🎧Gitcoin Twitter Spaces Collab - Open Data: Building web3 native tools and dashboards
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Twitter Spaces
October 20,2022
Open Data: building web3 native tools and dashboards
Speakers:
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
Evan Powell, Gitcoin
Erick Pinos, Ontology and Orange
Disruption Joe, Gitcoin
Philip Silva, Bright ID
Boxer, Dune Analytics
Thomas Jay Rush, True Blocks
Matt Davis, Ceramic
Pat, Transpose
tl;dr
13:50
Evan Powell
@epowell101
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'd kick it off just in the form of a question. I mean, what do people, fellow speakers and others on here think in terms of decentralization versus centralization, how do you guys feel when you see these?
15:26
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Yeah, I personally think that the problem lies in the node software itself and that the node software itself is doing a great job of one of its two purposes, which is joining the network and coming to synchronization with the network, but it does a pretty poor job of its other task, which is to deliver the data that it's collected. So the RPC itself I think is inadequate. And I think that, if you truly did want to build something that was decentralized, you would fix the RPC so it can deliver the data that people need and the data that these third party proprietary solutions are creating. It should come from the node software itself.
16:38
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Can you define for the rest of us what you are describing here in terms of node software? What nodes are we describing and what is the challenge with the status quo?
16:62
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
I'll try to, so I'll use an example. So the 15th issue ever written against the first Ethereum node software was we need access to the history of an account. The very first response was that's never going to happen. In other words, we're not going to put indexing by address into the node software. And I think that was a mistake because from the perspective of the note software developer, that makes perfect sense because it's hard to give. But from the perspective of the users, that's the only thing they want, which is a history of their own address.
17:56
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Got it. So this is really looking at the usability of on chain data and some of the challenges with the way that it currently works and this is basically a programming, issue with the way that the software was developed.
19:44
Evan Powell
@epowell101
I've heard it referred to as the original sin of Etherium, but others perspectives on either that indexing the criticality of it and and and sort of the gap. There were other top problems that you see that ought to be addressed in a Community centric way if possible.
21:15
Pat
@tannishmango
I went through essentially like every single type of technology that was used to index the chain. Everything from like the graph to our own solution. I guess along the spectrum of decentralized, the centralized.
One of the things we noticed was like with respect to the graph, there's a lot that's been incredibly useful about it, but there's almost like a lack of Composability to subgraphs, so you can't really build on top of them, which creates a very inefficient structure. It almost funnels you in with the way that, yeah, sort of the RPC node is designed.
23:00
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
What we've done now is, I say this way we've created an index or we've created a time ordered log of an index of a time ordered log. So we're kind of going up a level and creating basically a block chain of blocks that are the. Our index is chunked on purpose because we want to preserve immutability. What we give up is sorting every address in the entire history of the chain.
In one file, but that's OK because we preserved immutability and that's why index is chunked.
Another benefit comes from that that we can store that chunked index on an immutable file system like IPFS. If you try to store something on IPFS that's being sorted every 14 seconds, it breaks IPFS. So I think that decentralization of this data comes by embracing the time ordered nature of the data and stop thinking in terms of a web two database that sorts every time you insert a record.
26:08
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
at what points in this data stack is decentralization necessary? Is it not as critical to have?
27:08
Boxer
@0xBoxer
I think one of the aspects that haven't surfaced so far in this conversation is like there's of course like decentralization whereas the data is actually stored, but how accessible, how accessible is that data actually?
On a very core level and if I want to look at my own history or like my own states like what are my accounts actually doing, that should be a decentralized service. But if we actually go a step up and kind of look at what's the status of a protocol or what's the what is actually happening on etherium today, I don't really think that those need to be decentralized services. So like I think the higher we go within levels of abstraction within data.
34:32
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
The higher up you go in the data abstraction, so DEX is as an example it, it's not so easy to do from my perspective because we purposefully don't have big, you know, data machines that can churn that stuff out, right. So we're much more focused on the individual.
33:17
Boxer
@0xBoxer
What Dune is doing, we're just surfacing blockchain data and then we use APIs to decode the data so it's like nice and human readable. And then what we do on top of that is basically we have a bunch of data engineering pipelines which are also open source where we have one table that's called Dex dot trades. And in that table like all decentralized exchange trades across like multiple blockchains, multiple protocols, they all live there. So it's super easy to access the data, but it's all out there in the open.
40:12
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
I think that this is exactly what it's together as a variety of different stakeholders with different opinions and different perspectives. There's obviously overlap in what a lot of us are doing, but we we're all taking a different approach and I don't think there's a right way or wrong way. I think that everyone ends up optimizing for a slightly different outcome. But at the end of the day, it needs to be a a long an ongoing discussion, I suppose, about how much standardization is needed.
41:56
Evan Powell
@epowell101
And are there EIP's or similar that we should be getting behind or you know, to get a little more tactical?
Has an area of standardization you'd like to see emerge?
What would that area be?
43:38
Boxer
@0xBoxer
I think where the, where the bigger problem here is is that different governments will have different rules for like depending on your local legislation. So I don't feel like this is necessarily a data problem.
43:53
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
It is a data problem because you can't even get the list of all the things where the assets transferred that regardless, it is a data problem because you can't even get the list of all the things where the assets transferred. That regardless of what the local governments want me to do with that. You can't even get a list that says this is every asset that ever transferred.
44:10
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
that there definitely needs to be a lot more done.
On the on the accounting side, just to have like an accurate Ledger of like what you've done, even the AXI Infinity token when they forked an airdropped everyone looked at the AXI Infinity version 2 token like it, it looked like a completely new token and and these coin tracking softwares didn't even pick it up.
50:46
Evan Powell
@epowell101
The collaboration on this group because this has been an amazing conversation for me, I hope, for everybody on here. So one idea is that we could start to literally draft, you know, what we we could have, you know, issues. We could use GitHub and we could, you know, begin to kind of vote on which which standards do we want to talk about, who wants to help draft those?
53:08
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
At Orange, we've been focusing a lot on the model creation for assessing different kinds of reputation, whether it's like your your contribution level to a Dow or whether it's your risk model credit score for access to to better lending rates on a lending platform or even like for determining eligibility to apply to a certain grant or apply to a hackathon. We're focused a lot on like the model design and not being like the authority on. This is how you define Dow contribution activity. This is how you define risk assessment.
Full Transcription and Timestamps:
1:16
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
So welcome everyone. I am thrilled to be hosting this conversation with so many people that I adore and respect in this space.
You know, I also work in the space of open data through a project called Orange Protocol.
And so I admire the work that many of the people up here are doing in that space. I was very excited when Evan and I and Joe Disruption Joe started talking about the possibility of hosting these conversations on Twitter spaces. As most of you may also know, crypto sapiens host conversations that are meaningful, that are thought provoking, that inspire us to take on the challenge of.
Building out a better web. And so we put together this programming starting last week and we continued it to this week, but from the lens of open data and the tools that we can build dashboards you know we have.
Quite a few projects up here that are building in that space. And so I'm gonna go and just wrap up this introduction very quickly so we can do brief introductions from the people up on the stage and then we can just kind of start diving into this, you know, meaty discussion. You know, as usual this is for educational purposes, is never financial advice, do your own research, there is a pull up. We're going to be celebrating this like we did last event with a poap, a cool kind of feature of these is now open data can be used to create reputation proofs from them, so as the conversation is open data.
I figured this would be a nice experience to add on to it as well. So Evan, why don't you briefly give us an introduction to yourself and then we'll just keep going down the line.
6:10
Evan Powell
@epowell101
Yep, sure. Just quickly, thanks. Thanks so much, Humpty. And I am working with Gitcoin and and really focused on this notion of a somewhat nascent open data community. That means software, that means data Ok I am really excited to be here and the projects that are on here and those that are starting to pop up in the little GitHub that has been spun up around the open data.
Are pretty amazing, so really excited to hear from some of the team here on the call on the Twitter space. Don’t forget that hackathon for one week, a little more than a week and 20,000 roughly dollars available. So if you are a user of some of these solutions, we'd love to hear your input today and on the channel then that's to say the hackathon channel. But we'd also love to see you in the hackathon. You know collectively I think we can address some of the challenges and the opportunities here in the web 3 space in terms of scaling web 3 and protecting web three. So just a quick show for the hackathon and for sharing your opinions about solutions you use either here, today, now live raise a hand or on GitHub or in the discord or however you'd like.
7:38
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
These conversations are really to highlight the hackathon, too. So anyone who's listening who wants to learn more about the hackathon, please do check that out. Let's go down the line. Eric, I think you're next on my screen. Would you like to give a brief introduction to yourself, please?
8:03
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
Sure. Hey guys,I'm from ontology and orange. We work on decentralized identity and reputation and very excited to be a part of these discussions and talk about open data. I'm a big believer in open source, big believer in decentralized and self sovereign identity. And I'm also a big believer in collaboration, collaborating with other projects in the space and building a solution together with each other.
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Thank you, Eric. DisruptionJoe?
8:39
DisruptionJoe.eth (🤖,💙)
@DisruptionJoe
I work in fraud detection defense with Gitcoin, and I'm definitely excited about seeing this open data community really sparking up because you know, we can, we know that we can't do it by ourselves.
8:56
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Awesome. We have Philip Silva. How are you doing? Want to give a brief intro to yourself?
9:03
Philip Silva 🔆
@UBIpromoter
I work on the bright ID project. I'm a member of a whole slew of Dows and recently helped launch the Aura game, which sits on top of bread ID and aims to be the best place for Sybil hunters to hang out and solve this problem and look forward to working with all of you to make a better open world for all.
9:24
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful, Boxer.
9:26
Boxer
@0xBoxer
Yes, hello, my name's boxer. I work at developer relations in Dune analytics. And yeah, I've been part of the open data community, I guess for the better part of two years. Just helping out all my all my Wizards. Really looking forward to this conversation and to see what what we can bring to the communities around the world.
9:54
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Amazing. Thank you, Thomas.
9:59
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Yeah, my name is Thomas J Rush. People call me Jay or TJ you might see I have a project called true blocks and I guess I would call myself a decentralization maxi. So my project wants to live behind the node software and I want it to communicate directly with the note software and allow the user, the end user, to get access directly to the node software without a third party and that.
It it's already open, so the data is already open on the node, so I want to make it more accessible, more easy to get to.
10:40
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful, pat.
10:44
pat
@tannishmango
Hey, I'm pat. I was formerly working at the Defiant.
And it was pretty much building out like a whole back end infrastructure tracking web three data. Uh. I then started doing some subgraph work with Messari. Pretty rigorous implementations there, tracking curve maker, some other ones. And then finally I moved a little bit down the stack, joined the team with the transpose and now we're really working on clean comprehensive data solutions that can just aggregate and get the DFI data that people demand in an easy manner.
11:39
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Excellent. Thank you, Michael.
11:43
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
Hey everyone, Michael here. Thanks for organizing this everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm here on behalf of transpose as well, excited to be bringing a slightly different perspective to these open data chats. I think it's really important to include a broad variety of use cases and data participants in this space. And I mean we're primarily focused on providing crypto data and blockchain data to companies building on it, which is an important use case and definitely.
On the edge of the open data side of things, but we want to be as involved as possible active participants in this initiative. So excited to be here and to contribute our perspective.
12:24
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Amazing. And last but not least, Matt.
12:28
mattdavis0351.eth
@mattdavis0351
Hi, nice to be here. Thanks again for organizing this. I'm with ceramic. I work at the ceramic network. We really focus on composable Web 3, decentralized data, so being the decentralized database for your applications. And our team has also done a lot of work in pioneering decentralized identity standards and we've shipped quite a few libraries actually when it comes to managing that identity and data for your applications.
So I'm here on behalf of ceramic and hopefully we can talk about composability a little bit.
13:05
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Yeah, wonderful. OK. So everyone here and made a round of introductions. So for anybody listening, hopefully you get a sense of the depth of work that's happening in the space, the number of projects that are taking on, you know, open data and, you know, finding innovative ways to work with it. So maybe we can start the conversation just by framing open data and introducing what that is and maybe.
Even differentiating open data in the sense of maybe web two traditional web two applications and web three applications. Evan, did you want to kick this off and maybe you can pass the baton to someone else?
13:50
Evan Powell
@epowell101
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'd kick it off just in the form of a question. I mean, what do people, fellow speakers and others on here think in terms of decentralization versus centralization, how do you guys feel when you see these?
You know, proprietary indexing companies raising a bunch of money and coming into the Web 3 space.
You can kind of guess from my question how I feel and and and and is there a problem in that there may be too many centralized solutions or sort of Tower of Babel type problems or what are the problems that we see when it comes to making sense out of what's happening in web three and what would you pick as your top?
Problem you know is, is it?
Folks, rec centralizing what is supposed to be natively decentralized, is it? We haven't agreed, although yeah, I think the point about ceramic being quite helpful there. But in general we maybe haven't agreed for on a bunch of schemas. What? What are the other problems? Or there just aren't enough tools? I'd love to hear the folks on the call just share what they view as the kind of top challenges to open data today.
15:26
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Yeah, I personally think that the problem lies in the node software itself and that the node software itself is doing a great job of one of its two purposes, which is joining the network and coming to synchronization with the network, but it does a pretty poor job of its other task, which is to deliver the data that it's collected. So the RPC itself I think is inadequate. And I think that, if you truly did want to build something that was decentralized, you would fix the RPC so it can deliver the data that people need and the data that these third party proprietary solutions are creating. It should come from the node software itself. I think there's a number of different things you could do to the node to make it a lot better than it currently is. And that's kind of what our work is. Our work at true blocks is let's look at the node and see exactly what it is that is inadequate. Why is it inadequate? Can we push stuff? Can we push features into the node software to make it so that people could get access easier?
16:38
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Can you define for the rest of us what you are describing here in terms of node software? What nodes are we describing and what is the challenge with the status quo? Then maybe we can reframe that again from how true blocks is changing that.
16:62
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
I'll try to, so I'll use an example. So the 15th issue ever written against the first Ethereum node software was we need access to the history of an account. The very first response was that's never going to happen. In other words, we're not going to put indexing by address into the node software. And I think that was a mistake because from the perspective of the note software developer, that makes perfect sense because it's hard to give. But from the perspective of the users, that's the only thing they want, which is a history of their own address. So when I talk about almost everything, it's about can we index, in a way where you can answer the query what happened to my account, because that's what all of these solutions are doing I think.
17:56
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
So this is really looking at the usability of on chain data and some of the challenges with the way that it currently works and this is basically a programming, issue with the way that the software was developed. Maybe we can just keep pulling on that thread you were talking about true blocks, looking at that and solving that by different means. Can you describe then what and the outcome would look like using true blocks which is not accessible now and some of the opportunities that that will open.
18:34
mattdavis0351.eth
@mattdavis0351
I was just gonna add to your point about indexing being the demand from the user base. That's something that we've seen a ton over at ceramic to the point where we've had to to shift a little bit of our priorities to be more heavy on the data availability with indexing, right. So like we've worked a lot on making that our priority last like work season in this upcoming work season. It's just a whole lot of indexing work. So it's interesting.
To to see that this isn't just a generalized data problem, but it's almost like a design flaw if you think about how Ethereum prevents the indexing from from taking place at at that such a low of a level that now the protocols in the projects that are building on top of that blockchain have to figure out ways to solve for indexing. So it's definitely a widespread thing that is going to hinder adoption at the rate that we want to see it at least.
19:44
Evan Powell
@epowell101
I've heard it referred to as the original sin of Etherium, but others perspectives on either that indexing the criticality of it and and and sort of the gap. There were other top problems that you see that ought to be addressed in a Community centric way if possible.
19:58
mattdavis0351.eth
@mattdavis0351
I don't want to steal the floor here, but there's a.
That one of the other problems I see outside of indexing is things that are inherently public, which I think a lot of us would agree with. You know we're on this call, we believe in open data in an open web, but to some degree not all data can be public. And the fact that things are inherently public prevents certain enterprise applications or certain types of data from being usable in web three. And until there's a real project or protocol that comes around that that solves that. Somehow still maintaining an openness of the data, but allowing us to maybe store something a little more sensitive. I think that's always going to be a problem area for us.
20:52
pat
@tannishmango
I went through essentially like every single type of technology that was used to index the chain. Everything from like the graph to our own solution. I guess along the spectrum of decentralized, the centralized.
One of the things we noticed was like with respect to the graph, there's a lot that's been incredibly useful about it, but there's almost like a lack of Composability to subgraphs, so you can't really build on top of them, which creates a very inefficient structure. It almost funnels you in with the way that, yeah, sort of the RPC node is designed.
That too like it's almost path dependent to where building on just like a local database and building it out properly.
It's just so much cleaner and more efficient. That's kind of like it's almost a bit antithetical to my sole reason for getting into crypto was similar to Thomas but was very much ideological and from a decentralization standpoint. I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about what the proper points to the centralized not, but I know that like in terms of if I just want to get the on chain data. You know, when I joined transpose like it just was the fastest, most efficient way to do it. Of course, that's currently the sacrifice of aspects of decentralization.
23:00
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Blockchains are time ordered that each block comes after the previous one, and if you do an index you're basically extracting data from that time ordered log and you're sorting it by something other than time. So an example for our index it's by address. So every time we get a new block, if we add an address and sort we've ruined the time ordered nature of the data and the time ordered-ness is why it's immutable. It's like you can't have immutable data that isn't time ordered. That tension between sorting by something other than time and time is why blockchains have blocks. Blockchains have blocks so they can stop sorting the data, the transactions in particular. So what we did with true blocks is we took that a step further and we said, so we're going to build an index.
Add addresses until we get to a certain point, and then we're going to stop sorting that part of the index, and we're going to create what's called a chunk.And what we've done now is, I say this way we've created an index or we've created a time ordered log of an index of a time ordered log. So we're kind of going up a level and creating basically a block chain of blocks that are the. Our index is chunked on purpose because we want to preserve immutability. What we give up is sorting every address in the entire history of the chain in one file, but that's OK because we preserved immutability and that's why index is chunked. Another benefit comes from that we can store that chunked index on an immutable file system like IPFS. If you try to store something on IPFS that's being sorted every 14 seconds, it breaks IPFS. So I think that decentralization of this data comes by embracing the time ordered nature of the data and stop thinking in terms of a web two database that sorts every time you insert a record.
I am preaching and I apologize for that, but I'm going to sit back and listen. I appreciate your thoughts on what I just said.
25:37
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
I think Jay makes a fantastic point here. Um, there is definitely an interesting tension between how much of this capability needs to exist at the node level or at the RPC level, because as you mentioned, I mean exactly correctly to maintain decentralization. All you need to do is preserve the immutable nature of the time ordering of these transactions. So then there's the question of, well, how do you serve?
What is not in the predominant use case, which is indexing in another way? And then there's an interesting argument to be had, or an interesting debate to be had, to be honest about how much of that functionality should live in the node versus being layered on top, as kind of has been the case now. And I think that there is actually a point to be made for not having all of the functionality at the lowest level, for keeping that a little leaner, because then we end up with smarter, better client diversity, hopefully, and I mean the client diversity problem is, is a whole other whole other side of this beast that we haven't really touched on today, but represented another interesting input into the discussion on decentralization and at what points in this data stack is decentralization necessary? Is it not as critical to have? So yeah, I don't know if anyone wants to comment on that.
27:08
Boxer
@0xBoxer
I can take it.
I think one of the aspects that haven't been surfaced so far in this conversation is like there's of course like decentralization whereas the data actually stored, but how accessible, how accessible is that data actually? Do I need a PhD in computer science or at least some advanced knowledge in computer science to actually access that data? Do I need to download complicated software, download Python, do whatever? Or can I actually just go to I know we are centralized solution, I also have
That joint you and but I definitely see a benefit for the space and that data being publicly accessible and easily accessible for everyone. And like our like we will always have a free tier on which that data is accessible to everyone. Of course like there could be a case where Duane kind of manipulates data or anything but like our whole reputation is staked on the data being correct. So we really have no incentive to ever fuck with the data and I agree like on the.
On a very core level and if I want to look at my own history or like my own states like what are my accounts actually doing, that should be a decentralized service. But if we actually go a step up and kind of look at what's the status of a protocol or what's the what is actually happening on etherium today, I don't really think that those need to be decentralized services. So like I think the higher we go within levels of abstraction within data.
The less decentralization really matters because if like if there's like a few wrong transactions in there, would it even matter? Of course, like should never be the case. But there will be other solutions as well where you can double check against them. So that's kind of like, I think the accessibility of the data is a really important factor here and really what drives a lot of data scientists today into web three data just because it's like it's exciting and fun.
That we actually have all these data sets. There's so many things still like left that haven't been explored yet or I don't know. I I think the the art of writing it takes on protocols or on bad actors in this space. That's just not possible in Web 2 because everything is closed source. So I think the nature of that is like really interesting for the space.
29:52
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
If I could just make a quick point off of what you said boxer. I think that that's all exactly spot on and and really what's more important than necessarily complete decentralization at every layer of the stack is really an emphasis on verifiability to be able to check to make sure that that the data reported or are accurate and also a focus on resiliency. I mean that's the the whole the whole risk that people bring up with with the leaning into heavily on a single centralized.
Other providers, what happens if in 50 years they go out of business or they're no longer around or everybody leaves the company or whatever, that's that's super valid issue especially for protocols that are designed to to live on in perpetuity. So I think that there it's important to have some diversity in in data providers in in in the options that people have and they're with the fair market, you end up having everybody compete to provide a better level of service to the various target user.
32:25
Evan Powell
@epowell101
You're starting to touch on or maybe have touched on the notion that has animated a lot of open source over the years which is you know lock in right. And maybe that's another angle here. We could take I think decentralization being a crucial one. I think everyone's on the conversation that there is an aspect to your business models where basically folks can as we call it now, rage quit or or avoid lock in or maybe you could speak, maybe folks could speak to that. Like to your point about resilience, Michael, how would you reduce your risk of using one of your solutions because a lot of what they're doing can be taken from the solution if that makes any sense. So obviously in the case of Jay, it's open source, so it's pretty clear to me. I think I get it with dune, So how would you avoid your users avoid locking?
33:17
Boxer
@0xBoxer
I can immediately respond, so Basically, like what Dune is doing, we're just surfacing blockchain data and then we use APIs to decode the data so it's like nice and human readable. And then what we do on top of that is basically we have a bunch of data engineering pipelines which are also open source where we have one table that's called Dex dot trades. And in that table like all decentralized exchange trades across like multiple blockchains, multiple protocols, they all live there. So it's like super easy to access the data, but it's all out there in the open. So even, somebody else like a copy of that repo somewhere and can kind of reengineer the data that we've done there. But I know that transpose has exactly the same. I know that they have NFT dot trades. Flipside has very, very similar things. So it's like in the end we're all kind of doing the same thing and we are all hoping that we find the best solution.
But there already is kind of built in redundancy and we don't really, at least we don't know of any customers who are deadlocked into dune where they couldn't switch. Like no actual on chain contract relies on June data. So I don't really of course there would be like maybe there's a short information.
Like lack of information in their organization if they rage, quit June. But there's always redundancy and while obviously like I would.
I don't know it's good for the space, so we are all in this together and I think in our in our telegram conversation also on the on the notes that we shared before and there's there was a bit of talks around like finding open standards and that is a conversation which I'm really interested in because what actually does constitute a trade in the decentralized exchange or NFT trade or something like that. I know there's probably like for the decentralization Maxis here probably not as interesting but.
34:32
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Actually, let me jump in. I'm actually super interested in that. And I think that the, this idea of the, the higher up you go in the data abstraction, so DEX is as an example it, it's not so easy to do from my perspective because we purposefully don't have big, you know, data machines that can churn that stuff out, right. So we're much more focused on the individual.Users with 10,000 transactions or 3000 transactions, then the smart contracts with millions of transactions. But I think one of the things that you mentioned was standard. So as these standards emerge, ERC 20 is a perfect example. That one's super easy for everyone to do because it's very clearly defined. But all these other things like staking and and loans and stuff like that are not well defined and they're different across multiple different protocols. So as those standards evolve, maybe it starts pushing back down more towards the node and less towards specialized private data sources. So maybe it's a matter of time that these standards emerge and then it can get pushed down further into the open data area.
36:00
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
Yeah, I agree. I mean, who are the arbiters of what? You know, who are the arbiters of, of what data should be included under which category, I think I saw a tweet today, total amount of NFT trading volume that has occurred and somebody responded like ohh you forgot pseudo swap and it's like. Well, that's a different way of trading. NFT's is still considered under NFT trading volume. Should it be included in that table? Should be included in those analytics, right? Who decides?
This is, a data set of all the trades, or this is a data set of all the NFT trades. I think the best is just to like offer as many different options and let the DAP decide. Like oh, this is how we're going to choose to display this data or calculate this data or a numerate and show this data.
uh this is uh this is a data set of all the decks trades or this is a data set of all the NFT trades i think i think the the best is just to like offer as many different options and let the let the dap decide like oh this is how we're going to choose to display this data or calculate this data or a numerate and show this data
36:58
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Yeah, I was gonna frame this just briefly on something that I'm a little more familiar with and I think also fits into the conversation that were happening or having right now on, you know, this open data, but also working with standards. And one of the, one of the, one of the areas in which I operate quite frequently is the space of DID.
And you know, the ID would be a standard that I would say is probably widely implemented, though there are a couple of different flavors.
In terms of the implementations across web three but also outside of it. And one thing that I would say is there is this dilemma currently in terms of the different credentialing data that is being produced there is this also challenge of locking and kind of one of the things that I think is quoted as an issue, or maybe a one of the things that makes it difficult to adopt is the inability to be able to interoperate. Though I think it's quite interesting to consider how solutions can be built around repurposing this data. And I say that from the lens of orange protocol, of course, where it is agnostic to the credentialing data, the source, and just.
Takes these inputs both off chain and on chain data to be able to create some positive outcome from that data. So maybe looking at it from standards, but also looking at it from building systems that are agnostic to the source and just construct meaning from them.
38:53
mattdavis0351.eth
@mattdavis0351
I didn't say. I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned from the way DID's implemented that spec, right? Like we just got on talking about how there's not a well defined standard for for all of this other type of data in these transactions and and how to interact with certain types of tokens and stuff. And the idea is is super open one with how it's written and then two like the spec allows for it to grow and change and evolve and maybe there's some sort of middle ground to where these other transactional type standards that don't exist could could take some lessons learned from that did standard as a whole to say, hey, like how do we build a framework to be innovative but still be interoperable. And that's one of the things that ID does wonderfully, it is very much is interoperable.
39:54
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
Yeah. I think this is a fantastic point. And actually kind of going back to what Eric was mentioning, I think that there's very much a spectrum in terms of how much standardization versus how much flexibility you give. I mean, obviously it's not a binary option or outcome, but by coming together as a Community here and this is why I personally was so excited when Evan originally approached us talking about this Gitcoin Open data initiative. I think that this is exactly what it's together as a variety of different stakeholders with different opinions and different perspectives. There's obviously overlap in what a lot of us are doing, but we we're all taking a different approach and I don't think there's a right way or wrong way. I think that everyone ends up optimizing for a slightly different outcome. But at the end of the day, it needs to be a a long an ongoing discussion, I suppose, about how much standardization is needed. You see with ERC 20 it's a limiting standard. It imposes a lot of limitations on what protocol developers can do. But at the same time standardization is necessary, you need some level of it for things to be modular and interoperable. And so it's definitely a really interesting discussion and and fascinating to be at the forefront of this debate to to think about how important it is and whether it's important to to focus on modularity versus giving people true flexibility in how with this data and how they build on it, and I mean coming from someone deep in the data indexing space, I mean we've seen just like the most absurd ways of using all of these protocols and specs and things that go way beyond what any of the creators originally would have thought. But that's not a bad thing that should absolutely be allowed for. So yeah, definitely raises some really fascinating points here.
41:56
Evan Powell
@epowell101
And are there EIP's or similar that we should be getting behind or you know, to get a little more tactical?
Has an area of standardization you'd like to see emerge?
What would that area be? So yeah, I don't know if anyone wants to take that, but yeah, so standardization might be beneficial, but where? Like what, what, what? What's the low hanging fruit or at least the high value thing that you think as a community we should take on or get behind?
42:28
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
I don't know if it's low hanging fruit, but it might be high value.
If you look at, I don't know about you guys, but I hired some accountant to do my crypto taxes and it's like it was wrong in almost every single. It was like surprising how many different ways you could get it wrong so.
It seems to me if we have an 18 decimal place accurate accounting Ledger that we should be able to push a button and get 18 decimal place accurate taxes or something. So something where we standardize on.
Transferring assets and being able to actually extract useful data for accounting to me would be.
High value I think. I'm not sure about low hanging fruit but.
43:16
Boxer
@0xBoxer
I mean in in the data space people always try to do the taxes themselves but i think we're like at least i tried it and it's really hard i think where the where the bigger problem here is is that different governments will have different rules for like depending on your local local legislation like there's no way that the texas are easily identifiable so i
Yeah, in in the data space, people always try to do the taxes themselves. But I think we're like at least I tried and it's really hard. I think where the, where the bigger problem here is is that different governments will have different rules for like depending on your local legislation. So I don't feel like this is necessarily a data problem.
43:53
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
well it is a data problem because you can't even get the list of all the things where the assets transferred that regardless
Well, it is. It is. It is a data problem because you can't even get the list of all the things where the assets transferred that regardless of what the local governments want me to do with that. You can't even get a list that says this is every asset that ever transferred.
44:10
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
the issue the issue is
The the issue is once you use once you use any kind of once you use any kind of lending platform. Now you have a now you have a receipt token and that receipt token looks like a deposit to most of these coin tracking softwares. And then any kind of staking income looks like a deposit with zero cost basis. Any anything you trade on the NFT marketplace if you lend on a NFT 5 it looks like you're losing the token instead of like putting it in any anytime you add liquidity to any pool.
Anytime you use a rebasing token like Ampleforth or Ohh it looks like stuff is just showing up in your wallet. I've had the same issues. I've had to deal with every kind of use case of every kind of thing.
Even before you apply like what the tax law is of like ohh do I need? Do I owe short term capital gains or long term capital gains? I agree that I think that there definitely needs to be a lot more done.
On the on the accounting side, just to have like an accurate Ledger of like what you've done, even the AXI Infinity token when they forked an airdropped everyone the AXI Infinity version 2 token like it, it looked like a completely new token and and these coin tracking softwares didn't even pick it up. It was just like as if you made you made all this extra money even though you didn't. So there has to be a way to link the old token to the new tokens.
When when these guys AirDrop into the things, there's just little things like that.
45:44
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
If I could just break in here, I think that a lot of fantastic points made, but what we're really toeing around is the distinction between asset level and protocol level activity. And I mean activity at the asset level is, is fairly objective and it's it's hard to argue like OK, this ERC 721 was transferred and this block from this address to that address, that stuff is very easy to determine and there's not much ambiguity in terms of what happened. Where things get really murky today is at the
On solving over a transpose and um what there's been a lot of great work done at at a bunch of a bunch of other companies working on this problem is how can we standardize protocol level information so that actually things like NFT sales, things like like like lending and and and liquidity provision can be tracked accurately and can be interpreted correctly because that data isn't objective like it may feel like it should be. But unfortunately people go implement this stuff in such wild ways.
And from having gone through hundreds of protocols at this point to actually implement how they, how they're done and this is what what Pat actually is even more focused on than I am with with us, we've just seen that there there is no single way of thinking about things. So there have to be some subjective decisions that need to be made in order to interpret all of this activity.
47:06
pat
@tannishmango
And with respect going back on the tax aspects, like even there there's no canonical agreement on like what the price of a?
Pretty much like 95% of assets are like that are traded on chains. I think you know, to me there are some ways where I think there's like logical standards that could be put in place there to then like make it so that it's super accessible and easy to compute for like tax purposes or accounting purposes. But right now, like there's there's not a single API or.
Be aware where you could get the price of like the vast majority of on chain assets. You'd have to rely on a small subset of chain link nodes or centralized exchanges for a lot of that information.
48:08
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
But here's what's so odd, what's so odd to me is that we we can all agree that inside of the blockchain, it's keeping accurate 18 decimal place, accounting for 400 million addresses every single block. So it seems to me that that information wants to come out of the out of the chain. It's it's all there. It's it's I understand everything you say, and I completely agree it's it's subjective and it's different jurisdictions.
Have different rules of course, but just just getting the data out would be something that we could focus on in a way that I don't even think you can really get the data out with perfect clarity and I understand that for certain.
Standards like ERC 20 and 721 you can, and that's good.
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
but some of these other things have to be be made into standards so that we can start actually pulling that information out in a reliable way and that would be somewhere where this group could benefit But some of these other things have to be be made into standards so that we can start actually pulling that information out in a reliable way and that would be somewhere where this group could benefit. I think we were talking about schemas that's kind of what we're saying I think when we talk about schemas, I think.
49:20
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
So as we are a little under a little over 10 minutes to the top of the hour, I want to circle this conversation back to you know where we started and really the intention here in some of the opportunities available right now to participate in kind of helping to develop these schemas as you've said and maybe other solutions. We like I said the this is really to support and feature the.
Open Data science Hackathon that's going on now. Maybe, Evan you can help to mention one more time here kind of how anyone who's listening that's interested in open data, how they can get, you know, started if they haven't yet or already joined the hackathon. I also want to circle back to something I mentioned earlier in terms of pull up. So for anybody who's listening who wants to get the plot for this conversation as a signal of your participation, you'll need to use.
The secret word on the poap and the secret word is open data. dot hackers. Hackers, excuse me. So open data dash hackers. Yeah. Evan, back to you. What are some ways that people can get started now to start contributing to these schemas, to this development of systems that allow for, you know, working with this open data in better ways?
50:46
Evan Powell
@epowell101
The collaboration on this group because this has been an amazing conversation for me, I hope, for everybody on here. So one idea is that we could start to literally draft, you know, what we we could have, you know, issues. We could use GitHub and we could, you know, begin to kind of vote on which which standards do we want to talk about, who wants to help draft those? And we could just start doing the work. And, you know, I can spend some time as an orchestrator.
But there's people on this call who are significantly deeper, pretty much everyone than I am. So that's one idea. But for sure if you are listening in and interested the hackathon, there's it's pretty vibrant and there is a discord going there and there's a kind of a sub channel that's starting to pop around solutions and you know why is ether, why are etherscan API so slow and questions like that. So that's also more.
Practically if you wanted to collaborate with others on on how to how to use some of the solutions out there but but yeah when you dig in you're fine. You can find your way to this and via my Twitter or otherwise to this GitHub where we're trying to capture some of the insights and and and write them down as issues and start to prioritize what should we talk about as a landscape you know what's missing and it's obviously those schemas is is one thing that's and.
I would just say that it was fully triggered by the comment on taxes, so I'm just now recovering, but thanks for that.
52:36
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Cool. Anybody else want to add, you know, a couple of final words here? I just want to be respectful of everybody's time. Maybe we can go around one more time in terms of the projects that are participating here. A few words in terms of how people can get get connected to you and even contribute to your projects.
Um, I guess I've been went, uh, Eric, did you wanna, uh, just give a shout out in terms of, you know, uh, some of the work that you're doing, how people can contribute to that?
53:08
Erick Pinos
@erickpinos
Um, yeah. So at Orange, we've been focusing a lot on the model creation for assessing different kinds of reputation, whether it's like your your contribution level to a Dow or whether it's your risk model credit score for access to to better lending rates on a lending platform or even like for determining eligibility to apply to a certain grant or apply to a hackathon. We're focused a lot on like the model design and not being like the authority on.
This is how you define Dow contribution activity. This is how you define risk assessment. But rather letting the projects that we work with make those definitions or for us, we just provide all the data integrations necessary to be able to choose the parameters that you want freely. So if anybody's interested in in brainstorming and ideating like new kinds of models to test out and to campaigns to do.
With my Twitter, the orange Protocol, Twitter is at Orange protocol and then the website is orange protocol dot IO.
54:09
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Excellent disruption, Joe. Maybe talk about FD or the hackathon itself.
54:13
DisruptionJoe.eth (🤖,💙)
@DisruptionJoe
Yeah, I think the hackathon is a really interesting place. You know, we were looking at what infrastructure do we need for data to defend grants grounds, and the protocol is going to be launching soon for grants 2.0 from Bitcoin. And this is gonna allow any community to fund their shared needs by choosing their own funding sect. That's the funding mechanism. That's how they either gate the access somehow or retroactively deal with fraudulent behavior.
And we're looking for insights around that. And this conversation here is a little upstream of that, which is how do we continuously get that data in ways that anything we learn can be built upon by the community. So we don't have people continuously learning the same thing over and over, that we can actually work as a collective community in between many different funding rounds, learning what parts of a funding stack actually allocate.
Capital optimally and that's the real goal.
55:21
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful. Yeah, Thomas.
How can we how can people connect with you and how can people contribute to the project?
55:35
Thomas Jay Rush
@tjayrush
Sure. We have a website up at true blocks dot IO. There's a lot of stuff to read about what we've been saying to people contribute that there's links to our GitHub repos there, and I thank everyone for the conversation. I'm happy to announce that we got a grant, and part of that grant is to participate in conversations like this. So hopefully you'll hear from me again. Thank you.
56:02
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful, pat.
56:10
pat
@tannishmango
React to our ideas or influence into certain EIP proposals and actually get closer to the chain to establish legitimate patterns instead of having them more be more ethereal and layered on top.
57:19
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful. And I may have missed a boxer boxer. Did you want to tell us how we can find you and connect with dynamics and contribute to the project too?
57:30
Boxer
@0xBoxer
Yeah, sure.
So first of all go to dune.com and then on the top right there's a nice button which is discord.
Find me hanging out in there. And in general at Dune, we offer everyone our data. It's it's really accessible for everyone. So if you want to get started on normalizing, standardizing crypto data, which is very complicated today, you can do that immediately on our platform or in our DBT repos, and we appreciate any contributions. And there's also always a bunch of bounties ongoing, so be on the lookout for those.
58:08
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Amazing, Michael.
58:10
Michael Calvey (calvey.eth)
@michaeljcalvey
Yeah, just to echo what Pat said, we're always excited to chat with others about ways of thinking about this data. And then we really break it up into indexing and interpretation as as two individual components where indexing hopefully can be as unopinionated as possible and really strive for objectivity wherever possible. And then on the interpretation side is where people get to put their own spins on, on how to actually consume this data. And and that's what we're really focused on open
A free tier that we're gonna have around forever as well. So come check us out our websites. Transpose dot IO would love to hang out in our discord or hit me or transpose up on Twitter. Thanks a lot everybody for organizing and joining.
on a free tier that we're gonna have around forever as well so come check us out our websites transpose dot IO would love to hang out in our discord or hit me or transpose up on twitter thanks a lot everybody for organizing and joining
59:01
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Yeah. Thank you, Matt.
59:03
mattdavis0351.eth
@mattdavis0351
Yeah. Thanks for putting this together again. I definitely appreciate the ability to be here one more time. We're we're ceramic. You can find us at our website, ceramic dot network. That'll point you everywhere you need to go. That's Twitter, discord on the forum that we have everything. If you need to get ahold of me directly, you can do so here on Twitter or you can go to ceramic dot network, join our discord and ping me directly. I'm more than happy to help 100% of the time. And again, we foc
And uh, identity and authentication stuff. So, um, if you're building an app and you're like, what do I do about my database layer, you should probably be pinging. Matt, I'll help you.
59:42
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Amazing. Thank you. And I think I missed one more person, Phillip.
59:44
Philip Silva 🔆
@UBIpromoter
I haven't said much, I lack the technical shop to keep up with you guys, but I'm so happy that you're that you're building these open data and open source standards, busy doing our doing our bread thing and and going to help remove all the symbols from these projects. That hurts absolutely everything in this space.
1:00:02
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Wonderful. And you know, I, I'll, I'll kind of second Phillip sentiment there. I am definitely not the most technical person in this group and so I a lot of times hoping that I can help direct this conversation. I found myself really just furiously taking notes to try to follow and then kind of learn more. But that's the purpose of these conversations, right? We're not experts here. We're coming in, we're trying to learn, we're being challenged to create a better Web 3 ecosystem that can educate us at different levels. If you want to also take a look at some of the pinned tweets, go ahead and either bookmark them like them, whatever your account allows you to do the latest one. A GitHub repo that has been put together by a few of the members of this conversation. It's github.com forward slash open data for web three. Take a look at that. The challenge again to everyone who's participating in this conversation is can we create a community built kind of repository of what open data is and how we can build it together, right. How we can build some of these tools that we were talking about earlier where whether decentralized or centralized?
What is the right approach? Have these conversations right. Be part of it. So go ahead and check that out. Check out the other tweets. Follow everyone who's up here, giga brain people up here. Thank you so much everyone for your time. There will be a recording of this that will stay up on our Twitter account. We'll also do a recap. And a lot of these will probably also live on YouTube. So if you want to check these conversations out again in the future, you definitely can with that.
Thank you again to everyone who participated both in the audience and on the stage. Evan.
1:01:48
Evan Powell
@epowell101
Yeah. Thank you all. Amazing exceeded expectations. So thanks. Thanks all.
1:01:54
Humpty Cauldron, Crypto Sapiens
@CryptoSapiens_
Awesome. That's amazing to hear. If you didn't get your point, please make sure secret word is. What was it? Open dash data. Dash hackers. Thank you so much everyone. Bye bye.