Decentralized Collaboration: Fileverse's Onchain App for DevCon Attendees & Speakers

GM GM. Welcome, welcome all. It's going to be another great DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday for members of the Web3 community to come on the show, whether you're a big-time Web3 founder, a weekend hacker, or anything in between, to showcase what you've built to the Web3 community. Today, I'm ecstatic to have back on Andreas, who's the co-founder of Fileverse. If you recall, Andreas came on the show about a month ago to showcase Fileverse. Today, if you're tuning in, this is one you're not going to want to miss if you're an attendee of DevCon. In today's episode, Andreas will be showcasing a decentralized collaboration and knowledge base app for extending DevCon on-chain that can be used before, during, and after the conference. So, definitely want to stay tuned for this one. All right, let's get into it.

GM GM, welcome back to the show Andreas. Ecstatic to have you back on the show.

Hey Narb, good to be back. Sorry for being back so quickly as well, but the discussion was so good, so...

Exactly, exactly. The first one was so good, we had to get you back on the second time in quick fashion. I guess, for folks who missed the first one or are tuning in to the show for the first time, would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, so I'm Andreas, Miro_Yetto on Twitter or Farcaster. I'm one of the co-founders of Fileverse. Fileverse is a trustless collaboration app. We released dDocs.new three months ago now. I think a lot of people in crypto have caught onto it and tried it. We're spinning out more apps such as dDocs.new, and on the side, I'm also finishing my PhD here in the UK. Voilà.

Awesome, awesome. So, definitely got you busy, which is awesome. So, DevCon. DevCon is about a month away. And as I understand it, you guys at Fileverse have cooked up something interesting for all the attendees there. But before we get into that, I just want to get your thoughts on DevCon. It being in Bangkok, have you ever... is it your first time going to DevCon? Is it your first time going to Bangkok?

It's when you started your sentence, I thought that you were going to start with what did you think of the last season of Rings of Power? I thought you were going for the light start, which I have the worst thoughts possible about that, but we can talk about it later. By the way, I tried to match your background; I took the elves' side, you're on the dark side.

So, is it the first time in Bangkok? No, I went when I was younger; really loved the city, and it's going to be a very different experience. I was there when I was 14 or something. And for DevCon, it's the first time, actually. I've been to a bunch of the global Ethereum conferences, but this is the first DevCon and probably the most exciting conference because of the quality of people that are going, the amount of topics that are covered, the amount of... you know, you can spend your time on crypto Twitter, on Farcaster, on ethresear.ch forums, reading Vitalik every week; still, there'll be a lot of knowledge just beyond your grasp simply because it is difficult to get your hands on it or be privy to the discussions that are happening around important mechanisms backing most Layer 1s, most proving networks, most Layer 2s, etc. So yeah, I can't wait. It's going to be full of learning and it's going to be very exciting because we're doing a community experiment combining Fileverse, combining the DevCon team, combining some other teams like Waku, Firefly, Hats, etc.

Wow, amazing, amazing. And I guess, just before we get into the meat of the content, I guess what's your favorite part of these Web3 conferences, DevCon or other? I know everybody usually has something they are targeting when they go to these, whether you want to go hit up the side events, or you want to take up the panels, or just go for networking. What's your go-to for going to Web3 conferences?

So, first of all, I always try to speak. I know it may come across as a little bit cocky to think that what I have to say is worth listening to, but I really think that if you're an active contributor to the space, shoot your shot and try to get panel speaking positions, anything like that, because you do get really quality feedback and discussions going just because, okay, you gave yourself 10 minutes to actually explain to even a little audience about what drives you in that space. So, whoever you are, if you're listening, even if you're a new dev, go ahead, try to get speaking opportunities; it's really useful. I'm going to be speaking in the Real-World Ethereum track, for those who want to listen to me talk about knowledge and collaboration. The other thing I would say that I'm really keen on getting from those conferences—I know it's not a very unique answer, but it's talking to people. Especially this conference, from what I understand, they're very careful in creating little hubs of interest that are physical, that are digital as well, so you can go into your favorite topic subgroup, meet people, hack together, talk about topics, and create new knowledge together. So yeah, this is really exciting, especially pleases the academic side as well.

Yeah, fantastic answer. And yeah, definitely if you're a dev or a Web3 enthusiast out there who's interested in getting some public speaking experience, speaking at a conference is no better way to go about it. And then I guess, yeah, with that, we can dive right in to what you have prepared. As far as I understand, this is Alpha, if I'm not mistaken.

This is pure Alpha, yeah. So, it's the first time that we're showing it around and actually explaining a bit deeper what you can do with it, with this app. But maybe before I share my screen, or are people already seeing my screen? No.

No.

So before I share my screen, maybe just a quick introduction on how this happened even. So, the Ethereum Foundation's DevCon team reached out to us, I think really beginning of this year. They were very interested in what we call collaboration smart contracts, something that we created as a team which acts as a file system, a decentralized file system that lives on-chain. And we had a very long discussion about what it enables, this on-chain file system plus the middleware infrastructure that we had built to create apps like dDocs.new, so a decentralized Google Doc alternative, like Portal, which is the full workspace suite alternative to Notion or Google Workspace. And they were interested in if this middleware that we had created could be replicated for some more specific use cases, let's say. So this is how it started, and it culminated to what we call today the Sufficiently Decentralized Knowledge Base and collaboration app. And what it is is very simple. Today, when you go to a conference, you realize that maybe one of the most unique and important things that the space, the industry in crypto has created, is new knowledge. New knowledge about new types of technologies, how they fit together, how they can be used to create better social and economic systems, etc. And that knowledge, that 15-year-old knowledge that has accumulated throughout the years, is basically scattered across a few platforms, and more and more they're in the hands of a few centralized platforms that if one day they decide to censor us because we're mainly from the wrong region of the world, or because there is a little conflict, or because it turns out that there was a North Korean operative in one of the major DeFi teams, so whatever Google decides that or Notion decides that all of the team is compromised, we need to shut down all their docs, etc., it would be catastrophic for the space. It would be almost existentially a bad event. So this app is basically just a way for attendees, speakers, anyone with an actual ticket to DevCon, to before the conference, during the conference, and after the conference, contribute knowledge and collaborate with others on the topics that are discussed during the conference. So this is the overview, and it becomes much clearer once I put an image to it. So let me share my screen, and it should become much clearer. There we go.

Yeah, it's on the screen.

Super, super. So, this is what the app looks like. I'm going to try to be brief because this is supposed to be really smooth and intuitive for people to use. So at DevCon this year, you'll have the usual schedule that you can personalize where you want to go, which talks. You're going to have live streams where people can interact with a speaker, do an Q&A. And you're going to have this knowledge base and community collaboration app. On this app, you should know that it's powered by an on-chain smart contract living on Gnosis. Data is stored on IPFS. Data is also encrypted here. Interactions between people are as much as possible done in a peer-to-peer way, completely peer-to-peer when it comes to real-time collaborations, etc. So let's say I'm an attendee, I arrived on this app, I want to check out the event schedules. Very simple, it brings me here. There is a tagging system that gives me a quick indication on what are the main topics in that schedule. I can open a schedule here, get some information on the talk, the speaker, and resources. So this is where it gets interesting. Instead of you just having a quick description of what is happening at the event, you can also have documents, images, whiteboards that were created by other attendees or speakers that relate to this talk. So let's say I went to this talk, I took five really nice pictures, I can upload them; it automatically adds a tag that associates it to this talk. Or I can create an article and post about it. So here, somebody created an article, they pushed it, and I can access it and see what somebody's notes about a talk were, or what questions they had that they hoped that somebody else might respond to. Another thing that I can do is create my own article. It opens up a dDoc for those that are familiar with the flow. I can give it a title, BFT Tendermint Engine, add a tag to it like BFT, say hello.

And here, I can either post it and have this document just associated to a specific talk or to a specific hub happening at DevCon or to a specific discussion, very simply. Or I can also invite people to collaborate. So here I would put my name, Bob, I would start a collaborative session, and now I can share this document, or people that are on the main app that I just showed you will see that there is a document that is having a real-time collaboration between people. So attendees, speakers, etc., can join and actually share their thoughts, share their notes, and basically co-produce knowledge together. Once we're finished, I'm just pushing this, it will appear over here—sorry, it will appear on the main page that has before the event schedule, it will have just community posts. So here, somebody has written about ZK-SNARKs. I can like, I can comment on it, I can even share somebody's document. And this is another unique thing about this app and about the middleware stack that I'm putting so much emphasis on here: because of the sufficiently decentralized stack that powers this app, we basically have a lot of composability or interoperability with other projects out there. For example, you can copy this document and share it as a Farcaster frame so that people that are just on Farcaster can browse through the document without leaving the app. You can already see in terms of UX, okay, this is clearly superior to what Notion would allow us to do at the very best, without even guaranteeing us good encryption, peer-to-peer interactions, knowledge that doesn't disappear because it has been distributed across thousands of nodes, etc.

Another thing that I'll be able to do on this app—so here you have some pinned posts, let's say for very important announcements. You can see who has participated in the community space; here it's just six members because we're just testing it out. But ideally, what we're hoping to see here is more people that come and actually experiment with this new idea for coordinating the global Ethereum community, making sure that the knowledge we produce together is of a higher quality, is better archived, is better retrieved when needed, etc. I talked about three sections: so there was a community post, event schedule, and then you'll have also a social feed. I find the social feed quite cool simply because today when you're trying to find out what is going on during a crypto conference, you have either a really underwhelming spreadsheet on Google somewhere that gives you some indications of some side events and some main events; you have Twitter, you have Farcaster information, etc. Here, we're collaborating with Firefly in order to aggregate both Twitter and Lens and Farcaster all in one feed. So people will be able to click on the feed here and in one place find what discussions are happening across Lens, Twitter, Farcaster, all from one place without needing to log in or even have an account on Farcaster if you don't have one. So voilà. All this is to say that we took what the DevCon team had accumulated throughout years of organizing those events in terms of knowledge on what are usual pain points for conferences and community members participating and tried to address all those pain points and use cases head-on. So again, knowledge base creation through collaborative tools: so I can create an article; we'll be adding whiteboards as well, images, videos. I can add people to collaborate live with me, I can post it here for people to find it before the conference, during the conference, after the conference. I can find also the whole schedule auto-populated with all the right information, see what information has been tagged to it as well.

And a few things just to conclude, and I swear I'll stop yapping: you have something coming next week; we're going to be adding a global chat. So instead of going at the conference again and being on 15 different Telegram group chats, three Signal group chats, two private WhatsApp group chats, etc., here you should know that there is a place for only attendees and speakers to actually be able to interact with each other and with events happening at DevCon and knowledge being shared from DevCon. The reason I say only is because we've taken a privacy-preserving approach to authenticating people, which uses ZKPass. So you'll be able to prove that you have a DevCon ticket without revealing anything about your identity. And if you want, you can add things about your identity: my name is Obi-Wan, you can add a picture, so that when people come on this app, they'll be able to simply see that you're one of the members here, or a member participating in the conversation or posted this article on ZK-SNARKs.

And this is a final cherry on top, which goes back also to the question you asked me, which is what are you looking for when you go to a conference: connecting with people. Here, it's a blessing at least for me to know that there is only people with tickets that are active contributors through their articles, comments, talks, likes, whatever. And I can connect with them, send them a direct chat or join a group chat they're in because they're discussing the pros and cons of TEEs and it's a discussion that really interests me and I don't want to miss out on it. So this is the final feature that will go live in the coming weeks. And this is it for the tour of the app. Just if you'll allow me just one last piece of information, which is my favorite: it has to do with how we built this app. So again, I give you some words about the stack; we're trying to make it as decentralized as possible and privacy-preserving.

And this is achieved not through just the work of our team at Fileverse; this is really a community project. So here you have the DevCon team that directly participated in how this app looks today. You have Firefly that is helping with the social feed aggregation. You have Hats Protocol that enables the access permissions and the good flow of information done between people. You have ZKPass for the privacy-preserving authentication. You have Waku that is being used as well for a bot that will be doing a bit of moderation here. And that people will—okay, I'm giving away some info that we wanted to share later, but I'm excited about this so I'm going to say it—for translations as well. I know that a lot of people that are participating at DevCon and most conferences for Ethereum are not native English speakers, such as myself, and having a little toggle here that allows you to translate contents of this document on BFT Tendermint engines into Bahasa or into Greek is something we really want to try and that's going to be live, so I hope a lot of people get excited about this. So voilà, it's really a community-led experiment. I really do hope that a lot of people go on it, just add to their on-chain reputation by showing that they contribute knowledge. You don't need to be just a dev to show that you're an essential part of the Ethereum community; you can add knowledge and help archive it and make sense of concepts at different layers of abstraction. I don't want to go too philosophical, but I think that a lot of people that are having heated debates on crypto Twitter might not have those debates if they had better access to existing knowledge, and they can't because simply it's too scattered, it seems almost niche in some areas, etc. Voilà, I'll stop here. Narb, back to you.

No, this is amazing. And yeah, you've basically... you guys at Fileverse have basically made kind of like the front door for people at DevCon and probably other conferences as well. And on that last bit you spoke on, where you're making Web3 basically accessible to everybody and beyond devs, which is basically the point of Web3, because everybody's kept harping that Web3 is for everyone, but is it really if we're just keeping it to the super technical? So this is amazing to see. Thanks, means a lot Narb.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Some interesting use cases that popped up while you were going through the demo: this could technically be used as a way to aggregate questions for speakers. So say somebody creates a dDoc to aggregate questions from the crowd as a series of panel speakers are talking, and basically the moderator can go through and ask these questions or whoever the speaker is can go and answer the questions on the file so it's there for everybody after the fact.

I really like this one. It's spot on because it covers something we talked about today with the DevCon team and with the Meerkat team. So Meerkat is going to be delivering basically speaker slides with a real-time Q&A window in it. And this Q&A and chatting will then be put as static data on Fileverse, and people will be able to continue the discussion on it for the days, weeks, months to come. So it's exactly what the user here, the person here, is commenting. So it will be available as well, and yeah, it also shows, you know, again the power of the composable architecture and a middleware that can take information from some other open system and include it into a specific context.

Gotcha. And sorry, were you referring to this question from wantstocomment? Basically, whether or not how a person can log into this app and have that continuity continue.

Yeah, so this is a basically it's a bring-your-own-account app. We're in crypto, we're not doing it the old way. If you have a wallet, you just connect with your wallet and then you prove with ZKPass that you have a ticket, and that's it, you're in. If you don't have a wallet, don't worry, you can just put an email or you can put whatever a Twitter or Discord login. And what happens is that we create a Safe account, a Safe multi-sig, locally for you, and this controls your data, the comments that you add, the likes, the documents that you post, so whatever happens to this app, you're still the originator of data that belongs to you. So it's quite an important thing.

Awesome. Great question, great answer. And some love from the homie Billy, saying 'Fileverse is such an amazing tool.' Yeah, 100%, 100%.

Oh, thanks so much man. Thanks.

And I guess, kind of putting the business cap on, can this experience be white-labeled in the sense that yes, this is for DevCon, but can future conferences or perhaps other Web3 companies work with you to create similar experiences for their communities? Or is that in the plans or too early to say?

So, you're spot on. So the idea behind this experiment, the reason why it has also different actors participating in making it a thing, is that it's a way of testing how the global community of Ethereum, wherever they are, at whichever time in space as well—so like this November or early January when this other conference was happening—can have a better way of getting together, share knowledge with each other, collaborate to create new knowledge. And if this experiment goes well, we will have both great feedback to work on for what can make this UI, this app, even better, maybe a 10x better as well from people actually participating. Does it bring value during, after, before the conference that is material, detectable, appreciated, etc.? If it is, the idea that at least we've been discussing with the DevCon team and with other teams that reached out is you'll have this white label basically, this app that you can customize to your own event, your own conference. And because they're all using the same middleware and the same way of addressing content, retrieving it, identifying people, you will have yes different conferences, teams doing their own little knowledge bases and collaboration spaces, but all of them will be linked in a very consistent manner.

For you know, the community five years from now, when there is a debate again about the blockchain trilemma, they'll just go onto that universe of knowledge that has been produced by a systematic approach to knowledge and collaboration, and they'll be able to retrieve years of discussions at different conferences in a way that I believe would be a huge plus, again, to probably one of the most important activities of the industry: producing new helpful knowledge for humanity. Yeah.

Beautiful, love it. We're more or less at time, but I want to get through just one more topic and that's basically what Laszlo mentioned in the chat: basically how can people... when can people expect to be able to use this app and how can they sign up for it once it is available?

Thanks for the question. It reminds me of something that was quite important because of... because this is the first time that we're showing it publicly, anybody who's listening, please feel free to send us a DM @fileverse on Twitter ideally or to me directly @miroyetto to get exclusive access to test this app out. This app, beyond the beta testers that I'm giving a shoutout to now, it will be available, I think maybe starting 10-15 days before the conference starts, in order to let people actually start, you know, maybe sharing some ideas, sharing some notes, sharing a thesis, sharing documentation that they want attendees to pay attention to. Voilà.

Awesome. And the accounts to request beta access, they are tagged on X, if you're watching this live on X, and they are also in the YouTube description as well. But with that, I just want to thank you again so much Andreas for coming on the show, giving us this Alpha gold. Really, really appreciate that, and I'm sure a lot of the viewers here today and attendees of DevCon will really appreciate this super useful tool at this conference and very likely beyond. Thanks a lot Narb, always a pleasure to discuss with you. Today was a little bit more blah blah on my side to show everyone the new goodies coming their way and a good way of building their on-chain reputation and contributing to the space. But yeah, I hope everybody gives it a try and if it's a success, I can see this, yeah, being experimented beyond just DevCon. Yeah, 100%. Who doesn't like a little bit of organization? All right, with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend. And before I forget, if you are a Developer DAO member and you are attending DevCon, Developer DAO has actually partnered with DevCon to give you a builder pass for $299. That's $300 off the regular price. So use the link that I'm dropping in the chat below to sign up. It's on a first-come, first-served basis, so the first 100 people will be able to purchase a builder pass with that discount. Definitely get on that and get on the Fileverse train and you're going to be all set for the conference. All right all, with that, again happy Friday, happy weekend, wherever you may be and we'll catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. See ya.