GRTiQ Podcast: 121 Petko Pavlovski

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Petko Pavlovski (00:00:18):

There’s something really beautiful in that The Graph has no central point of failure. The Graph is not one organization, it’s not one person. It really, to me, embodies the spirit and the goals of web3 as a whole.

Nick (00:00:35):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Petko Pavlovski, Senior Software Engineer at GraphOps, a core dev team working on The Graph. Most of you will have already encountered Petko or The GraphOps team as they’re busy contributing throughout The Graph ecosystem. And as you’ll hear, Petko has been a contributing member of the ecosystem in various roles throughout his career for a very long time.

(00:01:30):

During our time together, Petko talks about his background and growing up in Bulgaria, his career track and how he got started in web3, his time working at LimeChain, a name some of you OGs will remember, and at Kraken, and then moving over and going to work at GraphOps. We talk about Petko’s passion for The Graph and the community, what he’s working on at GraphOps, and his vision for the future. As always, we started the discussion talking about Petko’s educational background.

Petko Pavlovski (00:02:02):

So I’ve pretty much been all over the place. But formally I graduated a banking high school here in Bulgaria. And after that high school I went to university, and it’s the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria. It’s actually the biggest university in eastern Europe, where I did a bachelor’s in finance for four years. But at the same time as I did that, I was also taking a course in software development in Software University, which is also located in Sofia, Bulgaria. And it’s weird, because it’s called Software University, but it’s not really a university. Because the government hasn’t recognized it officially as such, because they don’t teach math, at least the math that’s required in other state universities. So yeah, that’s briefly my educational background.

Nick (00:02:58):

A lot of your background is in finance and like you said, banking. Why did you decide to first study finance? What drew you into that?

Petko Pavlovski (00:03:06):

That’s also a good question. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually made the conscious decision, or I can’t remember making the conscious decision of: okay, I’m going to study finance and this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Although I think that a lot of that was peer pressure and things that I’ve heard from my friends and my family, how I should study something serious and something that will land me a serious job instead of going into the humanitarian fields or painting or anything like that.

(00:03:42):

So I think at a very young age, I think around when I was 10 or 11, I vaguely remember the 2008 global financial crisis. And even at that age, I just remember sitting there in front of the TV and just asking myself all of these weird questions like, how can this happen? I felt that there were smart people in charge, people that know what they’re doing. I even remember in 2012 when I was supposed to choose which high schools to study in, because here in Bulgaria, we study in normal elementary schools until the seventh grade, so that would be until you turn 12. And then you decide which high school to go to. And there’s high schools for languages, humanitarian sciences, all of that, and there’s financial high schools.

(00:04:31):

So I was watching the TV, and I remember Obama getting elected. And again, just hearing about banks and inflation and a global crisis and how everything’s going downhill. And I asked all of these questions to my family, but none of them really had a financial background. So all of us were sitting there and hearing this bad news, and none of us really knew what was going on. So I think maybe that was one of the driving factors of me deciding to go to a economics high school.

Nick (00:05:04):

Well, you also mentioned during your studies you attended Software University where you took some computer science courses. How about that? What drove that decision?

Petko Pavlovski (00:05:13):

Yeah, so that’s actually very interesting. Because during my time at this financial high school on the second year, we’re studying things like macroeconomics, banking, just finance in general, law, taxation and all of that. And I very vividly remember me being surprised in a very negative way and even disgusted about what’s happening in the world in terms of financial institutions, in terms of central banks, insurance companies and all of that. So I think it was 2014 in my second year in high school when I decided that this was just probably not going to be for me, and that the whole system is really weird.

(00:05:57):

So it was at that time when I actually first heard about Bitcoin, oddly enough. I think it was on some YouTube video that got recommended to me or something. And I remember watching that and just hearing about Bitcoin and how it can possibly bring back something like the gold standard where your money actually has some objective value and it’s not tied to whatever the government says you can buy with it on this particular day. So that’s when I really got interested in Bitcoin.

(00:06:28):

And oddly enough, at that time I thought that the only way I could really get into Bitcoin and blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a whole was through software. And I was still pretty scared to go into software and programming at that point, because I’ve always heard that there’s a lot of math involved. It’s very heavy, it’s very logical, and I was never good at math. So I kind of just let that sit in the back of my head, and I just kept learning about Bitcoin and decentralized ledger technology in my free time.

(00:07:04):

But then in 2017 in 12th grade, I had some classmates who were really into software development, but from a perspective of hacking things. So for instance, they would create these applications that were the Notes application on your phone, but that application would have a secret backdoor where they would install malware on your system and key log everything that you press so that they never use it for any evil purposes or anything. It was just having fun. But I remember that impressed me a lot.

(00:07:40):

And this one time they came to school and they said, “Oh, well there’s this thing called Software University. It’s not technically a university, it’s like a bootcamp, like a academy.” And we decided to apply to see what happens. And they asked me if I wanted to apply also because they knew I was interested in computer games and blockchain from that sort of more deeper technical aspect. But I was worried, because I couldn’t just go to my mom and say, “Look, mom, give me a few thousand dollars for this education.” And they said, “Oh, no. Well, they actually provide a free beginners course.” And that’s why I enrolled there.

Nick (00:08:19):

As I always like to ask this question, when I talk with people that have studied computer science in different parts of the world: if during the course of their study they ever came across some of the ideas or concepts behind web3. Things like blockchain, distributed ledger, maybe even Bitcoin or Ethereum being mentioned itself. And I do this to kind of survey the world: what are people learning in the field of computer science? And of course, all of my guests took these courses at different points in time. And so some of the more recent ones have different experiences than the folks that took it a little while ago.

(00:08:52):

So how about you? I mean, what did you study? And did you come across any of these things during your time at Software University?

Petko Pavlovski (00:08:59):

Yeah. Well, it’s always been kind of weird with me in that aspect. Because the reason I enrolled in the software university was to learn more about blockchain and how computers work and how to program this money in a way. And I never expected to specifically study blockchain. I just wanted to see what software development is and whether it would be something that I could do. But I was very surprised, because even at one of our first lectures, and this was in 2017, so that might actually be understandable because there was a huge bull run at that time. Our lecturer actually mentioned that he can show us how to build a little blockchain with Java. And that sounded wonderful to me. That sounded like it was impossible.

(00:09:43):

But he started coding, he started describing these data structures that withhold the state of the blockchain, how transactions would fit in, what wallets look like, how different balance operations fit in. And in one hour, he really coded a mini blockchain in Java. And if I wasn’t on the development hook by then, I surely was at that point.

(00:10:07):

And we did have a more serious module where we studied specifically smart contract development with Solidity, which is the language that smart contracts are written in the Ethereum world. And that was a blast. It wasn’t a required module. I took it out of interest because we were required to take one or two voluntary modules, and that was really nice. We started from the ABCs of Solidity. We moved on to building the classic bookshelf examples or decentralized voting. By the way, because at the end of this course we had to create our own smart contract with a frontend, and the frontend is basically the webpage that lets users interact with that smart contract. So I built this decentralized voting application, and I even put pictures of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the users to vote on. And then that vote goes directly to a smart contract, and after a given period of time, the results are displayed again, taken from the state of the smart contract. So that was really fun.

(00:11:12):

And even at the end of the course, my lecturer offered me to start working at their startup, which was even more cool.

Nick (00:11:20):

Petko, as you know, a lot of my guests have a little bit of a similar story where they started off studying something that was unrelated to web3, and then they got interested, started studying how to code. Maybe they took a computer science course online or a free one on YouTube or something, and that’s how they got their foot in the door within the industry and started being a developer full-time. I want to ask you about that move you took though from finance to being a developer and starting to code. Was that a hard leap to make? Or did that come natural to you?

Petko Pavlovski (00:11:52):

That’s a very interesting question. And the first thought that came to my mind is: yes, it’s really hard. But now on second thought it’s not that hard. And maybe finance is actually something that’s not that hard as, I don’t know, philosophy or sociology or something. But even from finance where most of the things that we did in school were still very theoretical. We talked about, well, what would happen if the central banks raised interest rates on whatever country and how that would affect someone? So that was still in the theoretical realm. There are numbers involved, but it’s a lot of theory. Whereas with software development, on the first day, you actually have to understand what codes to write to get the result you want.

(00:12:39):

And I even remember now that one of our first assignments was to visualize, using numbers and letters, a Christmas tree given a number. So say if you got five, then your Christmas tree has five levels. But of course as the levels go from top to bottom, they get wider. So something that is so simple was really hard for me to wrap my head around just because you have to think about, okay, this happens first, this happens second… You really have to be very logical.

(00:13:13):

And as I said before, I’m very scared of math, always have been scared of math. But it turns out that software development is, at least the parts that I’ve been involved in, it’s not mathy at all. It’s more logical in a way. So I would describe it as solving a Sudoku or building something with Legos even. So it’s a lot more logic than math. So that’s why it was fairly hard for me to make the jump, but I was so amazed at building Christmas trees on screen that the hardship was worth it.

Nick (00:14:46):

Well, I have a lot of follow-up questions about that experience, and we’ll get to some of that in a minute. I am very optimistic and impressed with the fact that during your course of study, you came across blockchain, even in the form that you saw it, and then smart contracts. And so I love the idea that more and more universities across the world are starting to incorporate these concepts into computer science degrees and their curriculum.

(00:15:15):

I do want to ask you though before we move on, this question about where you live. So as you mentioned, you’re joining me from Bulgaria. This is a GRTiQ Podcast first, I’ve never had the opportunity to interview somebody living in Bulgaria before. And as you might know, I always like to ask people located throughout the world what the sentiment or attitudes are toward crypto in where they’re living. So what can you tell us about the crypto, web3, and blockchain community in Bulgaria?

Petko Pavlovski (00:15:43):

I think it’s split almost half-and-half, maybe 40% to 60%, where 40% of Bulgarians view crypto as something fundamentally good and fundamentally as a benefit to society. And the other 60% probably think it’s a scam. I think this is something that I can explain with the fact that Bulgaria is somewhere between Latin America and the West in terms of its economic situation. So because we were part of the former Soviet Union, well, not directly part of it, but we were in the Soviet sphere of influence, before 1989 the economy was centrally controlled. And you couldn’t really do anything without the permission of the government. So for instance, you couldn’t own any foreign currency, you couldn’t buy certain things. Because it’s interesting, certain things you could only buy with dollars, let’s say. Like bikes or fancy clothes or whiskey and stuff like that. And of course, only the people that were close to the government could buy those things.

(00:16:45):

So when the Soviet Union fell, Bulgaria and a lot of these ex-socialist countries, they fell into a libertarian heaven. Which for the people living at that time wasn’t so good, because they really had to face the harsh economic realities of living in a state that has all of its government systems fail because they just ran out of money. And everyone had to learn economics really fast, because there was hyperinflation back in 1997. I wasn’t born back then, but I’ve heard all these stories of really, really long bread lines or that people had to work for a whole month for three dollars. Yeah, hyperinflation was really bad back then.

(00:17:31):

So I think because people went through all of that, they gained a lot of economic knowledge. They also became very skeptical of government interference in economy. And so that’s why I think that a lot of people found blockchain and crypto really interesting when it started becoming a thing back in 2012, 2014.

(00:17:54):

I can even give a few examples, sadly not so good ones, but your listeners might have heard about OneCoin, which was actually created by a Bulgarian woman who is currently the most wanted woman by the FBI and has been for a few years now. So back in 2014, she somehow managed to scam a lot of Western Europeans to invest their life savings in OneCoin, which was supposedly this Bitcoin successor that was going to make them filthy rich. So that’s something that I’m not very proud of, but it’s just a fun fact related to Bitcoin and Bulgaria.

(00:18:30):

Another one is that back in 2017, our government actually seized 220,000 Bitcoins from this supposed thug group or whatever. Which is a lot if you calculate it in dollars, especially during the bull market of 2017. And they actually never said where that Bitcoin went afterwards. They claim that they are saving it for further investigations, but we could fairly assume that a lot of that has been spent.

(00:19:00):

Also, just a few other quick facts you might know Cardano. So Cardano was obviously founded by Charles Hoskinson, but he was working very closely with a Bulgarian named Vasil Dabov who is a mathematician. And he even named one of the Cardano hard forks after him after his death.

(00:19:23):

Then also we have Nexo, which is really widely known. We also have LimeChain, which obviously I also spend some time in. And of course I have such shout out Software University again, because aside from the Solidity modules, they also have open courses where anyone can go and learn about fundamentals of blockchain and bitcoin, about mining crypto, and they regularly just create events for just people to learn about blockchain and crypto.

Nick (00:19:52):

If a listener ever finds themselves, Petko, in Bulgaria, is there anything they should do? Should they go visit something? Or eat some of the food there? Something specific? What would you say about that?

Petko Pavlovski (00:20:04):

That’s a great question. Thank you for asking.

(00:20:07):

So first, I’m going to start with the food as any typical Eastern European. So we are known for our yogurt. Bulgarian yogurt is somewhat like Greek yogurt, but Greek yogurt is sweet, whereas our yogurt is a bit thicker and a bit more sour. It’s actually made using this bacteria which only grows in Bulgaria called Lactobacillus bulgaricus. It’s the main ingredient in Bulgarian yogurt, and it’s supposed to help a lot with digestion and just overall gut health. So if you find yourself in Bulgaria or if you find Bulgaria yogurt in the store in your country, definitely try it out. You will be pleasantly surprised.

(00:20:47):

So that’s one thing. And the second thing is banitsa. Banitsa is a pastry which can be made with a lot of things, but I think its most widely known variation is with eggs and cheese. And this cheese is kind of like feta cheese, and it’s made with Bulgarian yogurt. So if you eat banitsa, you get Bulgarian yogurt included.

(00:21:08):

And then on the notable places to visit, so first I have to mention this tweet by Elon Musk a few months ago, he shared a picture of one of our most beautiful landmarks, the Rocks of Belogradchik. And he wrote something like, “Oh, is this from…” whatever video game it was, I don’t remember. But he was very impressed with the Bulgaria nature. He thought it was actually computer-generated. So I thought that was really fun.

(00:21:40):

Also, we have very beautiful mountain ranges. We have the Balkan Mountains. By the way, the term “Balkans” that people use to describe this part of Europe comes from the Balkan Mountain range, which is more than 80% located in Bulgaria. Don’t quote me on that, but I think that was the number. So the Balkans are a truly unique place to visit. There’s lots of nice wilderness that is unique to the region. We also have the Roto Mountains, and we have the Valley of Roses, by the way. Bulgaria’s top export at many points of its history was its roses. So definitely visit the Valley of Roses in Kazanlak.

(00:22:21):

And just to go through a few other ones real quick, Nessebar is on the sea. So if you want to get that Byzantine vibe with all of these really old buildings and this beautiful seaside, definitely visit Nessebar. I got to say, whatever old town or city or landmark you visit, you are probably going to be pleasantly surprised because at different points of its history, Bulgaria was part of the Roman Empire, then it was its own independent empire, then a part of the Byzantine Empire, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Then it was independent again for a bit, and then it was under Soviet rule. So if people like modernism or brutalism, they can also see a lot of that kind of style of buildings here. And you can basically see monuments, landmarks, and buildings from all of these historical periods of time.

Nick (00:23:14):

I want to go back now to when you first became aware of crypto and blockchain. You’ve mentioned it a couple times already, but I always like to double click on your own first impressions when you first encountered it. So take us back in time. When did you first hear about crypto and what were some of the first thoughts?

Petko Pavlovski (00:23:31):

Yeah, as I already kind of mentioned, in 2014 when I was in high school, I was really disillusioned by the financial systems of the world. So hearing about Bitcoin back then really blew me away. And a few months after that, hearing about Ethereum blew me away even more. And since then, it’s just been a constant cycle of being blown away and getting more hyped about the technology and all the good that it can bring to the world.

(00:23:58):

A really funny story is, so back then I was a huge World of Warcraft fan. Frankly, I played too much, but after I heard that one of the myths around Vitalik envisioning Ethereum and the world computer and all of that came at a time where he also played way too much World of Warcraft. And at one point Blizzard, which is the company that developed World of Warcraft, they nerfed his favorite character, and that just means that they lowered some of the character’s base stats. He was so mad he couldn’t sleep for a week, and he was angry that some central power can do that to his beloved character. And that’s one of the reasons that he then came about the idea of Ethereum. Which might be true, it might not be true, but it’s just something that I found very fun back then.

(00:24:47):

Then of course, these stories are really fun, but they didn’t really work to convince my mom to give me her credit card so I can actually buy some Bitcoin. So after I was not successful with that, I tried to build my own miner for Ethereum. I actually saved money for a few months and bought a dedicated GPU, and then I just plugged it on my computer motor board. But of course, my computer had been a really cheap one from 2007, and it barely had one gigabyte of RAM. And its motor board was really, really old. And that GPU had no chance of running on it. So I was really sad, and I was forced to sell the GPU because there was no way I would save money for motor board and fans and racks and all of that. But at least I tried.

Nick (00:25:33):

Petko, earlier, you mentioned that while studying at Software University, one of the mentors led you to your first job outside of university. What can you share about what you did after university?

Petko Pavlovski (00:25:44):

So I’ve actually been working ever since I was 14. So it’ll be 11 years since I started my first job. I started as a junior accountant at a local company just based off my knowledge from high school. But I got so fed up with that financial system that I ended up selling museum tickets in a children’s museum, and I honestly thought that was a hundred times better than working as an accountant or in a bank. But I’m saying this just to set the mood of how happy I was to actually be starting my first software development job.

(00:26:20):

So after this final assignment in the Solidity module, my lecturer just asked me, “Hey, do you have a job?” And I instinctively said no, although I did. And he said, “Okay, do you want one?” And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but apparently people that wanted to start in such a high risk environment in Sophia at the time weren’t that many. So I started working for him, and this was at a small startup that were building a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. And a atomic swap widget, which for those that might not know, is a web application where you can swap, for instance, Ethereum to another ERC-20 token directly with another token holder, so you don’t have to go through an exchange. Of course that has its downsides compared to the exchanges, but a lot of users actually preferred it that way, mostly because it was anonymous.

Nick (00:27:17):

And what did you do there?

Petko Pavlovski (00:27:18):

So it was interesting, because it was a blockchain startup, but I didn’t get hired to work on the smart contract. They actually hired me because I could read smart contracts. I was mainly working on the frontends of the decentralized application and the atomic swap. So this is things like creating UIs, dashboards, landing pages, charts, and things like that.

(00:27:40):

And of course, at this point I experienced firsthand the problems of trying to pull data from the blockchain and into a frontend dashboard. It’s absolutely horrible. So at first we started thinking, “Oh, well maybe we can just query the data from the blockchain and directly display it on the webpage. And even though the load times are slow, our users aren’t really going to care.” But after a few weeks, it ended up taking more than two minutes to load a simple dashboard or to switch from one tab to the other.

(00:28:13):

So we said, “Okay, we have to create our own server. And that server is just going to be a very old laptop sitting on the desk at the back of the office, and we can just have the server running there. It’s going to pull data from the blockchain, it’s going to store all that data there. And we’ll be fine, we’re just going to display it on the frontend from the server.” Two weeks after that, our laptop stopped working, and all of our users had no access to their accounts or even to our website. So that’s just a fun example of how The Graph could have saved our business back then.

Nick (00:28:49):

What was it like going from something that you had developed some conviction for based on the financial crisis and some of your own personal interests in computers, tech, computer science? What was it like going to work full-time? Was it everything you had hoped for? Was it different?

Petko Pavlovski (00:29:05):

Yeah, so in the beginning of course it felt like this is everything that I had dreamt of. But really after a few months I understood that maybe I’m not fit to write frontend for the rest of my life and just move buttons around a webpage. And of course, frontend development is definitely not only that, but at that role, that was basically what I was doing. Because someone else has coded the smart contract and the backends, and then I was just moving these widgets on a webpage.

Nick (00:29:36):

And I’m going to ask you about that first experience with pulling data from the blockchain a little bit later. But I do want to ask about how this role ended. I think if I’m remembering right, a bear market was soon upon us around this time. Did you experience that? And how did that impact your role then?

Petko Pavlovski (00:29:55):

Yeah, well, that was my first bear market. And my experience was definitely not too good, because our business went underwater. We had no users at the time. We didn’t have a lot of interests when all of the prices are going down all the time. And actually it’s a funny story, but that company then transformed into a mobile app for audiobooks. Which is great, but I felt like I should probably jump ship, as really, that wasn’t the most interesting thing I wanted to work on.

Nick (00:30:28):

This story about joining the industry during a bear market or shortly before a bear market is fairly common on the podcast now, especially with veterans that have been around for a while. Did it sour your opinion or your conviction for what the industry was trying to do given the fact that you sort of had to change jobs and reorient yourself when the market went down?

Petko Pavlovski (00:30:50):

Well, definitely not. I mean, I still was at the same motivation level as I was before. I guess I was mainly feeling sad about how things were going, and I tried to find other jobs in the crypto space. And there were a few jobs around, but none of them would hire me after only one year of experience and only frontend experience. So that is why I had to take a break from web3, and that was the only time where I worked at a web2 company in my career for a while.

Nick (00:31:23):

So tell us what you did.

Petko Pavlovski (00:31:25):

So it was actually kind of random, but the first place that I sent my CV to and they didn’t auto reject me with some bot or something when they saw I had one year of experience, was a natural gas and energy supplier in the UK, OVO Energy. They were looking frontend developers to help them with a dashboard. And this dashboard was a part of a larger software product that was for scheduling and executing appointments by fuel engineers. So these are the people that come in and install your gas meter, electricity meter, and stuff like that. And I decided, okay, this is a great way to creep into the backend as well and hopefully become a full stack developer soon. Cause that was where all the jobs were.

(00:32:15):

So I started working on this dashboard for a few months. Then after some conversations with my manager, I moved on to the backend side of things. Then I also spent some time working on the mobile application, which actually from those three I found the most fun. And so after one year at OVO Energy, I could probably call myself a junior full stack engineer.

Nick (00:32:35):

It’s incredible that you were able to step into web3 crypto blockchain for a period of time, and as you mentioned there, that firm went away, so you had to go find other works. So you stepped into web2. It’s incredible, because you probably had the opportunity, given your experience in the web3 environment to make some assessments or judgements about the ways in which blockchain or crypto might improve the web2 stuff you were working on. Did you have any of those moments where you’re like, “If this company would just adopt blockchain for X, things would be so much better around here”?

Petko Pavlovski (00:33:09):

Yes, absolutely. And thankfully I stopped myself from emailing the CEO of my bright thoughts at 1:00 AM in the morning. But some of them included things like, when these field engineers that go into people’s homes, they have to report the work that they’ve done. And I imagine that that would’ve been way easier with just the smart contract. We didn’t need all of these giant databases having all of this information about the engineers and about the customers, because a lot of people probably would feel better if they knew that their details are not just stored somewhere where they have no access. So maybe the encryption in web3 could have helped them. Also, I thought about supply chain solutions that might come with blockchain and just things like that. But again, I never recommended any of these to them because that would’ve been funny.

Nick (00:34:02):

So after your time at OVO Energy, you were actually able to get right back into the industry and go to work at LimeChain. That might be a name that a lot of listeners already know, but for the sake of those that don’t: what’s the story about how you made your way to LimeChain? And can you provide just a little background on what LimeChain does?

Petko Pavlovski (00:34:20):

Of course. So LimeChain is a dev shop, but it’s not just a dev shop. They only do work in the crypto and web3 space, which I really admire. So LimeChain started, I think back in 2016 by a group of friends that they actually have a very interesting mission. Because, and this is something that I haven’t really witnessed myself, but I’ve heard a lot of stories about it, that a lot of developers from the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and regions like that, there’s still a bit of stigma that we are a bit more lazy. We’re maybe not as smart as the people in Western Europe. So LimeChain actually sought to disprove that, and I think they are doing a good job.

(00:35:04):

And my entry into LimeChain is also somewhat random, but when I was working at OVO, I became really close friends with this dude who was very, very, very ecstatic about Rust. And Rust is a programming language similar to… Well, I shouldn’t say similar to JavaScript, but it’s just another programming language at the end of the day. We were spending a lot of time after work just playing around with side projects, and he was also really into blockchain and crypto. So we were building these really small blockchain applications on top of Substrate, which is the framework for building smart contracts on Polkadot. And that just really got me into Rust.

(00:35:48):

And this one evening we were talking, and I literally said something along the lines of how cool will it be to find a job in the blockchain space with Rust. And this might be a conspiracy theory that our devices are listening to us, but the very next day, I kid you not, the next day I saw an ad on LinkedIn from LimeChain looking for a Rust developer. And I said, okay, this is fate. The stars have aligned. A bull market is approaching. I’m going to go for it. I didn’t even think they were going to accept me, because at this point I was only starting off with Rust. It had been a few months that I was creating hobby projects with the language. But I sent in my CV, and after a round of interviews I got accepted. And I initially got accepted to work with the Substrate framework to build smart contracts. But because there was nobody to start working on this new work that was coming in from a new client, I had to jump on that. And that new client was The Graph.

Nick (00:36:48):

Incredible. Well, I’ve got a lot of follow-up questions about that. But as we map out your professional journey, we should note that your time at LimeChain did come to an end and you eventually found yourself at Kraken. What’s the story about the transition from LimeChain and going to work at Kraken?

Petko Pavlovski (00:37:05):

That’s a good question, and I know that at this point I’m probably seeming like a job hopper. But I firmly believe that people should be allowed to experiment before they find what’s right for them.

(00:37:17):

So yeah, I spent one year working at LimeChain. Me and my colleagues there develop Matchstick, which a lot of listeners might have heard of. It’s the unit testing framework for subgraphs. So I had a lot of fun. I interacted a lot with The Graph ecosystem, which is the reason why I fell in love with The Graph as a whole because everyone was very welcoming. It was very supportive throughout this journey of building Matchstick. But this really cool opportunity came around to be a part of the Kraken team for eight months. This was an offer for performing a specific work and then ending the contract. So it wasn’t a full-time contract. At that time, Kraken were starting to rewrite their backend in Rust, and they basically needed all hands on deck. And with my experience from Matchstick, I was able to help them to further improve their development tools. And so that’s how I ended up spending eight months there.

Nick (00:38:22):

What was the experience like of working for a centralized exchange in an industry where there’s so much emphasis on decentralization. And Kraken’s, obviously one of the industry leaders. And at the moment that you took the job at Kraken, was that an adjustment to work in an industry that put decentralization at the center, but it was a centralized exchange? How did you think of through all that?

Petko Pavlovski (00:38:45):

So to be honest, I still feel like the Devil incarnate when I say that I’ve worked at a centralized exchange. But to be fair, if I had to choose one centralized exchange to work at, that’s definitely Kraken. Because Kraken is a weird mix of obviously centralization and this corporate feeling to it.

(00:39:06):

But at the same time, a lot of workers there actually shared strong libertarian values, including the CEO Jesse. So for instance, Kraken has fought back the US government a number of times when they, let’s say when the US told all of the crypto exchanges to shut down accounts of Russians. And whether you agree with that sentiment or not is an entirely different conversation. But Jesse then firmly said, “Well, I’m not going to do this because we value our users.” And it was the same with the truckers protests in Canada. I don’t know if they ended up actually complying with that, but just the spirit of libertarianism from those actions was something that really struck me.

(00:39:53):

And another fun fact is Kraken is probably the most secure exchange out there. For instance, the security team at Kraken is, or was, bigger than the whole team at FTX, which probably tells you a lot.

Nick (00:40:11):

So what did you learn then during your time at Kraken? You had an inside view of exchanges. This was a centralized exchange, it was a short stint, it was an eight-month kind of contract working on a very special project. What did you learn during your time there?

Petko Pavlovski (00:40:25):

I learned that… So here in Bulgaria, we have a saying that something along the lines of “There are passengers for every train.” And so given the need of a lot of people and institutions for centralized exchange, because they value the security or whatever, given that that need is very big and that it’s there, although centralized exchanges have a lot of flaws, they can still be the best at what they do. And I really believe that Kraken was such a place. And while I have talked negatively about centralized exchanges before working at Kraken, I definitely developed somewhat of a respect towards them in a way after my time there.

Nick (00:41:40):

Well, Petko, this has come up several times already in discussing your background. And I know listeners are probably anxious to get right to the heart of it. But you’ve brought up The Graph a couple different times, certainly during your time at LimeChain. But as you were working with your first experience in the blockchain industry and trying to query data from blockchains, you kind of mentioned that that gap in the market was a pain point for you in the role that you had.

(00:42:06):

But let’s go back and just set the table again. Do you remember when you first became aware of The Graph and what some early impressions or thoughts of the project were?

Petko Pavlovski (00:42:15):

Yeah, I very clearly remember when LimeChain told me that I was going to work for The Graph. I felt really disappointed. And the reason for that is I was preparing for months to start working with the Substrate framework. And now I had heard The Graph for the first time, and they said, okay, you’re going to have to work on a project for The Graph.

(00:42:36):

But of course, after a few weeks of research, I basically fell in love with The Graph. I spent some time in Discord, I joined a few open meetings, I chatted with a few people in preparation for the work that we were about to do on Matchstick, and really immersed myself in the community in order to understand the needs of the users that we would be building this framework for. And to be honest, my initial reaction couldn’t have been more wrong.

Nick (00:43:05):

And so let’s talk through that a little bit here. From your perspective, the problem that The Graph is trying to address, how important is that for the industry?

Petko Pavlovski (00:43:15):

So I might be accused of being subjective here, and that’s totally fine. But to me, this is this single most important problem. After all, data is at the heart of pretty much everything that we do day to day if we think about it. And that’s even more true on the blockchain. Everything revolves around data and being able to prove things without disclosing information and stuff like that. So I really truly believe that The Graph is central.

(00:43:46):

And without The Graph, a decentralized application would not really be a decentralized application. After all, as the saying goes, a system is only as strong as its weakest link. And if that data layer is not decentralized, then you’re basically setting yourself up for being censored, or losing data, or bad actors manipulating data.

Nick (00:44:11):

And to bridge this gap that you had mentioned before right out of university, of finding it so difficult at the organization you were with to query and index data. And then going to LimeChain and being assigned to work on The Graph. Did you make that connection immediately of like, “Oh wow, this was a problem that I had faced just years ago and really could have used something like this”?

Petko Pavlovski (00:44:33):

Yes. And I’m not joking, maybe on the third day of me researching The Graph, I remembered those moments just because they were really hard. We spent months trying to solve this issue, and at the end we weren’t able to solve it. So yes, I remembered that right away.

Nick (00:44:49):

Talk about the experience of meeting The Graph community. So on the one hand, you’ve talked about the technology and the way in which The Graph solves important problems in web3. But you also had the experience of meeting people in the community and going to work side by side with a lot of them. What was that experience like?

Petko Pavlovski (00:45:09):

To be honest, and again, I can be accused of being overly subjective, but this is the best web3 community that I’ve ever been a part of. Since day one, I’ve asked a ton of stupid questions, and so many people rush to help me out and to help me understand the things that I’m struggling with. Even when we started Matchstick, I had some issues in the first few days just getting set up with the software around The Graph. And I asked in Discord, “Hey, how can I do something?” And someone replied, “Oh, well you won’t need to do that because LimeChain are building a unit testing framework.” And I said, “Well, actually, I’m building that unit testing framework.” And that person was really well versed in The Graph, it’s actually Sebastian from The Graph council. And he immediately offered me to hop on a call and discuss all of these things. And it was truly surprising to me as an outsider.

Nick (00:46:08):

And how about during your time at Kraken? Did you come across The Graph during your time there?

Petko Pavlovski (00:46:13):

Yes. And this is another funny story, because when I got hired there, they didn’t really ask me anything about The Graph. But one day browsing in Slack, I saw that they had a channel specifically about The Graph, and that was very interesting. Why would they have that? And I looked around, and I saw that Kraken were actually offering staking services for GRT, and that means that they were running a indexing operation. And so they were kind of using that channel to ask questions to each other about that indexing operation. And at a few points, I mean not to brag, but I was instrumental in keeping that Indexer alive when they were facing issues.

Nick (00:46:54):

Well, Petko, this is a great overview of not only your own professional track, how you became aware of The Graph, and some of your conviction for what it could do for web3 starting at LimeChain, and going to Kraken. And part of the reason we’re talking today is after Kraken, you joined GraphOps, which a lot of listeners will recognize as one of the core devs that are working on The Graph. What’s the story behind leaving Kraken and going to work at GraphOps?

Petko Pavlovski (00:47:23):

So after eight months at Kraken, my work there was pretty much done. And I knew I was going to get back into The Graph one way or the other. And a few months before my contract ended, I was in talks with both The Graph Foundation and Edge & Node. And I was trying to figure out what would be the right place for me. With the foundation, we were talking about recurring grants to do some risk work. And with Edge & Node, they were actually hiring for a risk developer.

(00:47:56):

So while I was in talks with them, I saw on Twitter that GraphOps was hiring. And at this point, GraphOps was still not a core developer. And I got really interested, because I knew that GraphOps was a small team globally distributed. And to be honest, I’ve always liked this atmosphere of a small startup-like team. So I reached out to Chris, shout out to Chris, and I asked if I could maybe come on an interview. And after an interview with him and then with the team, it was clear to me that GraphOps was the place to be.

Nick (00:48:36):

Well, I’m anxious to talk to you more about The GraphOps team, and listeners of the podcast know that I’ve interviewed Chris Wessels before. Chris was recently announced as a member of The Graph Council. But as you said, GraphOps is a very cool story within The Graph community, starting off as a one man Indexer operation and growing into this multi-person core dev team.

(00:48:57):

But I do want to ask you question about your conviction for The Graph. And you’ve said it a couple times so far, but it seems to me that once you first got exposed to The Graph at LimeChain, you had developed some drive or interest to just stay in or around the ecosystem. Explain that. Why do you have this drive to stay close to The Graph?

Petko Pavlovski (00:49:23):

So this is a very easy question. First off is of course The Graph community. The people are amazing, literally so many motivated and mission-driven people. And it just blows my mind every day. But then the second part of that is I’ve always known that I want to work in blockchain. And ever since meeting my friend at OVO, I knew that I want to work in blockchain with Rust. And I also knew that I didn’t really want to work at a financial blockchain company. And that is why I can’t even imagine myself working somewhere other than The Graph.

Nick (00:50:01):

So going back to GraphOps then, what can you tell us about the team?

Petko Pavlovski (00:50:04):

Yeah, so as you said, we’re a small team comprised of, as Eva Balen said at Graph Day last year, that we’re a team of Graph OGs, which really warms my heart to hear it. So we’re working on a few key points right now. That includes improving Indexer experience, also maintaining the core networks of graphs. And also doing some R&D work around substreams. As we know, substreams is new and hot right now and we are very involved in that.

(00:50:38):

Also, we are developing Launchpad, which is a Kubernetes-centric tool for Indexers to manage their indexing operation and to scale. And last but not least, the tool that I’m directly involved with is GraphCast, which is this off-chain solution for improving communication and data sharing between Indexers at first, but it will scale to other network participants as well.

Nick (00:51:11):

Well, I love the impact that The GraphOps team is already having on the ecosystem. And listeners will probably know that The GraphOps team recently published a popular blog post about the tools that they’ve been contributing and some of the things that are coming down the line. So if you want to learn more, certainly visit the show notes. I’ll put a link to that blog post.

(00:51:29):

Before we move on, I want to ask this quick follow up about substreams. I mean, there’s so much chatter about substreams, and it seems to me that this is going to be like a massive step forward for a protocol. Am I overstating it, the impact of substreams and what it could do for the protocol?

Petko Pavlovski (00:51:46):

No, I don’t think so. The impact of substreams is going to be huge. And immediately, this example pops in into my head: just to roll back, so when I was working on Matchstick, we use this example of why subgraph developers need Matchstick. One of the main key points there was that the Uniswap subgraph, for instance, was taking more than 30 days to fully sync. And naturally subgraph developers wants to see if their subgraphs have some bugs or errors before those 30 days pass and they see those issues in production. So substreams is something that is going to immensely help with that. And again, don’t quote me on this, but I think a subgraph like Uniswap, if it was a substream, it would sync in about two to three days. So you can see what a massive shift that is.

Nick (00:52:38):

Petko, as I’ve alluded to a couple times during this interview, I’m really interested in your story. Because it started off right out of university, encountering directly the problem that The Graph was created to resolve. Then you went to work at LimeChain, you went to work at Kraken, and you had these direct experiences working with or alongside The Graph and in the ecosystem. And now here you are, you’ve joined GraphOps, a very well known and respected core dev team, and you’re working on this brilliant team on the Indexer experience and making really great contributions. I’m sure you learned a lot at LimeChain at Kraken, but working in the role of core dev, what new things have you learned about the protocol or about the community?

Petko Pavlovski (00:53:25):

So to be fair, I guess the time when I most learned about The Graph, like in-depth reading materials and all of that was right after my time at LimeChain when I was at Kraken, and I had to keep my connection to The Graph alive. And there was two main channels that I did that from, and one of them is the GRTiQ Podcast. So thank you a lot for being here. I really learned a ton from listening to the podcast. And the second one is The Graph Advocates program that I joined right after quitting LimeChain. So I was involved in some initiatives there around bootstrapping the program. And those two things really kept me connected to The Graph, and I used them to learn as much as I could before applying at the Foundation, Edge & Node, and before I ended up at GraphOps.

(00:54:20):

And I want to say that being a part of a core dev team, I do feel a lot more pressure than I did before, either at LimeChain or as an advocate. But at the same time, I think that that’s a good thing, because ultimately it aids me in being more thorough about the work that I do and about the impact that me and my team are making. And one key observation that I have from this new role is that The Graph, to me, does a great job of embodying the web3 values. Just if you think about it, The Graph Foundation is this entity that doesn’t really control what’s happening in the ecosystem. It kind of strives to guide the ecosystem. But there’s a lot of these groups like The Graph Council, of course, the Foundation and the other core dev teams, and they are constantly working together and helping each other and the whole community to improve and to move forward and achieve our goals.

(00:55:31):

So there’s something really beautiful in that The Graph has no central point of failure. The Graph is not one organization, it’s not one person. It really, to me, embodies the spirit and the goals of web3 as a whole.

Nick (00:55:48):

Well, Petko, I’m always incredibly humbled when a guest mentions the podcast and that it played a factor in their story. So I express gratitude for that. And listeners won’t know this, but you and I know this, you’ve been on my list as someone I’ve wanted to interview for a very long time. And I really appreciate that we are finally able to lock down a time and do this.

(00:56:08):

I only have a couple more questions for you, and then I want to ask you the GRTiQ 10. The first question is about your optimism. So you know a lot about The Graph. We’ve established that. You’re working hard on some really important tooling for the Indexer experience on the great team at GraphOps. What makes you optimistic about the future of The Graph?

Petko Pavlovski (00:56:26):

Well, to be honest, to me, The Graph is inevitable. Data is the most important piece of the web3 puzzle. And without The Graph, you just don’t have decentralized data. It’s that simple. So I really believe in the bright future of web3 as a whole, but especially The Graph. And just seeing all of these community initiatives like The Graph Advocates, Indexer DAO, subgraph DAO, and all of that, these are really amazing people. And again, it’s through Discord and it’s through this podcast that I learn about a lot of people that are involved in all of these initiatives. And I am humbled. I am more and more motivated every day.

Nick (00:57:17):

And I also want to ask you this question about the web3 stack. So you mentioned earlier that as you got some wind behind your back out of university, you developed into kind of a full-stack developer. And this question of whether or not we have a fully developed web3 stack is interesting to me. And I guess I’m asking it because it seems to me, and this could be a faulty assumption, because it seems to me this would be an important thing to have resolved to ensure that the industry can kind of take the next leap forward in terms of adoption and growth, that there is an established web3 stack. So putting your full stack engineer lens on, is it the case that we have a fully developed, reliable web3 stack?

Petko Pavlovski (00:58:01):

I think that’s a very interesting question, and the answer will depend on the developer you ask. But in my humble opinion, I think the stack is definitely there. Some parts of the stack are maybe in their alpha or beta stages, but they are there. And I think what we can do is keep developing them.

(00:58:21):

And here I have to mention that we actually can use a lot of the so-called web2 stack. And I guess the best example of that is GraphQL. As most of the listeners probably know, GraphQL is key to what The Graph does. And GraphQL was actually created at Facebook, but in 10 years, I don’t think anyone will remember that GraphQL was created at Facebook. They will just know that GraphQL is essential to The Graph, because The Graph will become a household name.

Nick (00:58:52):

And the final question I want to ask is about the industry as a whole. And I’ve routinely asked this question in prior interviews, and so this won’t be the first time longtime listeners will have heard this. But my question is: do you feel like you’re working on an experiment? That being, web3 is a little bit of an experiment, and we’re going to see what happens. It’s a better alternative to web2, and a lot of people are putting momentum behind it just to see. Or do you feel like this is an inevitability? This is just the next natural step in the evolution of technology and the way in which we use it?

Petko Pavlovski (00:59:29):

From my point of view, as I said about The Graph, that The Graph is inevitable, I feel the same about web3. I really think that web3 is inevitable. I don’t think that given the existence of this alternative, people are going to keep using web2 for the things that web3 really excels at. I do think that web2 is going to keep being around maybe even forever. But for the specific cases where web3 is a hundred or a thousand times better, I just don’t see how it’s anything else other than a inevitability.

(01:00:07):

And it’s kind of the same as the development stack. The foundation of web3 is already here, it has proved itself. And I think the only thing we should do moving forward is keep rooting out scams and just spread the word about good actors. And keep improving everything that we are doing better now to do it 10x better, 100x better, until web free reaches its full potential.

Nick (01:00:36):

Well Petko, now we’ve reached a point in the podcast where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. And I know you’ve listened to the podcast for a little while, so you’ve had a lot of exposure to prior guests answers, but I’m very interested to hear yours. And this is a segment I added to hopefully help the listeners learn something new, try something different, or achieve more in their own life. So Petko, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Petko Pavlovski (01:00:59):

This is my favorite segment. Let’s do it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):

The GRTiQ 10. Questions for astronauts floating in space.

Nick (01:01:11):

What book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Petko Pavlovski (01:01:15):

It would have to be a kind of a niche book called A Crown of Thorns by Stephane Groueff. And it’s a biography of Tsar Boris III, which is Bulgaria’s last ruling monarch. He ruled for 25 years, and it was very, very turbulent years. He pushed the country forward in the face of great uncertainty, war, famine, and pretty much all of the bad stuff that was going around in the world, and bad stuff that is still going on today, sadly. So to me, that’s an example of profound stoicism. And I try to remind myself of this person every day to help me fight my own battles.

Nick (01:01:58):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Petko Pavlovski (01:02:02):

Okay, so I’m not usually a fan of romantic movies, but I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby. It’s the only movie that I can watch 10 times and still not be bored of it. I think it’s a great example of how people can fight for what they want. And ultimately if they want it hard enough, they’ll get it. But at the same time, it’s a tragic story about how sometimes life can take very unexpected turns, and ultimately people should be ready for anything.

Nick (01:02:31):

And how about this, if you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Petko Pavlovski (01:02:36):

So I am a metal fan. And every time there’s a new album from a band I like, I just listen to it on repeat. And for the last two years, that’s been the album Manic by Wage War. If people like harder music, I definitely advise them to check that out. It’s very motivating and uplifting.

Nick (01:02:56):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Petko Pavlovski (01:02:59):

So this is interesting. I was a part of this mentorship program, and I was learning about sociology and philosophy from this person that we couldn’t have been more different. We were diametrically opposed on pretty much everything we believed in. But this one time when I felt like I had a lot on my plate, he just said, “When you are stuck and when you are wondering what to do, just do something.” And that’s the thing that just keeps coming back to me.

Nick (01:03:30):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know yet?

Petko Pavlovski (01:03:34):

This is going to sound a bit hypocritical, but I truly believe that people should not take advice from other people for granted. And especially if they do so, they should really ask themselves: do I want to be like that person? Do I want to be where that person is? Because every person is different. Every person has different goals and aspirations. So don’t listen to other people’s advice, and try to listen more to yourself.

Nick (01:04:03):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Petko Pavlovski (01:04:06):

So this is not going to be anything new, but I’ve discovered that whenever I manage to wake up before 6:00 AM, the whole day just runs a lot smoother. I have a lot more time, I can achieve a lot more in the day, and just generally I feel happier.

Nick (01:04:22):

Petko, based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how or why people find success in life?

Petko Pavlovski (01:04:33):

So I think two things are most important here. One is not being scared to take risks, and the second is not being scared to look or sound dumb. Because when you move out of your comfort zone, you can really achieve a lot more. And that’s just something that I’ve seen from people that I would consider to be successful.

Nick (01:04:53):

Well, Petko, the final three questions of the GRTiQ 10 are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is: the thing that most excites me about web3 is…

Petko Pavlovski (01:05:03):

The prospect of freedom, censorship resistance, and really owning your own money and your own data.

Nick (01:05:11):

And this one: if you’re on Twitter, then you should be following…

Petko Pavlovski (01:05:14):

So this again, might be a bit controversial, but I will go with Molly White. Molly White is a software developer who is a huge web3 hater, you can say, but for all the right reasons. And I feel that a lot of people, especially in our space, and this was certainly true of me, we can get stuck in this echo chamber and we can pat ourselves on the backs. But it’s very useful to see what the outside world thinks of us. And it’s useful when web3 haters actually help us root out scams in the space.

Nick (01:05:49):

And the final one: I’m happiest when…

Petko Pavlovski (01:05:52):

So this has to be threefold. First one is when I’m hiking in the mountains with my girlfriend. The second one is when I solve a bug that’s been bothering me for a week. And when I’m feeding stray animals.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):

The GRTiQ 10.

Nick (01:06:08):

Petko, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. You’ve been incredibly generous with your time. And for sharing your personal story. I’m sure a lot of listeners will find it very interesting, as I know I did, about how you kind of came into The Graph and the level at which you’ve risen within the ecosystem, joining GraphOps and working on some really important problems.

(01:06:35):

If people want to stay in touch with you, and learn more about your work and the things you’re working on with the GraphOps team, what’s the best way to stay in touch?

Petko Pavlovski (01:06:43):

So I’m not very active on Twitter, but if anyone wants to follow me, I am axiom_aardvark, with two As “aardvark”. And if they want to stay in touch with my work, I would say it would be best to follow GraphOps at graphops.xyz.w