GRTiQ Podcast: 33 Index Africa

The following podcast is for informational purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute tax, legal or investment advice. Take responsibility for your own decisions, consult with the proper professionals and do your own research.

Boyd Varty (00:13):

When we first started learning about The Graph, we could never have imagined that this is what emerged out of it. I’m sure that the founders of The Graph Protocol had no idea that someone would be doing this inside of their network. And I think it goes to show that if you create these systems, you create these networks, you actually don’t know how people will innovate on them, but you can be sure that the network will drive innovation.

(00:47):

And that’s certainly where we found ourselves in a highly unexpected innovation, that driven by The Graph Protocol that could, and I am certain will be the future of philanthropy. I mean, we are only a few months in and we are changing rural African people’s lives… and preparing them to be competitive in a future marketplace. That is so incredible.

Nick (01:34):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Rich Laburn and Boyd Varty with Index Africa, an Indexer at The Graph. As you’re about to learn, in addition to being the only Indexer currently operating on the continent of Africa, Rich and Boyd are also leveraging their work as an Indexer to pioneer a new approach to philanthropy called decentralized philanthropy or DePhi with a P-H.

(02:00):

A conversation with Rich and Boyd span a wide range of topics including how they migrated from the safari business in South Africa to The Graph. Their work in building Graphica, the name of the emerging graph community in Africa, how their work in decentralized philanthropy is changing the lives of children living in the most rural parts of Africa and their long-term vision for web3 and The Graph.

(02:25):

We started the conversation by talking about Rich and Boyd’s background and why they launched Index Africa. We started with Rich.

Rich Laburn (02:36):

When I left school, I went to the University of Cape Town and I studied digital media and marketing and that really was in the early 2000s, right after the dotcom kind of boom and bust. And there was a whole new emergence of web2 developing. But when I finished that, I actually pursued a boyhood dream to become a game ranger and that led into becoming a wildlife filmmaker to fuse the digital media with the wilderness. And then that led me into the tourism industry. And I’ve started building tech for the tourism sector for the last 10 years or so.

(03:05):

I’ve completed an MBA in Madrid a couple of years ago and now I’m running the Silicon Kruger initiative of which index Africa and The Graphica community is our primary focus.

Nick (03:16):

And how about you, Boyd?

Boyd Varty (03:16):

I had a strange educational background. When I was young, my parents were building safari camps all over Africa. My family was in the safari business, the photographic safari business. And so I went to a boarding school initially and then as a teenager my parents took us out of school, myself and my sister, and we found ourselves being educated under trees in the most rural parts of Africa. We had a tutor and sitting under those trees, the most amazing things would happen. Kids from local villages and local tribes would come and sit around with us. And we found ourselves really connecting with the most rural people in Africa and being involved in education with them from a very early age. And that really shaped me.

(04:00):

I realized at that time that really the only difference between us and them was we had access and they didn’t have access at that time. So that really was my first encounter being educated under trees around Africa. And then I went to the University of Cape Town and I studied psychology. I was very interested in human potential and transforming human potential. And my life has sort of become a coming together of all these strange backgrounds into what we’ll talk about today.

Nick (04:27):

Well, I find both of your backgrounds very interesting and I believe the point where you connected was somewhere in Africa. But before we get to there, how did each of you get involved or interested in crypto and blockchain?

Rich Laburn (04:41):

So I remember really in late 2009, just as someone who followed technology hearing about Bitcoin and coming off the back of the cypherpunk movement. But it was only really when Ethereum began to make headway and the space more accessible in about 2017, 2016 that I started to take note. And coming off the back of doing my MBA thesis was this idea of creating an identity management dapp that would be at like a data intermediary in the healthcare sector, a sort of decentralized record of your most confidential and personal healthcare data with built-in distribution capabilities to various stakeholders such as doctors and pharmacies and health cover medical aids and other specialists.

(05:22):

And that project just got me exploring how data in a decentralized world is created, how it’s captured and how it can be shaped into new modalities that contribute to society. And finishing on that, I just realized that going into the web3 space was really the thing calling me and I’ve been on that path ever since.

Nick (05:41):

And how about you, Boyd? How does somebody with such a strong family background in safari, in Africa to get involved in crypto and blockchain?

Boyd Varty (05:49):

My introduction was I think like a lot of people who’ve come into the space. I was introduced through a friend and what’s been really fun about it for me is that I did grow up in the woods. I don’t have a particularly technical background. And so it’s been this immense learning curve and like a lot of people, it’s been a kind of awakening into the potential that the web3 space actually has.

(06:14):

And the other wonderful thing about it is that I feel like approaching it as a layman, I have what in the east they call beginner’s mind. I feel unclouded by actually a lot of technical knowledge. So I can just be really practical with seeing what’s in front of me. And there’s been a great joy in that in many ways, just seeing, does this work or does it not work without actually a broader sense of the depth of the ecosystem. And so that’s given me a real practicality in my approach to introductions to the blockchain and what’s possible in the web3 space.

Nick (06:47):

Well, Boyd, I’m really curious about this interplay between a guy that is educated in the woods in South Africa under a tree as you said, and technology and not only current technology, but web3 and DePhi, the future of technology. It seems to me these things would never meet, and if they did, they wouldn’t really know what to do with one another. How would you reason through that?

Boyd Varty (07:11):

Well, I would start off firstly by agreeing with you. Some people may even consider me something of a Luddite. I grew up next to campfires, under trees, under the stars, being educated in the most rural villages. I’m not an extremely tech-savvy person, but what I am is someone who is extremely open and someone who can see where unexpected things can come together. It was an enlightenment experience for me, being introduced to the web3 space, being introduced to how these networks operate. And it was a fun learning curve. And as I learned more, it actually became clear to me that in a very strange way, there was an incredible fit between rural African people and this digital space. And in some ways I actually started to see that these spaces were an expression of the heart of African people, a digital expression of the heart of African people.

(08:18):

And I know that’s a very strange thing to say, but I believe that African people are going to be extremely well positioned to participate in decentralized, more communal spaces, more transparent spaces, where people can operate peer to peer. It actually fits the African consciousness and way of being extremely well. And so I think of myself and Richie and Index Africa as, we are a conduit in which two extremely unexpected things can come together.

(08:48):

And even between Richard and I, with Rich, you have someone who’s got strong and deep technical skills. And with me you’ve got someone who’s got on the ground, skills creating education in rural places. And when you put us together inside of an indexing node and stir in the power of The Graph Protocol, you start to have an unexpected coming together of multiple things. And so that is our story.

(09:15):

Our story is innovation coming together through unexpected spaces being put together. And another way of saying it is the future, I believe is about symphony. Symphony is the bringing together of unexpected elements to create something really unique and beautiful. And I believe that in some ways that’s been our gift, our somewhat unusual background and bringing together this understanding of how Africa operates on the ground and this incredible new technical power platform.

Nick (09:51):

I like to ask guests of the podcast from various countries what the attitudes or opinions of the local population is towards crypto and blockchain. So what can you tell us about South Africa where you two are operating?

Rich Laburn (10:04):

So let me comment about South Africa and say that I think that there is amazing scope for DePhi in South Africa. And I say DePhi specifically because we have such mature financial institutions with which it’s aligning at an enterprise level. But more and more we’ve also found that there’s just a mass of people who are piling into the DePhi space purely from a speculative level. And that is really driving a ton of momentum around adoption of dapps and other subgraphs in the space.

(10:30):

More broadly in Africa, I think it’s a mixed bag as to how governments view it. I know there are many governments in Africa that are stridently against it and trying to figure out how to regulate it. I know that there’s massive growth happening in West Africa. There’s massive growth happening in East Africa. And here in South Africa, there’s also a big attempt by our reserve bank and by our government to try and get ahead of the regulatory environment, to harness it, to harness the potential of it.

(10:55):

That’s how I see it. But Africa essentially is full of these energetic generalities such as commerce and community. They just happen everywhere. And really what’s needed is to try and find coordination behind these two things to let these idea flourish so that the spirit of commerce and the spirit of community can start to flourish in the space.

Boyd Varty (11:16):

Well, I just think that there is an incredible opportunity in Africa and one just needs to see the power of what the cell phone did in Africa and how quickly it got adopted by the most rural people. Everywhere you go in Africa, you will find a cell phone. And I think that that points to the potential of the web3 and blockchain space in Africa. The other thing is that African society is naturally collective. In fact, we have a philosophy in Africa that is referred to as Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu philosophy says, “I am because of you.” It’s through the relational nature of life that we get to experience the deepest parts of ourselves.

(11:58):

And so in a strange way, I see the DePhi space as an extension of that philosophy into the digital space. African people are traders, African people operate in a peer-to-peer dynamic all the time. African people are collective in their thinking. And so I think that what needs to happen is we need to educate people and we need to give people access to these systems and inside of that, it’ll be second nature to them. It’ll be literally a digital second nature to the very nature of African people. And that is philosophically incredibly exciting to me.

(12:33):

And practically, if we can provide systems that work that people can transact on, that people can trade on inside of the web3 space, it’s going to go exponential in a growth environment. So I’m chomping at the bit inside of this.

Rich Laburn (12:51):

If I can just build on what you’re saying there, I think that one of the other thing that’s really interesting to me coming out of the web3 space is bit of mechanics around governance, bit of mechanics around incentive structures. And essentially allowing for things like decentralized autonomous organizations to reshape how projects, initiatives, social goods are going to be structured in the continent over the next 50 years. So that we see almost a collective reframing of how power, how money and how governance influence Africa’s wheels of progress. And that’s really one of the kind of principles behind this concept of DePhi that’s spelled D-H-P-H-I, decentralized philanthropy that Boyd and I have started to pioneer through the Index Africa initiative.

Nick (13:34):

Well, I’m very excited to learn more about a decentralized philanthropy, and I know you are pioneers in this cause. Maybe before we get there, it’d be interesting to know how the two of you met and decided to begin working together.

Rich Laburn (13:47):

That’s a long story, but we actually knew each other at university and then we reconnected many years later as we both went for the last beer in a cooler box at a house party. And that kind of cemented the reconnection. That is how I began my sort of career in wildlife filmmaking and digital technology in the tourism space was through Boyd and coming to work in his family business. And since then we’ve just been really good friends and we’ve also been working together as business partners since 2017.

Boyd Varty (14:17):

Just to how Rich and I met and something that I think is important for listeners to hear. When I met Richard for the first time after we left university, we had known each other vaguely at university and then we bumped into each other at a party. And what he said to me was at that time, he said to me, “I’m passionate about digital marketplaces and wildlife filmmaking.” And I was so struck by what a weird Venn diagram that was.

(14:46):

And so Richard came into the safari business that I was running at the time, and he started to use powerful wildlife content to attract people in a digital marketplace to come on safari and really built out the first kind of online tourism tribes and online ecosystems for people to connect with what you could experience on a safari. And so that was really powerful and what I saw was the coming together of two things that you would’ve never put together.

(15:16):

At the same time, I was working in education, I had founded a nonprofit and we were rolling out learning centers across the country and I was fascinated in economics and how we could create avenues for the incredible talent that was latent in Africa to be expressed in the world. So it was a sort of a humanitarian cause. So I think both Richard and I have very strange Venn diagrams and our strength is that we’re able to put seemingly unexpected and discordant elements together. And I think that’s been the joy of our partnership, is to see two unrelated things and work out how they go together.

(15:55):

And as we move into talking about Index Africa, I feel like that’s fundamental to what we’ve done, is we’ve seen a number of unexpected things and then we’ve been lucky through sort of the strangeness of our own interests and our own weird personal Venn diagrams to work out how to put them together.

Nick (16:12):

Following your interest in web3, DePhi, both DeFi as in decentralized finance and DePhi as in decentralized philanthropy, you got involved with The Graph as an Indexer presumably, but it might be interesting to tell your background into finding and getting involved with The Graph.

Rich Laburn (16:31):

So we have a friend who was working on The Graph Protocol and we’d known him a long time and he knew that we were excited about new technologies coming out of particularly the West Coast and in the web3 space. And he told us about The Graph and said, “Oh, you should get involved as a Curator.” This was about probably July last year. And so we started to get more interested and more involved in it. And when it launched, I was signed up as a Curator and a real desire there was to just learn more about The Graph and dig in further into how dapps and subgraphs work.

(17:04):

But what that gave me was it gave me an opportunity to meet people in The Graph community. And I think that for me is the big tipping point as I’m sure many other people in The Graph community would attest to just wanting to go fully fledged into it and commit a whole bunch of time and resources into spreading it where I could. And so that’s really how the journey began. And as I became more involved in the community and got to know people, I started talking with other indexes and then this idea emerged about saying, “Well, there’s no hosting infrastructure or indexing infrastructure anywhere in Africa,” and Boyd and I said, “Look, this is our mission. Let’s put Africa on the map.” That’s what we want to do. So we then went about and we set up our own node and that was really the genesis of where we find ourselves now.

Boyd Varty (17:51):

So as I got introduced to The Graph, I was going through an incredibly steep learning curve and really my learning curve was talking to people who had a deep understanding of the space. And quickly I understood the utility of The Graph and I started to get a sense of the potential that would come in the web3 space and how The Graph was centralized to that in some ways. The Graph offered opportunity for everyone to index data in this huge ecosystem.

(18:22):

And so my involvement was really a layman being educated by experts through conversations, and it was just tremendously exciting for me. I felt like I was in a new world and I was literally seeing a new world. And really my learning curve was driven by excitement. We were interested in what The Graph could do and then learning about indexing and then learning about curation and learning how this network was fitted together and then starting to get a sense of how this community was supporting each other to create this. So it was really learning driven by excitement.

Nick (18:57):

Are you still a Curator, Richie, working at The Graph?

Rich Laburn (19:00):

Yes, I am a Curator. I will say that the majority of my efforts are focused on indexing, but as we are building out The Graphica community and starting to look at building a whole bunch more subgraphs, certainly that’s where the emphasis of my focus is going to be in the next six to 12 months.

Nick (19:18):

I haven’t had the chance to interview somebody who made the move from Curator to Indexer. Might be a good opportunity for you to share some advice or some insight with any listeners who are contemplating the same thing.

Rich Laburn (19:28):

I think that the main thing is to align yourself with very strong technical DevOps people. My background is not necessarily technical, it’s more digital commerce. And I had a colleague that I worked with that helped me set up the DevOps. His name is Ian and he’s our technical lead on the Indexer. But really what drew me to the role of the Indexer from Curator was one, just wanting to learn more about the infrastructure behind The Graph. And I wanted to be on the cutting edge of this concept of data farming and to be doing that in the African continent.

(20:01):

And what it has done, becoming an Indexer is it’s provided me with a much deeper understanding as to how the networks of decentralization are put together from a hardware perspective as well as how The Graph has been engineered to work. And what comes from that is just a deep understanding of how profound and immense and how rapidly evolving this technology is. And that unlocks a massive understanding of the potential as to what is still to come in the evolution of this protocol.

Nick (20:33):

Well, you keep mentioning that you’re the only Indexer node on the continent of Africa. Why is that such an important thing for The Graph and good for the protocol?

Rich Laburn (20:42):

Yeah, it’s a decent question. I wish I could have a technical lead here with me to provide the actual details of it. But essentially, decentralization is not just about stake decentralization, it’s also about geographic decentralization. And when you look at nodes on a map, the broader the coverage and the more connection points between nodes that are on offer, the stronger the network. And so putting an Indexer node on Africa was at once putting Africa on the map in as much as it was also giving geographic diversification to the strength of The Graph Protocol network.

Nick (21:19):

What can you tell us about Indexer Africa?

Boyd Varty (21:22):

So Index Africa was the culmination of this passion that was emerging inside of Richard and I. We were excited to be able to participate in The Graph Network. We were excited to set up the first indexing node in Africa for The Graph Protocol. And then what happened is as we were setting ourselves the goal to be a world-class Indexer, we started to also have this kind of enlightenment that what was incredible about this network was how it generated value. And this was a deep philosophical kind of light bulb moment for us. Instead of extracting value, this entire network was generating value.

(22:03):

And then Richard and I being who we are, we started to see if we could put together discordant and unexpected elements. And very quickly we saw that through my work, I had been involved in setting up learning centers all over Africa, those learning centers were teaching digital literacy. Suddenly we had an indexing node that was creating abundance and we could connect that indexing node with our digital learning center. And immediately the lights went on for us.

(22:33):

There was an unexpected innovation here waiting to happen. And so on one level we were setting up an indexing note and becoming world-class indexes. And on another level we were starting to awaken to the incredible possibility that setting up Index Africa could have for creating digital education in Africa.

Rich Laburn (22:54):

Yeah, just building on that, Boyd, I think that the whole sort of concept behind the spark of innovation came from the ecosystem within which were already existing, through the Good Work Foundation and also through being remotely based in the Kruger National Park. And I always kind of laugh that the best place to go to pursue technology development is definitely not the most remote location in South Africa, but that’s where we find ourselves. And that was the idea behind setting up this concept called the Silicon Kruger and it’s stolen directly from Silicon Valley. There’s an initiative called the Silicon Cape in Cape Town and it’s all around stimulating a tech ecosystem.

(23:36):

And we had a digital learning center and we had a couple of individuals, myself included, who are deeply passionate about tech and we thought, look, let’s set up this initiative and let’s put Index Africa within it and let’s align it with contributing part of the rewards to funding the Good Work Foundation, which in turn is providing STEM education, digital literacy to rural school children, providing bridging years to graduates so that they can get work ready and let’s see if we can create a closed-loop system of funding into the next generation of people who are get up and educated and enlightened and alive by the web3 ideas.

Nick (25:59):

Boyd, you said something in your answer that I want to go back to, which is you had this philosophical alignment or aha moment for how The Graph generated value. What can you tell me about that? What do you mean by that?

Boyd Varty (26:13):

Well, again, speaking as a layman, we set up our indexing node and we started to see how as a result of us running that indexing node, literally we started to generate token value. And that was the beginning of it. We started to see how instead of extracting value out of the network, this network was in fact displacing value into it, which was profound. At the same time, separate to indexing, we had been involved in setting up this foundation, the Good Work Foundation. We had six learning centers operating in the most rural parts of South Africa. And from a philanthropy point of view, we had to go out every year and try and raise $2 million to maintain the running of those learning centers.

(27:07):

And in fact, across in the philanthropy space, the holy grail of philanthropy that’s been around for the last while is for people to be able to develop some kind of sustainability built into the philanthropic endeavor. Everyone in the philanthropy space has been trying to get away from the old models of just endless donations and say, “How do we actually make this sustainable?” And as the nodes started generating rewards, we immediately saw the possibility of starting to tie the node together with the education system in the development of a model that was founded in abundance.

(27:44):

And so the idea is that Delegators stake onto our node, our node indexes data and produces rewards, a percentage of those rewards flow into our digital learning centers where young, talented African people are upskilled in digital education, preparing them for the future web3 economy. In turn, with those skills, they come into the web3 space and start developing the economy itself. They start to provide development skills into that space. The Delegator instead of making a donation because they delegated, they’re able to earn on their money and return their stake to themselves.

(28:29):

And so everywhere you looked inside of the model, there was just incredible abundance for everyone. And that model didn’t just come to us, it slowly started to emerge and that’s what we’ve been building up to this point. And already this year, we’ve put 80 kids from the most rural backgrounds into a digital education process that will start to prepare them to participate in this future economy. And we’re in our absolute infancy. And the possibility, I honestly believe that this DePhi space, digital philanthropy, it will become the future of philanthropy. The model is so incredibly powerful and it offers wins for everyone through the chain.

(29:10):

And so again, Index Africa is the coming together of a number of unexpected things. What I should really say too, is that all of this is made possible by the presence of The Graph Protocol. And what I’m so excited about is when we first started learning about The Graph, we could never have imagined that this is what emerged out of it. I’m sure that the founders of The Graph Protocol had no idea that someone would be doing this inside of their network. And I think it goes to show that if you create these systems, you create these networks, you actually don’t know how people will innovate on them, but you can be sure that the network will drive innovation. And that’s certainly where we found ourselves in a highly unexpected innovation that driven by The Graph Protocol that could, and I am certain will be the future of philanthropy.

(30:04):

I mean, we are only a few months in and we are changing rural African people’s lives and preparing them to be competitive in a future marketplace and there’s a leapfrog opportunity there. There’s latent talent in Africa that is going to be unlocked by this, and the more delegation that we can attract through being a world-class Indexer, the more lives we can affect on the ground. I think what makes us unique is that we are on-the-ground African operators who are also connected to this global economy through The Graph. And so we just have tremendous scope to play here. And I want to see this rolling out all over Africa and I want to see high level developers funded by the network coming out of our learning center and building incredible dapps onto the network in the future and advancing the space of web3. So couldn’t be more excited about this.

Rich Laburn (30:55):

So yeah, just building on it, I want to naturally just try and simplify it. This whole DePhi model, the decentralized philanthropy is really in the same way that DeFi, decentralized finance has reinvented finance. Essentially what we are trying to do is take delegation, putting it into an escrow by delegating it onto a node, earning rewards, return an APY for the Delegator, and allowing them also to benefit from the growth and the price of The Graph token. And a portion of our rewards are then used to fund these learning centers and to fund projects that help with the development of digital education and web3 education.

(31:33):

But I think most importantly is that as more people start to participate, there’s a self-reinforcement that happens on The Graph Network that sort of underpins the premise of decentralization, as in the more people that you have using a network, the stronger it becomes. And that’s what’s also tremendously exciting about the concept of DePhi.

Nick (31:54):

So if we contrast traditional philanthropy with DePhi, and again for listeners that’s DePhi with a P-H-I, if we just go point by point in ways that The Graph and blockchain and crypto, all of these things enable a DePhi model, where’s the point by point benefit for listeners to participate in something like DePhi?

Rich Laburn (32:18):

So the easiest way to look at it would be to, if someone wanted to participate in DePhi, our recommendation on our prototype is to buy graph tokens and simply to delegate onto the Index Africa node. And simply by delegating onto the node, our commitment is that we contribute a portion of our awards to these projects. And we provide the funding as a social enterprise to these projects from the rewards generated. And the more people that we have delegating on, the greater the rewards and the greater the amount of funding. And that is as simple as it is as a starting point.

(32:51):

What we are looking for in terms of a version two and a version three is to ultimately set up a node specifically for a foundation or an NGO, receive the right amount of tokens to allocate that will allow for the rewards to be cashflow positive in terms of the cost and to raise delegations for that node, specifically for that NGO and that project. And that’s version two of the model.

Nick (33:14):

Boyd, you mentioned that thus far there’s been 80 children in South Africa that have benefited from DePhi and what you’re doing with Indexer Africa. What can you tell us about these kids and their stories?

Boyd Varty (33:27):

I wish I could just, and maybe I can just take listeners to one of these learning centers for a moment. The first learning center that we built in 2005 when we launched the Good Work Foundation was an old banana shed that when we walked into it, many people would’ve said, “This is a rundown old building,” and we saw the potential for the future of education. And right at that time when myself and my former teacher who were involved in founding the Good Work Foundation walked into it, we remembered all those years as a child that I spent in the most rural parts of Africa, realizing that the only difference between myself who had access to education and the most rural school kids was access itself. And so we set out to provide access to world-class education.

(34:15):

Now if you walk into that learning center today, it is a vibrant learning space. You will see kids on iPads doing gamified learning. You will see increases in maths and science. We operate a supplementary to the school system. You will see kids singing and running with excitement into that learning center. You will see a robotics class unfolding. You will see access to some of the best education in the world via the internet. And it’s just tremendous to watch. There’s a vibrancy of learning in that space.

(34:47):

These young people have tremendous potential. They are open and they are ready to adopt and participate in the future economy. It’s really powerful. They just want to upskill themselves and get going. And they’re innovators because they’ve grown up in very different ways to other people. So they have a different outlook. They’re resilient, they’re trade and entrepreneurially-oriented. There’s just a vibrancy. They are steeped in Ubuntu culture, the idea that I am because of you, we’re relational beings and we need to uplift each other together.

(35:22):

So to see those 80 kids becoming prepared for the future economy is really exciting. It’s exciting for me to believe that Africa could in fact lead in this space. And we’re just getting started. We’ve only been operational for a short period of time in our indexing node. And as we grow our delegation, we are going to impact the lives of many, many more people. I think that we are very lucky that we have operational on-the-ground skills and I think that’s what makes Index Africa unique.

(35:49):

We’ve been operating on the ground in the most rural parts of Africa for a long time. So now you arm us with the power of web3 and there’s a coming together of two, again, very unexpected things, the most rural African learning center and the power generated by The Graph Network. So it’s extremely exciting. We are seeing 7,000 kids per week through our six learning centers. 82% of our facilitators are women who have come through the learning centers. There’s a strong bent towards entrepreneurial skills and I just believe that the sky’s the limit. These kids are, because we’re getting them going early, they’re digitally-oriented and they are ready to play.

(36:30):

And my dream is to see high level developers emerging out of these learning centers and advancing the web3 space and Africa becoming known as a place where we are not just working on these systems, but we’re in fact advancing these networks.

Nick (36:45):

Boyd, another concept that’s come up, and I know I’m not going to say it right, but I think it would be beneficial for certainly myself and listeners to understand and appreciate more this idea of Ubuntu. If I’m saying it right, correct me if I’m not, but please tell us more about this important concept.

Boyd Varty (37:03):

Ubuntu is an African philosophy that says, “I am because of you.” Another way of expressing the sort of a translation of what Ubuntu is, Ubuntu is people are not people without other people. Now in the more collective consciousness of Africa, it is said that we get to experience the deepest parts of our humanity in relation to others. And everywhere you go in Africa, you will find this philosophy playing out. It’s extremely alive. As someone who’s traveled extensively through rural Africa, I have had people take me in, I’ve had people hand me food, I’ve had people take care of me because they understand in a fundamental philosophical way that our wellbeing is tied together.

(37:52):

So Ubuntu is incredibly active in Africa. You see it everywhere and it makes African people extremely ready to be connected in peer-to-peer economy. And in some ways, I really believe that the DePhi space could be a digital expression, and I’m getting somewhat philosophical here. It could be a digital expression of this fundamental philosophy of the African heart. And that is why on a deep level, as people in Western well-developed countries are struggling to try and imagine this DePhi space, I believe Africa could leapfrog straight into it because somehow it is fundamental to the people who live here and that’s very exciting.

Nick (39:11):

Well I think listeners will appreciate how unique Indexer Africa is. On the account of what you’re doing with the rewards and DePhi and building this incredible community in Africa, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask a follow-up question to both of you, which is this, what motivates you? Why are you so motivated to give back and to get so involved in this philanthropy in South Africa? Richie, start with you. What’s your motivation?

Rich Laburn (39:39):

My motivation is built around the idea that context is everything. And the context that Boyd and I live in is that we live in the same region of South Africa as many rural people do who are close to the wilderness. And what I’ve discovered through getting to know many of these people is that they’re exactly the same as us and they’re just working for prosperity amidst their circumstances in this day and age.

(40:04):

And over the years we’ve seen that the difference between success and failure in working towards prosperity is simply access and providing people access with the tools to get on and create that prosperity. And that is really what motivates me is being able to look for opportunities where we can provide that access, to be able to create and share a more abundant environment for the people around us.

Nick (40:29):

How about you, Boyd?

Boyd Varty (40:30):

I would say that my motivations are probably multi-leveled. The first is that I’m passionate about education and I’m passionate about the latent potential in African people and my whole life I’ve wanted to serve the community that I’ve grown up in. I’ve been motivated by the beauty of people on some level, so that drives me. The second thing is that I love building unexpected systems and I believe that philanthropy in its traditional form has become somewhat outdated and we need to build a new model.

(41:09):

Just on a personal level, I’m excited about the potential to build a new model. I’m excited about unlocking abundance and I think that this model will disrupt traditional philanthropy and I think it needs to be disrupted. And I’m very excited to be leading in that space. And it just puts all my favorite things together. There’s education, there’s the opportunity to build a new model, there’s the opportunity to transform philanthropy and there’s the opportunity to prepare African people for what I believe will be the future economy and make Africa competitive. So it just hits everything for me. I couldn’t think of a model that would be more exciting to be playing inside of at the moment.

Rich Laburn (41:53):

If I can just build on what Boyd is saying. Just speaking from the heart here, we are both Africans and we are super proud to be Africans and we are super proud of the continent and we’re super proud of African people everywhere. And really what I feel is a core driving motivation is to be world-class in Africa and to make Africa world-class. And to me there is a new groundswell of a digital generation that is coming through across the continent and we want to be a part of enabling that and we want to be a part of driving that growth, driving that innovation and driving the prosperity that’s going to come from it. Not just with solutions for the African context, but also for solutions for a global context that take into account many of the ideas and principles that are only found in Africa. And that at a secondary level is really what I find tremendously exciting.

Nick (42:45):

Well, we’ve introduced a lot of new ideas and concepts for listeners today, including this powerful concept of DePhi with a P-H for decentralized philanthropy. Another term you’ve mentioned a couple times that I’d love to learn more about this community and idea of Graphica. So what can you tell me about that?

Rich Laburn (43:04):

Graphica stands for The Graph in Africa and it’s the community that we set up for high level blockchain developers in Africa to join. And really it’s built off the idea that we have an indexing node, we have digital learning centers, but what we need in the ecosystem is high level talent, developing really great solutions and utilizing The Graph and building subgraphs and seeing how we can take the ideas that are coming out of Africa and building specific solutions for the African context.

(43:36):

And really what it is, it’s a calling card for innovation. I feel like sometimes what we’ve done with it is tried to put up the bat signal and we’re just saying whoever hears the call or sees the bat signal, come here, this is where it’s going to be happening. And already we’ve grown the community to about 40 developers who at various different levels, we run small, intimate weekly training groups to uplevel and upskill people on sort of finer details of blockchain development and web3.

(44:03):

And then I think the bigger intention that’s starting to emerge is to enter a few hackathons, build out some cool subgraph ideas and see if we can get teams beginning to gel. And essentially, we are limiting any ideas on specific outcomes and are more interested in building connection, building dialogue, pioneering exploration amongst developers across Africa, much like the idea of astronauts in space, to see what ideas emerge and to see what happens when these teams of developers begin to gel and begin to spark and to begin to work with each other. And that’s really the context behind Graphica.

Boyd Varty (44:40):

Yeah, I think Richard has said it so well there. I think of this as emergent innovation. And you put a group of innovative, talented people together and allow them to start to have a context in which to interact and then we wait with intention. And I’m certain that incredible opportunities will emerge that we can’t imagine yet, and then we start to build out those opportunities. And we do it together as a community in the spirit of Ubuntu, understanding that collectively we are stronger and we enforce this entire network.

Nick (45:15):

In looking at the statistics for this podcast prior to this interview, I get a pretty good share of listeners off the continent of Africa. If listeners want to get more involved with Graphica, what’s the best way to do it?

Rich Laburn (45:27):

So the best way to do it is we have a Discord invite, which you can post in the show notes or join The Graphica Telegram channel or join the Index Africa Telegram channel and ask for a Graphica discord invite and I’ll share one with you.

Nick (45:42):

So Richie, one of the main talking points right now within The Graph community, and I almost think within the proof of staking at large, is this idea of keeping stake decentralized. Every opportunity I’ve had to interview an Indexer working at The Graph, I’ve wanted to get their opinion on this important topic. So what is your opinion right now or perspective related to this topic of keeping stake decentralized?

Rich Laburn (46:06):

I think it’s critical that we seek to preserve the integrity of the system and create an economically balanced network, but I also understand that the economics of tech can’t help but skew towards the most efficient systems. And what in the centralized world is called the winner-take-all markets. And this is why I think that the idea and the discourse and the discussion around state decentralization is not just important for the distribution of token delegation, but beyond that for what this distribution enables and various nodes operating on the network.

(46:40):

And essentially what I’m saying is that the greater the diversity of delegation, the greater the diversity of innovation stemming forth from it. And case in point is index Africa, if all the stake was centralized, even with North American index nodes, what would be prevented is what we’re trying to do in Africa with The Graphica community and with funding learning centers and with pioneering web3 development on the continent. And that’s kind of the point is the knock on indirect benefits of state decentralization is for the pockets of abundance that they provide whilst creating a more secure network that is more decentralized and is less susceptible to bad actors or malicious behavior rather.

Nick (47:22):

Well, I really like what you said there, Richie. It resonates with me and I can’t help but think in the case of Indexer Africa, this is an opportunity for members of The Graph community who want to participate in something like decentralized philanthropy to do it. And if we can keep stake decentralized and give Indexers like Indexer Africa opportunity, it’s really important at the human and community level.

Rich Laburn (47:46):

I look at things through the logic of a flywheel. Let me put it this way. First, we want to get more people using The Graph Network and delegating Graph tokens so that we increase the security of the network first and foremost. Then we want to diversify the delegation of those tokens so that there’s broader stake decentralization. And essentially what we’re offering at Index Africa is not just the opportunity to do that whilst earning a really good return, but also to participate in new models of decentralized philanthropy and allowing for new modalities of funding to be streamed through into parts of Southern Africa and beyond.

(48:29):

I think so much of decentralized finance is built on metrics and metrics for success and the metrics for success are invariably quantitative. And therefore, those with the highest value win. And essentially what we’re more interested in is creating new narratives that allow for intangible abundance and qualitative abundance to emerge. That’s not just driven by, “Hey, this guy’s got 0.5 of a percent bigger APY than this guy and therefore we’re going to go with him.” But rather a higher calling, a bigger narrative, a different story that gives people a reason to believe and a reason to delegate with us and to delegate away from someone who’s just going to give them the maximum return.

(49:12):

I’ll caveat that with saying, and Boyd said it before, we want to be world-class indexes. At the end of the day, efficiencies matter and we’re as focused on optimizing our APY as other indexes are and really do have a long-term goal to optimize it as best we can because it’s going to benefit everyone in our model.

Nick (49:30):

I’d like to hear both of your long-term vision for Indexer Africa. There’s a lot going on here. You’re building a community in Africa, you’ve started Indexer Africa, which is obviously a technical operation, helping to support The Graph Network, and you are also pioneers in this DePhi, decentralized philanthropy space. What is it then that’s your long-term vision for everything that you’re doing there?

Rich Laburn (49:55):

The long-term vision for Index Africa is really simply put down to one thing and that’s about partnerships, to achieve distribution of the protocol. We’re ambitious, we believe in a positive sum game and we’re collective. And that is really what we see is more partnerships, strengthening up the network.

Boyd Varty (50:15):

Yeah, I would build on that and say what I see is world-class indexing nodes all over Africa that create network diversity but also are unlocking the potential of hundreds and thousands of African people, uplifting them, educating them, and preparing them for the future web3 space and being a model for a radical transformation in philanthropy centered out of the idea that decentralized protocols create value rather than extract value.

(50:49):

So I would like to see that built out to the point where across the continent, we are affecting the lives of hundreds and thousands of people whilst further decentralizing the network and disrupting philanthropy. So I just see us operating on multiple levels. It’s ambitious, it’s big, but I really believe that it is possible and we are off to the races and we are already seeing the potential and now it’s just a question of building that out across the continent.

Nick (51:20):

Well, in a similar tone, I’d like to know what your long-term vision for The Graph is because outside of everything you’re doing, The Graph seems like a remarkable platform, not just for DePhi and web3, but for people out there who are mission-driven like you. What’s your long-term vision for The Graph?

Rich Laburn (51:38):

To me, The Graph is all about the community and the spirit of abundance, the spirit of sharing and seeing that grow so that more people are aligned in a way of working together, which is bound by common values and by the collective. From a technical perspective, I think It’s pretty infinite what it can do. When I look and try and envision what The Graph could become, it’s not a 10 or 20 year journey. It’s almost like if you’ve got to cast your head four decades, three decades into the future with trying to imagine the full scope of decentralization and the amount of decentralized data that is going to be moving around and being shaped through it.

(52:20):

One of the ways I look at it is I try and reflect back to many years ago when the Arab Spring happened and Twitter was the big app for distributing communication around it, and that was effectively one of the catalysts for that to happen. I look at decentralized media such as Live PIA, and I think how will that work in the context like Africa and how will that work in terms of the knock on effects?

Boyd Varty (52:47):

As a layman, I always caveat my position as technical layman, but my light bulb moment was when I first started talking to high level developers who can actually conceive of where the space is going. That’s where the light bulb really started to go off for me because when I saw what they were seeing and how excited they were about what The Graph is positioned to do in the web3 space, how far it is ahead of anyone else, I started to realize how difficult it is to even conceive of the potential of The Graph. Because in order to perceive of the potential of The Graph in the web3 space, somehow you have to get yourself into the full scope of what web3 will mean. And that is actually a massive challenge.

(53:35):

It is so powerful and I think so difficult to conceive of that it’s difficult for people to project into the future in that way. But I know that as you say, The Graph is going to be central to that. The Graph’s utility is central to that. The Graph is the foundation that builds that. I don’t think people have fully grasped that yet. And you just need to see the lights go on in web3 developers’ eyes and believe as I do that web3 is the future, to start to even remotely conceive of what this could be.

Rich Laburn (54:07):

To me, I viewed this funnel of data, it’s like a quantum field. It’s like you’ve got to learn how to shape energy and data is no different. It’s so ubiquitous. We seen the tokenization of everything. We are going to even see the tokenization of humans in a few years. It’s already happening where you can go and list yourself as a public or traded commodity. But effectively with data, it’s not like oil anymore. It’s like sunlight. It’s just everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. And we have to understand that with The Graph enabling that, it’s touching everything. And that is tremendously exciting in that it has such a wide breadth of reach.

(54:44):

But with that, I think what I see as the vision is people who are able to shape the energy, people are able to shape the data and start to move at a new directions and start to move the streams as forces. And the key thing there is to create forces for abundance rather than forces for personal use or selfish gain. And I think that that’s what is remarkable about The Graph is that already it has established such a strong community with such strong values of the spirit of abundance and of support and of altruistic ideals, as opposed to a protocol that might say, “We’re all about as much as we can extract and this is what matters to us.” And I think that for me is tremendously exciting in terms of the long-term vision of where The Graph could go.

Nick (55:28):

Richie and Boyd, thank you so much. You’ve been so generous with your time and I’m really inspired by what Indexer Africa is doing and your vision not only for The Graph and for web3, but for the people of Africa. If listeners want to learn more about you and the work you’re doing, what’s the best way to do it?

Rich Laburn (55:47):

The best way to find out more about Index Africa is to visit our website. That’s indexafrica.io. You can also join the Index Africa Telegram channel, which is where we communicate with all of our Delegators. And The Graphica Discord channel is an open invitation for web3 developers in Africa. And we’ll pop that in the show notes.