to. But like the ideal idea in a Web3 world would be like you have multiple nodes that are storing this data and you write to a node and if that node goes down, there are dozens of other ones where you can kind of read back from. So like the core idea of one of the core ideas around this decentralized web infrastructure is that you have like more robust infrastructure with less single points of failure. But again, like all of those pieces just aren't there yet. So compute, for example, that's a really interesting discussion because what does compute even mean when you're reading data from either a blockchain or a public network? What does data privacy look like? Where does private data go? You wouldn't want to have like a messaging app on a public blockchain, right? And if you did, you would have to have some really interesting encryption going on. And there are projects that are out there solving it. And you'll see people like, oh, just use this, but you can't just use that because this is not like ready yet. So yeah, the answers aren't all the way there yet for like building out a fully decentralized app to do all of the things that we're used to. So that's one big thing. The other big thing is that this whole like, quote unquote, Web3 space is really confusing because it mixes like all of these things that we just talked about and kind of like tries to just put them all together in one package name called Web3. When in reality, it's just a bunch of shit that's like, you know, happens to kind of have some overlap around ideas and goals. But in reality, there's like overlap also between like maybe Web2 stuff. You know, you'll have just, you know, some of the exact same things we've used in the past. You'll have some new ideas, but you're kind of trying to tie together like tokenization. You're trying to tie together blockchain. You're trying to tie together decentralization. You're trying to tie together self-sovereign identity. You're trying to tie together, you know, public data that you want to be made available for anyone to build upon. Like all of these things are all together. And it's just really a lot, you know, it's even now six months into it, I'm still trying to figure out a lot of it. But I think that's also, you know, part of the reason why it is so stimulating intellectually is because you're part of that like discussion around solving some of these problems. And, you know, if you like that type of challenge, then it's probably going to be fun to you. But if you're looking for a solution to a problem that is just there for you, then it might not be that fun for you, you know? Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. Yeah, that's interesting to kind of look at the way things are, right? Like we're in a Google Meet call right now. I'd like, it's interesting to break that up into like all of its sort of disparate pieces and think like, what does that mean for something like that to run like fully decentralized? You can do that with anything, right? A decentralized version of this? Well, I mean, to me, a decentralized or web three version often, often that's just building another centralized version of the thing, but instead, aligning ownership in different ways. So like, you might build a centralized version of something that's already out there, but instead of like, you know, two or three founders and like 30% go into a venture capitalist and the rest go into the stock market, you have 10 ,000 people that have equal ownership. Like that's one way to think about it. For a live streaming app like we're using now, there's actually something called Livepeer that is a decentralized live streaming service that has a decentralized network of nodes running. So you might use Livepeer. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, people. I mean, I'm sure, yeah, I can't imagine the first person that's like, let's go look at all 100 tabs I've opened and figure out like which one of these is ripe for web threefication or whatever. Yeah. And I think like, I mean, one of the things that I, that I early on when I, when I probably even interviewed on some other podcasts, six months ago or five months ago, I would be like, you know, thinking like, yeah, we want to build out a fully decentralized version of all apps. But in reality, that's not possible right now. So like instead, you know, you know, like, again, like I mentioned, you have like this idea of progressive decentralization. But I think, to me, a lot of the really interesting stuff is, is more around more equitable and, you know, let's say distributed ownership of platforms and aligning interesting incentives that might encourage those types of platforms to be more successful. You know, there's also the idea around that we never really talked about around advertising and, and, and user data that is often harvested, and kind of, you know, taken advantage of, and what are the incentives that make that a thing today? And how is that different in web three? And you can actually read a little bit of my thoughts around that in that blog post that I mentioned, what is web three, but that's another interesting part of this whole discussion, I think. For sure. Yeah, so I, that may actually be a good point to wrap up, because I think we're, we're almost out of time. So where this I think, would be a good place for us to leave off, like, where should people go to see those kinds of links? Like, I know, like, your writing, for me was really useful in getting started, especially like the full stack development of Ethereum and stuff like that. Like, should people go to your Twitter? Or where would you like people to kind of go next? They want to check out your thoughts and all this stuff? Yeah, I mean, there's two tutorial or not tutorials, there's two blog posts I wrote that I think are interesting, because they'll give you my overview, but they'll also link to a bunch of other people's thoughts. One of them is called the new creator economy, DAOs, community ownership and crypto economics. That is on dev.to. That's a great title, by the way. Thanks. I'll post a link to it here. Maybe you can kind of like, yeah, or something. And then the other one is just called what is web three, and it's on free code camp, you can just Google that should show up first or second. And also have links to other interesting posts that will bring you down a rabbit hole. Like if you read both of these posts, and you follow the links, you will probably have a day or a week worth of reading. Yeah. And you know, you'll either come away thinking that I'm crazy and that we're all you know, just speaking of things that are just dumb, or you might be interested. Either way, it's fun stuff, I think. Yeah, totally. And I have no like really strong opinion about convincing people like I think it's more again, about there's a lot of people interested in this stuff. And I think it's in my nature to explore all types of stuff. And I think I always encourage other people to explore other things. And, and you can walk away again, you know, thinking this is interesting or not. But I think it is worth like at least trying to understand where we're coming from. Maybe, John, any last questions? No, that's awesome. We covered Yeah, it was great. Great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate your time on this. Yeah, thanks for having me. 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