GRTiQ Podcast: 62 Kent Fourie

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Kent Fourie (00:00:20):

Subgraph development is, it really gives you a lot of time to work on being creative, which you would normally put into struggling to get your backend deployed. So it’s an amazing set of tools. It’s an amazing protocol, which really is creating quite a vast economy. I’d like to see it grow. I’d like to see more indexes and more Delegators and more Curators and more people using decentralized nets.

Nick (00:00:43):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Kent Fourie, co-founder and CTO at Graphrica,, a community-based hub for high level web3 development talent to share ideas, problems and opportunities and to support each other and help leapfrog the African continent forward. The name Graphrica is a combination of The Graph in Africa and is also the leading community for The Graph in Africa. As you’re about to hear, Kent is incredibly passionate about web3, The Graph and the future of the people of Africa. Kent has a technical background coupled with a unique ability to explain complex topics and ideas.

(00:01:53):

During our conversation, Kent shares many ideas from finding his way into web3, his optimism for Africa and its people, and some fun exploration of the concepts of mining, Subgraphs, graph grants, web3 and the future of The Graph. We began the conversation by talking about Kent’s background and some questions related to where he lives in South Africa.

Kent Fourie (00:02:19):

My educational background is not as exciting as my professional background. I started learning at Bridge House School when I was younger. I started coding there, just a bit like JavaScript, Java, SQL, HTML and C++. And after that I briefly attended UCT, University of Cape Town to study psychology and sociology as my majors, but I enjoyed my minors a little bit more, but I couldn’t pursue that course anymore. Because I had a little bit of financial constraints.

(00:02:47):

So after dropping out at the end of the year, my father endeavored me to enroll at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, which is a technical college, which is actually really enough, much better for learning computer programming if you have the right syllabus, because you have a lot more practical experience as opposed to someone doing like a CompSci degree. You usually have very little experience doing practical work in a CompSci or a usual standard traditional university degree in computer science, at least here in South Africa, during my time of studying and during that time I learned quite a lot. It was a great course. I enjoyed studying there for the first year. We learned a lot of really, really good things in the first year, like binary, CSQL, a lot of the design principles, and it had a lot of different courses and eventually you could basically split into different tracks. You could split into technical programming, you could split into networking, which is Cisco systems or more of the business side.

(00:03:49):

At the end of my first year, I got hired as a full-time developer, so I transitioned into part-time studies, so going in at night classes from about 05:30 PM until 09:00 PM. And that first job really was like being thrown in the deep end. It was my first experience with C Sharp and full stack .net systems and also some PHP and some other things. But I really got to learn a lot about how to work in large enterprise systems and large enterprise companies, with dev teams that are scattered all over the country, all over the world, and also all the other things that you don’t really learn in university like Redgate and Blue Gates, and those are kind of tools to migrate SQL data across from one live database to another. And learned a lot of things not to do, learned a lot of things to do.

(00:04:38):

And after that, spent about six years after dropping out, because I just was really not happy with how CPUT was going with my course, because they weren’t really teaching as many relevant things to do with development at the time. They were teaching us really, really old standards and principles, and it wasn’t really relevant to the current market or the current industry. Basically, I decided not to continue with that, because I was learning more in the working environment. I was learning more on the job, and I was already about two to three, two years experience working before I had dropped out. I think I did three years there ,and then I dropped out, and just went full on into software development.

(00:05:22):

From there, I went to a couple large enterprise companies after that, worked on their systems. I worked for Dotdigital and Trimble and some other applications inside of the medical space, and also the tracking logistics space with Fuel. I learned a lot of great skills there. I learned a lot about Agile at those companies and how to do things on scale, how to implement good standards, and how to work as teams, how to manage teams and processes. And while I was there, web3 bug bit me, and I decided that it would be a good time for me to challenge myself and step up and try my hand at leadership.

(00:05:59):

So I moved to a local and international web3 company, it was a development house and grew the development team there, set a lot of processes and standards in place and hired and trained some of the developers and learned from them as well. And that was my baptism into actually coding in the web3 space.

(00:06:17):

On a side note as well, I ran a recording studio and a record label and modular synthesizer retail store for a few years while doing that as well. I was quite ambitious and it was quite a lot of fun. It was a big community project. We released a one vinyl, which is a collection of South African techno. And we were able to make a space for the community to have access to equipment which they would normally not have for free. And we host a lot of jam sessions. We had some live streams from there, and it was a great space, a lot of pretty cool artists came through and used it. And midway through last year, I stepped away from that company, and I have basically been working as a freelancer and working with The Graph protocol. I’m one of the founders of Graphrica, which is the home of The Graph in Africa. And we are a growing web3 hub of African tech talent, and I work on various jobs in the web3 space.

Nick (00:07:08):

So whenever I meet with a guest of the podcast in a different part of the world, I always like to ask them about the local people’s attitudes and opinions towards crypto. You’re not the first guest to join me from South Africa, but I’d still like to ask you, how would you describe the people of South Africa’s opinions and attitude towards crypto and web3?

Kent Fourie (00:07:27):

In South Africa it’s actually quite developed. I was hearing about it back in 2011, and people were mining here, and mining Bitcoin. And when Ethereum came around it was, there were meetups, we had a couple hackathons here, but the actual scene currently is quite big. There’s quite a large amount of development companies, a lot of people interested in it. Quite a lot of thought leaders come from Cape Town, or from South Africa, like Simon de la Rouviere and Andre Cronje, and there’s quite a few other people in the space that really have changed it globally and locally. I won’t name them, but there’s quite a few, there’s quite a large names and quite a few names that you wouldn’t know, that have changed, and basically were thought leaders in the space in a lot of different aspects of web3 and blockchain.

(00:08:20):

But I think that the South African mentality, the South African psychology of Ubuntu, really melds well with blockchain. Richie said it once as well, and we have a lot of similarities in thinking about the collective rather than the individual. And the blockchain ecosystem really purports this, and it’s kind of one of its tenets. I think that we picked it up very well. I think Africa and South Africa, really leapfrog the digital mobile banking era, and we still are leaders in that space, and I think we are leapfrogging right now into the web3 space, so it’s exciting. There’s tons of great companies locally and in Africa here, and they’re doing amazing things, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time.

(00:09:07):

And one of the biggest things is that we actually have had for a long time a lot of access for education into the space, the universities, and there’s lots of academies and workshops and accelerators that really work to educate large amounts of people, from all different walks of life, whether they have access to tech or not, because they make it available. And these are people like Blockchain Academy or Bitcoin Academy and UCT, and some other really, really big players that have been making it available and really putting it up there as one of the next things in tech that we need to be focusing on.

(00:09:42):

And the South African Reserve Bank has been playing around with making a stable token for, I don’t know, since like 2015, or even before that. So the government has been involved in crypto currency or in blockchain tech for very long, as well. And I can’t really speak to other countries in Africa, but South Africa, at least where I am, is really stepping up.

Nick (00:10:04):

Well. You mentioned a couple ideas and people there that I want to inform listeners that haven’t heard those things before. You referenced Richie Laburn, I’ve had Richie on the podcast before with Boyd Varty, their Indexers at The Graph, their Indexer operation is called Index Africa and they’re also members of Graphrica. But you also mentioned the concept of Ubuntu and I’d love to invite you to define that term and kind of help listeners understand what you mean by what is Ubuntu.

Kent Fourie (00:10:28):

Ubuntu is an African philosophy that focuses around the community over the individual. It says, I am because of you. In Africa, a community raises a child not a family. And similarly, we believe that working together will get us further than going it alone. The philosophy has a great quote which explains it quite well. If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

Nick (00:10:52):

Kent, if we could go back in time then, when did you first become aware of crypto, and what was it that interested you about it?

Kent Fourie (00:11:00):

Some of my university friends and colleagues at my first tech job back while I was studying, were mining Light coin in Bitcoin in their apartments in 2011. I was fascinated, but I didn’t really have any capital to buy a rig or to invest, and frankly I didn’t really understand much about it, and I didn’t really look into it. I was quite young and naive, but I did use my laptop to mine some Bitcoins. And when I saw that the price spiked in 2013, my ears pricked up and I realized that the laptop that I had mined on had gotten stolen and I didn’t back up any of my keys. And this really taught me a lesson. So when 2016, my roommate and fellow coder said, Hey, come look at this Ethereum Frontier site, I was absolutely blown away and it’s kind of been a love affair ever since.

(00:11:46):

I mean, I’m quite obsessive, and this is an obsession for me, but when I was going through it, and there was Slock.it and all of these crazy implementations and use cases of it, it was like a sluice gate had opened in my mind. I was able to really look at our society and our economy, and see it for what it was. It was fractured and broken, and there were so many problems. There were so many people being taken advantage of, and serious issues, and there was people who had access and people who didn’t. And I saw that blockchain could fix it, or at least alleviate some of the issues, or alleviate some of the pain that we have.

(00:12:24):

And a lot of people think about DeFi and all these other things, but slock.it was initially nothing to do with DeFi or any of these monetary systems. It was purely for a utility. It was created to allow autonomy of a lot of the things that we use in life, like cars and houses and locks and electrical equipment inside of apartments, and they really painted a beautiful dream, and the use cases outside of that were immense. And yeah, that year for me was immense. I learned so much. I was obsessive. I was the guy in Cape Town that was telling everybody, go look at this thing, invest. It’s cheap, if you want to make money, but it’s way bigger than that. Get involved. And I was irritating to a point, but a lot of those people come back to me now and we’re like, damn, I should’ve listened to you, but c’est la vie.

Nick (00:13:17):

So Kent, I have to ask about this laptop that was stolen, and the Bitcoin that you mined. How much did you have and how have you dealt with that loss?

Kent Fourie (00:13:27):

I mentioned it that, yeah, mine 24 Bitcoin on my laptop over a period of a few years, and I was naive and I actually just forgot about it, and it was on a laptop that had a key, and I knew that I had 24 and I came home one day and that laptop was taken. And I didn’t at that point realize that there had been Bitcoin on it, because I was like, it was back of my mind. But when 2013 hit and the price went over $1,300, I was like, that is a lot of money. And I’d never experienced that sort of money, or been close to it my whole life. So I really regret it something very, very powerful, and it really made me prick my ears up and you learn to roll with the punches. But that loss, I don’t even think about. It’s just something that happened, and it’s a good lesson, and I had more lessons in the future.

Nick (00:14:21):

Another follow up I want to ask you is about slock.it. I don’t think I’m familiar with what you mean by that or that term. What is slock.it?

Kent Fourie (00:14:29):

So slock.it, S-L-O-C-K.I-T were one of the first big companies to hit the scene in 2016. It was a lot of the guys from the Ethereum Foundation, Steven Tual and some other guys. And I think, a large amount of the community that’s still here today, were involved in that project. I mean, if I go to the medium blog for slock.it, there is literally every single big name in the industry that has different endeavors or different projects now or similar ones.

(00:15:03):

But anyway, slock.it was a company that started that wanted to basically, that did build, smart locks connected to smart contracts. So you could essentially have a smart contract, open up a lock of a apartment like an Airbnb. And I think this was around the time that Airbnb started. So you could have these autonomous houses where someone could scan a QR code, and it would basically take enough funds to run the electricity and the appliances, and maybe some insurance money, and then it would close the locks, or only give them access for a certain amount of time. And you could basically scale this out to the appliances and the house, the TV, or scale it out to a car, and they were big.

(00:15:46):

And slock.it essentially became the DAO eventually. And the DAO, as you know, it was the big DAO hack in 2016, which forced us to fork. I say us, because I also eventually were, I was mining quite a lot of Ethereum at the time of the fork, so I had quite a large mining operation set up. It wasn’t massive, but it was quite big. I did it with one of my friends and yes, slock.it, they were one of the big first companies in 2016. They were the first DAO, or one of the first DAOs. There was also Digex back then was gold back tokens. They also had a massive sale, massive DAO. And that was also before the hack, or before the hack, and before the fork. So yeah, that’s slock.it. You should go check it out. It’s great ideas, great web3 too.

Nick (00:17:57):

Staying with this idea of how you got your start and everything, how then do you move into the industry and go to work in crypto and blockchain?

Kent Fourie (00:18:08):

As I said earlier, I really wanted to get involved in the industry in 2016 when I saw Frontier Website. I wanted to get involved, and the meetup groups in Cape Town were almost dead, or they just didn’t have the support they needed. They needed locations and they needed people to be Advocates and to run around and basically set up these locations, and to make sure there were snacks and to basically put together a talk. And in 2016 I was working at a building where the top floor was run by Barclays, it was called Barclays Rise and it was an accelerator program in tech. They had really, web3 became a big focus in the future, and two floors down there was the Bitcoin Academy. So this was 2016 and there was a Bitcoin academy on the third floor where I was working.

(00:18:58):

And on the top floor they had this really, really great space that had facilities for conferencing and events. And I made a point to reach out to the Ethereum meetup group in Cape Town, and I spoke to the Barclays Rise floor, the people there, and I said, Hey, I want to host this Ethereum event and would you guys have me? And they said, we’d be happy to have you, we’ll supply drinks and food for you. And we have this big auditorium or this big space, and it was really great. And I met a lot of people there that are pioneers in the space still today, and they’re pioneers globally and locally. And I gave a talk about mining, and I gave a talk about the use cases that you could do. I hadn’t been developing at that point yet. I was just trying to understand the ecosystem better. I gave a talk on what a blockchain is, and what Ethereum is, and how it’s different from Bitcoin, and spoke about mining and I spoke about some of the applications.

(00:19:51):

And after that I was working in my enterprise job doing .net full stack, but I really was obsessed in that every single day I was on an exchange or on a website, learning about something I had Mist Explorer or the Mist one installed on my laptop from my first iteration. I think I still have maybe the third version on my oldest MacBook, and it still has some of those badges that you get that aren’t NFTs, they’re badges. So it’s a little bit different. So yeah, I became totally obsessed with the ecosystem, and I left and I started working in the web3 space full-time for a company called Linum Labs as a tech lead, and essentially pulled out the development team and some of the processes and they gave me amazing opportunities and I learned so much there. So that was my first induction as I said.

(00:20:46):

And the space moves so quickly, and you have to be on it, all the time. I thought that web2 tech moved quickly and I was around and was playing around with React and was rand new and it’s like this is the coolest thing ever. And nowadays people are saying that React’s old. So for me this was just absolutely super bleeding edge. It was such a fast-paced industry. I was hooked, and they were using all the bleeding edge technology. And for someone stuck in web2 in the .net space back then, it was asp.net, so it was MVC and you didn’t really have a lot of options for this really, really cool markdown languages. A lot of them were in Angular. A lot of my reasons for moving over to the industry, was also to be able to play with this awesome tech and to be on the bleeding edge. It’s really important, and it’s actually one of the best places to be.

Nick (00:21:43):

For listeners that don’t know what is meant by mining, and I’ve had many guests of the podcast come on and say they were miners that they had a mining operation. I’ve never actually asked the question of, what is mining and what’s the utility of it? Why do people do it? Would you mind describing, at least for you and your perspective, what mining is and what the utility of doing it is?

Kent Fourie (00:22:05):

Because blockchains are decentralized ,and we have multiple sources of truth, essentially we don’t have a single source of truth, we have multiple versions of the truth. This is because we are hosting the same data globally on many, many different nodes or computers or servers. In traditional web2, we trust Google, Facebook, whatever to host it on their servers and they have control, they have autonomy. But if you think about a bank’s servers, if it’s held in one place, it is quite susceptible to things like hacking, and natural disasters, and war, and human corruption. When you have many, many different sources of truth, and you have many of these servers that are holding the full truth, how do you make sure that everyone is playing a part in being truthful? You have to come to consensus. What that means is, if you have 100 people and 99 of them say that this apple is green and one person says no, it’s red, then you know that you have consensus that the apple is green, because that one person is probably lying, and this is the work that miners do.

(00:23:20):

Miners basically do a bit of work and the work is computational work. They’re running a computation and basically what this computation is doing, is checking that the new block produced has the right information in it, which refers to the previous blocks which refer to the previous blocks referred. There’s some other computations that it does, but it basically checks that someone hasn’t basically pushed up a fake block, they also check the rest of everybody else’s confirmations, and they produce a block from work, they get paid for this. So they are the ones that are supporting the network, the miners. And this is only in proof of work, in a proof of work consensus model. We have proof of stake, which is slightly different.

(00:24:03):

Yeah, so essentially what mining is, is you basically, for Ethereum it’s quite different from Bitcoin, but for Ethereum what it means in practical terms, is you’re getting a bunch of very expensive graphics cards, GPU units, and you’re lining them up as many as you can on one machine, and you’re running a bit of software. And what that software is doing, is basically syncing with the blockchain, it’s taking that information that the new work that is being posted, and it is basically listening for new transactions on the network in the men pool, it’s grabbing those wants to process those into a block. And we don’t have to go into the technical bits of it, but yeah.

Nick (00:24:42):

That’s a great explanation. So are miners the ones that get paid in this Ethereum context, the gas fees?

Kent Fourie (00:24:48):

They do, and they also get a block reward. When you produce a new block, you get a block reward, and this is a set amount that changes at a certain point in time. Over time goes it keeps halving. Yeah, they also get the gas fees.

Nick (00:25:03):

I have to imagine there’s a listener to this podcast that’s thinking, well maybe I can get into mining. I understand the operations that Kent just described there. I’ve got the know-how, the wherewithal to build something like that. What are some of the reasons people should be cautious about jumping into mining?

Kent Fourie (00:25:20):

Mining is hardware intensive. It is also time intensive. Once you set it up, and if you set it up really well, you will inevitably run into consistent issues with packages. You have to consistently update your software. It’s very expensive to get into and it’s extremely competitive. If you want to make a good amount of money in mining, you have to put a lot of money into it. And if you’re in a place where electricity is expensive, then it also doesn’t become viable. If you’re in a place that has high heat in summer, or high heat during most of the year, it’s also not viable, because the machines get extremely hot and will burn out.

(00:25:57):

There are many reasons why people should not mine. I have one big one, it is not worth your time. There are a lot of people doing it, but if you really are invested, and it’s who you are, definitely do it, right? Go and do it if you really, really believe that this is what you want to do, but you’re going to spend a lot of money, and you’re going to come out with a little bit of money.

Nick (00:26:16):

I want to turn our attention to Africa and Graphrica and the work you’re doing there. But before we do, as I hear you tell your story, your background, how you got involved, all these different things that follow along your personal narrative, I’m seeing this person come alive with passion and interest in web3 in blockchain, and you’ve mentioned a couple reasons why that might be the case. You’ve talked a little bit about economics, you’ve talked a little bit about leading edge technology, but as you reflect on all of this, how would you explain why it is that you became a man on fire about blockchain and web3?

Kent Fourie (00:26:56):

I think, that once I realized what web3 could do, and what it meant for the world, it became quite clear that this was a really disruptive industry, and people use that word quite a lot, disruptive industries. And this was really a disruptive industry, and it was the first one that could really take on the banks, and it is the first one that could take on socioeconomic structures that we’ve had in place for hundreds of years. And I think that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations looks a lot more like what we have in the blockchain, than our current economy. We have a lot more of a democratized opt in sovereignty with web3, you can choose to participate. And when you participate, it is very democratic. You have full sovereignty of your wallet. If you’re using the full web3 experience, no one can come take it away from you, unless they come to your house and really get it from you.

(00:27:57):

And I think, it really started giving power back and breaking down barriers to entry for a lot of people, especially in places where their own governments couldn’t provide them the access that they needed. So once they had access to web3 and these kind of borderless transactions, borderless communities, and I mean, that is one of the biggest things that really excites me, is the communities that have come up out of web3. I mean, the thing that I get most excited about, is what we don’t know yet, and what we can’t imagine. Because when I started working in this ecosystem, DeFi wasn’t even defined yet, and NFTs as art were around, but they weren’t really big. And we were really thinking as an ecosystem on utility for NFTs and how to bring utility into NFTs, rather than NFTs as art. And there is so much out there, and it’s actually great to go into ecosystems and different communities, different discords, different Twitter spaces, and go and speak to people about actually what’s happening and also listen.

(00:29:04):

And what I’ve found is, that even in these NFT communities, they speak about community, they and how they were brought together, and how being part of this, just buying into this NFT has brought them closer to people that they would’ve never have known, and they were able to form these communities, and act on the community. And I’ve said this before, and in other chats with some of my friends, I’ve said that NFTs are catalysts for DAOs. They are a way for people to align on certain values, and then work together with capital and time and effort, to a common good. And I could have never seen that happen. And it’s kind of a no-brainer, but when you go and speak to people about it, when you listen to them and you actually just make them aware of what they said, they are actually blown away at the power of it. And I see it every single day, and I’m just excited for the next things, and to be part of building the next big thing.

Nick (00:30:08):

Well let’s talk about the next big thing in the context of Africa. And I already asked you a question about South Africa, but if we zoom out a little bit and we just look at the continent, and we look at all the activity, all the enthusiasm there for blockchain and web3, you’ve started Graphrica, you’re very plugged-in to the community there. How would you explain to listeners that may not be up to speed on everything that’s happening in Africa, in the context of web3 and blockchain?

Kent Fourie (00:30:34):

Africa is hungry. Africa has a lot of talent. I am consistently meeting men and women, actually more women than men, throughout Africa who are joining my community. They’re also reaching out to me in different channels and I’m actively going to their communities. Just the other day I had a discussion with a group of developers called in NGENI Devs from East Africa, and they’re all around from Kenya and Uganda and those areas, and they have a group of up to 50 devs which they train and work on different web3 projects together. They’re absolutely amazing, and I’m hoping that I can help them more in their community with Graphrica.

(00:31:11):

And what Graphrica is, is the home of The Graph Network in Africa, and essentially we’re a community of talent, of like-minded thinkers. You don’t have to be from Africa to join. We want to connect Africa and connect the talent and like-mindedness, to show you that we are leaders, and we have the talent and we have the drive to lead Africa and the world, in this next iteration. And we host community calls, we host free training sessions in web3 for anybody who wants to take the plunge.

(00:31:41):

And Africa is really blowing up. It always has been. I mean I’m always blown away at the new projects coming out and it’s a lot around utility. Most of these projects are around utility. And just to speak about some of the companies, we have Invest Capital, which are some huge players here. We have Linum Labs, amazing development company, very close to my heart. And we also have Invictus Capital. They started off as Crypto20, they’re also in the DeFi ecosystem. Just recently in Cape Town we had the Luno Tower go up. Luno is a local exchange where this big building with the light shining all day and all night with Luno, and now it’s like it’s the tallest building in the city, and it’s shining with cryptocurrency. It’s a big exchange which is absolutely surreal.

(00:32:28):

Within Graphrica, we have huge delegations from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and it’s growing every single day. We endeavor more people from North Africa and all over to come and join us. We’re doing cool stuff. We also have the ability to train and place you eventually. We have a lot of cool development partners that we are busy working with, and there is endless work in the web3 space for everyone. And when I mean everyone, it is marketers, it is lawyers, it is builders, farmers, anybody who worked in any industry that can think about how they can apply blockchain to the industry is welcome. And that’s what it’s about. We disrupt and we change. Blockchain is not just tech. It can be applied to every single facet of life, and Africa needs this. Africa knows this. I mean M-PESA is digital money. It’s been around since 2007, absolute leaders, and for Africa we already understand how to use this digital money. We’ve had cell phone banking forever. Most people live off mobile banking in Africa, which is a huge problem. We call it the unbanked and it’s one of the biggest issues we have to solve.

(00:33:41):

And I think, also in the African context, we are much more aware of these issues and all of the third world issues, so they come front and center. We should be looking at these problems in our society and Africa does. They look at what we can do to fix, how we can bootstrap funding into local business, how we can revolutionize a local business, or a local industry, with blockchain. And I’m just waiting to see what’s what is next to come from Africa.

Nick (00:34:10):

So you mentioned anyone can get involved with Graphrica. What’s the best way for a listener who has interest to do that?

Kent Fourie (00:34:17):

Anybody can join The Graphrica community. We’re on Discord. You can go to graphrica.org. There is a big Join Us button there that’ll direct you to our Discord. It’s free and open to anybody who wants to come and learn more and be part of our community. And some exciting news. Graphrica is also becoming a development service provider. We have a few developers working with us and we are actively training developers to come and move up into our ranks. We work with some great companies and we build subgraphs, all sort of web3 fun, and we’d love for more people to come and join our community as we’re looking for developers.

Nick (00:35:23):

Well, I definitely want to encourage listeners that are interested in getting involved with Graphrica and learning more about everything that’s happening in Africa, to take you up on that and join the Discord. And you’ve already mentioned a couple of times that you have worked in, and have some passion for what The Graph is doing. When did you first become aware of The Graph?

Kent Fourie (00:35:41):

So at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, I was doing a lot of architecture for a few different companies and these were quite large ecosystems. They were most of the time either one or two dapps per ecosystem. So it was quite a lot of front end work and wiring up to do. There was many contracts, sometimes up to 14, and multiple backends to basically do coordination for these contracts, whether it was store of chain data, index the contracts to serve them as state of the contracts up to the front end. And having built a backend that indexes smart contracts in the state that smart contracts are in, and the events before, from scratch, it requires so much work. It requires that you obviously build it. This is probably the easier part, because you can spin up a backend that has a database. There’s lots of boilerplate code for that. You use something like web3 or Ether to listen for the events that you want to listen for, and then you create the entities in inside the callbacks.

(00:36:42):

The problem with this is that you’re essentially listening to every single event, which is okay, but it kind of sucks for certain contracts. If you’re listening to events on an EOC20 token that’s being used quite a lot, by a lot of people, then you are only listening for the ones that you’re doing. This doesn’t happen very often, but what I’m saying is, having built a large backend to index smart contracts in the past, I knew what went into it and building it is the easy part. Actually running it and maintaining it is the hard part. The DevOps required and the version control of packages, and if something goes wrong, it just stops and you have to re-index from scratch again, or from a certain block. This could take up to a couple of months.

(00:37:23):

And when I found The Graph while looking for solutions, I was immediately interested, and I think, I took the current project that I was working on, I threw about three or four contracts at the CLI, spun something up in one night, and I was like, woof, there’s our state API, there’s our Indexer, and this was back when they didn’t have the decentralized network yet, it was only hosted service. So I was having a lot of fun and I was really enjoying it. The hardest part was convincing my clients that they should be going that route. I hope that they’re still happy with the choice that we made for them, and I hope that it’s paid off, because I think it’s probably the best thing you could have done. Yeah, that was the first time I became aware of The Graph.

Nick (00:38:08):

What’s a CLI?

Kent Fourie (00:38:09):

Command line interface. The Graph CLI is a package, one of many of the packages that The Graph has, and The Graph command line interface allows you to basically spin up the project from a couple of commands, or it essentially prompts you for what the contract address is, where the API is, what network it’s on, what you want to call the subgraph. And essentially it spins up and it builds, it scaffolds. It scaffolds out a new project for you that has the basics that you need to start your subgraph, but you need a lot of work to go from there.

Nick (00:38:43):

Longtime listeners of the podcast will know that it’s happened multiple times where a guest has said they found The Graph because they were working on something, they needed a solution for it, they found The Graph, it plugged in and it made their life easier, or it checked an important box on what they were trying to accomplish. You went through this a little bit there when you talked about how you first became aware of The Graph, but diving a little deeper, how does The Graph make life easier for people like you, that are working on the projects that you described earlier?

Kent Fourie (00:39:13):

Well, the first way it makes it way easier, is that we’re able to build APIs for our smart contracts very, very quickly. This requires a lot of custom work if you’re doing it by hand. It requires a lot of skills, which a new developer doesn’t have. When a new developer comes to a graph, and you asked me from my perspective, so how it solves problems for us as developers in the ecosystem is, it makes something very complex, quite simple, that is the hosting part of it. People don’t have to host their own subgraphs, they can if they want to. You can run your own node, and you can host your own subgraph, right? But the hoster network and the decentralized network basically allow developers to iterate way faster. They allow them to create these APIs extremely quickly. I mean the other day I did a two-hour session and we created the beginnings of the Luxray subgraph, right?

(00:40:09):

It’s not completed, but in a two-hour session I was able to take absolute newbies through the rungs of how to do it, and it doesn’t take that long. What it means for the ecosystem is another thing, the possibilities, the applications, we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. And I had a lot of great ideas halfway through last year, which I’m only seeing come to fruition now.

(00:40:31):

And I’m happy to see that some people have come to the same conclusions as me on how to use it. I want to one up them, but I’m also very, very excited about some of the new things coming up, like data edges. That pattern is something that I’ve been needing for a few of my applications for quite a while, and crosstrain bridges using subgraphs as an L2 layer. I’ve been playing around with ideas for eight months about that. So I am extremely excited about what it can do, how you can leverage it. I’m still learning new ways to use it and fun ways.

(00:41:10):

If you’re creative, you can do amazing things with the subgraph. It can turn some work that would usually take you a month into a very, very pleasant two days of work, and you feel like you accomplished something amazing, because you did. You’ve basically indexed the smart contract, and it simplifies the process. It’s an amazing tool. And the ecosystem around it, and this is just from a developer’s perspective, I’m talking from a developer perspective using it as a tool to create some graphs, which are these APIs for decentralized applications, there there’s a whole other side. There’s a whole economy about Curators and indexes and Delegators, and I see it as donut shaped economies, and they all pay back onto each other. If we have people participating, all the protocols, all the EVMs, The Graph is going to support them. That helps The Graph. If we have indexes playing well, and we have Curators playing well, and we have people querying these subgraphs, then the economy thrives.

(00:42:13):

But there’s a lot still to be built. We’re in the early stages. If anybody knows about the roadmap, the R&D roadmap and other things coming, it’s quite long and quite detailed, and they’re working on amazing things. So definitely jump into community calls, because they give you a little bit of a window into what’s happening at The Graph.

Nick (00:42:34):

You mentioned a lot of different things there, good ideas or initiatives that you’ve been keeping an eye on. One that I’m not a hundred percent sure I understand fully yet, is this idea of L2s and subgraphs becoming L2. How can you help me as a non-technical person understand what that is, or how it works, and why it’s actually important?

Kent Fourie (00:42:57):

I’ll just say go look at Hop exchange. If people want to learn more, join Graphrica and I can possibly teach you about it.

Nick (00:43:04):

Fair enough. So listeners will reach out to you, get a little more information there. But zooming out maybe just a little bit more, what’s one idea or a couple use cases that most excites you?

Kent Fourie (00:43:15):

To go back to data edges, and I won’t go too deep into this, because you can go onto the forum and read about it. But essentially, I started thinking about the limitations of subgraphs, right? Because when you’ve built your subgraph and now you’ve got free time to play with it and you’re not breaking your back trying to finish this large backend or something, now you have time to play and to try and see what the limitations are of solidity, and you start doing some Googling. I had the idea that storing state to the blockchain is expensive, because you have to spend gas. I was thinking, well what if we don’t change any state, we just emit an event? And what is the theoretical limit of a string parameter? What is the limit of a string parameter for validity function? And that made me think, I was just like, okay, well if I have a subgraph with the function, and I put some permissions there, only owner, and I have a version of this on my GitHub if anybody wants to look, it’s quite a lot of fun. It’s called Neo Post.

(00:44:14):

And essentially I just thought, okay, well we have a smart contract with the function, that takes in some data of a string, just some string data, and it emits it as an event. So what are the limitations of that string parameter? And I Googled it. And there was a few answers, and the one answer said it was something reasonably small, and there was another answer and quite a few other answers, that basically said that it’s a large number, it’s a library’s worth of books in text, or at least lots and lots and lots of books in text. You can post the whole book if you like, easily. You can post multiple books in if you format it. Basically what I’m saying is, if you copy a whole book into your clipboard and you paste it into a HackMD file or a markdown file, Google doc, you take a whole book, you post it there, and when you push save, it’s saving it to this function. It’s not posting it to IPFs, it’s not putting it there, it’s just pushing it right through to the event.

(00:45:25):

I experimented and I did this with a few books. It worked, and it was very, very cheap gas cost. And essentially I was like, okay, well you could essentially make your own blog this way. You could make a forum this way, you could add permission gating. And the large idea that I had was, we could work towards putting the world’s knowledge on a centralized decentralized, because it’s decentralized, but it’s in one place on the blockchain. We could put all this knowledge, all this knowledge that we have, which is fractured and books are being burnt currently in parts of the world, so it’s quite sad.

(00:46:01):

But I look back to the library of Alexandria, and there’s a beautiful story about the Library of Alexandria. It was started by Alexandra the Great and he wanted to create basically the largest university, the world’s knowledge essentially. And it became that. It became the most prestigious university in the known world at the time. And there was women who were professors and supported it like Hypatia. But the most important thing was that every single boat that came into port, they forced the boat to give over every book, so that they could transcribe it to the library. Every single record, they forced them, and they would give it back. They paid people to go on book bounties, to go out into the world to go find books and texts, to bring back to the library of Alexandria. They employed tons of translators to rewrite it into different languages, and add different alphabets. And it was a university, so they were consistently adding to this knowledge. It was amazing. And we know obviously you had burnt down and quite sad.

(00:47:05):

And when I read about this, it gave me the idea that we could possibly have a similar sort of global library, and we could have a decentralized network of bounties for people to go and find new texts, or to go and find those texts and put them on, to translate texts. Imagine what this could do for a new economy of translators that could translate books. I know that Nestle and Cadbury had a big campaign to translate X amount of books into African languages, and this is exactly the same sort of thing. What I like about it is that we could also add the governance of the world to this.

(00:47:43):

We have Wikipedia, similar sort of thing, we could port that over. But the governance aspect of the World Knowledge database is quite something remarkable, because we won’t have problems with people wiping things from history like they used to, because of the immutability of the blockchain. So yeah, that’s one idea I had. I haven’t been working on it, but I really would like to see more attempts to push data to the blockchain, and there’s some great ways you can do it, and there’s great implementations for it. But yeah, I had a dream to truly build the Library of Alexandria on the blockchain, and it might come true.

Nick (00:48:25):

I love the idea, and I appreciate you walking us through it. You’re obviously somebody with a lot of ideas and somebody who’s really committed to The Graph community. It should be noted that you’re also a Graph grant recipient. You were recently awarded a grant in Wave 5. What can you share about your experiences being a grant recipient?

Kent Fourie (00:48:45):

I’m firstly, extremely honored to be on this wave. To tell you a little bit about how it came about, I had been in contact with a few people from the foundation and engine node, Simon, and recently Carl Rojas as well. And I had been, this was midway through last year and closer to the end of last year, I was in contact with them. And this was first for Graphrica, because I was working on building up this community. It was actually Edge & Node and The Graph that put me in touch with Richie initially. So I really wanted to become part of the community and I said, what can I do to help? And the foundation in Edge & Node, they said, we have a lot of these companies that they need help with subgraphs, they need help with getting EVM compatibility or getting the right tools up like Multisig wallets to run in EVM compatible chain.

(00:49:37):

So they were putting me in touch with some of these companies and I ramped it up at the beginning of this year. I had always been involved in The Graph Discord, mostly inside the subgraph support. But at the beginning of this year I ramped it up, and I was asked to help out with matchstick testing. So to work with the Lime chain team to basically help test the new versions of Matchstick and some of the other features that they’re going to release and provide support and some inputs on them in meetings. So started doing that earlier this year, as well as really ramping up my involvement in the community.

(00:50:11):

I was running Graphrica at that time, and I had a lot of time sitting on a Discord, so my Discord would always ping and I would help out in the community if people had an issue. And I got to meet Slim Chance and I got to meet Payne, and a lot of the other Advocates that you know today, and I was in contact with them, because they would help me, and they would point me in the right direction and I would also flag some issues that I would find in code to them. And yeah, that’s essentially where the relationship started.

(00:50:42):

And then the foundation reached out to me and offered me a grant for the work that I’d been putting in. I honestly wasn’t expecting it and I was just happy to help out in the community at the time. I was really enjoying it. I really had always enjoyed The Graph community. I had done a little bit of soul searching at the end of last year to find out what I really wanted to do and Graphrica was what I wanted to do. So at the beginning of the year I started ramping up my involvement, and my hard work was seen.

(00:51:11):

And what my grant entails is essentially that it’s community support in technical matters. So that’s like subgraph support in other places. I support the Limechain team with some of the match tick testing, and I also will sit on some of the other calls, to speak about community, to look at some of the new clients, and some of the new plugins that they’re working on and give my advice and help out with the testing there too. Yeah, I’m really excited to be a grant recipient. I’m loving the work, and I’m looking forward to continuing my support.

Nick (00:51:45):

How important do you think The Graph is for the future of crypto and web3?

Kent Fourie (00:51:51):

I think, The Graph is already extremely important. I think, The Graph is if you’re not using it, you’re really putting yourself at a disservice as a developer. I mean, not everybody has access to The Graph tools unfortunately, but I know that The Graph team is trying to add more chains all the time. So why I think it’s important, is it really is a great starting point for new developers. For someone who isn’t a developer at all, or someone who is self-taught with a little bit of JavaScript knowledge or whatever, for them to jump into other environments and other stacks, it’s quite daunting. What I’ve found is, that subgraphs, actually there’s a nice balance there. If you go and learn Solidity, and you have to have a little bit of Solidity knowledge to do a subgraph, but it’s doable, right? There are resources out there to do that.

(00:52:50):

From there you have to know a little bit of data structures for your GraphQL, and you have to know a little bit of TypeScript, but those are totally manageable to learn if someone’s helping you, or if you have the time and you have the drive, it’s easy to learn. Once you learn how to make a subgraph, you have TypeScript and GraphQL. Once you’ve built on those skills, you have TypeScript, GraphQL and Solidity. And if you add, React to that stack, you’re a full stack web3 developer, so you can build Dapps, how’s that for a leapfrog? And in traditional web2, you have to learn all these different disciplines. You have to learn them quite deeply. With regards to web3, you’re going into Solidity and there’s a lot of other things, but with a subgraph, Solidity, you don’t have to know how to write it, but if you can read it and you understand the events and you understand what it’s doing, then you can move from that and create subgraphs.

(00:53:41):

Why The Graph is really important for the ecosystem. They stand on the middle ground, they stand as, I kind of see them as the center post, of the tent of web3, for the ecosystem that I work in, which is EVM and compatibility and a little bit more, The Graph, just for most of the solutions, it’s part of the solution for a lot of the Dapps and applications that you see out there. And I’m just speaking about the development side, so I’m not even speaking about indexing, I’m not even speaking about curation or delegation right now. So I’m speaking from the developer standpoint. I would love to be able to touch more on indexing and delegating, curating, but I’m not the expert on it. I’ve done a little bit of curating, I’ve done a little bit of delegating, but I deploy subgraphs, and it makes my life as a web3 developer way easier.

(00:54:28):

And just because you have to build a subgraph for a smart contract, doesn’t mean it can’t apply to a very web2 sort of, or a very real world thing. We can get really creative and with what we do, and I’ve kind of explained that with building a forum, but subgraph development is, it really gives you a lot of time to work on being creative, which you would normally put into struggling to get your backend deployed. So it’s an amazing set of tools. It’s an amazing protocol, which really is creating quite a vast economy. I’d like to see it grow. I’d like to see more indexes, and more Delegators, and more Curators, and more people using the decentralized network.

Nick (00:55:09):

Do you think web3’s an inevitability, or is it an experiment we’re watching to see what happens next?

Kent Fourie (00:55:15):

I think, that the standpoint is quite binary, as with life, everything’s quite fluid and chaotic. And I mean, if we’re going to say that web3 and the blockchain ecosystem isn’t chaotic and fluid, then we’d be doing ourselves a disservice. I believe that web3 will evolve. It’ll consistently evolve. There might be a Web4, we don’t know. The really, really exciting thing is that it constantly changes so quickly. One thing I do think, is that we do need to find balance. There’s a lot of chaoticness inside of web3, and as in nature, there’s like balance and chaos. I think, that we always have to keep our minds that we have to find balance in what blockchain serves, right? And what I mean by this is, there’s a lot of things that we need to fix in the world, and it doesn’t have to do with money.

Nick (00:56:04):

So after you became aware of The Graph, you’ve developed some passion for it. You’re highly involved in the project, you know a lot of people within the community. What drives that level of passion?

Kent Fourie (00:56:16):

I believe that The Graph stands at a middle point in a very contentious and competitive industry. It supports everybody. It supports all protocols and chains, or at least it tries to. Their positioning as a supporting player is underestimated. They support all these different protocols, and all these different chains, which are normally competitors in the space. They kind of stand as a middle ground for a lot of these competitors, and it’s in their best interest for all of these companies, all of these protocols, all of these chains, all these Dapps to succeed, because that makes The Graph succeed. I think they’re instrumental in the success of web3 in the future, and they are already instrumental in supporting web3. I’d like to see more people understand this and we’re still on the frontier, and we have this momentum. That is one point of about why I’m passionate.

(00:57:08):

Another point is they have a large respect for the community and the people supporting them. They deliver on the promises that they make, and that’s quite rare in this space. The whole ecosystem around The Graph runs very professionally, all the companies. But the community, the community that The Graph has created, is something that I’ve never seen before, and I’m very happy to be part of it, so I’m really looking forward to the future.

Nick (00:57:35):

Well, Kent, thank you so much for answering that and so many other questions here. I now want to turn our attention to the GRTiQ 10 questions that I ask every guest at the podcast so that listeners can learn something new, try something different, or achieve more. So are you ready, Kent, for the GRTiQ 10?

Kent Fourie (00:57:50):

Yeah.

Nick (00:58:01):

Kent, what’s one book or article that’s had the most impact on your life?

Kent Fourie (00:58:05):

The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I hope I didn’t butcher that. That book changed my life when I read it at 13. It taught me about being conscious of yourself in the world and other people, and self-actualization. So everybody should read it if you haven’t. It’s an easy read and it’s an amazing read.

Nick (00:58:22):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you think every human should be required to watch?

Kent Fourie (00:58:26):

I’m a big Trekkie and I love Star Trek, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I think that it’s a beautiful, beautiful image of the future, and what we can do if we work together. The quotes in there are just… They’re eternal.

Nick (00:58:44):

Kent, if you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, what one would you choose?

Kent Fourie (00:58:49):

This is an impossible question, because yeah, it literally is impossible, but it would probably be Graceland by Paul Simon. It’s probably one of the most deeply South African albums there is, and it features Ladysmith Black Mambaso, which is an African choir, and if you haven’t heard it, is heart-wrenching, and will bring tears to your eyes.

Nick (00:59:12):

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

Kent Fourie (00:59:14):

My CEO and mentor at one of the past companies that I worked, said that therapy is just as important as physical and mental exercise. You said that you know need to spend 10% of your salary, go once a week, like you would go exercise a couple times a week, and you would do a Sudoku for a challenge. Therapy’s incredibly important, and it took me a while to take his advice, but yeah, it’s changed my life.

Nick (00:59:43):

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

Kent Fourie (00:59:47):

Think twice about your future, and look long, and hard, and far into your future, before you act. Regret is debilitating and it lasts forever.

Nick (00:59:56):

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

Kent Fourie (01:00:00):

To make time for yourself in the morning. I’m a morning person and I think that everyone should try and wake up early if they can. Just get a start on your day. And what I try and do first thing in the morning is meditate, waking up early and having some time for myself, starting my day with the right intentions. Essentially, the idea that an idle mind is the devil’s playground, so creating the right intentions first thing in the morning, really does help.

Nick (01:00:24):

Kent, based on your own experiences and observations in the world, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains people finding success in life?

Kent Fourie (01:00:34):

Consistency. And that has to do with remembering as well, having a good memory. So being consistent and remembering to be consistent, is very important. Another thing is to try and learn from other people’s mistakes, and that goes with having a good memory. If you’re consistent and you continue doing the same thing, and doing it better than you did before, you’ll be successful.

Nick (01:00:59):

And then the final three questions are complete, the sentence type questions. So Kent, complete this sentence. The thing that most excites me about web3 is…

Kent Fourie (01:01:08):

What we can’t imagine yet.

Nick (01:01:09):

How about this one? If you’re on Twitter, then you should be following…

Kent Fourie (01:01:15):

CryptoOB1 and 6529 and Graphrica.

Nick (01:01:17):

And then lastly, complete the sentence, I’m happiest when…

Kent Fourie (01:01:22):

I’m in nature.

Nick (01:01:31):

Kent Fourie, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate how gracious you’ve been and a lot of great answers here and insights you’ve shared. If people want to learn more about you or the work you’re doing, especially with Graphrica, what’s the best way to do it?

Kent Fourie (01:01:43):

So you can get us on graphrica.org. There’s a big join us button there to join our Discord. That’s where we are. You can reach me at KTFou on Twitter. That’s KTFou. You can get all the links to Graphrica and also my Discord handle, which is Mac. So you’ll find it all in my Twitter, hope to see you in Graphrica and The Graph protocols Discords.