#569 QuickNode on Building World Class Blockchain Infrastructure

Alex Nabutovsky and Dmitry Shklovsky are co-founders and co-CEOs of Quicknode, where their mission is to help blockchain ecosystems scale, by providing accessible core infrastructure. In this conversation, we discuss infrastructure importance, data structure, low latency, popular use cases, picking various chains, and the long term vision. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies: https://www.gemini.com/ =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alex Nabutovsky and Dmitry Shklovsky are co-founders and co-CEOs of QuickNode, where their mission is to help blockchain ecosystems scale by providing accessible core infrastructure. In this conversation, we discuss infrastructure, data structure, low latency, popular use cases, picking various chains, and the long-term vision for the business. I'm an investor and I'm really, really excited about what they're building. I enjoyed this episode and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:21Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang bang. I've got my friends from QuickNode here. Hello, how are both of you?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Doing well, man.

• 3:56Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the first two-person interview that we've done in the new studio. So you guys are the guinea pigs. We're gonna hopefully that this works. Let's just talk about the QuickNode story, right? And I think just kind of starting there and that'll lead us into some of the data infrastructure that's actually happening in crypto. Walk me through kind of your guys' background to get to actually starting QuickNode. Right? You guys are very technical, right? Very kind of well-versed in terms of a lot of this computational power and infrastructure. So like, what did you guys do before we get there?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Sure. So Alex co-founded a managed hosting company like back in 2001, maybe even earlier. You're still messing around with it. Early, early internet stuff. And you know, we built out a company that was managing thousands of servers in like over 10 data centers around the world.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  So like, we got awesome experience on how to be like on the provider side and how to build global networks, manage like all different stacks of software.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Then, you know, there's different projects within that company, you know, with regards to like video encoding, ad serving. We got to work with a really broad range of customers.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  20, was it like 2015? We started building our content delivery network. Because, you know, people started, the internet started being more media-rich and you needed faster speeds. You couldn't wait for your server in New York, you know, if somebody's living across the Atlantic. It'd take forever to load a video, you know, if the video was hosted in the United States. So what we'd do is we'd clone that video over to somewhere in Europe. So the download speeds were a lot quicker.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  And that that experience we we decided to bring into QuickNode because as that company, that tech was very valuable. A company called Komodo SSL acquired that company. And as as that, as we were transitioning out of that, this was around 2017, 2018, we were got really intrigued with what smart contracts could enable. And, you know, we we knew what Bitcoin was back from 2013, Mt. Gox days, you know, we bought some Bitcoin at like 300, sold it at 1,000. It's silly to think about that now, but,

• 6:18Speaker 02

  you know, so we're like, all right, so let's let's let's buy an ENS domain name or like, maybe maybe like some of these token sales were really interesting. And we tried to interact with like MyEtherWallet at the time, Metamask, like the very, very early versions of it. And we noticed that when when one of these like popular token sales like 0X, for example, it crashed the MyEtherWallet servers, it crashed the Metamask servers. And we're like, well, this is no way for Web3, which is like this network of blockchains, to to grow. And so like, how do we help? How do we take our experience and how do we help

• 6:59Speaker 02

  this ecosystem expand, grow, develop? And we're like, well, who who better to build Web3 infrastructure than us who have been in, we've seen the transition from Web1 to Web2? We've contributed to a lot of open source software and a lot of, a lot of businesses that that are on Web2 today. How do how do we help Web3? So

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And so really, the idea was like, the experience you guys had in terms of low latency and and all the computational infrastructure you'd previously built for almost two decades, it sounds like, right? When you got to crypto, it was like, essentially not there, right? Like, it was just, everything would crash, it couldn't handle, you know, large volumes. And then also, it sounds like as you got deeper and deeper into this, you realized like, one, we probably can just build the infrastructure. But two, also, there's all kinds of things that are unlocked with better performance in terms of actually connecting to the blockchains. Is that fair?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Sure enough, yeah. So we basically took all the experience that we would gather during, especially during our CDN time, you know. We learned a lot. We understood what latency translated into conversions for customers. We understood how to optimize certain layers of the business and infrastructure and software to maximize throughput and to have the absolutely lowest latency in the business. And so we took all that and we applied it here because, as Dimitri pointed out, we saw the transition from Web 1 to Web 3 in the beginning of 2018, for example. And what's Web 3 really? It's, you know, Web 1 was read-only, Web 2 was read-and-write,

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Web 3 is ability to verify, you know. And so we saw there's a lot of that, what he described, and we understood that we could bring this experience over with our team and build something that people will need going forward. So initially, that was like dedicated nodes that helped to transact on blockchain, but that had limitations, which eventually grew into this QuickNode API product, which we released in February 2020. That thing completely took off. Everybody observed it and started using it. We grew like 1100% in three months. And so it was, we understood we had a market fit, right?

• 9:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so when you think today, the main chains that you support are Ethereum, Matic, what else?

• 9:22Speaker 03

  XDI.

• 9:23Anthony Pompliano?

  XDI. And those are pretty much the main three?

• 9:25Speaker 03

  No, we also support Optimism.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Optimism?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Binance Smart Chain.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Binance Smart Chain.

• 9:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So here's something that's fascinating to me is, I'm going to call them smart contract platforms, Ethereum, Binance Chain, and Matic. And when we look at that stuff, it feels like Ethereum is the one that everyone knows, right? And that's kind of got like the, when people think of smart contract platform, they think of Ethereum, right? So it's got the mind share. But Binance, Smart Chain, and Matic, you know, I should start by saying I'm an investor in the company, right? So we've had a lot of conversations about this. Are popular as well, right? And so is this a world where like these chains are actually just competing on technical infrastructure? And like, who can create the most innovation? Who has the fastest throughput speed? Who has the lowest cost fees?

• 10:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, it really is kind of this like race to zero on fees, right? Maybe it doesn't actually ever get to zero, but there's definitely like the commoditization across these very smart contract platforms.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  So there's a balance. There's a balance you have to achieve. And this was most prominent recently when the fees on Ethereum mainnet skyrocketed. They were just really expensive to move anything around.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  People started looking for alternatives and you basically, you know, you sacrifice some decentralization and thus some security for doing something. But if it's like every, you know, transactional stuff, not like all important governance stuff. Yeah, you can, you can do it. Layer two is the solution. And it's not like, you know, you don't sacrifice much. It's just a trade off. And again, more and more people are starting to realize that the future is multi-chain. You know, you might have your, your governance contracts on Ethereum because yeah, it's expensive. But you know, it's worth to have that security to make sure that this is governing your entire organization.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But the everyday transactions, if you're moving, you know, a couple of dollars around, you move some tokens around. That stuff can be done with, you know, with security, with confidence on a layer two, like Binance, like Matic, like XDi. And then we're looking forward to seeing what, you know, what people build with the optimism technology.

• 11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And so really the idea is a decentralized smart contract platform is really important for governance, like you said, right? So there's a reason for decentralization in that standpoint. You want to have almost what I call like democratic governance, right? As many people participating as possible and as least concentration or kind of single point of failure as possible. But if I simply just want to make a trade, I don't necessarily need all that decentralization, right? I actually want the most efficiency that I can gain. And sometimes the decentralized systems are much less efficient. Sometimes for certain things, they may be more efficient, right? That's a whole nother thing. But if I simply want to just get the efficiency, lower fees, faster throughput, then decentralization doesn't really matter in that situation. Fair?

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain to people the difference between Matic, Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, just from like a technical, you know, high level in terms of block times and like, why are these others maybe more efficient without decentralization as kind of the core lynchpin?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So Ethereum currently is proof of work. It's got about 15, 12 second or 12 second block times. Matic has validators and there's, there's like a three point system where they're validating. And then the block times are also shorter, quicker rather, and Binance Smart Chain also validator concept with three second block times. So, you know, a lot of, recently, a lot of DeFi platforms have moved to Binance Smart Chain because Binance, you know, just because they're, they're an exchange and they have all that, that deep, you know, financial pool. But it also

• 13:28Speaker 02

  helps to have like order books update every three seconds because you want to make those trades.

• 13:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Compared to Ethereum being 12 to 15 seconds.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 13:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  And, and, and they've made the fees, you know, less expensive. So, again, if you're, you're, you're building a wallet app, a decentralized wallet app, you'll, you know, you'll have the main governance on Ethereum, you'll have the transaction, like moving tokens around on Binance Smart Chain, you'll have your NFTs moving around on Polygon. There's, there's a big move of NFTs and like media platforms moving to Polygon. So there, you know, again, future is multi-chain, we're looking to support that. You know, we're, we're looking to expand the chains we support because, yeah, there's, it's good to give developers choice. You know, when they're building an application, you know, you don't force them to use Ethereum because Ethereum is not perfect.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Neither, you know, I don't think any, any platform is perfect. And so when they have that choice, they can choose and pick and choose and put, how we, how we say, like Legos together to build their application.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  So the way I describe QuickNode is it's basically like Amazon AWS, but for blockchains, right? Which I think is like a fair thing. How does the product work itself, right? So if I'm a developer, I come in, I go to the QuickNode website, like what do I choose from and like, what is actually technically happening?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Okay, I mean, you just sign up for either a free or nine dollar account, for example, as a developer. You get an endpoint right away. Within five minutes, you'll be able to take that endpoint, plug it into your code, and you're ready to transact. I think a great example of that was a customer of ours, for example, doing analytics, came to our site in the middle of the night, four in the morning, had an outage under self-hosted nodes, able to sign up, and within five to 10 minutes, they were back online without having to speak to anybody. And so what we built is a self, self, self, self-platform that customers could come without having to speak to anybody, just sign up and go.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  And, and then to add to that, on the backend, we're, we're running like dozens of clusters of super, super powerful Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Matic nodes. And a node is a peer-to-peer piece of software, which maintains an up-to-date copy of the ledger, and it talks to other nodes on the network, miners, validators. It sees when a new block arrives, and then it builds that database. And then we have these middle layers, like a routing middle layer, which if you're making a request from the Netherlands, you're going to hit a node cluster in the Netherlands. If you're making a request from London, you're going to hit a node cluster in London, China, Singapore, San Francisco, New York. So by bringing the data closer to the users,

• 16:09Speaker 02

  you minimize network ops, you reduce latency, make things quicker, snappier. And as Alex mentioned, that's experience we bring over from our, from our CDN experience. You know, companies like Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into research into human psychology that faster speeds results in happiness, like for people. When something happens fast, people get excited, and that results in them coming back to your website, or using your application more, making a purchase, taking a call to action. So we understand how important speed, and like blockchain is notorious for its slowness. So if, you know, our platform makes, you know, if we can make it just a little, a little bit faster, or in some cases, a lot a bit faster,

• 16:54Speaker 02

  you know, some customers came to us, they're like, hey, we switched to you guys, and we saw a hundred X improvement in, in, in our polling speeds. And we're like, wow, so this is fantastic.

• 17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So I can say this, you guys can't say this, because people think you're bragging. But when I was doing the diligence to research, to invest and researching all this, I'd go talk to customers and they were like, listen, it's like not even close. Right? In terms of a lot of the other services in the space, just there is that latency and they maybe just be focused on other things. That's not the most important thing they're building. I think given your guys' background, you really understand the importance of latency and you're looking for customers that want a lack of latency. Right? And so because of that speed, what are customers actually doing? Is there one or two examples that you have of like, hey, a customer is doing X with our infrastructure that can highlight to people like why this is so important from just a pure like infrastructure interacting with these blockchains?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Sure. I think you might like to talk about this a lot, so go for it.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, we have the great part about being at the infrastructure level is that everybody who's working with blockchain, interacting with blockchain needs your service. So we work with a bunch of projects across the board. Anyone, anyone from like traditional finance systems who are looking to interact with the blockchain to decentralized finance systems and professional traders who are who are looking to get like the fastest information, the latest block information, you know, what happened to the smart contract? What happened to this uniswap pair? What happened on, on, and any one of these decentralized exchanges? But moreover, there's, there's a lot of people looking for the mempool data.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  And the mempool, for those who don't understand is the mempool stuff is that's what happens before transactions get mined and accepted as truth into the blockchain. And there's about, you know, a 10 to 12 second period where people's transactions get entered into the mempool and then miners get to choose which transactions they mine into the next block. And what happens there, let's say a transaction is submitted somewhere in New York and it's mined, and it's mined somewhere in New York. By the time that propagates and by propagates, it goes from one node to another node to another node and makes tops.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  To a node in China, it might be anywhere from several milliseconds to several seconds. And that's very valuable time, especially for in the finance sector, where they need to make these split-second decisions on what their next move is. So what we've done is we've created, we're aggregating the mempool data from all the nodes we run all over the world. We have over 12 locations, we're in multiple clouds. So basically, anywhere in the world, the transaction enters the mempool. We then broadcast it to whoever's subscribing to that data.

• 19:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're paying as like a subscription?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  They're paying, they're paying for that, for every transaction that they're subscribed to, they're paying for that request, like to receive that piece of data.

• 19:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when we think about this, you have not only infrastructure, right? Like what I consider just, you guys have done the work, you've built out infrastructure. Now I can come in, I can basically plug in through your infrastructure and I can communicate with these blockchains. I can get the actual kind of copy of the blockchain or whatever. But also you got a ton of data, right? And so maybe talk a little bit like the data importance versus the infrastructure importance and like how you think about like the business evolving over time?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so if you look at the relationship between Citadel and Robinhood, for example, there's a lot of, you know, business there. So what we, what we're able to gather is all these transactions that are going on in our network and all this data that we're able to share perhaps with, with someone that could be very valuable, specifically for like large funds who are executing on things that need to have more insights and research companies, you know, to better understand the landscape of, of, of what's happening before the rest of the world sees it, right? And so that data piece could be very valuable and if, by our estimation, somewhere in $10 billion a year range, you know,

• 21:09Speaker 03

  over the next five years or so. And so. That piece is very, not a lot of people talking about that piece specifically, but we think that that piece of the business is huge. You know, we've been having certain conversations with certain funds and things like that. With CEOs that are interested in the data, that could utilize this data to make better decisions on their end.

• 21:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And when you think about the infrastructure, really, it's kind of a two-step business, right? You have to have the infrastructure in order for you guys to get the data, but you're monetizing the infrastructure itself. And then if there is this opportunity to do data as well, that's really additive to the business. It's not kind of an either-or decision.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Not at all. It's a bold decision.

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you think is the biggest challenge going forward? Really, when you think about, all right, we've got all this work to do. We're going to keep doing this. What's the biggest challenge for the business?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  To keep up with demand.

• 22:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a good problem.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  It's a great problem. It's like every startup's dream to have that problem. But it's to keep up with demand and keep meeting customers' expectations. And their expectations keep growing day to day to day. You know, there's some people that were querying maybe like five blocks at a time for data. Now they're querying like chunks of thousands of blocks and they need that data in a millisecond. So like we're working on different ways to index it. We're using special hardware that's like super snappy, like super, super fast disks to be able to access this data. We have a caching layer that stores some of this data in memory, again, to improve speeds. So, you know, the great thing about, again, infrastructure layer,

• 22:50Speaker 02

  such a wide range of customers, we get so much data from our customers around how they're using it, what their use case is. Maybe perhaps I didn't touch up enough on the range of our customers is we also have NFT platforms that are minting NFTs. We have customers that are building blockchain gaming ecosystems. They're doing esports tournaments that are blockchain backed. So things like in-game skins and certain like prizes. Um, there's, uh, there's people building universal basic income. There's another project called Pool Together, which is a no loss lottery. I think it's one of the craziest inventions because, uh, people basically buy a ticket for, for the lottery.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Uh, it goes, it gets lent out into a decentralized lending platform, which earns interest. And then one person wins the interest and everybody gets their money back. Like it's, it's fantastic, no? And this, this happens trustlessly, automatically.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  How often do they like do like a drawing?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  They, they do a drawing. I, I, I don't know.

• 23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And once a week or something?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Something like that, but like it's an amazing concept that you, that you can have, you can do this without an intermediary. Like you're not buying a lottery ticket from the state of Florida or anything. This is just, it's a global lottery that's trustless and automatic.

• 24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And you don't lose money?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And you don't lose money. Somebody, just somebody wins some interest.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  It's a win-win.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  It's win-win.

• 24:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I guess because you're really getting everyone's interest. It's not just the interest that you would have gotten going by and doing it yourself, right? You're contributing to this big pool. The big pool earns a ton of interest all at once. And then basically somebody wins that as part of the lottery.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it is wild. Um, one of the things that, uh, fascinates me about this is as you guys have chosen new blockchains to support, uh, they've turned into, uh, we'll call spectacles to, to be nice. Uh, which is, um, you say, hey, we're going to support something. Uh, when you choose to support it, uh, that community gets really excited, but also other people start to pay attention. And so just like, what is the process for vetting these, deciding who to work with? Um, and kind of like, how does that work through like prioritization?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I mean, for us, it's all about, we're all about community, right? We would like to build a community. We'd like to support the community. And we understand for this to grow, for everybody to benefit, the community piece needs to exist. So we always look at when someone, a foundation, for example, like Matic approaches us or we approach them. Every time it's a different story. Usually we will, we'll look at their GitHub. How active are they? How many developers do they have? How, how involved are they with the whole ecosystem? Are we helping the whole ecosystem? And then we'll make a decision whether or not we're going to take our eyes off our roadmap and add them to, um, to, to, to add them to our network. And for us, it's very important that whoever we add to our network, that they're contributed to the whole ecosystem. They have a, uh, sort of a sandbox environment for their developers.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  You know, public endpoints that they could subsidize. So that's a very important piece for us because we understand we're not only helping us, we're also helping the whole community and the whole ecosystem to grow. And yeah, that's pretty much it.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're also listening a lot to our customers and the customers basically tell us what they want. You know, customers come say, when are you guys going to support Matic? We're like, okay, we'll look into it. Like, when are you guys going to support XDi or BSC? And like, this is like such valuable feedback because when you get enough of these requests, you're like, hmm, maybe they're on to some. And also, like, when, you know, we've been in the space since late 2017. We've built the brand, it's a non-brand. And, you know, when a company chooses to partner with us, it's celebrated very, very well, especially in the community.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Because it's like, this particular foundation is serious about supporting their developers and giving them choice, giving them robust infrastructure to be able to build these, you know, global scale apps. Because the foundations, they don't have the kind of teams with the kind of experience that, you know, QuickNode brings to the table. So being able to bootstrap, you know, this high-performance, scalable node with infrastructure

• 27:03Speaker 02

  is like super, super valuable to these people. And it's very well received by the community. It's celebrated like, you know, almost like a token listing. Like, yeah, it's true.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy, right?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. Well, I mean, you know, we were accepted into the Y Combinator

• 27:24Speaker 02

  batch for the winter. And, you know, they pumped out Instacart, they pumped out Coinbase, for example. And I'm looking at Coinbase's story and they started out just selling Bitcoin. And then they added Ethereum, and then they added Litecoin. And now they have like, I don't know, it's like 20, 30 assets. So I'm like, this is very, very much parallel to, I feel like, what QuickNode is doing. You know, we're not, we're not just dedicated to Ethereum. We support Bitcoin and we would support six chains and 10 different networks at this point. And this is just the beginning.

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to me too that you guys have done a lot of this. You've also raised capital, so maybe we can talk a little bit about that. But like outside of like the hardcore development community, maybe people don't know about you. Right, which is almost like a testament to you've found the right people that to know about you. Like who cares if everyone knows, right? It's just like the people who are the customers, they all know. And when they think of, hey, I need infrastructure that's got a little latency, like bam, I go to QuickNode. Right? And so was that intentional or did that just kind of naturally happen?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Of course, it's a natural progression really. I don't think it was intentional. What do you think?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  I mean, we just tried to build the best possible product and, and, and.

• 28:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why I love you guys. You guys are like, that's the right thing.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  We know we had to build, we had to build the right thing that that worked well. That people would love, the user experience was absolutely the best. And we took all the things what not to do from the previous companies and we applied it here. We had the right formula, you know? We learned on our mistakes, we learned. We, I don't remember being in the late 90s, being in high school, coming home before AOL, you know, going to I C. And all this, I remember all this progression from web one to web two, understanding how to change the world. And I wish I was older, you know, older back then to understand what I was being involved in, you know? And now being here with experience, with, with all of that, to be able to take all that and to apply it here. Just a piece of cake. We know exactly what people want. We're listening to our community, we're listening to our customer.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  And we, we drive, we're driving the, the need from within the company. And so like, I don't think anybody else works harder than us. You know, we, we, we're there in the office building 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, nobody's sleeping, you know? Seven days a week. So we understand.

• 29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I know you guys are.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, talk about the fundraiser in terms of what was the thought process? You went to Y C and also did the fundraiser. Either one of you, whoever wants to talk about it.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I'll start off and you could pick up.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  So we we started our fundraise sometime in in November. And then we got during during the initial stages of it, we got accepted to Y C. And that was very exciting. Y C is a, you know, a great process to go through. We learned a lot and but we decided like, you know, Y C recommends not to start any fundraising during Y C until the demo day. Since we're already in the process, we sort of just left, you know, we sort of just run with it. And that was that was great because, you know, in the beginning, we we got a lot of like, hey, what the hell are you guys talking about? Why doesn't Amazon just come in and do it? You know, we don't believe in that there's a need for this product. Into towards the end, you know, towards so that that was that was November. By January, we had so much interest in our company.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  That we had like literally probably like over two hundred companies. Coming up like, hey, let us write you a check. What's the valuation? And what's this? You know, can we get in? And, you know, you're an investor. We we met with you and it was. No brainer, no brainer. No brainer, you know, it was it was one of those. Processes that that I think Y C also helped us a lot through, you know, like as we were taking on some of these some of these investors. We want to make a strategic partnership with each one of them. You know, we understood you as a strategic piece to it, you know, you know, very. Listen to me, I have fifty million followers, etc. Like you you will definitely help spread the word. You know, like we had Michael Arrington, who who was who actually convinced us to stay with Y C. Because we were in the beginning like, oh, do we really need it? You know, we we sort of have the experience.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  But he was like, hey, you guys don't understand what it is. You definitely want to be part of it. We're like, hey, for sure, you know, we'll go with it. Then we had like Alexis Ohanian, you know, like he he brings in so much. Seven seven six. Seven seven six fund, yeah. He brings in so much, so much experience and every two weeks, he him and his team are with us. For an hour at a time, we're going through things, we're strategizing, you know, we we're going through everything like. He's been amazing throughout the whole process. So, but you know, and we sort of like, so Hashkey was one of the. One of the investors, for them, we were like, what did they bring to the table? Well, they're Asian, you know, one of the biggest Asians invested into blockchain space. They have a lot of blockchain companies in their portfolio. You know, we sort of picked them for that, for that environment.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And so like, we sort of put, put a team together for investment that could, that could drive us to, to, to the next level. And today, I think we're, we're, we're very happy with our partners.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Couldn't have asked for, for better partners, honestly.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely amazing. SoftBank. SoftBank, SoftBank brings in so much experience. The opportunity fund, as you know, has been created for, um, you know, um,

• 32:22Speaker 03

  sort of, uh, you know, the black founders and, and one of our founders happens to be Austin. He's, uh, he's half WAG, half, um,

• 32:31Speaker 02

  South American.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  South, South American and, uh, he was able to, you know, connect us with, with SoftBank and we were able to work with them and we love their team. You know, them too, they, we get on, on monthly calls with them, strategizing, accounting pieces, you know, how to, how to structure certain deals, how to close certain customers, how to grow the business from within and, you know, how to, how to focus on the culture. Also, I mean, seven, seven, six fund, these guys also, they want to diversify our, our team. They want more women on our team. We actually just recently hired our first, first woman, uh, for, for, for,

• 33:06Speaker 02

  HR and customer success.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, she's, she's going to be like the mother of the,

• 33:10Speaker 02

  We, yeah, we needed a mother in the company.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  And so like, we've, we've been trying to hire like from all different backgrounds. First of all, we're all immigrants, you know, like all four, four co-founders, uh, three co-founders are immigrants, you know? He's from, uh, Russia, I'm from Ukraine, the other one is from, from Germany, Manuel Kreutz. And so like, we understand the process, you know, we understand the importance of diversity within the team. And so for us, like what we are building is exactly that. We understand that, you know, there can't be just a bunch of white dudes sitting and building on the Facebook. There needs to be somebody that, that understands the, the pain points that, that people go through. And sort of that, that's the, that's the sort of company we are building.

• 33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, it's fantastic. What, what has been the biggest surprise in building the business over the last couple of months?

• 33:54Speaker 03

  I don't know, the amount of, the amount of demand that's coming in. I mean, we open up our gates and it's just people flooding in. We have so much, so much interest in the business and so many foundations are coming to us. It's like, please take our money and add us to the platform. And I think that's, that's been the biggest surprise for my perspective.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's the number of diverse projects that are, that are building on the platform and, and that we're able to facilitate. You know, they're giving us this feedback like, oh, your platform is so easy to use. We were able to get started real quick. Um, and you know, it's there just again, there's, there's companies building, um, like new ways of governance. There's new ways of voting, meritocracy, uh, just all, all across the board. Uh, and then, and then, you know, you have, you have some of these large financial corporations with like billions in crypto under management. They're, they're also, they also need this service. Um, you know, uh, banks and, and hedge funds, they, I think we're, we're just at the, the very, very beginning.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Even, even though there's been so much progress, even from when we entered the space in 2017 till now. Um, you know, it's so much easier to build a decentralized application or a blockchain powered application. Um, and like what, what Alex had mentioned, like back in the nineties, how difficult it was to build a website. But then you had, you know, companies like Amazon come along and make all that process like streamlined and it made it so easy. So when you, when you think about running, uh, node infrastructure, you know, you probably have to go read a bunch of documentation. You have to learn how to use a command line. You gotta go do your research on what kind of specs you need for your cloud server. Or you just go to QuickNode, you sign up and, and you go. And then, you know, there's complex, the, the complexity increases as you scale up. Uh, do you need two nodes?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  You need a load balancer in front of it, how to keep the data consistent between, you know, the, the different, different types of nodes. Um, but being able to support, uh, such a wide range of projects, um, is, is just, it motivates us every day to come, come to work and just like build the best possible product and make our customers happy.

• 35:55Anthony Pompliano?

  If you look forward like five or 10 years, how big can this get? And like, what does this morph into, right? When you just kind of look at like, what's the natural progression of this?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Web 3, every single application we use today will have some element of blockchain built into it. So, you know, you think of, you think of middlemen, first thing comes to mind is like real estate. You need, you need an agent, you need an escrow agent, you need title insurance. Once you have deeds on the blockchain, you can govern a real estate transaction by a smart contract. You don't need a middleman, you don't need a third party, you don't need escrow. You know, one side sends USDC, for example, the other side submits the deed. They submit the title and the title is governed by a system that keeps it honest. So you need, you don't need title insurance then. It eliminates friction, it eliminates that trust layer.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  So when both conditions are met, the smart contract that lives on the blockchain, it's completely independent of anyone's control, then just swaps it. And, yeah, and that could be tied down to like the keypad, changing, you know, changing the code so the person can get access to the property.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  That's, that's where we see this going, you know, we see, was it BitClout?

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  BitClout, yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so social networks moving into blockchain. Every single application, I mean, everything, from, from universities issuing diplomas on the blockchain. So you can then, you know, imagine you, you're asked to vote on something that you actually have a merit in. Like, only if you have a PhD in medicine can you vote on, on a certain, on a particular issue. So that kind of stuff, that's what, that's what blockchain enables, that's the kind of future that we see. So, I mean, global scale, this is the neck, this is like the new, the next iteration, the next version of the internet.

• 37:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild to think about, right? Like, if you just think about like, alright, like where we are headed is fucking nuts compared to where we've been. And today we look at like cars, right? And it's like, wait, people used to ride horses? Like, there is that element of like, you know, you said like title insurance, like all these things that aren't gonna be needed. You're like, you did what before? There's physical paper involved? And now people are gonna be like, okay, like, obviously the digital system's so much better. You're telling me people literally didn't think that was gonna be true?

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Okay, man, get get Gen Z to send an international wire. They'll they they they won't be able to do it.

• 38:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course not.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  They want Cash App, they want Square, they want, you know, it's just peer to peer, like, here's an address, here's my address. Send, send, send me the tokens.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  That's why companies like Venmo and whatever exist today, you know, to be able to do that. But I think, you know, primarily, if you if you look at like, if you're looking to purchase a property somewhere abroad, for example, say Spain, right? So you're looking to buy a home in Spain. The amount of bureaucracy and crap you need to go through, I went through that, so I understand, like, to from your bank to send the money there, they need to exchange it from dollars to euro. They need to, you need to prove that this money is coming from you. Then you need, you know, you need to go through this whole process and the way the real estate is done there. Globally, you could have one global system that that sort of eliminates all that. Like, if if you want to send your N five hundred bucks on a Sunday.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  You know, in in in in a traditional way, the banks are closed, you're unable to do, they're gonna charge you an arm and a leg. You just went through, you have to go, a bunch of KYC stuff, you know, because Russia's in.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  You know, whatever. Like, it's crazy, you can't even use your own money during the certain times. Same thing in in the banks here, like, if if you're making a large transaction, whether it's a deposit, deposit or you're withdrawing, that you need to tell them what, what, why, why is this happening? This is your money.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so ju- just you you mentioned transferring money, but like a a small era controversy was like recently Vitalik was airdropped some like a couple of billion dollars of this Shiba token. Uh, and he was able to donate that to an Indian, uh, relief fund. You know, because of the of the COVID stuff happening in India. And that he was able to do that without anybody's permission for like like it was like twelve dollars or something in fees, maybe maybe a hundred dollars in fees, but like a billion dollars moved across the world any to any point without anyone's permission, uh, for a very small amount.

• 40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do we know if they, um, went ahead and liquidated it? Or did they hold on to the Shiba token?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Would have, would have to look at the.

• 40:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we'd have to look, right? I I don't know.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  It's transparent, like, if you want to know what happened to it, just go go look at the transaction.

• 40:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, which is like the. Best part about it, right, is because now all of a sudden, like, one, kudos to him for doing that, right? Two is you can literally see what they do with it.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's like, pretty crazy to think, it's not just about the transaction itself, it's the fact that he got it, right? Then once he got it, right, what'd they do? Then he donated it, okay? Now, once the day get the donation, what do they do with it? It's transparent, like, there's a whole bunch of ramifications in just that one, um, kind of mechanism that you're like, wait a minute, this was not possible before.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, look what happened in Haiti, you know, during the, during the whole thing, like, a bunch of stuff went there. It never went to the people. It rotted, it got stolen, you know? And, and this is exactly what it's for. And Metallik, by the way, he burned the rest of the Shiba, you know, completely. I think it was like $6 billion worth or something?

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:16Anthony Pompliano?

  He burnt 6 billion?

• 41:16Speaker 03

  He just burnt it. You know, he donated most of it, and whatever he had left, he burnt it.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  And he left the message, like, don't, don't airdrop me these tokens without my permission. I don't want to be responsible or something like that. But he, he was very, like, philosophical about it.

• 41:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, he, he, he basically, because what, they tried to give it to him so that it would seem more legitimate? Because the creator of Ethereum held the tokens, so basically, he was like, I don't want these and get rid of them. Yeah, it, it's, I mean, it's fascinating. Not very many people who could say they donated a billion dollars or something.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Even, even, uh, who was it? Sandeep from, from one of the co-founders of Matic, uh, he, he released a tweet. He's like, I can't sit around, sit around anymore. I have to do something. I have to help, you know, the people in India. And within, within like a couple of hours, he created a multi-sig, uh, wallet and had the whole global crypto community donate to, to this cause. So on a philanthropic, uh, philanthropic level, you had a global crypto community, like, get together and, and, and like, create this fund to help something, you know, in a different part of the world, like, in a day. Like, that's just, you know, you, you could try it with GoFundMe or whatever, but I think this, this was just, um, a great example of,

• 42:28Speaker 02

  A, the crypto community coming together, but also, uh, the application of, you know, move, moving, moving funds cross borders without permissions, without any kind of like red, you know, bureaucracy or red tape.

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's crazy to think about, right? What are you guys most excited about moving forward?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Every, every, every day, every day is something, something new, something pops up. You know, projects, like I said, projects signing up and being able to, to support them.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  I'm looking forward to see what optimism is gonna.

• 42:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Optimism, you guys keep talking about this.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, super excited about that team, what they're doing. Can't talk much about it, but I think that's one of the projects I'm really excited about going forward by you.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Definitely that, you know, we, we have, we have a couple of chains. We, we signed a couple of new, new contracts with foundations, with new chains that we're, we're gonna, we're gonna develop.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  You know, we're hiring.

• 43:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, who are we trying to hire?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  We're, we're hiring, we're hiring across the board, we're scaling the team, you know, we got DevOps, DevOps engineers, front end, uh, front end developers.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Back end engineers.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, then, then we have like, um, technical support engineers.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  We had a good amount of additions to our team, like we, we grew from like, you know, a five people team on like a month and a half ago to 12 people team and we continue to, to expand our team. So if what we're looking, I, I'm looking to, to build a culture, I'm excited about building a culture in the company. And, and sort of this foundation of QuickNode that will grow into its own departments in, in, in near future. And so we just recently hired somebody from TikTok and previously worked with Facebook. They're in a, you know, a, a, a sales team there that's, that was excited to join our team and we're excited to, to be working with him. He's an amazing individual with, with, with, with a great like view of what, what this could become. And so I enjoy personally work with him on every day and sort of attacking different angles of the market.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  How we could, you know, how we could attack enterprise, how we could, um, improve our, improve our sales process for, for, you know, developer, platform and, and all of this, like, and so, and sort of like looking into what we could build together in the future and sort of segmented to, into smaller teams that like one team will attack the chain market, one team will attack the developer market, one team will attack the, the, you know, the foundations and, um, And the whole business sector. And so that's very exciting. I think working with that is.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to finish my point is like, well, we've been able to accomplish with a team of like five, six people. Now that we have this additional funding and we have this momentum, what will be able to accomplish with like a double the size of the team? That's what really excites me. Like we're gonna 10x the performance of the tech, make it way more faster, way more reliable. We're gonna expand the, the product. Uh, we're gonna expand it into different markets, you know? And, and now with, with some of these bigger players, uh, catching on, catching, starting to ride the wave. You know, being able to provide services to, to like bank, like mainstream banks and mainstream investor and hedge funds.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  That, that, that's, that's what I'm like most excited about.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I think you guys are on to something.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Thanks. Anthony, you've been, you've been a great help, man. It's, it's amazing. It's, it's so, like I said, we have, we have the best investors. We have the best partners that we're working with. So it's, it's great.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  I think also what's, what's really exciting is to see some of these, you know, big players like Cash App, for example. I had a, had a conversation with Cash App the other day and they're, they sort of understand that DeFi is gonna put them out of business. This is their words. Like, we understand DeFi is gonna put us out of business. So what we do and we create a team inside to sort of put us, uh, put ourselves out of business before that happens. And so they're really smart people. They understand that this is gonna change the world. This is gonna change the way people transact, the way you use money and the next generation will no longer be able to, you know, to stand for the, the previous, you know, standards that, that we had growing up. And so like, you know, companies like that that understand that, and we're still so early on that they're building something next and something cool. That for, you know, for the next generation. So that's super exciting, you know?

• 46:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. Yeah. Right. That you can, you can participate there. Uh, before I let you guys go, I ask everyone the same three questions. So I'm gonna do it and you both answer, uh, each, uh, individually. Uh, most important book you've ever read?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Hard Things, uh, Hard Things About Hard Things by, uh.

• 46:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Ben Horowitz. It's a great book.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Read it twice. I still come back to it very often.

• 46:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's a great one.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Uh, that book and High Output Management by Andy Grove.

• 46:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That's another great one. You guys are well read.

• 47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, second question is sleep schedule. Comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. I sleep on one every night. Cold as shit, sleep perfectly. I feel like I'm like a convert of the sleep religion. What's your guys' sleep schedule? Ooh, that's not a good start.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  We actually, I had a friend who was, I guess he was, he was trying to, like he was advertising this cold bed idea to us and, you know, maybe we'll go out and try that. Sleep schedule, it's, try to get six to seven hours. I mean, we're working crazy, crazy, like, super intense days, so about, what's like nine, 10 rolls around, I'm out.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  I'm 12 to 6, midnight and 6 AM I'm up, yoga and then 6:30, 6:45 I'm on the computer working.

• 47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So you can go 12 to 6 and you're perfectly fine?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally fine.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh man, I need eight hours.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  It's all about the mushrooms, you know, you got the, the reishi, the, you know.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Cordyceps.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Cordyceps, you put that in your smoothie.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Chaka.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  It gives you, it gives you amazing energy. We're using something by Paul Stamets, I don't know if you know who he is, he was big. That guy's amazing. He's like one of the biggest mycologists in, in the United States. He was in Joe Rogan's podcast a bunch of times. The guy is just like out of this world.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Super fascinating podcast.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Super fascinating and.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Definitely watch that.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  He has a movie on, not Netflix, Amazon Prime. But anyways, he has these, on fungi.com, he has this product, these products, these mushroom mixes that you could put into your yogurts or whatever. Incredible.

• 48:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you drink coffee or that, or you just use the mushroom mix?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  I used to do matcha, so I stopped the caffeine during this time. It's so crazy that you have so much energy, so much excitement working every day.

• 48:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  But if you had anything else, you, you start crashing.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I had to cut back on the coffee. Like I stopped coffee. I switched from full calf to, I started making my own mix of like two thirds decaf, one third caffeinated. Now I'm completely off because it was just messing with my mind. So.

• 48:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, just, maybe every once in a while I'll have like a centa green tea. Uh, but I, I can't do full on calf, at least, at least not, not right now, because it's already intense.

• 49:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I drink two coffees a day and I've been thinking like, should I try to stop? And I don't know if I could.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  That was me, man. That was me. I would have these, these crashes, you know, like in the middle of the day, I'm shit, I'm out of energy. And I got so many things to do, you know, and it's just like, it's messing with you. Coffee's definitely messing with you.

• 49:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you just don't do it at all and then you're good?

• 49:18Speaker 03

  No, no, it's.

• 49:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's good, there's good argument for that. Very good argument for that. Uh, last question is aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, we're, we're.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not aliens.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  How did we all of a sudden end up here, right?

• 49:34Speaker 03

  That movie he saw with Paul Simon, he said, "We all came from mushrooms like X amount of billions years ago." So the mycelium is actually like this this network, sort of like QuickNode, right? That's connecting all the trees and all the living things around around the forest. And all the trees and all these all these plants are able to communicate one another.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  And transfer nutrients. So the the trees and the and the plants, they they transfer nutrients through the mushroom mycelium networks underground.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That's wild.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  It's called the fantastic fungi, I think it's called.

• 50:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Fantastic fungi?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Some shit like that.

• 50:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, I'll have to try to watch that one.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Amazing. And so that's all it was like QuickNode. Whenever one region becomes overloaded or unavailable, we're able to transfer that that nutrient to the other region or to the same region on a different cloud, you know? So like, we are the product of of that, you know, like, we are like, people, people believe there's a lot of, so if you look, if you speak to mycologists and you speak to some scientists, everybody has their own theory on how we came about, you know? But I definitely stay more on the mushroom side because that's a lot more compelling.

• 50:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, you guys might convince me to go get some mushrooms.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, where can we send people to find you guys on the internet or find out more about QuickNode?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  QuickNode.com.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  QuickNode.com.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  We recently rebranded from Q U I K node.io to QuickNode.com, the way it was spelled. We had both domains from the get-go, but there was, you know, we were drinking Kool-Aid in 2018.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  It was a cool thing to do.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  It was a cool thing to do. Everybody was misspelling things.

• 51:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So you had both the whole time?

• 51:02Speaker 03

  The whole time, yeah.

• 51:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  We we knew, we knew from day one that, you know, it's gonna be autocorrect. People are gonna wanna go to the dot com. So we booked it from day one, but, you know, we were quick and if you leave a letter out, you're faster to type it. And it was, it was, and uh...

• 51:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, that's a shitty answer.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  You know, you know, there's, there's, there's, no, there's been research like when, when, if you can shorten your URL. You know, you might save like a hundredth of a millisecond or something like that. So just, just leave it, just leave it.

• 51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  But it was, it was a cool thing. It was a cool thing to do, but now that, you know, we're, we're more mature, we're in a different stage of the company. We're like, all right, let's spell, let's, let's spell it right. Especially looking five, 10 years ahead, you know, maybe we go IPO or something. We need to have a proper spelled company name.

• 51:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So quicknode.com.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Quicknode.com.

• 52:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Quicknode.com. Everyone go check it out. Thank you guys so much for doing this.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.