An overview of Akash, Web3, decentralized computing, and why it matters. We’ll also talk about how to get involved in Web3, decentralized & multi-sided computing marketplaces, applications running on the decentralized cloud, and what lies ahead.
Transcript
(00:01) [Music] [Applause] [Music] god [Music] fiscal you want to introduce our amazing speaker i know you guys been in touch there was a little bit of jokes before the uh before yeah started to hear your screen again uh in the meantime yeah so everyone welcome back another uh d-web brother i guess you would say everybody says the the d web stack is hns akash and skynet so it’s really great to have akash speaking here today um talk
(01:07) more about their protocol and how it uh interacts with handshake and whatnot um but i’ll i’ll just let you know i’ll just yeah i’ll let alani take it away we’ve already eaten away uh enough of his time so yeah you go ahead and give your presentation all right first things first you can all hear me yeah i hear you clearly yeah great awesome all right hello everyone um thank you to the handshake institute michael and the team for having akash as part of handicon has been a wonderful event so far entertaining and delightful
(01:44) um enlightening and insightful actually i am melanie technical program manager at akash and today i will be discussing why web 3 and decentralization matters um what we do are the cash um our relationship um you know with handshake and what we see ahead in the future and i will open it up for discussion right afterwards so i will share my screen here bear with okay in a moment all right first line this is beautiful okay so for my presentation tonight i’ll be visiting as i said earlier why decentralization matters why work
(02:29) through matters and how we’re bridging technical and functional use cases as i said earlier my name is alani some of you have seen me in some of the some of the akash videos and for those who don’t know me well i am alani i’m often imitated but never replicated keep that in mind so you know when we look at a brief introduction to centralization what’s going on with my screen here all right you know what i’m going to talk about is very briefly look at how we got here you know everyone remember the initial you
(03:05) know yahoo.com poster child for web one which you know web one was very very um focused on on community governance and some elements of decentralization the protocols were generally open and the value actually accrued to the edges of the network to users and builders you know so think of it as you know let’s build something everybody come in with your ideas and let’s explore that’s fantastic but as we know humans we will bastardize everything yahoo was great cluttered webpage a lot of information too much in too little time
(03:45) fast forward um just over a decade after that to web 2 which was very silos centralized services run by a few corporations basically what web 2 has done is to socialize the costs while privatizing the games what that means is a very few a handful of companies like google apple amazon and facebook what do they do they control the value and that value goes to them again socialize the cost privatize the gains so here comes what three would decentralize the ecosystem right community governance and ethos based on decentralization
(04:34) with the advanced modern functional functionality of web 2 while building on top of that and it’s owned by the builders and the users and orchestrated with tokens as a means to incentivize participation now where does akash fit into that now the cache akash is the world’s first to centralize an open source cloud we accelerate deployment scale efficiency efficiency and price performance for high growth industries like blockchain and machine learning and artificial intelligence now the principle behind the unstoppable
(05:08) cloud is fully sovereign cloud infrastructure that cannot be challenged or taken down by adversaries and hackers and the unstoppable cloud movement in itself enables the creators of the future to build with more freedom and it gives people control over their data what that means is you can never be de-platformed period and i’m go i’m gonna go you know one step further and and i will illustrate this and i’ll bring it you know full circle in a minute so in those decentralized clouds it means it means anybody can be a provider
(05:39) so think of it as every website or app that you go to today host it on the cloud it means servers at least by big companies like amazon google microsoft and others and whatever cost does is disrupt this centralization of resources by providing a decentralized network of server providers and it gives the possibility for anybody capable to rent compute and capacity on spare machines and they can earn an extra income so you can make money on that old gaming machine that’s been sitting in your basement accumulating dust
(06:13) think airbnb but for cloud computing and on the other hand anyone who wants to host an app or a website can now do that at a fraction of the cost and now to fulfill the transactions done between the parties akash uses the blockchain technology so that all the transactions are transparent fast global and cheap and akash is part of the cosmos ecosystem because it’s built with the cosmos sdk now furthermore how do we deploy an app on our cache what will leverage kubernetes contain orchestration to provide the maximum
(06:50) flexibility in terms of what applications can be deployed on our network so basically if your application is containerized with docker it can run on the cache the only thing you need are the akt tokens to pay for the computing and then voila you can deploy your app in a few steps for example a request for compute storage which means persistent storage as well or hosting is made and providers are able to bid on that request providers bid as a requester you look at the bids that you have is it price accommodating what that
(07:32) means is do you have the price elasticity do you have the right configuration and more importantly is that provider highly rated by other users in a nutshell akash gives control back to the requester while sharing the same control level of control with the provider so it’s an end-to-end marketplace that ensures that everyone has transparency elasticity and more importantly ownership solver now the user selects the bid they want the provider won the bid and the user configures the lease or confirms the lease and sends the escrow
(08:11) which is then held via akt tokens the stack definition language file is basically a manifest for you know a manifest that father tells here’s a configuration i want you know 24 gigs you know 60 gig gigabit ram however much storage you want this is what i need and so basically the customer and tenants define the deployment services data centers requirements and pricing parameters in a manifest it’s a yaml file and that file is written in a declarative language called the software definition language and that sdl in itself is a
(08:43) human-friendly data standard for declaring deployment attributes and that follows a form for lack of a better term for declaring or to request resources from the network and is compatible with the yaml standard and similar to docker compose files you can also then point to a handshake domain from within their catalytics deploy tool seamless now full disclosure we are in the middle of test net three many of you have heard about chestnut three that are cautious currently over the last two weeks and we put about almost a quarter million
(09:14) dollars off for grabs to those who participate so ssl support will be coming in about a month from now once we complete test net 3 at the end of this weekend so that’s fantastic news coming from akash you heard it first that was actually breaking news today furthermore the provider turns that stl file into a running container boom done and what do you have it just works and this is an infinitely repeatable process at scale globally so when we talk about ownership self-sovereignty transparency community driven
(09:57) akash is the perennial challenger and destructor period and with a healthy ecosystem including great partners like handshake together we are laying siege on centralization period now that being said just as i actually said this before the slide this is an infinitely repeatable process so it doesn’t end somewhere as new blocks are created we’re bringing new validators new providers new partners both tactical and strategic very soon grandma will be able to deploy family photos under cash okay a college freshman will be able to
(10:43) make an income by leasing out idle compute capacity and persistent storage on their machine while they’re not using it those are simple use cases journalists who do not want to be de-platformed activists bloggers gamers okay defy applications among many others currently deploy on akash and in the very near future there will be an escalation in that number of deployments globally furthermore which applications currently run on the d-cloud on the decentralized cloud powered by akash.
(11:31) com is an environment you can go on to see some of the platforms today that are currently deployed on the couch some of these are very familiar entities osmosis red coin polygon code stack chandra station among many others and you can go to that url you the list grows almost daily and those are the ones we recognize there are a whole lot more that are not on this list now if i may what’s my next slide all right so now why does web 3 matter the problem public trust institutional accountability today you surrender your personnel data in order to use services going back to
(12:20) my prior point around a few members of a cartel socialize the cost and they privatize the gains that is fundamentally unacceptable when you look at the core tenants of this decentralization you surrender your personal data use free services provided like google on microsoft amazon and of course facebook public trust right you know when you have control by certain entities who who are beholding to regulators and vice versa that by design brings the issue of public trust into question and then institutional accountability
(13:07) which today as we know is zero because the current work requires trusted institutions that we increasingly cannot hold accountable the best question to ask anyone is in crypto is where do you live there’s always a three second period of silence if i still have someone in within within a similar event just that i walk in crypto i’m not going to tell you where i live it happens all the time and that’s because again you never know who’s looking so we look at these issues you know that disincentivize decentralization and
(13:42) empowerment and it begs to question you know what does this mean who gains who profits who loses now the solution and this is one among many issues we have to contend with and in what you know the centralized platforms have historically served as an intermediary they have access to all of your data and they dictate the user experience via algorithmic social feeds that determine which posts you see among many other things people have been de-banked people have been deeply informed among many things just because institutions determine they don’t like
(14:18) you in web 3 that centralization goes away and you have a peer-to-peer system and they are no longer gatekeepers that determines what we see now the solution what three or more why matters is because we have incentivized participation where tokens and coins align the network participants who work together towards a common objective and the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token and all coin which incentivizes you know the the growing collective drives adoption drives innovation and further strengthens
(14:53) these networks and web 3 as a whole and it’s permissionless nature by design means anyone can use it without having to generate access credential or get permission from a provider there are no gatekeepers and the collective accountability means we all say yes or say no and it’s transparent everything is registered on chain and instead of the centralization centralized nature of ster of servers data restored on the network changes are recorded on the blockchain via again network verification so what then
(15:29) happens is the fixes i mean this fixes the core problem of centralized networks because the value instead of being accumulated by one entity and the entity ends up fighting his own users as we’ve seen with facebook and other centralized entities okay the values accumulated by the entire ecosystem that’s full decentralization and democratization self-sovereign immutable transparent now what lies ahead um what 3.
(16:11) 2 what four who knows but we are at the fourth turning because we’ve seen the journey from web one two three we’re in the thick of three right now and the time between the transition transitional trip increasingly gets shorter and shorter because obviously as technology technological advances uh take the day what we’ll then see is innovation is for the bolstered now without the network without connectivity everything’s a mute point if we took down access points today if we took down you know isps or their equivalents the blockchain’s useless because without the
(16:49) network nothing happens so what lies ahead is we’re going to see decentralized fluid mesh networks perhaps a new protocol furthermore we might see smart d5 where you have fully composable artificial intelligence that builds on-chain amms automated market makers and liquidity pools in in the case of defy and the friction that frictionless and in disintermediated ecosystem and hns plays a vital role in that strategically akash and this ecosystem of partners as i said earlier has late siege on centralization that’s not gonna end anytime soon we
(17:33) look forward to this grown ecosystem and i leave you with his words that resolve will always prevail over temerity if the cause is just so that being said you can follow me on twitter you can follow akash as well i’m always available for questions i’m going to throw the floor open and to the hns team muchos gracias thank you thank you well thank you obrigado gracias any questions all right here yeah we definitely got some questions over here i’m just going to show them on stage can you see them that’s a very good question now
(18:25) no industry platform or process is immune from meritocracy what that means is if you have the resources and you can support larger asks so be it if you have resources that can only support a simple wordpress site so be it so there will always be elasticity when it comes to capacity so the answer to that is yes right here my syria brandy brandi yeah a lot of people love this talk great job alani and here i’m showing another question here absolutely as a matter of fact we just onboarded a new a new partner prato preto is a seamless
(19:14) gui based deployment tool where you can become a provider or if you want to just set up you want to spin up an instance as a matter of fact one of the things i would encourage you all to do is you know for those who want to understand the ecosystem as a whole just look at what people are building who’s building on the cars and who’s building on what and from a product management perspective you should always listen to how people use your application and platform tells you the story of what they want to do with it and it tells you
(19:42) what you should be building and expanding resources on and akash is not immune to that we’ve seen a lot of that as well where people come from outside and build tools on top of the akash platform that does exactly that you would base point point click click because look let’s be frank cli is how developers like to flex their muscles okay and not a lot of people want to deal with the cli so that’s a very quick very good question and we’ll continue to see a lot of our touch free type tools in the very near
(20:13) future all right awesome that is great to hear we’re always looking to onboard the lowest technical uh possible user um you know make the playing field a little bit more level for everybody thank you okay isaiah i see through their cautious explore at least the award for us the same so william this name name is domains so after test net 3 is complete many this capability will be coming to akash as a matter of fact so keep an eye out right awesome and i will personally be in the discord channel as well he’s
(20:51) supporting uh you know although all the other efforts going on as part of handicon so you haven’t seen the last of me how do you feel about capturing a little shape so content is only as good as who’s consuming it correct so a cautious often gives you the ability i mean you can host just about anything now a user’s perception of content value you can post post a blog or video whatever you want to post however bringing users to view and consume content is always the onus that’s on you basically so we don’t
(21:43) control the value of the content so you own your content so i would assume you would have a solid you know marketing strategy around it i mean we will make it available and immutable and self-sovereign and will support the platform and you will not be the platform but you have to get it in front of the people who need to look at it but we’ll support that all right awesome and then we got one from johnny woo johnny so one main takeaway benefit of using akash is self-sovereignty immutability transparency three-in-one basically
(22:22) decentralized all right awesome great uh let me there’s there’s a ton of questions rolling in i’m trying to get to as many as i can during this session uh here let’s do this one d dot centralized i love that which bandwidth blocking project do you think we could see that will work with akash in the future that’s a very good question you know because the cost by design remember cache is open source so you can go on our github everything’s there you can build you can build anything on the cache that’s the
(23:02) elasticity at scale that akash supports and gives you so if you have a great idea and you want to build i mean let’s go all right let me do this one right here does does the precision of the token make the service quickly on the phone before the user’s grandma can afford so as part of test net three okay for those who don’t know we actually have fractional akt of z persistent storage among many other features so it’s not enough uh you know we control for inflation among other things so things like aussie allows you to
(23:49) actually delegate your wallet you can let someone else spend on your behalf in addition to fractional akt you can tell them spend only 10 of one akt which could be 20 cents for example so we have their measures and controls as part of that effort that will be coming out in the next release so we are wrapping up test net three as we speak and the solution to your specific question is in the next version coming in about a month or so so direwolf good question all right and then uh i guess this kind of wraps in with uh test net three i
(24:26) don’t know maybe you want to talk a little bit more about how long that’s going on uh what the prizes are and everything like that okay very quickly so we’re wrapping up test net three this weekend so if you want to get on there get on now so tesla we started two weeks ago and we put up about 200 plus thousand dollars off for grabs everything from testing persistent storage testing off z testing you know you know delegating uh separate functions testing tokens trying to misbehave finding bugs bounties all
(24:56) kinds it’s still on so just go to accost.network and you’ll see the link for test net three or you can go to a cost network’s youtube page right i break down every specific challenge every specific task and you have the link to the specific tasks in those challenges so that would be the fastest and the easiest way to get on like now tonight after it after handicap is money up for grabs get it fast all right cool and then we’ll make this one our last question for today before we switch over to a break
(25:32) okay or is the provision utility so the akt token you can trade on most exchanges um that’s one to start with you need a capital award for that and obviously we’re part of the cosmos ecosystem um so that’s incentive from a provider perspective i mean you’re not gonna you know deploy compute on your machines for free you know once i check nothing’s really free if anyone says anything’s free put your hands back in your pocket but that being said um yes the token is an incentive in itself um but also you know it also helps
(26:11) expand the akash ecosystem simply because you have you know all the blockchains that are participating within the akashical system you have all the technologies that are involved as well um but also i mean they’re also activists believe it or not we have activist developers who just want to do something to bolster the decentralization movement so you just got to pick which side of that of the ecosystem you want to dwell but like i said akash is an open open platform open source um exponentially scalable and with every day that passes that
(26:46) ecosystem is growing and thanks to partners like you know hns um it’s i would say that’s actually you know exponentially gets to the power of n at this point so get on board as fast as you can all right awesome well alani thank you for coming and talking today it was great to have you um got us pretty excited especially with um having ssl uh support within akash that’s something a lot of our devs uh we’re looking forward to so that’s gonna be uh really great and i think we’ll see more uh h s sites being used uh in
(27:22) tandem with akash in the future for sure fistful thank you so much it’s been a pleasure i’m enjoying handicon michael nice shades i’m gonna yeah man and yeah everybody we love you all and akash is always here remember decentralization decentralization we appreciate it thank you yeah thanks a lot it was really getting really great feedback in your presentation so uh and yeah definitely everyone take part in this hackathon and uh you know ilani is here he’s been more than supportive of this conference and the
(27:53) hackathon and and helping people on board to uh to build like that’s the whole point right we want people to build you know a lot i notice people speculating on the names and trading names but building is is the best way to add value to the network right so it’s great that you’re here to support us and support developers so thank you thank you sirs ma’am yeah and just i just want to tag on a little bit about the hackathon as well yeah if you want to participate in akasha’s test net 3 and their discord
(28:22) you can find all of their info there it’s wrapping up this weekend so if you want to get involved you better get involved right now and then we also have our uh content uh website building hackathon uh all we wanna see is content on h s uh tlds um so i’ll be posting the link in the chat for discord yeah i just posted a discord and a tweet uh for our hackathon and a just a twitter post that you guys could share around you can win up to 2.
(28:55) 5 k h s just for uh building uh just for putting content on a handshake site so it’s a good little weekend project um building ends on the 23rd so you’ve got a couple of days to uh to get some up and running and we are also partnered with akash and sia and opened up some uh categories with them uh so if you build a site with handshake and akash there’s just more prizes to be won so definitely check that out guys um guys there is so much free money there’s so much we want to give you money it’s mailbox money just get it
(29:36) yeah okay exactly i shared your tweet in the in the session chat too and there’s a few different chat rooms so yes so if you guys could share those links around that would help us a lot but we’re gonna cut to a break uh and then we’ll be back talking about hardware and d-web so yeah you guys are back in the panels it’ll be a panel session so yeah that’s gonna be fun guys definitely show up all right thank you everybody all right [Music] so [Music] kinetic is a blockchain crypto
(30:50) investment firm based in hong kong and puerto rico [Music] founded in 2016 they were the first fund in hong kong and one of the earliest in asia with a portfolio of over 220 companies they were seed investors in such projects as ethereum parity and polka dot solana ftx and of course handshake in name base [Music] founder johan chu was an active investor and supporter of the handshake ecosystem over one hundred thousand domains co-founder of d-web foundation co-founder of handicon and sponsor of the handshake house at miami hack week
(31:29) 2022 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Music]