ProvenDB Goes All-In On Hedera and AlwaysNFT Helps Cover Your Assets

Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications for distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I'm the SVP of communications here at World's labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am joined by longtime community member guy Harrison. Guy hello, how are you? Hi, Zenobia. Hi, everybody. So, guy, I think some of our community members may remember you from earlier conversations that we have had about one of your projects called proven DB. I think today we're probably going to talk about that as well as something else. Is that right? Right Yes. Love to talk about both proving Deb and my new project. Always nifty. All right. Great why don't we start with proven db? For those who don't know, can you give us a background on what was the Genesis of the project and then maybe an update on where you've progressed since we last talked? Sure well, it's been around for a couple of years now. And the idea of about proving DB is that I personally felt that databases didn't have the sort of trust, ability and verifiability that I would have liked as a sort of database professional working for a long, many, many decades in various databases oracle, mysql, MongoDB and so forth. So when distributed ledger technology and blockchains came to my attention, I thought, this is fantastic. Finally, we have something where we can write something and we know for certain that no one's going to override it. And we can always sort of go back to it and prove that this piece of data looked like this at this point in time. But unfortunately, blockchains when we got started, which is sort of like a little bit prehistory, it probably didn't have the performance and economics that would allow you to do that. It worked out once. It would cost you about $15 million to store a gigabyte of data on ethereum, for instance. And some days it's probably 15 billion, you know, like when because it's only a small amount of data you can put in every transaction. Right so we I thought the way to solve this was to build a database that was integrated with blockchain. Now the people have done other things, tried to build databases that are blockchains and things like that. But I also wanted a database that was familiar to people. So I chose MongoDB as my database that I wanted to blockchain ify, if you like. And we built an integration layer that changes MongoDB so that every, every piece of data is always kept. So normally you do an update and you replace the data that's in the database with something new, and the old thing's gone. But in our database, the old thing is still there. It's just a different version. Think of it like GitHub or something like that. When you put a new version of your code in the old version, it's still there if you need it. Same thing with us. And then we integrated into the database a system that allows us to prove using digital signatures that prove the state of all of the database, part of the database, whatever you like, really. And we write that digital signature in a transaction to a blockchain or distributed ledger. So that's it in a nutshell. We've got a document management system on top of that, if you don't want to use database languages or if you just want to sort of drag and drop something in or you can email it in and so forth. And actually there themselves, use this for some of your governance documents. You store them in proven TB compliant vaults so that you can always prove that these documents haven't been changed and you've got a blockchain proof of that. And so a few years ago, shortly after we got started, we announced support for Hedera because we were pretty attracted by their characteristics and those just sort of spell them out for everybody. Had their A differs from something like Ethereum in a couple of ways from someone who's building something on it. One is that transactions are very fast. They typically come back within seconds. Now theory comes back within maybe 30 seconds, a bit more Bitcoin within 12 minutes. But Hedera was way ahead of those in terms of how quickly something would come back. And secondly, and maybe even more importantly, the cost of each transaction is very predictable. It's pinned at 10 US cents, whereas in other blockchains, the price goes up and down depending on demand and depending on the exchange rate with the cryptocurrency. So then I've gone on for a long time, I'll give you a second to the button. But the one thing that really hit us hard in 2020 was when the Ethereum price went from $0.15 to $50 or something and. Period of a few weeks. Suddenly we were in this crisis where our costs of writing to the Ethereum blockchain just went through the roof. Right and and it's just for anyone who's got a business that's sort of like sudden increase a bit like petrol went to sort of $200 a gallon or something. You know, you just suddenly you can't drive your car anymore. And it's the same when you're using a blockchain that's got sort of like a variable pricing model that you run the risk that at some point it's going to become too expensive to use. Yeah, absolutely. I think we have seen people, even though prices have come down, people have learned that lesson the hard way through 2021. And so we're starting to see people pay more attention to that cost structure as they build what they consider mission critical applications. I think it was very clever for you to pin it in a Fiat currency amount. From a business point of view, that's what you want to know. How much is this going to cost me? And not in a cryptocurrency amount, but in an actual dollar amount. That might be one day we'll all be using cryptocurrencies instead of US dollars or what have you. But today businesses we all budget based on dollars. And so to know exactly how much it's going to cost today and next month and so forth is really important. So actually after the Ethereum price shock, we changed from Ethereum to Hedera as our default chain, and we pretty much convinced all of our customers to come along with us on that. And it's pretty it was pretty easy to convince really the price is like a no brainer when you're saying, hey, either your cost will go up 100x or it will remain stable. Well, we had to. Yeah so we had to hedge. So we don't charge we charge people in US dollars as well. So we had to say you can use a dare and it will cost you $20 a month for a reasonably sized database. Or if you want to use ethereum, it'll be $50 a month and also will delay Ethereum transactions at times if the price goes really high because we sort of like bundle up a lot of data and single transactions. So we don't really need to do it with hedera, but with ethereum, we do need to do it because we can't really afford to sort of be paying the transaction costs. So all of our customers were able to say the sense in that. And so far I haven't had anyone who has completely balked. People often come in knowing what Ethereum is and not knowing what had there is, and so their initial inclination is to use Ethereum. But once it's explained the economics of the situation, they've all come along. And what does that look like for your customer? If they were previously on Ethereum and have now moved to hedera, how painful or painless is that process? It's completely painless. There's nothing there's nothing that anyone needs to change. The only thing that a user would generally notice is in a proof. So in our system, every now and again, if you want to create a cryptographic proof of a piece of data or all of your data, so let's say you dropped your will in and you want it to create a proof that your will was it had been created at that time sort of like notarize it, really making sure stamping it with sort of like a bit of blockchain to tell everyone that this is when the will was posted. No one can claim I change that later. In the sort of raw cryptographic proof there will be a link to it's nodularis actually just a link that shows you where the transaction is. And that link has gone from the scan to Ethereum to dragonglass, and that's the only thing that you'd notice. And likewise in the proof certificates, which are a nice fancy look, a little bit like what you might get it from a notary. They will they have a little Hedera stamp on and explain what the blockchain is or they are ledgers and that this is where the proof has been gone to. So completely painless. Less than painless, really, because in fact, your pricing has gone down. So yeah, it works really well. Look, and we've been very happy with adara as a platform. It's been predictability, as I said before, is important, not just predictability in price, but predictability and response time and uptime and all that sort of stuff. And you guys have maintained a very reliable system, which, again, for people who are using blockchains around the clock to do work, that's really important. Yeah, actually being able to do the work right when you want to do it, when you want to record the transactions, et cetera. Yeah so there, there are low cost blockchains that seek to compete with Ethereum. I guess Solana's sort of a good example of that. Which have had tremendous problems maintaining availability. And if you're trading NFTs on solana, then maybe it doesn't matter. You know, you try and try it on a Saturday. It doesn't work. And so you tried it on Monday, you'll be annoyed, but you know, you haven't gone out of business. But for us that would be a two day outage in which none of our customers could do what they want to do with that product. And so it's just not on. Right? it's just, you know, I don't want to cast aspersions at any other technology because I sort of love all technologies, really. But that's sort of like what distinguishes Hedera for me is kind of like the seriousness of the enterprise business focus. This has to be reliable. It has to be predictable. People are going to use this for important things that their business might be sort of like must be mission critical for their business. Right and it does remind me of early days of the internet. You sort of accepted the fact that some sites would go down for a certain amount of time. But as the technology matured, the expectation was now. Now you wonder if it's a 2 attack, if a site is down right. There is no it's not acceptable for sites to be down for services to be down. And so I think people have gotten used to that, you know, 24/7 always available and that has become the standard and that should be the standard for this next generation of platforms that applications are built on as well. Yes I'll give you another analogy about this. The way Bitcoin has been seen as it's digital gold, right? So the blockchain is there for people to exchange gold and long term sort of store of value. But Ethereum there and other blockchains are more like digital oil, right? They're sort of the things that are powering work and you know, that can't stop. That has to keep going or the work stops going. Right so Yeah and totally agree we're at 2024 by 7 world and there are no applications that have sort of like scheduled downtime on Sunday afternoon to something anymore, right. Simpler times. So switching gears a little bit, you also have a project called always NFT. Tell us about that. Sure Thanks. Well, always NFT is a storage solution for NFT owners, so your listeners may or may not own NFTS, but what people who are an NFT is are often mistaken in thinking that everything about the NFT is actually on the blockchain or the ledger. And just because for the same reason I said before that you can't really store sort of like megabytes of data economically on blockchain. Even Hedera doesn't have that capability at the moment. There's always some part of the NFT that's off chain, and usually it's stored off chain in this thing called ipfs, which is a great distributed storage solution that ensures that when things are stored in it, they can't change. So you get a link to something, an IP address. You know for certain that link will always resolve if it resolves at all to the exact thing that it referred to yesterday, because the link actually has a hash of the content in it. It's called content addressing, so that's all great. But unfortunately, IP address is kind of like a giant case and things sort of like can disappear out of it if people haven't looked at them recently. And a good NFT creator will make sure somehow that it stays in IP address. Either by running their own IPFS nodes or by paying for some third party to store it on their IPFS service. But if they don't, and unfortunately a lot of them don't keep paying for this, then your NFT artwork just disappears over time. And so when you look at your NFT in your wallet, you'll just see a sort of like an image cannot be found icon or just a blank or something like that. And you might have paid people paying real money for NFTS, as you know, you know, like upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. And to have the artwork that is associated with entities disappear would be heartbreaking. And, you know, many studies have shown that, you know, somewhere between 10% and 20% of NFT artwork is already can't be found or can't be found initially. Yeah, crazy a lot. Yeah so it is amazing. It's true that a lot of those missing NFTs are airdrops like their NFTs didn't buy. So someone sends you an NFT that says, hey by my fancy real NFT and the artwork to that sort of like disappears off the internet over like a month or so, but then it's still in your wallet. You sort of like you've got this NFT. You don't even know what it is at this point. So still. But there have been plenty of. He says we're real valuable. And it wasn't pinned because the developer was just a bit sort of like naive about the process or indifferent to what happens after they sold it. So we offer a service for owners where they can just register their wallet with us and we'll scan the wallet, take all the NFT artwork and store it, safeguard an IP address service that we maintain also to some third party IPFS servers that we have a sort of like an arrangement with. And that way you can know that your NFT artwork can't possibly disappear no matter what the developer did your safe. Silence Whereas there are the solutions that are aimed at developers helping developers pin their NFTs to make sure they don't disappear. Our service is aimed at owners because owners are the ones who actually sort of luck, are the most economically motivated to make sure they don't disappear. A creator can create the NFT, sell it, and then their interest is gone, but an owner is presumably holding it for the long term. So it's almost an insurance or proof of your entire collection that you can. It is a bit like insurance. We don't replace it. Like if someone steals it. So it's not it's not totally insurance, but it's more like a fire suppression system in a gallery. It's making sure that things don't get destroyed. So I think you're motivated for the same reasons as you buy insurance, but that's for sure, because you've paid money for this. You want to make sure that money doesn't sort of go nowhere. So you pay for something to sort of like protect your assets. It's free. Asos is free for up to 150 years. So for a lot of people, they will not need to pay anything. But a $20 a month will do it for between 101,000 NFT. So it's pretty economical given what people are spending and do. If someone wants to use your service, do they just go to always crimefeed.com or how do they engage with the always NFT cloud? Start there, create an account and then you can attach your wallet or just give us the public address of your wallet and we'll do the rest. And we've got a little dashboard where you can see all your NFTs in the one place and things like that. It's quite, quite nice. If you add NFTs to the wallet, do you then automatically capture those new ones? Or someone has to go in and say, hey, I want to also add this to my yeah, now we do. We, we scan accounts every few days and add anything new. So you make it super easy. They don't even have to think about going. Absolutely Yeah. Oh, no. It sort of couldn't be easier really compared with the alternative, which is to try and find out the address of all of the IP addresses and manually add them to your own IP address server. I mean, that's sort of like a science project that would take me lots of time and I'm sort of like I'm deep into the weeds of how this stuff's all stored. Yeah and so what do you see in terms of what's been your experience building that out? And then what do you see in terms of the evolution of that service going forward? It's been interesting to me. I think I had the wrong impression about who NFT owners were. For some reason, I thought they were a bit like crypto owners who were sort of very technologically sophisticated, but NFT owners actually come from a far broader audience. And so its toughest challenge has been to explain to NFT owners why they need this. And to do that, you sort of got to understand the difference between on chain and off chain storage. And I think with some NFT owners, I think their eyes are just glazing over. They just don't understand what's being said. And because they've been bombarded from everywhere with offers and buy this and special things and scamming attempts. And so if what they don't understand, they tend to ignore quite probably quite reasonably, right. So the people not understanding the need and the severity of the problem, I think, is the biggest hurdle, non-technical hurdle we have to overcome. The technical I'm a technical guy, so the technical challenges I'm perfectly happy with, I just can't feel happier than when I've got a technical challenge. I'm trying to solve it. But those sorts of marketing challenges, it's a far more in your line of work. I find those deeply troubling. Well, those are about making it simple for the masses, right? I mean, that is the biggest challenge of our entire industry, right? It shouldn't have to take 20 steps to do something. It shouldn't have to take I mean, the number of times that I have, the number of times that you have to log into a wallet and associate it and do x, y and z, which is all very logical but is 30 steps, right. That's that's most people will not do that. Yes Yes. It's amazing. In a way, it's amazing that the number of MetaMask wallets that have been set up have occurred because setting up a MetaMask wallet is a bit know. It's not complicated, as you say, but there's a lot of things you have to understand if you're really sort of going to trust it. And there are plenty of other things that you might need to do to get on your journey to be an NFT owner. But we hope anyway that over the long term, we will form partnerships with marketplaces and so forth that can see the need to protect their users. And we've had some conversations in the Hedera community about that as well. So that probably brings me to again, we'll sort of close the loop with the daera because we just announced support for Hedera a few weeks ago. Hedera NFTs that is. So now you can if you've got a hash pack wallet or if you know your public account I.d., which you should, you can just either attach with hashtag or plug-in your account ID and again, we'll scan your assets and find all of the IPFS assets or all of the media assets actually, and pin them to our servers. So so that's exciting for us because in my other role that day, I've had a lot to do with the Hedera community, so it's great to be interacting with that. And there is NFT marketplace is also relatively smaller. It's thriving. You know, there's a lot of energy around it and a lot of new projects coming. So we're excited about that. And again, I feel somewhat based on my experience with the data in proving, Deb, that there has a lot to offer NFTs as they evolve. And by that I mean today NFTs are sort of they're speculative assets, really. I mean, most NFTs are connected with digital art collectibles, maybe some sort of passes to sort of special events and so forth. But you know, in the industry we all believe, I think, that NFTs one day will be used for really I don't want to call it more serious because collectibles are sort of like a big industry and serious in its own right. But we'll branch out into sort of perhaps more mainstream activities, dates and titles. And I do think an NFT will replace tickets to the movies or special events, you know, everything that you want to have a provable digital asset, it just makes sense to represent that as NFT, providing it can be done economically. And I think again, that's where Hedera has got a lot to offer in terms of making the pricing for NFT generation predictable because the pricing, again, for minting NFTs on there is totally predictable and very low compared with the alternatives. And you know, there is penetration into enterprise markets, I think puts it in a good position to exploit those form of entities when they arrive. And we'd like to be there as sort of like partners to help make sure that the off chain storage is managed correctly. Yeah, well, we just had Duncan Moore from Aberdeen on the podcast and he was talking about how Aberdeen is planning to tokenize essentially all of their assets, starting with a number of their funds. So to your point about more traditional asset classes being tokenized, Aberdeen is a $508 billion firm in terms of assets under management. And so I think when you start to think about total assets tokenized, there are going to be important things that people need to be able to demonstrate, not just, hey, let me show you my collection, but let me demonstrate what the sort of translation of real world assets is on this ledger. Yeah, and I think that's fantastic. I didn't know about Aberdeen, but it's really going to make life better for people when those sorts of assets are controlled and fully transferable by you without having to go through like brokers and all sorts of intermediaries. We have a situation with in my life where my wife owns some stocks that were bequeathed to her by her parents. And the paper trail is just sort of all, it's all gone away now. And, you know, like when it comes taxiety time, she's got no way of like where did these come from? She can't tell you because no one bothered to all of those things that need to be ideally associated with that asset. Yeah so in the modern world, you know, this is the, this is the correct technology for those sorts of assets for sure. Right and we're on like a long ish road of adoption for. ledges generally and nifty specifically to become sort of like dominant within all old verticals. But you know, technology will win out in the long run. You know, if something is technically superior and economically superior than in the long run, it's sort of bound to succeed. Or at least that's my sort of technophile sort of belief. But that's I mean, the history of the 20th century shows technology is winning out over and over again, disrupting the old technologies, replacing the new. And sometimes it takes a long time and sometimes it takes a short time, but it's kind of an inevitable March. Yeah, I think the more value that is entrenched in the existing systems, a lot of times the longer it takes to make that transition. But in some ways, the more valuable it is to make that transition. Yeah and sometimes it takes a shock, like when the old system is found to be deficient in some sort of huge sort of global financial crisis type way. You know, those are the sorts of, you know, GFC led to Bitcoin in some respects and these things will happen again and again and we'll eventually find ourselves forced to adopt better solutions to prevent sort of crises reoccurring. But, but Yeah. But even in the short term, the NFT market is huge. The amount of economic value and in cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers, there's a huge amount of value tied up in these things. And it's only growing. The price of the cryptocurrencies goes up and down, which sort of gives the impression that it's sort of like the value is sort of like going down as well. But the economic value involved in blockchains and entities that just keeps going up, the price of the individual crypto asset might drop, but the value that's sort of locked in is only increasing. Yeah, absolutely. Guy, Thank you for joining us today. Before we wrap up, any other thoughts, where would you love to send people today for to check out both these projects? Yes, Thank you. Always NFT cloud. If you're an NFT owner, please come and check out for a little while. We've got some special promotions that give you free 200 NFTs rather than 100 and some giveaways that you'd be in the running for. So if you're an owner, I can only encourage you to do that. And if you're looking for a database that's got the backing of Hedera blockchain proofs to ensure integrity, tamper proofing check out program D be at DB dotcom. All right. Well Thank you so much, guy. Always a pleasure to talk to you and we hope you will continue to keep us updated. I certainly will. Thanks, Zenobia. Thanks for the opportunity to share. Take care. Bye bye.