Fileverse: Privacy Enhancing, On-chain Alternative to Google Workspace

And we're live. GM, GM everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been building in Web3. So whether you're a big-time Web3 startup, a weekend hacker or anything in between, this is the show for you to come and demonstrate what you've built. So today I'm ecstatic to welcome Andreas, who's co-founder of Fileverse. If you didn't know, Fileverse is a decentralized collaboration app and workspace acting as a on-chain alternative to Google Workspace. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll learn all about Fileverse, how it works, why it was built, and how you can start using it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Andreas. Happy to have you.

Hey man, thanks for having me.

Certainly, certainly. Yeah, so we're going to talk all things Fileverse today. And really excited, I've been keeping up watching all the sick demos you guys have been sharing out on X. It looks really cool being able to spin up an online doc in just a mere few seconds and having that be on-chain. But not having that, not doing too many spoilers upfront. We'll save that for the middle. But just want to welcome you to the show. And yeah, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself for folks who aren't familiar?

Sure, sure. First of all, I love your background. And a bit about myself then, I'm Andreas. I'm the co-founder of Fileverse. I am also on the side finishing my PhD at the University of Oxford focusing on human-machine teaming and human control of AI systems in hacking operations, offensive and defensive. And yeah, I've been in crypto for quite some time now, officially 2016, but just like learning about it even prior. And I think the really deep jump I made was two years, two and a half years ago with Fileverse when we started with the Gitcoin grant.

Awesome. Yeah, a lot of these projects, they usually start as like a hackathon thing or people post them on Gitcoin like you guys did. And as soon as it gets traction, you're like, I know this is the thing I got to do. Yeah, that's fantastic. And that's quite a background you have. You mentioned you're in parallel to building Fileverse, also attending Oxford. I guess what really got you interested in technology in the first place and led you to kind of going on this development co-founder path?

It's a good question. It's tough just because there are so many sources that inspired me. I would say there are two really pivotal things that happened very early on. One was my two brothers actually introducing me to like the dark corners of the internet and showing me, hey, even if the, even if it's a bit difficult to get this type of book or movie in our country, you can actually get it if you go there and it works like that and nobody can stop you from doing that. And this already started blowing my mind. And then I think it was Bruce Schneier, for those who don't know, he's a legendary cryptographer, very much involved in the early protocols that make up the open web today. And I think he was describing the internet as this huge, most complex machine that humanity ever created. And it blew my mind because I realized that, oh yeah, okay, it's tubes all around the world undersea that are connected somehow, that some jurisdictions have more power off over others. And if you shut down one cable in Southeast Asia in between, no, Southwest Asia, then there is 600 million people that don't have internet anymore. And I thought, okay, this is amazing and I want to learn more about it, so I went down the rabbit hole.

Awesome, awesome. Yeah. I mean, once you start really digging in and learning how the internet works, you kind of go like, wow, just how complex it is just to be able to like read a post on X or just send an email. It's just, yeah, mind-blown.

And also, sorry not to cut you in your questions, but it's also something that's super, and I guess it will be a good transition to future questions, but it's fascinating to think of the internet as this super early technology still today, that you can have a disproportionate impact on. And I think a few too many people are already considering the internet as a never-changing monolith that is already defined in its architecture, whereas there is still a lot to change and possibilities to change it.

Yeah, 100% I agree. Yeah, and I suppose as you're getting inspired with basically the technology around you, how did those building blocks kind of lead you to where you are today and founding Fileverse?

So there are a few things like I mentioned initially at the beginning, the fact that in some of the countries I was living in, I was unable to access some information was very weird to me, especially when it came with clear punishment for if you try to access certain types of information or content. So this was quite important, influential. But for Fileverse specifically, there were a few things. I immediately want to talk about my co-founders because they were really pivotal there. So both Constantine and VJ, who are my two co-founders, they were discussing already together something that looked like today's Fileverse, which was much more simple, which was just file sharing, but in a peer-to-peer way, removing the dependence on centralized servers, which I found incredibly interesting. They shared it with me and then we decided to actually build it out and try it out on Gitcoin. And I think Gitcoin was the key moment for the three of us, where we were quite obsessed with the idea that a lot of people seem to have a great idea and think that because they think it's a great idea, it is a great idea and it is worth building it and having it out there. We were obsessed with having validation from people and to show that, okay, people actually want to see that come to life or are interested in reading more about it, testing it out, etc. So Gitcoin immediately getting us in, I think it was in April 2022, getting us I think 6,000 donors in the first month and almost as many users immediately after was really mind-blowing and an amazing show of support and encouraging as hell. So this is really what convinced us. Okay, we need to build this out and we think that we can make it into a internet changing protocol, if you don't mind the ambitious take.

No, I love it, I love it. You gotta be ambitious in this space. That's awesome. And I guess before we really dig into what Fileverse is, maybe you can speak on the particular role you have at the company and what your co-founders' roles are.

Yeah, yeah. It's funny, it's, I'm going to give you the typical founder mode, oh my god, sorry for the founder mode response, which is we all do everything, very much versatile. But if I had to specify it a little bit more, I do more of the research and strategy. And the strategy implies also a lot of BD and how we present ourselves. VJ is really the big brain architect of the infrastructure behind Fileverse. The reason why it's so reliable, the reason why so many people are impressed by the fact that we managed to pull off something that is peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted, and can do real-time collaboration with the latency you recognize in Google Docs is a huge thing. And doing all that open source as well is quite significant. That's for us two. And then you have Constantine that is basically the man that makes it all happen and all possible in that he has two people going all over the place and generating new content ideas and POCs on a daily basis and he actually enables us to funnel this into something that is practical, that is something tangible that the world can understand, makes sure that the actual organization stands, makes sure that the collaboration internally and with outside partners does not feel like alien or forced or anything like that. And also he's really the BD sales master at the company. So yeah.

That's amazing. That sounds like an all-star group. Actually, Kempster brought up a great point that I forgot to mention. Gitcoin, they were key early supports of Developer DAO as well. So big shout out to Gitcoin, making founders' dreams happen.

For sure.

And I guess with that, let's really dig into Fileverse here. So I guess if you were to give a one-liner about what Fileverse is, what would it be?

Okay, so Fileverse is a trustless collaboration stack that is privacy-preserving and self-custodial. It's a bit, it's not usually something I would use to describe Fileverse with a larger crowd, but because I'm amongst friends who are both developers and in crypto, I know that I can use those keywords without you thinking that I'm making a word salad of whatever. So I know that people understand what I mean, but the larger description we can get into it in a bit if you want.

Awesome. Certainly. Yeah, I guess you kind of touched on this early on with all your experience, what kind of inspired you and your co-founders to build Fileverse. I guess in your mind, what is the core problem that Fileverse is solving for in comparison to similar tools out there, not necessarily on-chain?

So this is my favorite question, simply because I get overly passionate. Narb, there is over 3 billion people that use Google Workspace, that use one single app suite for their daily collaboration, daily activities on the internet. That is more than half of all internet users around the globe. It's catastrophic. By any measure you're looking at this status quo, it is catastrophic because there is absolutely no control put into people's hands. There is on a regular basis data leaks. There is the ability of one disgruntled employee to simply wipe out your organization or your own personal data from the face of the earth. There is regulatory upheaval around the world that is starting to suffocate that type of model that is hyper-centralized and requires you to have like three, four data centers that look like whole cities all in one country and two states. You know, okay, I'm not going to go too much into it, but I don't think this is the best realization or materialization of what the internet's potential could be and is. So we think that there is a clear opportunity now that the decentralized stack, not only from on-chain primitives finally being mature, but also from peer-to-peer networks existing out there that can facilitate a different type of serving the same use cases without the huge infrastructural requirements and centralization. Because those things are now possible, it is time to actually try it out. And this is why what we're offering is quite unique. We developed for the past two years and a half robust infrastructure and a app suite representing the power of that infrastructure to provide what most of internet traffic goes towards today, to provide those people, those types of activities, the same experience without the downsides of hyper-centralization, a surveillance-based model that they dare call a business model. So yeah, this is what our focus is, what problem we're solving, and I think it's one that is very much understood in our space, but also outside. I mentioned regulatory upheaval. You have that with the GDPR, you have that with the California Privacy Act, you have socio-cultural movements that are rising up against the current technological status quo. And all those things create an amazing momentum that we don't have to just create, carry on our back, etc. But that we can help represent through a technology that has by design and by default the values and robustness that people are looking for. Yeah.

Amazing answer. Yeah, and I'm on your side of things there. It's like, we gotta get away from centralized web basically, that controls all of us. But this is a perfect segue into us seeing Fileverse in action. Would you care giving us a demo of how things work?

Of course, of course. So there are a lot of things in Fileverse, so let me, let me do that. I'll share my screen, okay? Share screen over here. Okay, I'll start with that. Can you see it? Alright, amazing. So first thing I wanted to share was Ddoc. It's our first public release. It came out month and a half ago now, maybe two months ago now. And you know, it was long time into the making and it had an absolutely heartwarming reception from not only the crypto crowd, but everyone on Twitter and beyond. So I wanted to start with that because it's something quite tangible that people can immediately start trying.

Just before you continue, I want to make the point, you guys made an app that doesn't really expose Web3 predominantly to the user. And basically you made a user-friendly app for a non-crypto native. So big point on that.

Thanks for highlighting that because it's super important. It's something that you've noticed, everybody else has noticed. It's very difficult to present anyone outside of the crypto space with a dApp simply because you don't want to expose people with, okay, you need to download a wallet first, and then you need to go to this pseudo bank, give your passport, buy some internet money with it, send it to the wallet you created, and then you can start interacting with whatever a dApp is. Catastrophic, both in terms of privacy, in terms of UX, etc. So we wanted to do, to introduce people to the amazing UX potential of crypto in a way that was quite familiar. So there is 1.1 billion people that are using Google Docs on a daily basis. And there is a quick way of using Google Docs. You write, you can't see my URL bar, so I'm writing it here. You write docs.new on your URL bar and it opens a new fresh Google Doc. But you need to be logged in or have a Gmail account. So we decided to show that not only we have a UX that is superior to dApps that exist because we don't require you to have a wallet or like money to interact, but we're also competing with Web2 UX that most people use on a daily basis. So first thing we did was to create ddocs.new, the URL. You can write it now on your browser and it will immediately bring you onto a blank page. You don't need to log in anywhere, you don't need to create an account anywhere, and you can immediately start writing.

So nothing to explain there, it's quite self-evident. You can write notes here. Hello mum demo day. And you can also start doing a few things that you cannot do necessarily with Google Docs. So you can immediately start a live collaboration, a real-time collaboration session, meaning I can create a link right now and I can share it with you in our chat and we can get people to join in and actually participate, collaborate with you in real time with no central server involved. So all this is peer-to-peer. It's Bob, Andreas, and Vitalik working together without ever having a third party come in between them and facilitate or allow for that interaction to happen. So this is just to give you both the UX and a little bit about what makes the app very cool. Just to continue now with the UX, I'll share also the link in the chat in a bit. First, I'll show you a few things before people come and maybe write whatever they want. We did not want to just do feature parity with Google Docs, which is going to be important. dDocs needs to feel like something that has almost no cost of transition from what people usually use to this. So you have a lot of the same features you have with Gdocs, but with some things that we targeted to specific audiences.

Like here, you can write slash and you can do a to-do list. You can do a to-do list. Hello, hello, hello. And that. And you can do other cool things, headings, bullet lists, quotes, you can put some code in here, you can create tables. Actually let me show you just copying from another page. Whoops, nope. Okay, a bit complicated from the other page because you can't see the screen sharing via different tabs. But you can do a lot of cool things right there. You can embed images, videos, Twitter, create columns. So you can organize this in a pretty advanced way. And you have other really cool features. Here I'm connected with my account, so I connected a MetaMask, but I don't need to. I can either remain accountless. But if I want to enjoy a better reliability for my data and better collaboration experience, I can create an account with an email, with my GitHub account, with whatever. And you can think of it a bit like a bring your own account type doc. And this is something that convinced a lot of people, I must say. You can also do something, this is a feature request that came from a lot of people in our space and beyond.

Including, I think it was a week and a half ago now, Vitalik commented on an update that we pushed on Twitter and said, hey guys, I would really love to also see markdown import-export. It would really help me, it would really convince me to use this even more. So you can imagine the hype just knowing that he was already using it. But it's something that was quite common in a lot of our users. So I just want to show it to you very quickly. I can import any markdown file and export also my document and then put it on VS Code or put it on GitHub, put it on whatever is your favorite IDE or editor. Whoops. And the advantage of that is it's light files, it immediately follows the structure and the format you've had in whatever this I took directly from the Fileverse GitHub. It copies the tables, it puts the exact format you want and like code highlights wherever you've put it on GitHub, etc. So this is quite powerful. It came out last week as an update. And I think it really attracted a lot of people outside of crypto as well.

And including, sorry I'm just highlighting that because in the Fileverse team there was a real divide last week. Half of the people were super excited that Vitalik was using Ddoc, and the other half was even more excited that the founder of NextJS and Vercel tweeted about us to all his followers saying, I love how those guys just link to their app. And this is we need more of that, this is what people should be doing. And it was such an amazing validation in terms of UX. Forget the fact that this is peer-to-peer, that this is end-to-end encrypted, that this is self-custodial, that this is something that will not rug you even if we disappear. The guy was focused on the fact that it was an amazing UX and this really meant a lot because this is how you start reaching out to the whole world and hopefully transition those 1.1 billion people that use Google Docs on a daily basis towards something that respects their digital rights much more. So I'll start finishing up here, otherwise I'll be rambling too much. Just to highlight a few other cool things. Here you have also a little for those who discovered it, actually I should have left it secret. Okay, I'm not going to click on it. You can go discover it yourself for whoever is listening. You have also comments, something that is quite cool that we wanted to show, another big difference with Google. You don't need to create a Fileverse account to come collaborate with me. You can just identify yourself either using a pseudonym or with your ENS and your ENS will automatically show in here. And people will be able to like verify their identity or prove their identity without depending on somebody's server saying yes, Bob is actually Bob. Which is quite important if you want to create really global potential for collaboration.

This is one cool feature. Another cool feature, maybe I'll stop with that, is that you can share also in crypto native or decentralized social media like Farcaster. So I can take this, I can click on this, and I'll be able to, wait let me share this tab. So this is my account on Farcaster. I'll be able to just cast, put the link that I just copied and it will automatically create a frame. For those who are not familiar, a frame is just like a mini app on Farcaster where people will be able to, so here it's loading. People will be able to read your document without needing to leave the app. So today when you share something on Twitter, people need to click on the link, a new tab will open, it will load, there is a lot of friction that people don't want. And so here you can remain on your feed and you'll see my link, you'll see a little window, here it's taking a bit of time to load, I think it's on Farcaster side here. You'll see a little window like a mini app where you'll be able to flick through this document that I just created and read everything without ever leaving the social place where you are and you want to remain in. So yeah, I'll stop, I'll stop here just to tell you that dDocs is really friendly to whoever wants to preserve their anonymity, who do not want to lose control over their own data because they shouldn't, who want to collaborate in a free way, and who want to use whatever identity or account they already have instead of creating their one thousand and one new account on the internet and password to remember and etc.

So Ddoc is this, but Fileverse is also much more. I don't know if I should already pull this out of the bag, but this is just the first public release that we did. There are more mini apps like these that are or full-fledged apps like these that are going to come out. For example, we have something called Fileverse Portal. Maybe I'll just show you. Fileverse Portal which is the complete workspace. So you'll have a whiteboard, you'll have a drive, you'll have sheets and a lot of other things that people are looking for in Notion for example. We reproduced a lot of those tools, but open source and with all the properties I described for Ddoc, of decentralization, of privacy, etc. So maybe I can just show you very quickly what it looks like. So this is, this is a public portal. So in the back I have something that looks like a proper workspace. I'm trying to see if you can see all my tabs. No, it's taking a bit of time to load, so I'll just show you the public side. So imagine if your Google Workspace or Notion had a public facing side where you decide what files of yours you want to display to people. This is what it would look like. It's a completely decentralized place that does not depend on Fileverse. People can access it via any public IPFS gateway, host it locally, whatever they want.

This is another that somebody had made that I noticed on Twitter. So this person had their own workspace. It's in private beta for whoever wants to try it out, you can DM us. and created also a public space just to have a bit of a decentralized profile out there. And they put some weird looking things on there. And this is probably my favorite one, which is during ETHPrivacy Prague in Prague. We did a little presentation, we got some people to join a workspace to all be together on there and write documents together, put files there together and we created a public facing also repository or knowledge base for our work. And this is what it looks like. We put some privacy memes in there, some hacker memes as well, which is really cool because you can do a lot of things here. You can add a public link, you can move things around, you can make them smaller, you can make them bigger. Yeah, I'll stop here, otherwise I'll ramble for too long. But there is a lot more coming with, with Fileverse. Ddoc was just the first public release, and there are a few more really exciting apps coming out.

That's amazing. Yeah, and this was a wonderful demo and just showing how the thing works, which is really great to see. We have some great questions from the crowd that I want to get into. I think you mentioned it a little bit back when you were saying the pages that you were just showing were stored on a IPFS gateway. So is your underlying storage solution storing things on Filecoin and IPFS at the moment or where do you store all the information?

Yeah, so as a user when you start creating a Ddoc, you can keep everything locally. So you don't need to use anything else and your own computer, even when you want to just connect with someone else and collaborate live. When you want to start having let's say more redundancies or like not put everything on your own device and collaborate with a lot of people, there are layers of peer-to-peer networks that we just facilitate your connection to or towards. One is IPFS. This is for when you have your files at rest and you're not live editing something. When you are live editing with other people for example, we use a really cool decentralized or peer-to-peer network as well called Gun, Gun.echo for those who are familiar, GunDB. And that's it. And the reason why Ddoc is so powerful is actually what we really innovated in is you can have a on-chain file system that acts so it's a smart contract actually and you never really realize that you're actually using the blockchain because when you create an account, we automatically create a multisig for you on-chain. That multisig deploys a smart contract and that smart contract acts as or has two main functions. One is it acts as a registry for all your files, what content hashes belong to whom and where are they stored on IPFS, on Arweave, etc. And second thing it does is access permissions. Who has access to those files, for how long, what type of access, is it read, is it write, is it comment. So this is quite powerful because you actually have something that is unrugable, to use a very crypto term, where you can also just share a common data space or digital garden or whatever you want to call it with other people in a trustless way. So you can add people to your multisig and you can make up a rule that says for those two files that are you know are internal contracts, nobody can delete them unless there is a signature from two known individuals that have access to the multisig. And this is quite powerful. Why? Because today with your Google Workspace account, there's one super admin, you might be the CEO of your company, there is one IT guy that can actually delete everybody's data without them even knowing that this old file is not there anymore or censor your account or whatever. And here you create something that looks more like a trustless infrastructure for data management.

Amazing. Awesome, awesome. And you touched on it briefly mentioning Arweave. A couple folks in the chat have been asking, when Arweave publishing option from Ddocs?

It's a great question. So Arweave does have this amazing advantage of you're able to just pay once for storage for 200 years of storage for your file, which more and more, the more I interact with organizations that come and ask me about the advantages that Ddoc or Fileverse more generally has over Google Workspace, this is one thing to highlight that puts at ease a lot of people because this is something they're really looking for. So on the private beta, on Fileverse Portal we call it, you already have a Arweave publishing option where you pay for yourself whenever you want to upload a file, a document, whatever on Arweave you can. And it's live. So whoever wants to try it, please DM, you can try it out. For Ddoc, it's coming a bit later. We haven't started yet the work on it because there were so many other priorities for our work there, specifically UX and seeing so many non-crypto people using Ddoc, you know, we wanted to also focus on that side. But Arweave is available on Portal.

Awesome. There you go folks. Next question from Irving, is it possible to build a plugin on top of Ddocs today?

Not yet, but it's coming. It's a great question actually because it's something that Ddoc and Fileverse is very much designed to do, which is just to put it succinctly, we don't want to be the only ones building on top of Fileverse. We built something that we think will fundamentally help open up and make it more robust, the layer of collaboration and knowledge we have on the internet today, which is very much the hands of one company. So we don't want to be the third company. We want to be an open protocol and if you want to create a new UI for Ddoc, you'll be able to, kind of you can actually already if you're a developer, if you're kind of technical. But you'll be able to do a lot of cool things like build your own extension and create your own apps using the same on-chain file system that I described prior. So yes, the answer is yes.

Awesome, awesome. And seeing as we're over time, I think this is a great question to end on. Basically a summary of the last 20 minutes. What do you think you're doing better than your competitors? Maybe just a summary of what we went through.

Okay, the cheating answer is everything and the more realistic one is I really, it's not something you hear from a lot of crypto founders, but I think we have enough to back it up with, especially with people like the Vercel founder focusing on that exactly, which is one is UX. You don't need an account to start writing notes and doing a real-time collaboration with 100 people. And this is quite significant already. Another thing just to remain on the UX side because, okay, you've heard that we're decentralized, we don't have a centralized server that can choke you at any point, we are end-to-end encrypted so we're privacy-preserving for you, you don't need to go through our website in order to access your documents, you can do it through any public IPFS gateway and do it on-chain, etc. But UX again, which is crucial for us to go to those 1.1 billion people using Google Docs, there are a few things that stand out. One is import-export of markdown, which more and more people are using. You have also split-screen for those who use it a lot like myself, I like watching anime while I'm writing some notes. It's very Gen Z of me to multitask like that. But anyways, split-screen is not that great with Google Docs for example, because it basically just shrinks up your editing options and you need to scroll horizontally to actually get your page right and actually be able to write, whereas Ddoc automatically adjusts everything and it changes also the editing bar and makes it very much friendly and readjusts also the size of your font, etc. So it's quite good on that side. Another thing is we're mobile optimized. Good luck writing on a Google Doc on your mobile, opening it up unless you've downloaded the app is terrible on browser, whereas for us it looks quite amazing, I would say. And you know, let's not forget that most of the world is mobile native internet users. It's not desktop native. So this was quite important. And a few other things like bringing your own account, not being dependent on us, you can port your data anywhere else whenever you want, we're not trying to lock you in, we will never try to lock you in. And this is by design, again important, it's not just somebody trying to sell you their product, you can go check the code for yourself. So those, I talked a lot about the other fundamental properties of the technology, I won't bore you again with it, but I did want to insist a bit on the UX because it's quite important at this stage, yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely and great questions here everybody. I appreciate those coming in. I guess what's the best way for folks to keep up with all things Fileverse?

So we're very much active on Twitter and on Farcaster. So and on GitHub. So come check us out over there. We do every week now a new push of updates on Ddoc. Everything is public, everything is it might be an overkill, but there is so much amazing feedback coming from people using Ddoc that it doesn't feel like a strain to actually ship every week a new sets of updates. So please do. Yeah, I would say go on @fileverse on Twitter, same on Farcaster. And for those who haven't tried it yet, go on ddocs.new. You'll also be able to see some updates and share feedback directly in the settings there. So please do.

Awesome. And just wanted to bring this up too. Laszlo says the Lord of the Rings background is fire. Thank you Laszlo. Why I want to bring this up is before we started this podcast found Andreas is a big Lord of the Rings buff. So if you also want to talk Lord of the Rings, he's a good guy to reach out to as well. But with that, just wanted to thank you again Andreas for coming on the show today and giving a great overview of what Fileverse is and sharing this wonderful app with us.

Thanks a lot Narb. The pleasure was all mine. Thank you for all the amazing questions. Also to the chat, I'm surprised that there were so many actually. And so many like super well focused. So yeah, thanks for organizing. Hope we do that again maybe next year when when you'll have the whole suite out there. Yeah.

Certainly. Yeah, looking forward to it. And just want to wish you and everybody a happy Friday, happy weekend where you may be. And that will catch you all back here for another episode of DevNTell next week. Until then, have a good one. See ya. Bye.