GRTiQ Podcast: 54 Adam Fuller

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.

Adam Fuller (00:13):

I basically built a subgraph and refactored everything and got it to work that I been doing that, became a graph fanboy in the sense that it made my app so much simpler I could do stuff that wasn’t even possible. I guess I came to The Graph as a user, which I think is a really, really cool place to start. I think about where I’m now, I’ve never worked on a product that I’ve been a user of before.

Nick (01:12):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Adam Fuller, product manager at Edge & Node, a core dev team working at The Graph. As you’re about to hear, Adam brings an incredible intellect to The Graph ecosystem with an impressive professional background that spans advanced degrees in biochemistry, a stint in management consulting, two years at Google, and then working at Circle to launch the stablecoin USDC. During our discussion, Adam talks about his move from using The Graph to working full-time at Edge & Node, his passion for utility and how The Graph enables developers to build and his insights on web3 and decentralization. As always, we started the discussion by talking about Adam’s professional and educational background.

Adam Fuller (02:03):

A long time ago, I studied biochemistry at university, so I think people often think about science as being quite technical, but actually, we barely used computers. For a lot of my degree it was a lot of writing essays, more like lab wet science. So I work in labs and so I worked in labs at my university. I spent a couple of really great summers working in labs in Boston and then New York. So it was a really great, great experience. Actually, that was when I actually started doing some data analysis as part of that, and then I guess was at a point where I wasn’t sure what to do. I guess like a lot of people who aren’t sure what to do, so decided to become a management consultant for some reason. So I did that for a couple of years, met a lot of great people, had a lot of fun.

(02:46):

It’s lots of young people working together. It was a good first working experience. But then thought I’d like to go and work for a company, thought tech seemed interesting and had a lot of imagination, so went and worked for Google ’cause it was a tech company I’d heard of. So I was there for a couple of years where I essentially got deeper into data analysis, and I guess managing consultants spent a lot of time in spreadsheets. So I spent a lot of time making spreadsheets at Google. I guess I got the opportunity to do a lot more of SQL data analysis, actually using the big tools that almost anyone in Google has access to if they want them, which is actually really cool. Even though I was just a random data guy, sat in London, got access to incredible world-class tools at Google, was there for a couple of years and then followed someone who I’d met socially but was also a customer at Google.

(03:35):

Went to Circle, which is a crypto finance business. So I was there for a couple of years, worked on a load of stuff, like Circle, really interesting business and they’re doing so well today. The biggest thing I worked on there was USDC, so this was the stablecoin. So the launch of that, I remember that being super exciting. I remember us being quite excited at the prospect of maybe heading to a couple of billion USDC in issuance and now they’re, I don’t know what the number is, but I think we’re north of 40 billion have been issued. So it’s really cool to be there at the start of that, and it’s been great to see how well that’s done. Since I then did a couple of other things, I took a bit of time out, explored some startup ideas with a friend of mine, which in the end, we decided not to go ahead with them. But I think that was the right decision.

(04:21):

I did some freelance work with the Harry Potter digital franchise, so that was a completely unlike anything I’d ever done before, thinking about wizarding experiences online. Then I worked for a supply chain technology business for a year and that was 2020, and so then through lockdown, got back in. I actually went to Hackathon East London in January 2020, which got me back into thinking about Ethereum quite a bit. I built a bunch of dapps, so the biggest one for me was Nifty Inc, which is a NFT platform on, well, Gnosis Chains as it’s now known, which I built with Austin Griffith. I did a bunch of work with him, which has been great, developer onboarding, building Scaffold-ETH or contributing Scaffold-ETH, which is a developer prototyping toolkit. So through that, discovered subgraphs, built some subgraphs, thought they were cool. So then when Edge & Node were hiring, I guess, a year ago, that was how I ended up joining as a PM.

Nick (05:19):

A lot of really incredible background there with some interesting work. I want to go back to the management consulting part of it. You’re not the first guest that’s been involved in management consulting, but I’d love to know your thoughts on that experience and more particularly, what you learned about business in an experience like that.

Adam Fuller (05:42):

So it’s interesting, I think it’s maybe changed now, but certainly, lots of the reason I went into it, actually, my mum was a manager consultant once upon a time. So we talked about it, and it did seem like an interesting path, and a lot of my friends were doing it. I think it is a really great place to start. If you don’t know anything, you get passaged in into far more influential situations than a 21, 22 year old has a right to. Don’t get me wrong, measuring [inaudible 00:06:11] higher smart kids, but they’re also kids. But it means you get these ideas of, you think you know how things work, you think how businesses are run, and in some senses, you do. I do think that managing consultancies, strategic consultancies are capable of getting a lot of work done, research done, getting quite a strategic understanding of a market in quite a short space of time.

(06:31):

But when it comes to actually the operational side of running a business, I look back, I was very naive then in terms of my actual understanding of how hard it is to do meaningful work, how hard it is to actually align a team or teams of teams in the same direction and to either bring something into existence or to really serve a market. I think those are things which you can’t understand if you are at arms length working in a consultancy, so I definitely learned a lot. I worked, as I said, with great people who I’m still in close touch with today. I’m still collaborating pretty actively with a bunch of them on on-site projects. So yeah, it was definitely a great experience. But yeah, when it came time to go and do something else, I did feel like going and working in a business was what I wanted to do next.

Nick (07:14):

So you went to Google, which is one of the biggest businesses in the world. How would you discuss what that experience was like and the things you learned there?

Adam Fuller (07:22):

Yeah. So I joined Google, and I was super excited to work there, and it is a cool place to work. You’ve got this great vibe. Again, you’ve got lots of smart people from all the places was I guess whenever it was, 2014 maybe? So people who talk a lot about big tech these days, they do have amazing products. They’ve got just such amazing infrastructure and tools, like I was saying earlier, around you’ve got a silver spoon as someone who’s learning a bit more about how technology actually works and how to build things. It was a great, great place to start. I almost didn’t know how lucky I was. Also, the part I was working in, I was working essentially with some of the largest advertisers in the UK who advertised with Google, so working with Expedia Group Hotels.com, eBay, people who spend lots and lots of on advertising with Google, but often have quite an interesting relationship because they’re in some ways competitive.

(08:16):

There’s this frenemy dynamic that was quite often in the backgrounds or understood when you’re having these interactions because obviously it was our business to sell them ads and their ads were profitable for them, but in some cases, some other part of Google might be doing something that was a bit competitive. So it was really interesting to be at that interface, and like I said, made a lot of friends, built some fun stuff, had some quite cool things like collaborations with people from the finance teams, San Francisco, which were again, really formative in terms of how I think about technology and some of the thought-provoking conversations with people that I met during my time there. So it was cool, but again, I think when I left I was excited to be a part of something smaller, maybe something where I could feel a bit more impact ’cause it’s hard to have an impact at a place as big as Google.

Nick (09:01):

How did the experience of working at one of the largest technology firms in the world that happens to be the leader in web2, how did that experience inform the way you think about web3 and decentralization?

Adam Fuller (09:15):

It’s easy to take for granted. Just today there was a Slack outage. Slack wasn’t loading and see some performance just to point that out is a failure of web2, and one of the reasons we don’t need to go through. But I think, to me, that just highlights how well this stuff works most of the time and it’s amazing what Google had built in terms of the infrastructure they’ve got, how well it scales. I’d say that the number of users that Google is serving every single moment of every single day is unbelievable. Particularly, when you look at the size and scale of web3 now, we’re talking orders of magnitude of difference. The fact that they go down even though they are centralized emphasizes how hard it is the thing that we’re all trying to do with web3, it’s hard to scale Google. You’ve got a whole teams building incredible custom bespoke stuff that still falls over sometimes. We’re trying to do this in a distributed trustless way.

[NEW_PARAGRAPH]I’d say it was more inspirational because you had people building this amazing stuff. I do think that there’s definitely an adversarial web2 versus web3 thing, which I don’t feel like as deeply, partly because the people at Google, most of them are trying to serve users. You can disagree with the tools that they’re using sometimes or the way in which people are being tracked and those kind of things. But I think the adversarial thing, I don’t feel it as deeply as I think a lot of people do. That’s maybe because I worked there, and I didn’t have a bad experience. I think the technology we’re building is more interesting and more human and there’s something monolithic and huge and vast about Google that isn’t like a human thing. It’s not the world we evolved in.

(10:54):

One of the things I love about web3 is that it makes the digital tangible, because it is composable and it’s open and it’s permissionless, so it’s just like the world we live in. If you ended up in a part of the world somewhere, you can breathe the air, you can use the water, you have access to these public goods. You can interact with them, but you can also make your way your own civilization. That’s just not a thing that’s possible. Google, you have access to this amazing stuff as a user, but you’re just not sovereign in the same way. You can’t build these amazing composable things. I guess that’s the stuff that makes me excited about. I definitely do feel all the privacy stuff and the control, but I guess I like web3 ’cause I’m excited about the possibilities as well as it’s important to me that it’s protecting against things as well. But I guess I’m here for positive reasons as well as avoiding the negative.

Nick (11:41):

Have you thought through what happens to companies like Google, like Apple, like Facebook in web3?

Adam Fuller (11:48):

I think you’d be foolish to count them out or to assume that there won’t be a place for them or companies that look a lot like them. They still have a lot of incredibly smart people thinking about, “I building some of the world’s most incredible technology.” I think that they’re probably not sure how they interface with it, but I think that they could play a role. I guess there are a few ways I think it will be hard for them to move as they currently are into web3 in that I think their mindset and their approach is different to what you need to succeed in web3. But I also see in web3 that people, the whole thing, the whole playbook where you build a massive powerful company that is a market leader and owns an entire segment and you have control in your domain and whatever it is, you see that exists in web3.

(12:43):

There are companies in web3 that look the Googles of web3. I’m not talking about the Google of blockchain graph branding side of things, but more like companies that look like that, and that is antithetical to the whole thing. So I think we all need to be mindful of that. I don’t necessarily see how we thread the needle of having power accruing to individual organizations or entities without disempowering the others, unless we do have quite interesting things around governance and other options. But whether it’s Google, Facebook or Amazon or whoever, if they choose to play in web3, I think you’d be foolish to count them out.

(13:24):

But you’d also need to be aware of companies with huge ambitions who maybe raise lots of VC money and within web3 are incentivized by their equity structure to try and achieve the same kind of dominance, and then you end up with the same kind of thing. So I don’t know. I think that there are some really great examples. So within Ethereum, the diminishing role of the Ethereum Foundation over time has been a really interesting exercise in the opposite thing happening at entity seeding control or reducing its influence intentionally over time. That’s quite counter to how a lot of capitalism and also business strategies pushes you.

Nick (14:03):

When you have the opportunity to explain web3 to people that don’t know about it, how do you explain what it is and what the impact of it could be in the world?

Adam Fuller (14:13):

I do definitely. I struggle here as well because web3 is so much in the eye of the beholder. Actually, yeah, I met someone over the weekend. Yeah, so I mentioned Nifty Inc, which is this NFT artist platform on Gnosis Chain. So it’s been about, I guess, 18 months that it’s been live now, and it’s a super simple dapp. Basically it lets you draw drawings on a thing that looks like Microsoft Paint, and then it lets you sell those drawings or put them up for sale or just send them to your friends or maybe create loads of copies, whatever you want. So I met an artist in Denver who was a Nifty Inc artist, and I think that she said that for her, Nifty was the first time she got Ethereum because it was accessible to her as an artist. She could just show up, paint something, put it up. People would then buy that for her. She’s then suddenly got some cryptocurrency.

(15:02):

She’s not had to enter it via going into Coinbase, having to do a load of KYC, wire a load of money to this organization that you don’t fully understand, buy some token that has some ticker that seems to oscillate wildly. Yet, that is currently the only path into web3 or crypto, really. Is there a starting point that doesn’t start with, “Okay, get a wallet, go to Coinbase, buy some stuff?” It’s not a great user experience ’cause it immediately feels like incredibly transactional and speculative. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what a lot of the focus of the industry is. It is quite financial at the moment. But I think that, for me, that thing of onboarding people by the things that it can unlock, which in the case of Nift Inc, ’cause is that you as an artist can create a piece of art.

(15:51):

Someone in the other side of the world could then buy that from you. You could then have some value which you could use to buy from other artists. You’re just doing this in a peer-to-peer way without really having to ask anyone. You’re just showcasing your creativity. People are appreciating that. It’s a market that didn’t possibly exist and you’ve also just got this quite nice community who aren’t just there to make incredible sums, but just to appreciate the art. That’s the possibility of web3 in that it unlocks new interactions that aren’t currently possible or are easy or actually just aren’t even possible. So I guess I’m biased. It’s the thing that I work on, and I do appreciate that, but like I said, it’s those kind of things that I love about the space.

Nick (16:32):

Earlier you said that web3 brings an element of tangibility. In what ways does web3 introduce tangibility to users or participants?

Adam Fuller (16:43):

So NFTs, I don’t like as a name because it’s defining something by what it’s not, and does anyone even know what fungible means? It’s such a weird way to anchor describe something. But for me, the internet interests abundance to people. Suddenly, you could copy things, pictures. You could copy everything infinitely, and you could talk to absolutely everybody. Everyone could watch the same video, do all those kind of things, and I think we’ve internalized that that’s just how the internet and computers work. But that’s not a thing that actually exists anywhere else. That’s an entirely artificial thing, that abundance online in the rest of our world. In our day-to-day life, we don’t go around… Nothing is abundant. So for me, I don’t like the thing where you introduce artificial scarcity of an asset or seeing that as a high good. But I think there is something about web3 where you can actually finally own something online, feel that sense of ownership or that it is a thing that you are able to hold in your hands.

(17:44):

I think that is quite human and also is more like the world we actually live in. I think we don’t necessarily want to make everything scarce because actually, abundance on the internet is amazing. It has unlocked so many great things, but I think it is to own something online and to actually own it. Even though you don’t necessarily own the sole access to it, but actually it’s provably yours, I think that feels quite like a evolutionary human thing, which is inside all of us. The thing where if you give people a pen, then they’ll value it more highly than a pen that is just on the table. There’s something in that. I say a thing that for me, that a mindset that I’ve evolved over the last few years is more anything that humans have been doing for a long, long time is worth thinking about and reflecting on and paying attention to because it often speaks to something shared that we all all have.

(18:37):

Yeah, I definitely didn’t think that. I was definitely had a bit more of a, what’s the word? I love new things more when I was younger, and I thought newness was prized and whereas now, I think I have a bit more… Well, I guess it’s age, isn’t it? But more of an appreciation for the things that have been done for a very long time. I actually thought this when I was in Turkey, went to Turkish bar with a friend of mine, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done that. But essentially, you get covered in boiling water and hot water and then some bloke pummels you and in the end you feel great. It’s one of those things that people have been doing forever. I was like, “Yeah, people have known for a while that this makes you feel good.”

Nick (19:49):

So going back to your personal story a little bit, you went from management consulting to Google and then from Google you went to Circle, and I’m interested in what you did there. Can you talk a little bit more about what you were working on?

Adam Fuller (21:09):

Sure. So I joined Circle not really knowing much about crypto, I guess. So I did once write a blog post about how when people Googled Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin went up and that we should all just Google Bitcoin ’cause then the price would go up more. But apart from that, I hadn’t really looked into it so much, but I joined. So I was recruited by [inaudible 00:21:32] who’d been a customer, but I’d also met her on the basketball court with a friend of mine playing basketball. Yeah, a colleague at Google would done an MBA. They’d already done an MBA together. But anyway, so I followed her to Circle. It seemed like a good opportunity. They were just starting an office in London and needed help with data analytics type stuff, which was my area, I guess. Yeah, I think I said earlier, it was a smaller place.

(21:57):

It seemed like there’d be a lot of scope for growth, personal growth, also learning a whole new industry that was appealing. Like Google, like I said, I had a good time at Google, but also selling ads didn’t make my heart sing so I thought I’d try something else. I think immediately I appreciated how much infrastructure I’d relied on at Google to actually do any analytics ’cause I had to land in, there wasn’t really a lot of infrastructure. So I had to, again, ongoing theme, met some really great friends there who I’m still in touch with who we built some cool stuff together on the analytics side. That was actually then where I transitioned into product management after doing a lot of internal stuff, looking at everything from trading performance to retention of users, acquisition of users, through to actually working pretty closely with the trading desk there to think about their P&L and build dashboards and better visualizations and those kind of things.

(22:54):

That was then when I transitioned into product management, which I don’t think I fully knew what it was, but it seemed interesting just working, I guess going from being a individual contributor data analyst doing stuff end-to-end to actually working with engineers who actually built real software products. That was a really pivotal transition for me, I guess. Well, at least in Europe, there’s not a path into product management like there is in some places in the U.S. where you’ve got the big tech companies. They have associate product manager programs that in Europe, you generally do a lateral move at some point in the company. So Circle was where I had that opportunity, so that was cool. It was obviously always slightly feel for the engineering teams we work with new product managers ’cause I made loads of mistakes, prioritized some of the wrong things and all this kind of stuff. But it was good experience.

(23:46):

That was then where, I guess, I actually had my first year I was still doing a lot of stuff on the operational and finance banking integration type side. But that was also, I guess, where I had my first really actually working with crypto stuff. That was good to get and understand. It was obviously it was what, it was in 2017, which was a pretty wild time in crypto. I remember we were all sat in all hands when Bitcoin hit 20,000 or wherever it got to in 2017, and everyone was going crazy. I enjoyed my time at Circle. We built a lot of stuff. We had some fun, but I always worked in the UK branch of a U.S. firm, I guess in all three jobs. So I had parallels there. But yeah, spent a decent amount of time in Boston, sometimes in San Francisco and I love going to America. So yeah, it was a fun experience. USDC was a fun and stressful time to launch a new thing, and it’s been cool to see it do so well since.

Nick (24:44):

So you were part of the team that launched USDC?

Adam Fuller (24:47):

Yeah. Yeah. So I’d say it was the focus of a huge part of the company. I can’t remember quite when in the year, but I do remember that there was just a point where it became the most important thing for us to deliver. So it was a pretty big team, but I was working with Joel who’s still there and Addix, who’s now at RECUR, so interesting to see what people have ended up doing. But Circle’s definitely been a place where people have gone off to do loads of really interesting stuff within crypto and outside it. But yes, well, I guess that it was one of those where everyone got involved in the end, and it became a pretty exciting thing to rally around. I think we did have this hope that it would launch and be a big bang, suddenly everyone would want stablecoins. We did get a bit at the start, but in the end, I think it’s been testament to ongoing hard work and grinding away and yeah, now like I said, it’s been growing pretty explosively.

Nick (25:48):

So USDC is a staple within crypto now. It’s just something that everybody talks about as though it’s always been around. What did that experience of building and launching that and now seeing where it is today, what is that experience like for you and did you learn anything along the way?

Adam Fuller (26:04):

Yeah. Yeah, so it’s cool. I get paid in USDC, so that’s a fun thing. Yeah, I’d definitely say I learned a lot about launching things, both in terms of how hard it is, firstly, to actually trying to get everything done, get everyone aligned, get everything out the door. I learned how fun it is also. On launch day, I still remember, I was in Boston at the time, walking across the park, all hyped up to go and do it. I really enjoy releasing things. I get a buzz from seeing something that I’ve worked really hard on and most often worked really hard on with other people seeing that into the world. So well learned how to launch this quite big complex thing, learned that I enjoyed that thing. As I said, learned some things that we could have done better at the time. In terms of, it’s always the important, I think it’s often really hard to get the technical side and the go-to-market to both be in sync and often one will be ahead of the other.

(26:59):

I think yes, that was a learning, but yes, yes, since then, it’s been really cool to see how it has… So it was a great idea, I think, obviously Tether was the preeminent stablecoin at the time, which has had its own troubles, controversies over the years. The core part of the USDC thesis was always to be buttoned up and fully audited, those kind of things. I think that they’ve delivered on it. It’s been great to see them also be on other chains and continue to grow and to see Circle, I think they’ve doing great work in terms of the more so B2B side helping people and helping grow that USDC ecosystem. So I think I left about five months after maybe, so it was some time after or whereas, I was there for a bit after. But I’m mainly just proud of for making it happen ever since, ’cause it’s not a given, it’s really hard to make something grow to quite how big it’s become now.

Nick (27:59):

Somebody with your background and the different companies you’ve worked at and probably the professional network you have could do a lot of different things. So how do you explain or think through why you landed in crypto? What the appeal of working in this space is for someone like yourself?

Adam Fuller (28:16):

Yeah, it’s a reasonable question. I think that a lot of it is, I think for me, it’s good to know yourself or to get to know yourself increasingly over time. Self-knowledge, it’s hard to actually know what you want, what makes you tick. I guess it was one of those things where I definitely found it interesting at Circle when I left, I left ’cause I wanted to try this other thing, we had quite an exciting idea at the time. It didn’t pan out like I said, but I guess that then a couple of years later, I just kept finding myself coming back to building on web3.

(28:48):

So building with Ethereum, sometimes starting hackathons, sometimes finishing hackathons, and it was one of those things where I just think that it’s good to pay attention to what you’re paying attention to and to see if you should actually just follow your instincts a bit and go back into it. I’d say that for me, it was really that through 2020 I’m starting to do these side projects working with some people I really enjoyed working with like encountering technology that I thought was really cool. So it was then just impossible to ignore and to not give it a go particularly, because there’s so much exciting possibility in the space.

Nick (29:25):

So after you got interested in crypto, you eventually make your way to Edge & Node. For listeners that don’t know, Edge & Node is one of the five core dev teams working at The Graph. What was it that drew you to Edge & Node then?

Adam Fuller (29:38):

Yeah, so I first came across The Graph in a hackathon. I applied for a hackathon, built a little thing on a subgraph and that was my first interaction with it. I was still pretty early in my front-end development experience, so I’m sure if I went back and looked at that app now, it’d look pretty gnarly. But it was cool to get a taste and just see some of the data that it made available to me. I knew nothing about smart contracts at that time, but I could visualize this protocol. It was basically visualizing streams between different people in a payments network. Then I went away, didn’t think about it too much. Yeah, like I said, built this app called Nifty Inc. At the time, I remember when we were talking about it building it and we were like, “Oh, should we build a subgraph?”

(30:18):

We’re like, “No, let’s just try and release it, and that’s too much overhead for now. Let’s just try and do the simplest thing.” So then it was only two months later, I think, that the app had become incredibly heavy and unwieldy and was having to pull and the RBC node to get the data that it needed. I basically built a subgraph and refactored everything and got it to work that I, in doing that, became a graph fanboy in the sense that it made my app so much simpler, I could do stuff that wasn’t even possible. I guess I came to The Graph as a user, which I think is a really, really cool place to start. I think about where I am now, I’ve never worked on a product that I’ve been a user of before.

(30:56):

So that was how I guess the other thing that I saw was that in building my subgraph, I came across a bug, and so I reported the bug on Discord. Leo solved it in 12 hours later or something, and I was like, “Hey, this is cool. These guys move fast and then they’re responsive to users.” So I had this good user experience of building a thing that made my life a lot easier. I’d had an interaction where they’d listened to me, a random developer on Discord. So then when I saw that Edge & Node were hiring, Edge & Node actually only formed in January of last year, so when I saw they were hiring, I thought it was cool they were hiring a product manager, which is what I did in my day job. I thought it’d be nice to do in the daytime what I was spending evening and weekends working on.

Nick (31:36):

So for listeners that are curious about what your role at Edge & Node is, can you provide just an overview of what you do at Edge & Node and some of the projects you’re working on?

Adam Fuller (31:45):

Sure. So I’m product manager at Edge & Node, focused on Graph Node. So that’s the indexing software that powers subgraphs, The Graph in general. So what does that mean? That means I spend a lot of time thinking about subgraph developers. So spending time with subgraph developers, that can be getting on calls with them to ask them questions, trying to solve their problems, getting put in touch with people who are trying to do new and interesting stuff. So there’s a lot of discovery, but then it’s also a lot of coordination. I’m working internally with a lot of the incredible engineers, other PMs who are working on this stuff across the core development ecosystem.

(32:22):

So I obviously work a lot with the engineering team at Edge & Node who are founding developers on Graph Node, but then also working a lot with other core devs. So streaming fast Figment, in particular, working with some other grantees and contributors who are also contributing to Graph Node, Graph-CLI, Graph-TS, all of the tools that developers use to build to subgraphs. Then also contributing and participating in some of the research discussions on some of the newer things, whether that’s on the indexing side or on the network side. So a mix of stuff and yeah, it’s mainly fun to be in a spot where you get to work with so many different people across the ecosystem.

Nick (32:56):

Well, you’re not the first guest to come on the podcast who was a user of The Graph and then migrate into a full-time role. What’s the explanation behind how it happened or why it happened for you?

Adam Fuller (33:06):

I think it does come down to just subgraphs for a magical experience for me like building my first one that made my life easier. It’s come on a long way since in terms of what the web3 or Ethereum, even the Ethereum specific development stack has come on a long way since I started doing stuff. The tooling is better than it was. But I think if you’re a developer and you feel the pain and then you find a thing that’s the solution and you have the opportunity to work on that thing, then that’s just a lovely confluence of confluence of things. So I guess that was what got me excited because it’s so clearly the answer to an important question, which is like, “How do we get the data that I need out of the blockchain?” It answered it in such an elegant way. The design of subgraphs is just super intuitive and pretty easy. There are some edge cases and there are always things you can get better, but you’d define three files.

(33:56):

You deploy a thing and you get a usable API out, and you can not worry about that thing anymore and you can just go on to actually focusing on your smart contract or you can quickly iterate between these things. It just fits so nicely into the toolkit. I think the different people have come in with different perspectives, folks who’ve come in from running indexes see the power of the network and also just the strength of the ecosystem. So I guess the thing I mentioned about Leo solving a bug and in no time at all and pushing it and helping me out, I think people also see that not only is the tech cool, but it’s an open ecosystem that values outside contribution that wants people to come in and to be a part of it, as well as the cool tech, which I guess I emphasize quite a lot there. Actually, the people and the human side of things is really appealing too.

Nick (34:41):

A lot of what you’re saying if you were to look at it under a microscope is this passion or this draw for builders. It seems to me that you have a real interest in building things that are useful for developers because you are, in fact, one and you probably have a very low tolerance for things that don’t enable the work of developers.

Adam Fuller (35:04):

Yeah, definitely resonates with me. I think that for me, the subgraph developer is just so important within the ecosystem. They’re the folks who understand the data that’s on chain, they managed to turn it into really useful consumable information. So I guess, well, I’m product manager working on Graph Node, so it makes sense that that’s like my North Star, but I just feel like for The Graph developers and the developer experience is so, so important. So I know that people talk about The Graph sometimes as the Google of blockchains, and I don’t actually love that way of describing it because I feel like with Google you show up and you ask a question. You get an answer, it’s a bit of Google has the information that you need, whereas, with The Graph, you actually bring your own knowledge and what you know about what data is on chain. You create the API that you need for your application to serve your users.

(35:54):

So actually, there’s a bringing your own information to The Graph that I think is the really powerful thing where it’s not just an API that’s generic. Don’t get me wrong, I think we could do better to provide more generic APIs for people who want the same things. That’s definitely something that I’m interested in from a product perspective serving those consumers more. But a key part of it is empowering developers to come with the contracts that they’re interested in, the events that they’re interested in, and then to create the API that will serve their users. I think we can’t lose that focus on that use case ’cause that’s what’s got us here. I think it’s also going to be so key for web3 in the future. It’s always going to be about the community coming together to create information, not relying on one entity to say, “This is truth.”

Nick (36:34):

I have a sense of what your answer will be, but I would love to hear you just articulate it. But when you think about web3 and you think about developers, especially now in the early days trying to build utility and user experiences, how critical is The Graph to everything that’s happening presently and into the future?

Adam Fuller (36:53):

So for me, and I meet so many people who are building on The Graph where The Graph is a core part of their infrastructure. It’s amazing how pervasive it is or how widely used subgraphs are because they do answer that really simple need of, “There’s data on chain. I need to show it to my users.” So The Graph is critical, but I think the thing that keeps me motivated is when I see subgraphs and The Graph in general not doing what those developers need it to do. So maybe it’s a situation where there’s a filter that they need and as a result, they can’t show a certain view to their users, or maybe they want to combine data across subgraphs in a way that they can’t do currently, or maybe they want to do some processing, reaching out across data streams, or maybe they even want to extract it in a different way.

(37:39):

You can learn a lot from when you see people using your product that’s not in the way that you expect or you intended, you can basically learn that there’s something that you’ve not seen there. So I guess the way I feel about the graph is that it is crucial to so many web3 applications, but there are so many ways in which it can also be improved to better serve more use cases for developers so they don’t have to hack subgraphs or so that they don’t have to still hit RBCs or run their own servers or relying on hitting the node. I just think there’s still so much possibilities. There are so many use cases that subgraphs don’t currently serve. I guess that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning because it is hugely motivating to solve problems, so again, that we can get that work out of their way. If you’re building an app, you didn’t sign up to build your own Indexer, you just want the data. Same if we can stay focused on that, there’s so much opportunity, and yeah, that’s why I love thinking about subgraphs

Nick (38:30):

As I’ve come to know and better understand the web3 space and the way The Graph fits into it, like I said, presently or into the future, I’ve become more and more aware of this interplay between centralized solutions and decentralized solutions and this competition between web2 and web3. There’s all these different themes that emerge. I’d love to take this opportunity to just ask you, when it comes to web3 and a web3 stack, how important do you think decentralization is for the web3 stack?

Adam Fuller (39:02):

Sure. So I was talking to actually one of our new Rust engineers about this. Decentralization is one of those hard things because again, different things to different people, but it also exists on a range of dimensions. You can be centralized in one way and decentralized in another way, but I think that if web3 is to achieve or deliver on the promises that it makes, that I think decentralization is absolutely crucial because in general, in a stack, you’re only actually as decentralized as your most centralized point. If you rely on one centralized thing and that thing falls over or chooses not to serve you, changes its API, well, your app’s fallen over and you need to work around it and do something different. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely crucial. You can get into the definitions of logical decentralization, political, those kind of things.

(39:56):

But in terms of the tools that you as a developer are using, I think it’s interesting ’cause there is a question around, “Do users care about decentralization?” I think lots of current users web3 don’t care or it’s not so important or motivating for them. As a result, developers don’t have, users aren’t always saying, “Is this decentralized summer?” But I wouldn’t say that that’s a really loud chorus, but I would say that the tricky thing right now is that it’s actually hard or almost impossible to build a fully decentralized app if you want to deliver on delightful user experiences. So that’s everything from how do you do notifications? Even simple stuff of when you paste a link on a website and it unfurls. Unfurling in a decentralized way is actually really hard for various reasons. It’s like decentralization is super hard.

(40:46):

I think it is super important to actually deliver on the stuff that everyone talks about, and it’s easy to skip over or to paint over the gaps along the way. Well, I think you can expect developers to use the best decentralized tools that are available, but you also can’t be too judgmental if the tools just aren’t there. That’s why I think The Graph and others who are building developer tools are so crucial, ’cause if they are able to do it in the right way, then actually developers can take stuff off the shelf. They can actually do this stuff in a much easier way. We don’t get there necessarily get there by being judgmental. We get there by making it easy for developers to build in the right way.

Nick (41:26):

I understand because of other interviews and conversations like this, the value The Graph provides to developers, I understand also how The Graph adds value to web3 more broadly. How do the use of dapps benefit or create value for the users of dapps? Why is it better for the world to have adoption of or more use of dapps?

Adam Fuller (41:56):

Yeah, so I guess it comes down to what a dapp is, but I think one of the coolest things that you see in web3 is the fact in web2, the ownership of the UI is, it’s pretty tightly coupled to the application as a whole. There are ways, lots of people, businesses do build business on top of Gmail’s API, but that’s shifting sounds and you’re always at risk of the whims of the Gmail PM or engineering team changing that API and how you can access it. The thing that you see in web3 where essentially Uniswap, they’ve got an app that you can use to interact with Uniswap, but you don’t have to use it. ‘Cause when I was learning about Uniswap, I built quite a ramshackle version of a Uniswap UI but that would let you actually just interact with that thing. What’s cool about that is that it basically lets people fork away and create the things that are useful to them on top of the same shared data.

(42:55):

So any individual dapp isn’t necessarily good, but the fact that it could be replaced by another competing one, the fact that it could be easily if one dapp developer decides to be malicious in a given way or if they fall over, if they go out of business, that someone else could just spin up another one. That’s part of the power of this stuff, that you get permanent apps, that you get a guarantee that stuff isn’t going to go away. You’ve got these applications that will just run in perpetuity forever, and all you need to do is maybe you can just pin a file to a BFS and fetch it down and that’s then your website, that’s pretty cool. That’s the thing that means that you as a user don’t have to worry about your app being shut down by whichever company decided it wasn’t worth their while anymore. Like I said, any individual app is just an application, but it’s the possibility of others, and the possibility of permanence I think is really cool for users.

Nick (43:50):

Does privacy and data, personal data factor into any of this?

Adam Fuller (43:58):

I think this is an area where web3, we still don’t have a great… or certainly not a unified story because so much of web3 right now is basically everyone’s open financial information. Well, there are obviously some places where you can find more privacy, but it’s been normalized that people know people’s ENS and if people’s ENS, you can see the NFT they bought. I don’t know if that will be a short-lived phenomenon. I do think if you think about some of the serious reasons why Bitcoin was started in the first place, I don’t think Satoshi had in mind that everyone would just be able to see everyone’s bank balances all the time. Privacy has always been pretty tightly coupled with the movement in general. I think the technology wasn’t there before, but with zero knowledge and a lot of the improvements in that area, which isn’t my area of expertise, but which seems to have just come on unbelievable leaps and bounds, I think there is a possibility of much making privacy more of a first-class citizen, ’cause where we’re currently at is almost hilarious in terms of how open it is.

Nick (45:09):

Well, I love that answer and I appreciate the vision you’re setting forth there. So as you look forward then on web3 and the future here, in terms of adoption and growth and evolution, what are some of the challenges that you’re keeping an eye on?

Adam Fuller (45:24):

Yeah, it’s definitely a good question. I don’t think I have an original answer to this. I think the things I think of are a lot of the things that we’re aware of. But everyone knows that the gas price on Layer 1 and general scalability of Ethereum specifically needs to be addressed and that community is rallying around to solve that problem. But I think that that will continue to be an issue and any blockchain which actually achieves and starts to achieve scale will encounter similar technical or economic growth hurdles. So I think that we’re still in terms of the population of planet Earth, we’re nowhere near the throughput that we need at the blockchain layer, which I think is a core base layer. So it’s cool to see everything from roll-ups through to some more data availability stuff that’s coming out.

(46:16):

Those challenges are being addressed and it’s inspirational to see these decentralized communities coming together to solve these problems. But yeah, that’s definitely a big hurdle. I think the infrastructure one the graph works on is another core one, that’s not just subgraphs, but all of the tooling around building decentralized applications is still pretty low level. There aren’t that many abstractions above the EBM still. Essentially, everyone’s still building stuff that’s quite granular, and I think that that’s cool and makes a lot of sense, and you’ve got amazing stuff being done. But in terms of onboarding more developers and also empowering the developers that we currently have to build faster, more robust applications, they need better tools. Then I think guess just to continue going up the stack to the applications, I think I’ve been amazed by the extent to which NFTs have cut through in the public consciousness.

(47:14):

I think it’s maybe related to the fact that you can get a good headline, and if you can talk about a picture of an ape being sold for millions of dollars, I can see why that’s hooked people maybe more than DeFi or things that were maybe slightly harder to conceptualize, there’s something about NFTs that I think is really… Actually, maybe even part of it is just that they’re so visual as well, so it makes for a much more eye-catching headline than a picture of a financial chart. But even so, I think it’s definitely been amazing to see DeFI and the financial aspect of everything that’s happening on web3 on all chains mature over the last couple of years. If you think back to 2017, it was basically a bunch of ICOs and nothing really happening on chains. Centralized exchanges were where the game was at. Now, DeFi is crazy. There’s just huge volume.

(48:07):

There’s real participants from quite traditional finance. There is liquidity. The financial system has been built or is being built more and more on chain. But I feel like that’s still an infrastructure-y layer. Even though some of these things do serve as applications, there aren’t things that users will use. It’s not original to say that blockchain and web3 needs to find the use cases and actually deliver on some of them to achieve scale, but that’s the truth. You’ve definitely got some cool stuff. You’ve got some truly novel experience. You’ve got creators getting paid like they’ve never been paid before in some cases. But you’ve also got lots of problems where people worrying about IP protection and people worrying about people’s security and all those kind of things. So I feel like a lot of infrastructure or quasi infrastructure has been built, or lots of the applications are still a work in progress.

Nick (48:59):

Well, Adam, I really appreciate this conversation and some of the insights you’ve shared here. Thank you so much for being generous with your time. If listeners want to follow you or learn more about the work that you’re doing, what’s the best way to stay in touch?

Adam Fuller (49:12):

Sure. So I’m on Twitter, I’m not particularly active but I’m AZacharyF on Twitter. I’m Adam F on Discord with a little dude stood in front of a red sky holding a surfboard. That’s me in The Graph Discord, so either of those work. I’m always happy to chat about The Graph also, yeah, just building out some Ethereum is also a passion of mine. So yeah, love to chat to anyone he’s interested.