GRTiQ Podcast: 53 Baptiste Greve

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Baptiste Greve (00:00:21):

And I feel like when you start using The Graph for the first time, there is something magical in it, right? I don’t know, it’s like maybe 20 years ago if you would perform a Google search, you would realize that there is something magical with being able to search the entire internet with a few words and with The Graph it needs The Graph query, but it has something magical in it.

Nick (00:01:12):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Baptiste Greve, project manager at Edge & Node and founder of Orbis. A decentralized version of Twitter built on Ceramic and Arweave. Baptiste is an incredible talent. Someone who has the rare combination of abilities ranging from software development to marketing to being, as Baptiste says, a builder. During our discussion, Baptiste talks about his journey into entrepreneurship, which culminated in the launch of his first enterprise, Unimersiv, a successful VR educational experience. Then Baptiste talks about his path into crypto, launching his second venture, My DeFi, and how he was first a user of The Graph and then went to work at Edge & Node. We then talk about how Baptiste recently launched Orbis, what it is and his long-term vision for the project. And all along the way Baptiste shares interesting ideas and information that I’m sure you’ll find insightful. As always, we started the discussion by talking about Baptiste’s educational background.

Baptiste Greve (00:02:18):

So I went to a classic business school in France. I had the chance to do some internships while I was there. And one of them was in New York, in Historic in New York, and that’s really when I got into web development, UX designs. It was in 2010. So the startup, because system wasn’t the same as today, but it was really when I discovered this world new startup thing and I really fell in love with it, it was a super exciting internship. And that’s how I actually started coding. So I was working as a sort of marketer, UX designer with this company. But when I was coming back to my home at night, I was starting to learn html, learned PHP, work on my first personal project. And that year I immediately loved it and it never was part of my curriculum because in business school in France, you never learned coding, but I just fell in love with it. And since then I’ve always did it in my free time, always coding on some new projects.

Nick (00:03:24):

I’d be curious to know what it was about that startup environment that engaged you so much and kind of drove the rest of your life professionally.

Baptiste Greve (00:03:33):

I feel like it’s multiple things. There is this energy that I never felt in my previous internship. So the previous internships were in sort of classic companies in France, and I never felt that energy, that excitement. And when I was in New York and part of it were maybe because of the American culture as well versus the French one, but this ecosystem, which is so moving superfast, I felt that everyone had a chance to actually do something bigger than that they were supposed to. So when I joined, I was supposed to do only marketing stuff for this company, but then very quickly I got a shot at doing some UX design stuff and I really loved it. And in the end, like in Germany, if I would’ve stayed longer, I could have probably also helped on web development and this kind of energy where you can switch from one thing to another if you spend time to learn and to develop some skills. I feel like this was very unique to the startup ecosystem and maybe to the US as well.

Nick (00:04:31):

So let’s talk about Paris. That’s where you’re joining me from. It’s your hometown. How would you describe the opinions of the people in France towards crypto and blockchain right now?

Baptiste Greve (00:04:42):

So it’s tough for me to answer this because most of the crypto ecosystem that I interact with is based in multiple countries in the world, the main one being probably the US with Edge & Node, but I’m also talking with some people all around the world. So I’m not that involved in the French ecosystem in crypto, but there is definitely an interest that is growing and growing and I felt initially it was mainly about speculative. The people wanted to make some money with Ethereum and Bitcoin going up.

(00:05:18):

So four years ago, for example, when I was in the ecosystem, all of my friends were like, “Hey, how can I set up my Coinbase account and which coin should I buy?” And no, I can see this with my friends. It really moved toward people actually using it. So I love it when I see friends actually using Uniswap or buying an NFT, even if they don’t do it, just they don’t necessarily do it because they accept the profit out of it, but they do it because there is some genuine curiosity that you didn’t have before. So I felt like this is a super, super exciting thing.

Nick (00:05:51):

And am I correct in thinking that there’s an emerging DeFi ecosystem in France? How would you describe what’s going on there?

Baptiste Greve (00:05:59):

Yeah, definitely. And I can see more and more companies being built in France. Even this morning I was having a call with a French guy who was starting to work on his own Z-k proofs company. So there were definitely a lot of things happening. And I can even see on LinkedIn or Twitter, I receive DMs from people that I was in school with and they were like, “Hey, I saw that you’re in the DeFi ecosystem. I’m launching my own DeFi company. Can we jump on the call to discuss this?” So those things are really new and I felt like those people or French people. So there is definitely a trend in France with people that weren’t in the crypto ecosystem before, but are starting to join it as entrepreneurs or as just people that want to join the space. So yeah, that’s great.

Nick (00:06:45):

So after your visit to New York, you obviously get the bug to be an entrepreneur and you enjoy the startup environment and anyone that looks you up and takes a look at your background will see that you are an entrepreneur at heart, some of your early ventures. Was it My DeFi? It was an early project you started. What can you share with listeners about what you did at My DeFi?

Baptiste Greve (00:07:04):

Yeah, My DeFi was a super exciting adventure. So basically what happened is, so we were in mid 2019, I wanted to get involved with the wallet Ethereum ecosystem more. I was following it since 2017, but never actually bought a real stuff on top of it. And so DeFi was just getting started. So I think back then we had Maker, which was my first step into DeFi. It felt magical to print dye with Eth being locked as collateral. It truly felt magical for me. And then you had Compound, you had Uniswap liquidity pools that were just getting started. Synthetics was just getting started as well. And so I was starting to use those protocols and I was wondering, but okay, now that my money is locked on all of those different places, how can I actually see what’s happening? So I started building a very simple DeFi aggregator in which you would just paste your Ethereum address and it would be synchronized with all of those different protocols and show you exactly where your assets were.

(00:08:12):

But the cool thing is that I initially built this for me, so it was my personal dashboard running on local. I was checking it during the morning and at some point I was like, but maybe some people have the same problem as me. Maybe I should just make it public because there probably other people that want to use it as well. So that’s what I did and it was really successful. The launch day, I remember I had hundreds of people who actually downloaded the app and then those people came back every day refreshing the app multiple times per day. So you could really feel that you are solving a problem that people had. But it’s fun now that I think about it, and it was so, it doesn’t feel that long ago, but in the DeFi lifetime it felt like an eternity. You have only four protocols, whereas as maybe now, you have a 100 and I don’t even keep track of all of them. No, it has become impossible. But yeah, super exciting experience.

Nick (00:09:05):

So let’s go back a little bit. What was that inflection point for you to move from traditional business into the crypto space and get interested in DeFi and launching things like My DeFi?

Baptiste Greve (00:09:16):

Yeah, so before my DeFi, I was working on my own company, which was named Unimersiv. And Unimersiv was started in 2015 at the very beginning of the virtual reality trend. And the idea with Unimersiv was to get people to download this platform that would be a platform of virtual reliability educational content. So you would download Unimersiv and you would be, within Unimersiv, you would be able to explore Ancient Rome and see how it was 2000 years ago in 3D, in 360 degrees, you would be able to travel as well to the Acropolis of Athens inside the human brain. So really I wanted to get people to learn in a super immersive way, and that was pretty successful. It was very early in virtual reality, but I had almost half a million people who actually downloaded the app mainly on the Oculus Go and that were just traveling virtually to those places.

And some of them were teachers who even were using it in their school to teach their kids. Some of our people were in university and wanted to work with me to build some more advanced sort of curriculums. So I did that for four years and during those four years I built more experiences. In the end I had maybe 12 or 15 different ones and I was also improving the core of the platform. But in the end, something that happened that was really frustrating for me is we were in this great partnership with Oculus and the app was frequently being featured because they liked the content and that’s one of the reason why it got so much traction. But when Oculus launched the Quest, the Oculus Quest, which is this really great headset, they kind of decided to change the rules and instead of following any type of content on the platform, they really decided to focus on gaming.

(00:11:10):

So the initial apps that were allowed on the Quest store was mainly directed to gaming. So when this happened, basically Unimersiv was already not in a very good shape financially because building all of this virtual reality educational content is super expensive and it’s harder to monetize that gaming. So the company wasn’t in a good shape, but this was the final nail in the coffin. And so when I closed Unimersiv with this still frustration in mind, it was really a push forward for me to join web3.I realized the power that decentralized platforms can have, because when you think about it, my opinion is that it shouldn’t be one person being able to decide whether or not a specific piece of content should be accepted on the platform. It should be a community choice.

(00:12:00):

I would’ve loved the Oculus ecosystem to decide, okay, should we accept education? Should we accept gaming? Should we accept other type of contents? And maybe they would’ve voted no, but that would be much easier to accept when it’s only one person or just a few people actually deciding this for you. So that really got me to focus 100% of my time on Ethereum mainly and now web3.

Nick (00:12:24):

So then I guess it’s your position that web3 would be the ultimate solution for scenarios like this where platforms have centralized power or authority?

Baptiste Greve (00:12:34):

So the thing with what we call the Web 2 is that as a partner, as a developer, or even as a user, you must trust the entity that you’re interacting with. When you share a post on Twitter, you trust that. And when you build a following there, some people have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and build maybe their business on top of it, you trust that Twitter will keep the same kind of rules, will still allow you to interact with your followers. And if you are a developer building on top of Twitter API, you trust that they won’t change the rules so that your business can keep on growing and being alive. So you have this huge trust, but the issue is that the company that you’re trusting doesn’t necessarily share the same incentives as you. If you think about even just the Facebook algorithm or any other social networks algorithm, it’s not necessarily optimized for your wellbeing or for you to find exactly the type of content that you want.

(00:13:37):

It’s sometimes optimized to get you to watch a advertising or get you even maybe to get a sort of addicted so that you can come back more frequently to the platform. So the incentives are really misaligned between the partners, the users, and the company that you are trusting. With web3 is different because if it’s built right, since the data is decentralized, for example, we can talk about Orbis decentralized social network that I’m working on, but if you share something on Orbis and if you start to gain followers, all of this content, so every posts, every reactions, every followers is not stored on a centralized server. It’s stored on the decentralized platform that is named Ceramic. So that means that even if the website orbis.club that you interacted with decide to change the rules and maybe to change its algorithm or to follow a business model that you don’t like, at any point you can leave and you can leave with your data.

(00:14:38):

So you could view, since all of this data is decentralized, you could view everything that you are seeing on the Orbis on a completely different website that could be built by you or by anyone. And so when you think about it as the builder of orbis.club, I know it and I bought it, so I want it to be decentralized that way. But so the incentives that I have are going to be much more aligned with the users and with the partners that are going to work with me because I know that if they don’t like it, they can leave. And I know that I can’t stop partners from accessing a specific type of data. So you can see that the incentives are really much more aligned between the users, the partners, and the builders. And I felt like this is a big problem that web3 is solving and this is really why I’m so excited about it.

Nick (00:16:03):

This idea of incentives is very interesting, as you said there’re, Web 2 has all these incentive structures that really empowers a centralized platform. So in the case of Orbis and realigning incentives, what are your incentives? What is Orbis’ incentives to provide this service?

Baptiste Greve (00:16:20):

I think it’s a good question. So the thing with incentives, I felt like the problem that we want to solve in web3 is not that builders should not be incentivized. It’s not that users should have all of the incentives, it’s how you can find a perfect balance for a project or company to live for hundreds of years. And so with Orbis, for example, one thing, and I was very transparent with my users since the beginning, there is one thing that I absolutely need is that at any point if the users are not happy by some choices made by me, they should be able to leave with all of their data. So that’s the data layer stack.

(00:17:03):

It being decentralized means that at any point in time, if I decide to follow a business model that they don’t like, or if I decide to change the user experience in a way that they are not comfortable with or maybe change the algorithm and make it not as open as it is today or things like this, they can decide to access the exact same data but from another interface, which is going to be a website. So you have this very important difference that you don’t have in web3, which is you have the user interface, which can be a mobile application, a website which can be centralized like orbis.club, the domain name is probably going to be owned by the Orbis company, but what’s behind the protocol and the data, this is decentralized.

And so you need to find a balance to make sure that since the data is decentralized and people can access your decentralized data, which is a common good from anywhere that they want, if you want to make decent business, you need to provide the best user experience as possible within the things that you own, which are the domain names and the application. And so I felt when you start thinking about it this way, there are things that you reject immediately. So ads for example, are a good example, I don’t want ads on Orbis because I think that they are a bad business model, but there are other things that you start embracing more.

(00:18:32):

And there are ways, for example, in which I really see Orbis as a door to entry to web3 for hundreds of thousands or even at some point hundreds of millions of people. And if this is something that you can succeed in, then it’s easy to find some revenue streams. So some example, the cool thing about Orbis is that since people log in with their wallet, you can view the different NFT collections being used by all of the users and people can show it in their profile picture. And I sometimes saw myself, I was looking at this user, he joins, he has a super nice NFT profile picture. And so I’m like, what is this collection? So I click on the collection, I go check it on Open, see how looks were, but it’s not such a big gap to say, hey, but maybe I should just be able to buy NFTs within Orbis because I’m watching this NFT on Orbis. Why do I have to go to another platform to buy it?

And so this would be this sort of things where the domain name that has the attention can monetize. It’s like, okay, I’m going to offer you this new service that if you want to, you can use, but you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, which is okay, now you can buy NFTs within Orbis and we get a commission on this. And again, if you feel that this is a bad business model, you can go to another platform that is maybe going to use advertising and maybe that’s fine for you because you prefer advertising. So the incentive is, okay, how do you make sure that you provide services in a way that are not going to make your users want to use another platform to access your data? And so if you think about the wallet DeFi and NFT ecosystem, there are plenty of ways where you could actually monetize by providing a service and not by extracting value such as attention from your users.

Nick (00:20:19):

Well, I’m excited to talk to you a lot more about Orbis and we’ll spend time in this interview exploring more about what you’re doing there and inviting listeners who want to get involved to get more involved. Before we get there, what do you say to people who might have a counter argument to this idea of platforms remaining neutral and they say something like, well, there are instances or occasions where maybe somebody should be deplatformed, maybe the platform should retain the right to boot somebody or block some content. What do you say to people who have those types of concerns?

Baptiste Greve (00:20:50):

Well, I think it’s a very rigid concern and there is definitely some types of content that you don’t necessarily want to be shared. And maybe sometimes it’s going to be because it’s illegal or some content that is illegal to share and to us as a platform, but the real question is how do you make those choices? And with a centralized platform, there is going to be decentralized entity that is able to make all of those choices, whereas with web3, you can have a much more advanced decentralized content moderation. So you could have users building reputation and being able to decide if this type of content should be allowed in the US, if this type of content should be all allowed in Russia or in China. And then you could have different streams of posts and developers could decide if they want to wire their version of Orbis to the content that has been moderated for the US or the content that has been moderated for China or for Russia.

(00:21:48):

But people have a choice. So I felt like moderation is important. There is some content that shouldn’t be shared because it’s illegal in some countries, but the question is how do you identify this content and is it centralized or decentralized? And I felt like if we do it right, we could have a very advanced decentralized content moderation. And even regarding, it doesn’t even have to be moderation, but if you think about all of the fake news label, so for who can decide if a news is fake or not, and I felt like this is a very fascinating subject and the community can play a big role in this. Like maybe you can, once again, if you can have people building reputation on certain different topics within Orbis, you could have experts sharing their view on whether or not a topic is an opinion expressed in an article is fake or not.

(00:22:39):

And you could even have debate and people when they check if the news is considered fake or not, they could look at the history of the debates and maybe make their own opinion and you could see if an article is considered controversial or if it’s sort of approved by the community. And I feel like it would be a much better way to track if the news is fake or not. Usually it’s a slider. There is some part of it that is going to be controversial or not. So I feel like this is the kind of problem that you can solve with web3 by making all of it decentralized and by building the correct set of incentives on top of it. You can go much further than the centralized platforms. We must pay for everything themselves.

(00:23:17):

If you want to do content moderation at Facebook, you have to hire someone to do this work and this is what they are doing. They have thousands of people actually blocking some illegal content on Facebook, whereas you could have in a decentralized platform, could have hundreds of thousands of people doing this maybe 10 minutes per day if you have the right set of incentives. So you can have a much larger amount of people willing to do this work than you have with centralized platforms.

Nick (00:23:45):

With respects to web3, there’s obviously a lot of online chatter and buzz about what web3 is, how it should be defined, and even if it can be realized in the world. So stepping back a little bit here, what’s your perspective of web3? Is this an experiment where kind of waiting to see what happens or is this inevitability and evolution where we’re heading?

Baptiste Greve (00:24:06):

So if you project yourself in five or 10 years, it’s very hard for me to think that we’re still going to be in a world where all of our digital human interactions are going to be stored in one server, but we’re going to live in a world where we are all subjected to the same algorithm and we cannot pick our algorithm or we cannot just select one that has been built by someone in another country. And this is the same thing with finance and the role of banks in the finance industry. When you look at all of the innovation that is happening, it’s hard for me to imagine that we’re going to live with the same rules in 10 years. And for me, this is what web3 is about. I’m mainly interested in data ownership right now because I felt that this is going to be something that is going to really shake the entire digital experience that we’re going to have in the next years.

(00:25:07):

But I feel like it’s fine if web3 means something different for different people. When I got started in DeFi, for me DeFi was web3. For some people, NFTs are going to be web3. For me it’s like data ownership and shared incentives is a very big part of web3. And I feel like in a few years we’re going to see which narrative actually had the biggest impact on people’s life and this is what web3 is going to be like. I feel like it’s going to be decided in maybe the next 24 months.

Nick (00:25:37):

There’s been an idea that keeps cropping up on the podcast, which is this coexistence with Web 2 and web3. I’d love to get your opinions on this because the more I learn about it, the more I speak with people like you, the more it becomes apparent to me that there’s probably some coexistence of the two and the world. How have you thought through that?

Baptiste Greve (00:25:55):

Yeah, I felt like not all of the data in the world is going to be decentralized or at least not right now, but there is some data that is super important for you that people will want to be decentralized and personal data, for example is one of those things. But if you think about all of the analytics tools that we are using, I think that there is still going to be value in having sometimes the data being stored in a very classic post grayscale database that you can query very, very simply. But as it grows, I feel like those centralized data silos are going to be more and more rare. But regarding web3 coexisting with Web 2, I felt like it really depends and I felt like it also really depends on how we define Web 2 even. It’s not only about web3, for example, is email Web 2 or web3, how does email play a role in web3?

I feel like I’m not super comfortable sharing my email address when I log in on a website with MetaMask for example, or we going to have a web3 notification system that everyone will be using instead of emails maybe. But for one thing that I’m convinced about is that at some point companies will have to make a choice, and it’s especially true for the current social networks for example, I felt like it’s going to be hard to trick people into thinking that you are web3 just because you support NFTs. Now, if you really want to embrace web3, you are going to have to open, give people the ownership of their data. You are going to have to make this data decentralized so that anyone can query it and build their own algorithm on top of it. And I’m having trouble imagining those platforms actually doing this.

(00:27:46):

So I feel like for some businesses it’s going to be a zero-sum game where web3 will get this market and will own maybe like 99% of this market in 10 years. And maybe finance is one of those markets. When you start really owning your assets on your wallet, it’s hard to talk with your bank and say that they need three days to unlock this wire that you want to make. Or maybe they blocked your account because they weren’t sure about the activity that you had because you were using crypto. It doesn’t feel like the future. Whereas when you play with DeFi, some experiences are really incredible. So I felt like some industries are going to be completely acquired by web3, whereas others will maybe stay alive and maybe will take a better turn to embrace web3. But I feel like this is going to be a fascinating sort of war to watch in the next five years, probably the most interesting of all.

Nick (00:28:55):

So going back a little bit to your personal story, you got involved in crypto and then you eventually made your way to Edge & Node. For listeners that don’t know, Edge & Node is one of the core dev teams working at The Graph. So what can you tell us about finding Edge & Node and going to work there?

Baptiste Greve (00:29:10):

Yeah, that’s a good question. So the fun thing is that when I was building My DeFi, I was actually querying subgraphs for some kind of data. So I saw chats of me on the Discord in 2019 with me asking, “Hey, how can I query the Uniswap liquidity pools using a subgraph or something like this?” So I actually discovered and was using The Graph way before I joined the team. And so I told you after My DeFi, so after working six months on it, no, it was just after my previous virtual reality company experience. So I didn’t necessarily have the energy to do it all again, to raise funds, to hire people. I was a bit burnt out by my previous entrepreneurial journey. So okay, My DeFi is working well, but if you really want to compete with the other platforms that were getting better and better, you need to do it full time and you need to hire some people. And I didn’t have the energy to do it.

(00:30:16):

So I talked with a few team in the ecosystem and Zerion, which is one of the best DeFi aggregator or node, they were interesting in acquiring My DeFi. So they acquired My DeFi six months after I launched it. And then I spent a year working in a traditional e-commerce company in France and after a year I realized that I wasn’t doing what I loved, I was missing crypto way too much. I was spending all of my weekends and all of my time learning more about it, experiencing with new DeFi protocols. So this was during the wallet year, 2020, and at this time crypto really started to gain a lot of traction in 2020. And so I went on the winter vacations and I come back and I’m like, okay, I need to switch back to crypto full time.

(00:31:07):

So I’m starting to look at some product manager roles in crypto companies and agent that was actually searching for product manager to help build The Graph Explorer and the Subgraphs Studio, which are the two products that people are using to build subgraphs and to discover them and do all of those protocol actions. And so I applied, I got to meet with Yaniv Tal and Brandon Ramirez and since I knew The Graph super well because I was using it as a developer, the interview process was very smooth and I was really excited by the chat that I had with them. So they made me an offer, I very happily accepted and so I joined the team, which was in March last year. And so I joined as a product manager. So my main role at this time was to launch the Subgraphs Studio and the new version of The Explorer because until now people were using the hosted service Explorer to discover subgraphs.

(00:32:05):

But now, we have this whole decentralized experience where subgraphs are published on the network being indexed by Indexers, signaled on by Curators. And so I, with the engineering and design team, we really built this thing from scratch. And so that’s what I did during my first four months really finalizing a lot of those products and launching them I believe in June. And since then it has much more been focused on, okay, how do we improve those products that we launch, which features our users need or how can we make it more easier to use this kind of thing.

Nick (00:32:44):

Another theme that’s emerging on this podcast in interviews with people like you is they first came into contact with The Graph as a user and then made some contacts and eventually went full-time into the space. What does that say about the type of solution or the problem that The Graph is solving in the world? What was that like for you?

Baptiste Greve (00:33:07):

Yeah, I think you are completely right. A lot of colleagues were actually people that built on The Graph before joining Edge & Node. And I felt like when you start using The Graph for the first time, there is something magical in it. You have access to all of this data, but as a developer it’s super difficult to get access to. If you want to query a large set of data using just the web3 GS packages, it’s going to take you a lot of line of cards and it’s not going to be performed at all. Whereas with The Graph, you can just do one GraphQL query and get access to all of the Uniswap liquidity pools, all of the vaults opened on Maker contracts. And so as a user you can feel that this experience is something that works super well and I felt like it gets people to want to join the team.

(00:33:57):

It’s kind of like, I don’t know, it’s like maybe 20, maybe 20 years ago, if you would perform a Google search, you would realize that there is something magical with being able to search the entire internet with a few words and with The Graph instead of being a few words, it’s a graphical query, but it has something magical in it. And also the team is really amazing when you get to talk with Yaniv, with Brandon and all of the other people, you can feel this motivation and this energy that I never felt anywhere else as an employee.

Nick (00:34:32):

So what did you learn going from a user to someone helping to work and build and to grow The Graph? What was some insights or early observations that you had?

Baptiste Greve (00:34:43):

So the first thing is that I felt that my onboarding as an employee was superfast because when you arrive and you’re like, oh, as a subgraph developers, they want to solve this kind of problem, and you’re like, yes, but me, so I was using The Graph from a different point of view than someone building a subgraph for his app. If you’re a Uniswap and you are building a subgraph for your app, you are not necessarily going to be looking for the same thing that if you are My DeFi looking to find the best Uniswap subgraph or the best Maker subgraph or the best Compound subgraph to build this aggregation thing. So I felt that I really understood The Graph very well, at least some part of it, the subgraph developer experience and all of the dev developer experience as well.

(00:35:29):

But the super interesting thing was that most of my work was targeted to the network. And when I was querying The Graph, it was back then in 2019, it was just the hosted service. So it’s like I was used to The Graph in this hosted service place where you query subgraphs and no, I check it again a year after. And no, it’s like this giant protocol with all of these token economics being super complex and those different roles to get everything to work with Indexers. And so the first thing was a very big surprise and I felt that I didn’t know The Graph at all. I had to spend hours watching videos, reading all of Brandon’s articles to understand what all of this new concepts were about. But what did I learn that I didn’t know before? I felt like apart from all of this different protocol interactions that were completely new to me, I’m not sure.

Nick (00:36:31):

Is a solution like The Graph necessary for web3 to exist?

Baptiste Greve (00:36:35):

Oh yeah, it is. And the fun thing is that when I started working on Orbis, which is built on Ceramic, I almost didn’t launch it because The Graph is not indexing Ceramic for Node. And so I was like, but if The Graph is not indexing Ceramic, how can you build something on top of Ceramic? So I almost didn’t launch Orbis and I had to find a work around to do this indexing work myself because The Graph wasn’t doing it for now. So when this happened, I was like, okay, you can realize the impact that The Graph can have on the entire web3 ecosystem and also the role that it plays in picking the network that it’ll support prioritizing the different networks, for example. But yeah, I felt like if we wouldn’t have The Graph, I don’t think that DeFi would be in the place that it is right now with all of those dashboards and super smooth user experience. So yeah, it’s definitely needed.

 

Nick (00:39:07):

Let’s talk a little bit about Orbis now, and it was something I’m really excited to talk to you about. It’s come up a few times here in the answers that you’ve provided, but some listeners may not be familiar quite yet with Orbis. And so let’s take a minute here and just describe what Orbis is and when you launched it.

Baptiste Greve (00:39:21):

Sure. So the main context is what I described earlier, which is when you project yourself in five or 10 years, I really can’t imagine billions of humans interacting digitally together via centralized platforms. So these interactions must be decentralized and this is something that our civilization really need. And so that was a deep problem that I spent a lot of time thinking about and even working on during the past year, even before joining Edge & Node. I had decided some parts on my computer, but I always had one issue, which is that if you want the data that you create to be sort of owned, you always need to interact with a blockchain. So my initial proof of concept, for example, you would be using a very early version of Orbis and to post something, I would push it to Arweave and then get the ash and store the ash on a blockchain like Polygon or xDAI for example.

(00:40:25):

And Polygon or xDAI are not very expensive to use as a user, but the issue is that you have this friction that every time that you perform one action, you need to validate a transaction. So imagine liking a post on Facebook and having MetaMask being open and always validating a transaction. So I never launched it and at some point I discovered Ceramic. And the great thing about Ceramic is that you can actually have, you have this identity layer within Ceramic itself. So the first time that you connect, you create your decentralized identity with your Ethereum wallet. And with this identity you can create any kind of content that you want, which are basically just your local streams whether they are simple JSON files. And now, I could actually build my ID without having to ask people to validate a transaction every time and to pay transaction fees because with Ceramic is just much more fluid. You don’t have to validate anything.

(00:41:24):

And so the concept of Orbis is very simple initially, is okay, how do we get people to share things to other kind of people in a fully decentralized manner? So you sign in as a user, you can share something on Orbis as a Twitter like experience, and this content is going to be stored on Ceramic and going to index it, and then someone else on the other side of the planet will be able to view this content and to decide if he wants to follow you or to react to your post. So very simple Twitter like experience, but the real long-term goal is much bigger than this. So right after launch I implemented the feature that I was the most excited about, which are groups. So right now, if you think about it, most of the crypto ecosystem is based on Discord servers.

(00:42:14):

You have all of us and NFT projects creating Discord servers, all of the DeFi protocols, some super governance decisions being discussed on Discord servers. And so what would happen if one day Discord decide to close all crypto related Discord servers? It would be super hard for the entire ecosystem if this happens. And the idea behind all these groups is that those communities, those crypto communities, they shouldn’t be relying on centralized servers. They should be relying on a decentralized technical stack. And with Orbis you can just log in and create a group. So we could have a group dedicated to GRTiQ, for example, that any of your listeners could join, and they would join just by using their MetaMask wallet. So you don’t have to use any email addresses, any password, so anyone can join your group. And then the experience is very, I’m trying to make it very similar to what you can have with Discord with different channels.

(00:43:12):

But the very interesting thing is that since you are connecting with your Ethereum wallet, Orbis has access to all of your unchain activity. So let’s say that instead of GRTiQ, it’s going to be an NFT project that is going to create its community on Orbis. So you could have all of us, all your users joining and being able to use the NFT that they own of this project as their verified profile picture. And also you can view the ENS name that they own. You can even view if they are verified on proof of humanity to prove that they are human. So you can have this native integration with the entire blockchain ecosystem, which is really fascinating. And if you go even deeper for let’s say that at some point The Graph creates community on Orbis, instead of having to use Discord to share some governance ideas, then the Discords forum to share very longer term discussions with arguments, then snapshot polls to decide the argument that were to actually vote on the argument that were being shared on Discord.

(00:44:17):

And then the real on chain experience, you could have everything embedded into Orbis. So you could have people joining The Graph group on Orbis, and you could have the poll experience that would be integrated within Orbis where all of your votes on polls would be [inaudible 00:44:36] weighted based on the amount of [inaudible 00:44:38] owned by the address that you logged in with. You could have longer term discussions, but also shorter term discussion and all of these things, I feel like it’s going to make the world collaboration experience in the crypto ecosystem much easier. So this is definitely the trend that I want to take with Orbis is allowing communities and groups together in a fully decentralized way and with crypto native integrations.

Nick (00:45:04):

When did Orbis launch?

Baptiste Greve (00:45:06):

A month and a half ago. Almost two months, maybe one month and 20 days ago.

Nick (00:45:10):

And what’s been the response in this last two months?

Baptiste Greve (00:45:13):

It has been very exciting. So I had thousands of people that actually joined with their, connected with their wallet, thousands and thousands of posts. I think I haven’t checked the last number, but there probably is around 8,000 posts that have been shared in this timeframe with users, hundreds of groups being created. I think something like 300 different groups being created. And you see those users, you have a specific core set of users joining every day and sharing super interesting ideas about Orbis and also about web3 in general. And I felt like we are having some conversations that I would never have on Twitter or on Discord. So it’s much deeper arguments or explanations about the web3 space. And one thing that has been interesting is that for some of us early users, they got maybe hundreds of followers on Orbis. And there are some people that they had a Twitter account for a few months, but it never really took off, even if they were super smart people with really brilliant ideas.

(00:46:21):

But on Twitter, the algorithm never actually give them a chance. But on Orbis, no, they are hundreds of followers, they are the most active users and they share all of their ideas. They can feel because of the response of the reactions of the comments, that they’re actually people listening to what they are saying. Maybe sometimes they’re going to asking for advices. And I felt like this is something fascinating. You have hundreds of millions of people using Twitter, but if you give a chance to people in a much more focused platform, they can actually develop an audience that they would not have on this very big platform. So this is something that has been super exciting to watch.

Nick (00:46:59):

You’ve touched on a theme here. I want to leverage some insight from you on because I don’t think a lot of listeners understand it fully. I know in a lot of ways I don’t. When you were designing Orbis, you selected Ceramic, so I think that’s kind of interesting. What can you share with listeners about the options available to builders like you to choose different blockchains and why you might choose one over another?

Baptiste Greve (00:47:23):

So there are two things I felt like. So there are blockchains. Ethereum is a blockchain. Bitcoin is a blockchain. Polygon, Avalanche all [inaudible 00:47:31] of blockchains, but you have also decentralized data stack that are technically not blockchains. If you think about Arweave for example, it’s not a blockchain, we cannot put it in the same bucket, but it’s not one. And Ceramic, it’s not a blockchain either. It’s more of a network of nodes in a connected together to get you to be able to access data in a decentralized way. And so I felt like the first thing that you need to do is, okay, which problem do I want to solve? And it’s going to be your app. And if it’s a financial application, then probably the answer is going to be a blockchain because Ceramic or Arweave would be very bad ways to enroll financial transaction if it’s even possible.

(00:48:09):

So then that would be a blockchain. And if it’s a blockchain, then what do you want to optimize for? Maybe what you’re building on is a game that needs super low transaction fees and superfast transaction times. So then Ethereum is probably not going to be the solution, but then you can dive into Polygon, dive into xDAI dive maybe into Avalanche or other networks. For me, I know that the problem that I had was that I didn’t wanted my users to interact with a blockchain because I felt like blockchain are super good for financial transactions, but they were very bad to actually ask data. They haven’t been built for it. So Ceramic was initially the only choice that I saw that was allowing me to have this identity and ownership layer on top of decent data.

(00:49:00):

So I saved it already, but each stream is basically a JSON file and this JSON file is being owned by a decentralized ID. And this relationship, it’s hard to get on things like, I know that we’re working on some things such as the Bundlr network I believe, which can get you to access some sort of similar experiences. But the Ceramic is in this sweet spot where you can have ownership on top of the data and real data, not just financial transactions. And so for me, that was the sort of logical choice. And also one famous thing is that I wanted to learn more but Ceramic because I heard about it for so long and I never dive into the developer doc, so I used Orbis as a way to learn Ceramic. So I did it the other way around and that ended up working super well. So I was very happy with it.

Nick (00:49:53):

So how do listeners then interface with Orbis? If I want to go use this and start getting involved, what’s the path to doing so?

Baptiste Greve (00:49:59):

Yeah, so that’s super simple. The domain name is orbis.club and all you need is a wallet. So you can either connect via WalletConnect or via MetaMask if you have it in your browser. And then once you do it, you don’t need in anything else, you connect with your wallet. If you have any ENS name, we are going to see that you have viewed this ENS name and it’s going to be showed instead of your Ethereum address. If you have NFTs, you can use them as your profile picture and we will actually verify that you own them. So you will have a small badge showing that you actually own the NFT that you’re using as a profile picture, and then that’s it. You can just start sharing posts or just joining groups if you want to. Some people don’t necessarily want to share things, but they want to read interesting discussions about web3. So you can just connect with your wallet and then start joining groups and watching conversations and if you want to even comment or share your own post.

Nick (00:50:52):

Well, it’s been incredibly exciting to watch as the community around Orbis has grown and a lot more attention is being driven to use and participation. What’s your long-term vision for something like Orbis?

Baptiste Greve (00:51:03):

So I feel like in the short term, I really want it to be the place that the crypto ecosystem uses to collaborate and manage their DAOs and maybe even hire people directly. But in the long term, at some point you want to, if you want to reach hundreds of millions of people, you will either want the crypto ecosystem to grow super big, superfast, or you want to reach people outside of the crypto ecosystem. And so I felt like this is not for the short term, the real short term focus, at least for the next 18 months, I would say it’s going to be mainly on crypto.

(00:51:42):

But at some point, once you can have those really great conversations, and once you have maybe hundreds of thousands of crypto people who actually joined this platform, then it becomes much easier for external people to migrate to this new social network alternative because you don’t have any advertising on it because the friction to login is super low. You don’t even have to use an email address or a password. All you need is a crypto wallet. And in two years, probably a lot of people will have a crypto wallet on their phone, and the onboarding will probably have been improved a lot. So typically I want it to be the place to replace the centralized social networks that we are using today, but this is very, very much in the long term.

Nick (00:52:27):

If people want to learn more about Orbis and get involved, what’s the best way to learn more? I

Baptiste Greve (00:52:31):

I think they should join. They should just come to orbis.club. We have a group dedicated to Orbis, which is named Orbis Community, and there is a lot of very cool exchanges and information about Orbis. So I think they should just… And they don’t even have to connect if they just want to learn about it, they can just go on orbis.club and go to the group URL and learn more about it.

Nick (00:52:53):

You sort of mentioned this earlier, and I’d like to come back to it just for a second here. How does The Graph play into what you’re doing currently at Orbis and what you want to do long term?

Baptiste Greve (00:53:03):

I feel like there is really a big distinction between the data layer being decentralized. So it’s going to be Ceramic, Arweave, for example, and the querying layer. And so for example, if you look at Ethereum, the wallet blockchain itself is decentralized, but if everyone is using OpenSees API to query NFTs, then you have this super centralized stack on top of a decentralized blockchain. So you can write on a decentralized tech stack, but if you query everything from a centralized stack, then it’s an issue. So what I want with Orbis is I want Orbis to be fully decentralized, but since you don’t have any decentralized indexing system for Ceramic for now, I index all of the different streams about followers, reactions, posts, and everything in a centralized indexing system, which is basically just a post grayscale database with a list of everything that happened on Ceramic.

And so the content itself is decentralized, but if it’s impossible to find, then no one can build on top of it. And so that’s where The Graph plays a critical role is that it’s the decentralized querying stack for the world web3 ecosystem. So when The Graph will support Ceramic, you could have anyone building a subgraph about Orbis to query all of the posts that users made. So you could have MetaMask, for example, query the Orbis subgraph and have a small social tabs within MetaMask. So if you want to, you could just go to MetaMask, go to the social tab and view all of the posts shared by the people that you follow. And they would never have to talk to me to do it. They would just be using a subgraph that could create their own subgraph. So the querying stack need to be decentralized as well, not only the writing stack. And this is where The Graph plays a very critical role.

Nick (00:54:53):

Baptiste, thank you so much for that overview, not only of what you’ve done at Edge & Node and your entry into crypto, but this really cool project, Orbis. Again, I want to encourage listeners to check it out. A lot of buzz, and I’m certain most listeners have already seen a lot of it taking place as Orbis continues to grow. I want to end with three questions and they’re kind of tailored to somebody like you with your life story, and it’s all about this idea of entrepreneurship. You’re obviously an entrepreneur, you’re very engaged in building things. What’s your advice for listeners that also want to be an entrepreneur but don’t know how to do it in the web3 crypto space?

Baptiste Greve (00:55:30):

Yeah, so I feel like there is something very interesting that I experienced multiple times is that we overestimate how hard something is to build or to do, and we underestimate our skills to actually build it. And so this can be related to web development is a super good example of it. For example, if you never did web development before and you’re going to look at some cards, you’re going to be like, this is impossible [inaudible 00:55:59] people or geniuses. But then you stop learning about it and you’re like, but this is not that odd. If you spend a few hours per week actually learning, following a few tutorials about web development, you could become super good in a few months. So I feel like you have people that have this drive to create something and to maybe create their own company, but they can be blocked by the fact that they overestimate how hard it is to build the thing that they might actually want to build.

And I think the solution to this is you just need to get started. So if you have one ID, you shouldn’t think about it too much. You shouldn’t even start by doing market research or whatever. You should just try to build it. Maybe try by, in my world for example, which is really related to customer digital experiences, you can start by doing some mockups so that these idea that you have and then you can start learning some basic coding to actually do it. So I felt like people should just get started a lot more. And the crypto ecosystem is fascinating for it because it’s really welcoming. So I felt like anyone could be like, “Hey, I have this great idea. How can I get started?” And it would’ve dozens of people actually sharing super well-intentioned advices for this person to get started in the web3 space.

(00:57:24):

And this is something that I have never seen anywhere else. If you start to build a small SaaS, for example, and share it on a subreddit dedicated to the people that you want to target, it’s very quickly going to be targeted as advertising or whatever. Whereas in web3 is different. People just like to see some cool new stuff and they want to encourage people to build new things. So I think they should just get started. And I talked about web development, but it could be like anything. So you have some on Orbis for example. You have people that joined on the first day and they have been super active in the community and now they’re helping me welcoming every users and they don’t have any specific tech skills. It’s just that their skill is that they are maybe good with people in digital manner. They want to get involved.

(00:58:13):

And they didn’t think about it too much. They were like, oh, I like this platform, so I want to help you grow. And the best way to help it grow was to be a sort of community ambassador. So this is what they did. So they should just join projects that they are interested in. If they are interested by development, just start asking a few things. Or even what you did with the podcast, it’s fascinating. You have this idea and you can just get it. And you can see that people are actually very interested in listening to your stories, whereas you could also have been hesitant and never launched it because you were afraid of actually talking in public. So people should just get started and experience with the things they’re interested with.

Nick (00:58:53):

Thank you very much for those kind words. I also want to ask you this question about what makes you an entrepreneur, from the perspective of a lot of what entrepreneurship about is trial and error and fix and iterate. A lot of people give up, a lot of people stop there. So what is it that allows you to push through that and to find a career not only as an entrepreneur, but as somebody with the characteristics of pushing through challenges?

Baptiste Greve (00:59:23):

So I don’t necessarily define myself as an entrepreneur, but I’m definitely a builder. I like to build stuff a lot. I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years every day and every weekend. And the thing when you start building things is, one, this thing is getting used. You turn into an entrepreneur because you need to incorporate, maybe hire some people and do some finance stuff that you weren’t necessarily planning on doing. So you become this entrepreneur because you are a builder. But the thing with failures are never easy, when I spend four years spending all of my days working on numeracy, when I had to close the company, it was a super bad moment in my life. But no, when I think about it, it was still a super cool experience and I learned so many things by doing it that now, if I do it again, I felt like I’m going to be much, much better at it.

(01:00:16):

And sometimes you look at people and you are like, oh, how can this person do this so well? But it’s just because you do it over and over and over again, and then at some point you know how to do it. So it’s not like this is hard and this is not something that you should wish for your project failures, but if they happen, then just learn from it and it’s going to be tough. But this is also what makes life exciting. If everything was easy and if you are succeeding in everything, that it wouldn’t have any flavor. The flavor comes from the fact that you have so much success compared to other states in your life, which is, I think the fun part. Again, I would die if I was living a very linear life with every day feeling the same emotions. So I felt every was sort of spiked in the timing and excitement, I feel like it’s super cool.

Nick (01:01:07):

If we put all your experiences, starting all these businesses, launching all these ideas, building all these products, we put all of those experiences in one bucket and you could pull out maybe the most important lesson or the most important thing you feel like you’ve learned. What would you say that is?

Baptiste Greve (01:01:23):

I feel it has to be solve your own problem. So for example, My Defi ended up being much more successful than Unimersiv, whereas My DeFi, I’m only spent six months on it. My DeFi, Unimersiv, I spent four years, but My DeFi was just this thing super targeted toward personal problem that I had. And by solving it for me, I just solved it for hundreds of people and know you have actually tens of thousands of people using DeFi aggregators like Zerion. So solve your own problem when you have someone. And the other day there was even someone on Orbis asking, “Hey, I want to build something in web3, but I don’t have any idea.” But find a problem that you haven’t solve it. So this is an exercise that people should do more, but sometimes it’s harder. So sometimes it’s something like much more I done than this, just very specific need that I have for My DeFi. But being good at finding problems is probably the best skills that you can have as a builder.

Nick (01:02:24):

Baptiste, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been so generous. If listeners want to learn more about you and follow the work that you’re doing, what’s the best way to do it?

Baptiste Greve (01:02:32):

So Orbis is definitely the place where I spend most of my time now, but otherwise I’m on Twitter and my handle is Baptiste Greve so that would be the two main spaces to find me.