Okay, we're rolling. Benjamin Brandall, co-founder of WeaveVM. Welcome. Thank you for having me. So you and I were introduced by a mutual friend of ours who's in the AI space and he's quite excited about what WeVM is up to. Before we get into WeVM, tell us your origin story. How'd you get into crypto and more importantly, why are you staying? Yeah, sure. So my background is in like B2B SaaS. Like throughout the 2010s, I was working for a variety of like Silicon Valley SaaS startups on the marketing and then later engineering and growth engineering side of things. I actually got into crypto through like a strange roundabout path. Like it wasn't really about like the financial aspect of it. Like I was first introduced to it via Rweave, at the time I was kind of obsessed with preserving digital culture, making sure that all of this stuff that I had that was rare was backed up and archived and available. the ways of doing that permanently weren't really around. Rweave was pretty much the first large scale infinite data bucket for on-chain storage that existed. Yeah, I kind of naturally got attracted to that because it's better than a torrent. It's better than having it on your local computer, even if you've got backups of it. And so it was a way for me to preserve rare media. So that's kind of how I got into crypto, like from the content angle. Then in the very early days, I joined an Rweave hackathon with my now co-founder of WeaveVM, Rani. And we kind of started building a social prototype on top of Arweave, like before Arweave really had the infrastructure to support apps. And so this is how we sort of learned how can we build computation on top of permanent storage. This was around 2020. Yeah, as I say, Arweave didn't have like a smart contract protocol or like really much of anything at that time that was suitable. And so we were building that and trying to figure out how can we add all of the necessary things to make an app on top of this like really useful base data storage layer. That's kind of where I came from. Then we pivoted a bunch of times during that 2020 to 2021 up until 2023 when we launched WeaveVM. We... we focused like in the app layer on like social and identity protocols. We launched the Rweave name service, which has done pretty well. And then we looked into how we can use Rweave as a way to store and link social metadata across different chains to provide like a unified identity. In doing so, we built like the infrastructure for that. One of the previous protocols that we worked on is called Mem, Mem.Tech molecular execution machine. which was basically a way to put JavaScript functions on chain and then push the results of those functions when they run to Rweave. So it's kind of like AWS Lambda serverless functions thing. When we came to add EVM support to that, we realized that... the EVM support is 95 % of the product. It's like very hard to build an EVM client. So instead of doing that, we went like EVM client first and then added the R-Weave storage part into it, looking to kind of solve the problem that a lot of EVM apps and chains and protocols have with the very tight storage limitations as soon as you sort of get into the EVM space. So that's our trajectory, where we came from. Like we're very much... were early in the R-Weave ecosystem realized its limitations and its strengths and then tried to bring the power of its permanent storage layer like out to where the apps are and where the stuff already exists that can make use of it most. Now you got into something that I think is known as the EVM storage dilemma. We've heard of the trilemma, but tell us more about the EVM storage dilemma because I don't think that's a problem that's well known or at least well talked about. Yeah, I think it's not well known because it's like a really uncomfortable one because people solve it by putting stuff on centralized storage and then kind of still pretending to have like their full app stack in a decentralized context. Basically, one of the problems around that are EVM nodes do not want to store data. Like there is an EIP coming up like EIP 4444, which proposes that EVM nodes will have very limited data storage. This is to keep hardware requirements low and things like that. so once that happens and EVM nodes have no incentives or even are hard required to not store data, then all of the ledger history and all of that kind of stuff gets pushed out to centralized providers. There's no incentive even now to run an archive node unless you're a company like chain stack or whatever that like sells access to archive nodes. And so really what's gonna happen and what is already happening with EVM data is that it's becoming like gate kept and in centralized providers. That's what one half of it. The other half is that it's just so incredibly expensive to put stuff on EVM chains. know, it costs on Ethereum it costs... hundreds of dollars per megabyte. You've got something called ETH storage, which seeks to sort of solve this, but it's ridiculously expensive, like thousands of dollars for a gigabyte of storage. And then even, you know, fast and cheap L2s like base, they're a couple of dollars per megabyte. And yeah, so really it's not set up to handle it. The only chain that I have come across that is set to do that is Rweave. But the problem with Rweave was that it kind of came out of the... came into existence around the time of the Ethereum ICO. so like EVM standard was not proven out and it hadn't caught on as strongly as it has now. And so it uses completely different everything, like different internals, different address space. There's no native interoperability there at all. And so it's very hard for EVM apps to make use of it. So that's kind of what we're looking to bridge with WeaveVM. Now, weVM is, tell us, let's go into weVM and how it solves the EVM, kind of the storage dilemma. By the way, that's actually quite disconcerting. When people think of Ethereum, they think of this fully decentralized world computer thing. But a lot of people don't talk about that actually a lot of the data is on centralized storage. Outside of You know, people know that NFTs, the actual metadata and the image is actually just a point to, know, IPFS or something else. But outside of NFTs, I don't think this is talked about a lot at all. And it probably should be. uncomfortable things. in general, mean, there's multiple ways of looking at it. Like one is if somebody has it, then you can at least restore it. know, people, there are public goods where people run archive nodes, but there are estimated to be only, you know, a handful of like full archive nodes serving Ethereum history. Most of the work is done by businesses. And the worrying thing about businesses is that they can do anything with it. They can... they can die by accident or they can, you know, willfully withhold it or raise prices, et cetera, right? So if it's not kind of in the public domain in a open data lake, like on our weave, then it's pretty vulnerable in my eyes. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's get into WeVM, why you and your co-founder founded it and some of the key problems that it aims to solve. Yeah, so our original inspiration for it was ledger history. were looking at how, especially chains that are going decentralized. Like if you look at something like Metis that has a decentralized sequencer model, they both have that model and also are the source of truth for their historical ledger data. When you join the Metis network as a sequencer permissionlessly, you still have to sync your ledger on your node from their data source. And so we were kind of looking at why is it not becoming more of a standard to put your data out in the open and have it like auditable and transparent for third parties. That was one of the things. The other was just looking at how much it costs to store data on EVM chains and thinking. It's temporary. It's you know, it gets it gets purged after a certain period of time with EIP 4444 Our weave is permanent and much much cheaper. There must be kind of a arbitrage here in the in the market between You know things are just far too expensive Here it's here. It's here. It's much much cheaper. How can we like bridge that that was that was the thing? We thought you know, it starts to enable properly fully decentralized applications as well, because if you're a content app or something like that, you're probably not actually putting all of the content of the app itself on chain. You're probably more like storing that somewhere where it's much quicker and easier to access and much cheaper for the end user, because you're kind of motivated to not pass on the costs of your own decentralization to your end user and then make them. know, pay loads of money just to use like some simple consumer app. And so really what happens is that, you know, all of the data just gets put wherever is cheapest, which creates like fragile apps. we're trying to make, you know, eternal web three protocols, then having that layer is really, really poor practice. But oftentimes people don't really have much of a choice. If you want to the margins low, you can't be like... storing full JPEGs as like EVM call data because it's just gonna cost you more than is viable. And so, yeah, one of the points of it was this is going to enable better decentralization. Even IPFS, like it is decentralized, but it is not permanent. That's kind of one of the scandals around NFTs. Some of them are already 404s after the 2021 NFT bull market. Some of the pinning services have stopped serving those content hashes because it's actually just really like, you know, it's permissionless and crypto adjacent, but it really is just the same as AWS in the fact that you have to continue paying a pinning service to provide you that JPEG. know, like Pinata or whatever will cost you $5 a month if you use a throwaway card and run out of balance. those nodes suddenly have no incentive to keep that content online and it's a 404. So it seems like using R-Weave storage should be like a smart default for like anything you want to keep around. And also a cost saving thing removes maintenance headache for like stuff disappearing. But yeah, like I said, the interoperability was not there and that's kind of why we built WaveVM. We quite quickly realized that DA was going to be a use case for it because similar to the kind of temporary nature of Ethereum ledger data, DA is also 14 to 30 days and then it gets removed. This is because rollups, they have the challenge period of after that period of time, they don't really need that data. So these systems stay lightweight by getting rid of it. But actually what we've come to learn is that they do need that data. especially if you are looking to build something decentralized. So we're working with Dimension, which are an L1 that supports app chain based stuff basically, like role apps they call it. So you can spawn a role app off of the Dimension L1. They are currently using Celestia as their default, but they're looking to add support for WeaveVM because... They found that with Celestia, it's making it so the role app operators have to run their own custom Celestia archive nodes. Because if the data gets deleted, then how can somebody sink into that network from Genesis block and know all of the full history of it? to reduce the operating costs and also just like general centralization for those chains that come off of the Dimension L1, that's kind of the solution that they're looking to offer. That's kind of one example of why something that uses Rweave as its default is particularly good for EVM land because there's a lot of hidden problems with the temporary nature of storage there. Yeah, so by DA, just for the audience, you're talking about data availability. And the category leader there is Celestia. Let's talk more about that. looking at the competitors that we VM competes with, there's the storage piece. And maybe name a couple of key competitors there. And then let's get into data availability and and how we VM is entering that space. Yeah, in the storage space, mean, I think, feel like we're still competing in a way with AWS. A lot of stuff gets, gets hosted there. I mean, probably don't need, do need much dissection on that, but then IPFS, it kind of went over that it's, it's temporary and doesn't have like incentives for storage. One of the good things about, about Rweave is that it has very long-term storage incentives. Like it has a mechanism whereby when you pay for storage, you pay for 200 years upfront sort of in a way of you overpay and then that overpayment goes into a pool called the endowment and the endowment is then used to pay miners out into the the foreseeable very very long future and the amount that you overpay is kind of determined by how much balance is in that endowment pool and so you're you're paying based on like how how sustainable the network can be into the future and so it's sort of self-balancing in that way. So that's kind of how we mitigate the problem with the lack of incentives around IPFS, but they are currently the standard. I think they kind of came out around the same time that Ethereum did, and they were sort of the only decentralized option at that time. And so they've kind of become baked into a lot of the Ethereum ethos and develop a toolkit. As well as that, there is actually new stuff launching as well. Competitors like Walrus over on Soy Network, I It kind of remains to be seen what they're gonna be like, but I'm pretty sure they offer flexible storage terms, kind of similar to Filecoin. Filecoin is a way to sort of extend the storage. in a deal by deal basis, you have to continually ask the miners to extend the life cycle of your file to keep it alive in Filecoin. So it's not like a set it and forget it thing, the same as R-Wave is. Yeah, so I would say that plus then ETH storage, which is a Ethereum based storage layer. It's very, very expensive, but it's also actually uses the Ethereum L1, which is why it's expensive. So it's very robust. It kind of offers similar permanence guarantees to Arweave, but it's, I believe, tens of thousands of times more expensive. It sounds like the key offering or the key differentiation with WeVM is against its competitors, its permanent storage, and its pay once and its set it and forget it. You mentioned also there's the compute piece. and it's also chain agnostic. Is that, first of all, is that correct? And it also sounds like there's a compute piece on top of it. Maybe tell us a little bit about that also. Yeah, so chain agnostic in a way, it depends on what you want it for. For DA, we are currently integrated with EVM chains. For ledger storage, we're integrated with SVM chains, substrate chains and EVM chains. Basically we have a tool which is able to parse your chain activity as it comes in and then make it into a format that is. that is useful for whether you are an SVM chain or a substrate chain or whatever, then settle it to WeaveVM. Then, exactly, yes, yes. So it's possible to also archive that ledger into WeaveVM and then pull it out of WeaveVM in a way where a node could use it. So in that way, we sort of act as a decentralized archival node for both EVM chains and non-EVM chains. But on the DA part and in the DAP layer part, it would be specifically for EVM, EVM World. got it. It sounds like from a partnerships perspective that not only EVM apps and EVM as well as Solana, these are two very healthy robust ecosystems and every app on those chains could be using WeVM underneath. Yes, true. Actually, our first kind of port of call for partnerships was at the chain level. What we found just sort of from a BD perspective is that it's pretty easy to get chains on board with the pitch of, we'll come on and be a decentralized archival node for you. There's very little goodwill in the chain community around like, oh, don't worry, I'll just like... set up this machine with hundreds of gigabytes of space and run you this archive node for free. so archival data is like kind of sorely lacking even in the big chains and even in Ethereum. And so being able to tell them like, we'll actually help you make your network more robust and decentralized and be a permanent store of your ledger data is really attractive. And so we've got some good names on board with that. Like we're currently archiving the ledger for avalanche, metis dimension, also Blobscan, which is a blob storage provider. are, because of that integration, we're also archiving like every single Ethereum L2 blob data. That's really great. mean, it sounds like you're seeing some traction there. On the Solana side, the Solana ecosystem is very robust and by a lot of measures, they're really winning in many ways. I've been speaking to lots of projects in the Solana space and they just rave at how supportive the community is and and getting support from the founders themselves that are still very active. What are some things that the team is doing to get more inroads into the Solana ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, EVM is such a big open space for us that we've not really needed to go looking too far in that direction. I know that at one point we did build a framework for spinning up a SVM enabled chain that uses WeaveVM for storage. And also we've got the archiver that pushes SVM data to WeaveVM. But other than that, we're not really working that closely with any Solana ecosystem projects, although it's something that I would really like to do. And also, it's kind of attractive too because Solana has typically been a big consumer of Rweave blog space. In the NFT bull run of 2021, I think Rweave was being stress tested really by the amount of Solana NFT. projects that spun up using R Weave for storage. There's a piece of dev tooling for Solana called the MetaPlex Candy Machine, which automatically on the backend pushes all of your stuff to R Weave. And so the gateways and the uploader part of it was being absolutely hammered by the, I can't remember what they're called now, but there was some kind of ape collection on Solana that used R Weave. And that was like one of the... massive early spikes, like at one point like 90 % of our data throughput was being consumed by stuff related to Solana. And I think that the connection and the affinity has still kind of lived on. You still see like good use of our weave in Solana apps. So it's something that we want to go for. And also we're considering putting up a proposal for a Solana grant to basically pay, you know, requesting the amount of Rweave token that it would cost to store the entire Solana ledger on Weave VM, which was no small amount of money, but I can't remember it precisely. But yeah, that I think, you know, Solana sometimes comes under criticism for having a small amount of core nodes. And so being able to say that a large kind of problem with the historical data is kind of being decentralized away by being put in the public might be a pretty attractive thing for the Solana ecosystem. again, we've got our hands so full with EVM land right now that we're not really in that territory yet. Yeah, I think there's quite a bit of history there too with Arweave and Solana and kind of the main linchpin there is multi-coin capital with Kyle Samani who was a key investor in both Arweave and Solana. And my guess is that's probably where the link is. That's where Solana and Arweave kind of got in bed together. Yeah, at one point they were even moving similarly in price movement. It seemed like they were very much like proxy assets for each other. Exactly, exactly. I think there's a, I think the inroads there for WeVM and Solana and Solana apps is, I think there's a lot of potential for growth there and probably less hair pulling than it is in the EVM space. Hmm interesting. Yes, because I would suppose the EVM space kind of chose IPFS Many years ago as it's its default, right? But yeah with the with the salon as our way of affinity that could be easier now because we just got to get the attention of multi coin Yeah, yeah. Now let's go into data availability. Tell us how, I guess, maybe give us an idea of what the data availability space looks like now in the key players. I have some interesting kind of tidbits around distribution. I've worked with a number of L2s and have learned a few things about L2s is that they're actually quite easy to deploy. especially with the advent of rollups as a service providers, so RAS providers. And what I've noticed is that these RAS providers have multiple partnerships with many data availability providers and just be able to choose one and spin up an L2 quite easily. And as a distribution model for WeVM, there's no reason why WeVM couldn't be in one of the options for AltLayer or Conduit or other roll-up as a service providers. But right now, it's primarily Celestia. And so that's, think, an opportunity also for WeVM to disrupt their traction. Anyway, I said a lot there, but go ahead. No, yeah, yeah. think you're absolutely correct about the, you know, the way that people are choosing their DA layers is like whatever their RAS solution is putting at the top of the list. And so that kind of it, makes it our only, our like only real option for becoming that default is being integrated into those platforms and then. getting a sort of high position on the list, guess, or like for those platforms to show in the benefit of it being stuff like you don't have to run a custom Celestia node in order to keep your chain alive, historical data alive. So yeah, we are down that path. We've had conversations with a number of these RAS providers. One of the kind of key takeaways is that they don't wanna go ahead with it while it's still in testnet, which I absolutely understand. you probably don't wanna be responsible for a production L2 that uses testnet components. However, are, Dimension is pretty Ras adjacent, I think. They have like a component of that stack called the Roller, where you can go in and like configure a new roll app on their chain and pick bits of which stack that you want to go in there. And WeaveVM is gonna be one of those options. As well as that, We're looking into how we can sort of support existing DA solutions and become their data storage layer rather than being such an aggressive kind of replace your entire DA layer with WeaveVM, you can replace just the storage section of it. And one of the partnerships that we got live just before the end of last year was with EigenDA. We worked on building basically a way where instead of instead of pushing the data to their servers and where it gets purged every 30 days, I think you just change one line of configuration in your Eigen DA setup and it goes off to WeFM instead, where it can live forever. So that's one of the angles that we're looking at. I don't know whether Celestia would be open to that. One of the kind of bits of hearsay I've kind of come across is that they don't seem particularly open to... are we based stuff? I don't know where that is. Apparently there's some kind of rivalry. But yeah, so I think, yeah, there's a few ways to approach it. Like one is we come in and be VDA layer, which is fine because we're an EVM chain that, know, EVM chains naturally have like very strong DA guarantees. And then, or we come in and be your DA layer storage layer, like with EigenDA. I think that approach at looking at, now this is not like a word you'd use, but it feels quite modular. And I think the modularity approach, use us for your DA layer or use part of us as your DA layer, I think makes a lot of sense. And the integration with EigenDA. Now, EigenDA is an up and coming kind of Celestia competitor. And I think that that's wise, being able to work with, if not Celestia, then at least you know, a competitor to Celestia. And it's one of those things that, you know, over time becomes commoditized, but once you get, once WeVM becomes part of every app, it just becomes like almost by default, just the brand extension, it becomes so strong that, you know, you won't even consider as an app developer. anything else, you just go with the one that has been already, that's already taking place in your mind. And so if WeVM gets into developers' minds, that's what they'll choose regardless of its features. Yes, and I think there is some catalysts kind of coming down the pipe as well about that. One is L2s are looking to decentralise. It's been a long time since L2 summer and it was always the promise that the training wheels are going to come off at some point and that we're going to start looking into... how can we have these as decentralized or closer to Ethereum grade decentralization of every part of them? One of the things there is that the storage layer and the DA layers also need to be decentralized. If you look at L2 beat, you see that there are still big problems with L2s showing up in the risk summaries of data is stored off chain, data is held by a small committee. A lot of these things are quite tough problems to solve if the tooling that you're using doesn't naturally integrate. It would be easy to say, okay, use Rweave, but then the reason that we built WeaveVM is that Rweave on its own actually doesn't have DA. It's cold storage. You can't verify that the data that is on Rweave is on Rweave without downloading it in full and then checking the... like coming up with a proof yourself, unlike EVM chains, which kind of naturally have that proving ability. And so to patch that problem and to make storage available to L2s, we kind of needed that EVM angle. And yeah, as I kind of mentioned before, Metis is one of the early ones that is looking to build a decentralized sequencer model. they're sort of growing out of being the ones that serve the Genesis ledger to new nodes and needs something needs something third party auditable and trustless to do so. So I think that as the narrative around decentralization for L2s grows, that's gonna be a growing need that people realize that they actually have. Like these dimension roll-ups are kind of realizing that now they wanna decentralize Celestia is a burden. And so I think that's gonna be in our favor as well as that. there's a emerging narrative, even some chains coming into testnet very soon like Monad and MegaEath that are so high bandwidth that the existing sort of DA and storage solutions that are compatible with EVM are not going to be able to handle the throughput. And so having something beefier and able to handle that capacity is gonna become necessary as well. That sounds like a really big opportunity right there. mean, know, MegaEath is making some big waves. think they're, you know, Maynette's coming up. And they've already occupied kind of a lot of mind sharing people's minds even though they haven't fully launched yet. yeah that also seems to be the meta like chains that have not launched yet Yeah, yeah. But I think it's quite positive because I think they solve a problem that many people have already in their minds but don't really talk about much. There's the old L1s and then there's the newer crop of newer ones that are coming up. And there's several coming up. There's Eclipse, there is Barra Chain, Mega Eith, just multiple ones that are kind of on the road to main net in the next, probably next 30 to 60 days. And so it's going to be quite exciting to see what happens and how their, you know, how their, you know, what their growth strategies are for their chains, because they're all going to be competing for applications and developers. And all of them are going to need a good compute storage solution, which is a big opportunity for WeVM, I think. Another one that I think is like a narrative that's an interesting opportunity is like the IP chains coming on like Sunium and Story. Yeah. Like something that I'm kind of struggling to reconcile in my head is like how can you have IP on chain if you don't have storage? So it kind of has to be that there needs to be like wider highways for storage to get into these chains. than currently exists if you're going to be storing and sewing films or songs or anything like this that would cost you lots and lots of money to do just inside EVM. Well, I think that you're bringing up something that I think is like the dirty laundry people don't want to talk about is that, you know, a lot of this is on centralized solutions. so, uh, you know, it's an opportunity for we VM to really point at the specific problem and how we VM solves that solution or is a solution to that problem. Um, but it's, it's a hard, it's a hard one because it's a lot of it's entrenched and people kind of ignore it. Going back to an example with L2 beats, most people don't look at the red flags. Instead, they pay attention to, oh, wow, there's a lot of assets bridged over, TVL is really high. There's a lot of things going on in this chain, or in this L2. But they ignore, most people ignore the red flags. You know how there's the red, yellow, green on L2 beats. I, one of my predictions is that we're going to see like a large scale nuke of one of these L2s that that's currently like super centralized, that's going to cause like, you know, loss of funds or like needing to re roll back the data to a old snapshot and reconstitute it to make sure that you know who had what balance where and that is obviously going to be like a disaster that highlights a need. Like I think that that's kind of inevitable, that something is going to get mismanaged quite badly at some point around it and create that need. And I think that'll be a big opportunity for a disaster like that or a disaster in the crater space, maybe one of these NFT projects or even the IP space like Story opens up the door for WeVM. I think that would be actually a blessing. Now I... you're not kind of hoping for a massive blow up where everyone gets wrecked because there are enough right now, there are enough projects that are thinking in a kind decentralization first way, thankfully. I met with a project yesterday in the real world asset tokenization space, RWA, and they shared about one of their customers that they just recently inked a deal with is a large life insurance company. And this life insurance company has a lot of these life insurance policies actually on paper. And so there's a big effort to digitize all of the insurance policies and then put them on chain. And it sounds like a massive amount of operational work, a headache. And it turns out that they actually can't even put most of it on chain because these nodes won't allow that much storage to be stored on chain. And so it could be an opportunity for WeVM to enter that space also. It's not super sexy. Native crypto people don't think like that. They think more of what's sexy for them and how they will benefit. But it's a real problem that this company is having. I'd love to make an introduction for you. Yeah, that would be great. think the ultimate kind of thing that like the ultimate adoption around like decentralized storage is going to be when companies exactly like that come and use it. Because that's also from like a BD perspective when you start to run into the assumptions that you made about stuff like sort of falling apart. You you might imagine that all of the compliance and all of the all of the red tape and the things that these enterprises need in reality to implement something like that might be something that you've never even thought of. I think that that's kind of the arena that some R Weave storage projects ran into when they kind of opened up enterprise plans and started working with companies that were very much like these traditional businesses. They found that the permanence was actually something of an anti-feature and that when it comes to like GDPR, you need to be able to delete that data. some kind of interesting workarounds need to be made there around like decryption and permissions around decryption encrypted by default, just sort of things that we did not turn on yet or by default because we're kind of looking at it from the perspective of we want public data pools rather than heavy permissions around things. But I think that by the time we get to the enterprise space, one, we will have actually proven to have emerged out of the infighting of Web3 to the real world use cases. But then another is we will have, we'll be like, actually ready for enterprises to adopt us, which means an awful lot of unseen regulation, I think. Yeah. Now, tell us about your road to mainnet. You're currently in testnet, is that correct? Okay. since September. Okay. Tell us what the road to Mainnet looks like and maybe not commit to any dates, but give us a sense of when you might fully launch to Mainnet and how the community... Yeah. And also let's get into the community piece because a lot of the community members are... Some community members are developers, some are non-developers. And so how can people get involved in your journey to Mainnet? Yeah, so the journey to mainnet. So we are looking to launch mainnet this year. So we're not hard committing any sort of dates there, but one of the preconditions is going to be a storage AVS, actually. So we're working with Eigen layer on a piece of the puzzle really that's kind of missing. So if you think about our architecture from a high level, is Active Validated Service. Got it. the way that we're looking at it is we have the on-node storage of WeaveVM, which is, it's not as secure as on-node storage of a network that has got a very high market cap token. Like let's put it that way, right? Like the security of the on-node part, which is actually the most useful part because it's easy to pull and... pull and push data from it. It's like the kind of top layer of the stack, the cache data kind of. The security there is not Ethereum L1 grade, right? And then the Arweave layer is actually more like cold storage, like kind of what I was talking about previously, there is no DA around Arweave storage. And so what we're looking to build in the middle is like this flexible hot cache layer that uses an AVS for inheriting Ethereum-grade security around WeaveVM's temporary on-node data. So it's sort of like, goes onto WeaveVM, it then lives inside the hot cache secured by Ethereum-staked ETH, and then is settled to our Weave, where it is also available as hard, cold archival storage. So that's the piece that we're building right now. And the cool thing about that is that it doesn't just have to be a piece that is specific to WeaveVM. You could use that as a kind of flexible storage layer for anything inside a Web2 app or anything like that, inheriting like EVM primitives and also Ethereum layer one security around that data. So that's the big piece that we're looking to build before we get into main net. But really other than that, it's like tweaks, like how far can we push the Rust Ethereum execution client throughput and bandwidth wise before it breaks? So we're at like 500 megagas right now. We're targeting a gigagas for main net. A gigagas would give us 125 megabytes a second throughput. And I believe that right now all L2s combined use around 100 kilobytes a second. So we would have space for every L2 under the sun for decades to come, I would hope. And then if not, then maybe core ref would have become upgradable enough for us to crank up the throughput on that even more. And so, yeah, right now we're the only ones that are running a Weave VM node. And that's also uncomfortable to go into main net like that. we wanted to make it so that that is possible to be run by multiple people. Like we've got the consensus between nodes set up. then one of the main way that we hope people to participate in the network is gonna actually be via this AVS. So staking your ETH towards the security of WeVM's intermediate storage layer. Yeah, so those are the pieces towards main net. As for the community, We've got a handful of developers who are happy to help us test new features at this point. We've got some apps spinning up as well. We've got an app called relic.bot, which is a way to basically publish photos on chain, like it's a mobile app. Just take your phone out of your pocket, take a picture, push it onto Weave VM. Mint it as an NFT if you like. it's kind of got social elements around it. This is all like fully on chain with with VM smart contracts and data storage. I was happy with that because that is like a perfect, simple self-contained demo of showing like how easy it and how easy it is just to actually store your data permanently on chain in the, context of a consumer app. Yeah. And so as for community, we're, we're in like the, the stages of large influx of mercenaries, I would say. Every kind of project when it starts out, I think, has just an awful lot of people that are looking for airdrops, And so that's sort of what we've got right now. And so we've needed recently to hire moderators. Thought the disk got out a bit to deal with spam. I suppose it's a good problem to have because any project ever, no matter what it's targeted towards, once it hits this kind of... critical visibility amongst that kind of sector of the crypto audience will be receiving those kinds of influx of users. It's good because it actually helps stress test the network a lot and makes us put in place processes to deal with scale around community early. But yeah, I would say that's an easy thing to grow a hard. harder thing to grow as a developer community, which is something that we're gonna be focusing on next. I think especially once we launch the AVS, between the AVS launch and mainnet is going to be when we sort of turn on our ecosystem grants program and start looking for people to build data intensive apps that can only really be built on WeFEM. I think that's gonna be the category. I remember, well, two comments. think the entry of mercenary community members that are just looking to farm air drops, I think could be very stressful, but I think is a signal that you guys are, you've hit enough critical mass that people know about you and that they're interested. And the unfortunate thing is these aren't necessarily builders that are trying to use WeVM underneath, but that's okay. you need all kind of segments of the crypto audience. And this is one really important segment, especially as you get closer to mainnet and token generation event. I remember in the early Arweave days that one of the key growth strategies was hackathons. And that, I think, really helped to grow the usage of Arweave. That as well as the Solana ecosystem, together was, I remember being at ETH hackathons and RWeave was always one of the key sponsors and key challenges was to build an app and then use RWeave underneath. That was really important. And I think that worked. Yeah, I think it did. But now what I think we're seeing is like, are projects that have raised an awful lot of money and are able to put massive prize pools together for hackathons. And so we're sort of seeing a dilution of the small segment of the crypto audience that have like really capable, dedicated developers are all very much sucked off to just like, you know, the biggest projects that have multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on hackathons. It actually even seems very stark to us because in 2022, we had a very small prize pool hackathon. I think it was like $10,000 or something to build something on top of Mem, which was our like early JavaScript smart contract engine on Arweave. And we got like really quite good responses. And it was quite a... a well attended hackathon and then a couple of years later with a higher prize pool we struggled to get decent submissions. The analysis on that was just since then there have just been so many more options for people. It's very much more diluted. But yeah, think hackathons if executed carefully and to a right the right audience and with enough money to be honest behind the prize pool are going to be a way to grow ecosystem but I'm kind of looking for another way right now. I feel like there must be another way. Yeah, no, you bring up a good point. mean, the competition is much greater now. And there's also a lot of money sloshing around, of courting developers. But that's also a positive, because most of these developers aren't necessarily the ones that are looking for big prize money. Those are probably not the ones you want anyway. But the ones you want are the ones that are looking to actually build an actual product on top of WeVM. And what are they looking for? Well, they're looking for support from you and the team. And they're also looking eventually for some type of funding or introduction to VCs. And so that could be a kind of a non quantitative of really important qualitative aspect that you could bring to these hackathons is, you you build on WeVM, we make introductions to help you raise money. There's a lot of things that that are kind of non non money related that I think could be helpful. Yes, the white glove aspect. Yeah, and the white glove, it's super important. I know that because money comes easily now, the white glove aspect, the customer service, the hand holding, the things that don't scale become really, important. Well, Benjamin, this has been really great. What can I guess before we end, what are some last words you'd like to share with the audience and how they can participate in the growth and the journey towards main net for WeVM? yeah, I mean one thing is, we publish an awful lot of updates on our blog. We're pretty regularly shipping new features, new products, new integrations and things like that. I would say like to get acquainted with what we're doing right now, the best place would be blog.wvm.dev. You can find links to the socials and discos from in there, but I would say that the pace at which we're... features and integrations is kind of high. And so it's good to just go and have a look at the blog index right now as a starting point. But yeah, I think keep an eye out as well for as we're getting up to the point where we're getting the AVS out. That's kind of when we're gonna be turning on more of the like developer incentives side of things too. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Benjamin, thank you so much. Thank you very much.