Introducing Developer DAO Cloud

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week from the DAO to allow founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today we're going to have a very exciting episode because we are announcing from the DAO's perspective one of the latest products to come out. And we're welcoming DD Legend Crypto, who's the founder of Developer DAO Cloud. So if you didn't know, DD Cloud is the latest product from the DAO, providing a bespoke hybrid cloud solution for blockchains and dApps. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Crypto give us an overview of DD Cloud, its high-performance infrastructure, how to use it, and the details of the upcoming beta launch. Alright, let's get into it.

GM GM Crypto, welcome to the show, man.

Hey, how's it going? Thank you so much for having me on, Narb.

My pleasure, my pleasure. Long time coming. It's been a while I wanted to have you on the show, and no better way than to come out firing with DD Cloud. But before we get into all the interesting stuff you have prepared for us, perhaps would you like to give us a brief introduction about yourself if folks aren't familiar?

Yeah, so I'm Crypto. I've been around Developer DAO for a few years now. It's the place where I really found my feet as a developer and grew my love for software and writing and honing my craft as an engineer. I've met many amazing individuals from all walks of life, all different areas of the industry, and it's really set me up for a very unique path in life. And so, you know, Developer DAO is very near and dear to my heart and I've made such amazing friends along the way. But besides that, I graduated from the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship as a part of cohort three. I graduated from Polkadot Blockchain Academy wave five in Singapore. And yeah, this is my second startup effectively. The first one is ongoing, of course. I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Givepact. But we're here for a whole another product, a whole another song and dance, and yeah, bring it to the people, make it exciting.

Wonderful. And that's amazing to hear how Developer DAO was such a big part of propelling you into the developer and professional person you are today. Just interesting to hear, were you in the technology sector before joining the DAO, or like were you working in Web2 before doing Web3 stuff?

Yeah, so before the DAO, there was roughly like a year period when I was out of college. I was like newly graduated and, you know, I got my degree in philosophy from SUNY Brockport. And, you know, I received a phenomenal education from the institution, but I needed to find a, I guess you might say, a more concrete skill set to be marketable to people and to have a straightforward sell. And plus, like at the end of college, I just started kind of getting into crypto, more so as like a speculator rather than like an engineer. And yeah, so I mean, I guess you might say like I was just like completely uninvolved with anything before the DAO. I was just coming out of college, kind of just figuring out my path in life.

And if I'm not mistaken, you also used to do some wrestling, right? As like a non-tech thing. I remember reading somewhere, maybe you wanted to grapple with Billy at ETH Denver or something. Do you want to go a little bit into that?

Yeah, so during high school, I wrestled varsity for all four years. I was a Nassau County finalist and I did pretty well in Greco-Roman and freestyle too. State finalist in Greco-Roman, somewhere up there in freestyle. And I also competed in regional tournaments, national tournaments. It was like a ton of fun. I was pretty decent. I also wrestled a season in college as well, Division 3 for SUNY Brockport. And yeah, I mean, really before I was super heavy into engineering, academics, anything of that nature, kind of athletics was the thing I cared a lot about. I was super competitive. And yeah, I mean, I did get injured back my senior year of high school and that I guess like to some level started like a transition out of athletics being my main focus, even though I did kind of return to wrestle and I did officer training. My shoulder ended up like biting me in the ass as it turns out. But you know, I had a ton of fun, definitely helped me build up quite a bit of a work ethic and it just taught me like how to be competitive writ large.

Clearly, I mean like in your background, you have quite the display of medals. Are those all from wrestling or a mix of like academics and athletics?

Yeah, mostly wrestling, some Jiu Jitsu and martial arts stuff. Like the sword, one of the swords you see up there, like the one on the bottom, that's from Naga like when I was like really young. North American Grapplers Association.

Oh, that's crazy man, wow.

Yeah, for the kids' divisions, they gave out swords if you won it.

Whoa, yo.

So you just see these kids wandering through the parking lot with a katana.

Oh my goodness. Awesome. I don't know if that would still be the case today, but like that's amazing. Yeah, so obviously you got the brains, you got the brawn. So I'm interested to hear about your latest startup, DD Cloud. Do you want to start us off with that, like what it is, why you built it, why people should care?

Yeah, so DD Cloud's really going to be a cloud provider platform, that's kind of the overarching vision where we are going to be offering computational and storage resources to the wider public. In my opinion at least, compute is something that is eating the world. I mean, you look at everything from language models to blockchain node software, everyone doing cool things needs some form of compute. And so I think being able to provide solutions both based on blockchain technology and cloud technology will ultimately lead to a very strong offering for the general public and not just appeal to folks who are native to our industry but also the wider Web2 populace. Everyone needs compute, everyone needs storage, and we're going to find the best way to bring it to you, the cheapest way and the most reliable way.

Amazing. And what would you say is the differentiating selling point to DD Cloud? We know it's a crowded space in the cloud infrastructure space. What would you say is your main selling point to folks who are potentially looking into DD Cloud?

Yeah, so the big thing is we are insanely focused on performance. We actually have a zero-GC mandate for all services that are coming through the organization. So basically everything except the front end has no GC to it. And so we're basically aiming to have some of the best latencies in the industry for the products that both appeal directly to native folks and for people who are using our cloud technologies more widely. And so the first product from DD Cloud that's hitting the market is our RPC Relayer, and we're looking to get those transactions down the fastest. We want to be able to appeal to projects that have large amounts of traffic, use cases that are very sensitive to latency, and we want to have the strongest offering at the best price.

Love it, love to hear it. And in terms of chain support, are you looking towards a certain set of chains to support at the beginning, or what's your vision for that?

Yeah, so I'm trying to serve as many chains as possible through Pocket Network, our main infrastructure partner. And so I think we have something like 36 some odd chains we get to support off the rip, which is very, very exciting.

Awesome. And I hear you might have prepared a little demo for us. Did you want to get into that at this point?

Yeah, totally, totally. We gotta show the people what we got. Indeed, indeed. Talk is talk until we walk the walk or something like that. And folks, as we're going through the demo, if you have any questions for Crypto or DD Cloud, please drop them in the chat and we will get those answered for you. Alright, go for it.

Sick. Yeah, this product has really been through so much. It's pretty awesome to see it being so close to launch now. But yeah, this is our landing page. The copywriting's probably going to change a little bit at least, but at least everyone gets to have a good sense of the aesthetic and the design we're going for, very in line with the DD brand. So we have our little call to actions, some nice little pieces for advertisement, testimonials. And now we go into our auth flow. Everything has been hand-implemented, very strict on this process. Sorry, I actually have to register first before I can log into an account.

Hear that folks? This hasn't been vibe-coded. This is legit old school coded.

Hell yeah. I think I'm just not running the server. Yeah, there you go. That's why. There always has to be something with live demos. That's just the way it is. Beautiful. So now that we've registered, we can go ahead, get our login code, which promptly arrives to the email. Activate our account. Boom, too easy. Redirects us to login. There we go. Here's our beautiful dashboard. Big shout out to Saul/SagaDev. He does such a phenomenal job in terms of design and putting a lot of this rebrand and styling all together. Very huge for us. I love this aesthetic. I think some other people might like it too. But yeah, now core functionality, we need to get some API keys. You gotta use the service from somewhere. And so generating a new API key is just this fast, and this is actually a round trip to the server, shockingly.

Right on, we like that speed.

Hell yeah. And then when you go to delete, you get this nice little modal so you don't accidentally run over your keys. Also, most likely you're going to want a payment plan. You're going to want to have much greater access to the service, serving a lot of traffic. So, you know, we're going to go pay for some stuff. Now, I'm not going to make everyone wait 60 blocks for Sepolia to finalize the thing. I'm going to show you some block explorer stuff instead, but we'll go through the interaction flow and you get to kind of see that aesthetic too. Actually, before I even do that, I have to verify my wallet ownership. That is part of my payment processor.

So sign in with Ethereum. This message, all these raw bytes get sent to the server. So all the functionality that you basically see is like pushed back up into the server, if that makes sense. And so everything is validated there so we make sure that no one could send malformed requests or bad information to the server or potentially exploit things. So now we'll pay with USDC. You get to see my testnet token that I printed up yesterday.

And so this will kind of track the block confirmations. We subscribe to the transaction for the JSON RPC endpoints. But we're not going to wait through all that so we're just going to grab a transaction that has happened in the past with this testnet token. And of course, it's not nullified because I nuked the database before all this so I can use it again because it fits all the criteria technically if I don't make that specific validation. Where are we going? Oh yeah, submit manual transaction. This will show that yeah, we've processed everything. And if you go back into the database just so you can see that things actually happened here, these are all the API keys. My login. And then the payment that we just recently discussed on the block explorer. This is a nice little tool by the way for anyone out there in the world just working with relational databases. PGAdmin is just a nice little front end, a great way to visualize data and just kind of work with relational databases in general. Picked it up a little while ago. It's a pretty good piece of tooling. But yeah, that's just something extra visual for you guys. And once you have a payment that's actually confirmed, it comes up in your transaction history and we have like a little route to expose that data, authenticated route of course. You can't just pull someone else's payment information.

And then yeah, back to the dashboard. Let me just recopy my API key just in case. And then we get to move on to the second part of the demo. There we are. My API key that I was using before isn't going to work out because I deleted all of them just for the demo, so I'm going to add this back here. But before I hit cargo run on that, these are results from before. We get fresh ones.

I want to show that we have like a cool little utility just to get your API keys from the terminal. So like for me for example, this might just be for me, but like there's gotta be someone else out there who might also appreciate this. But often times I'm just like working in my terminal, I don't want to like break my flow, go to a web browser, do this that the other thing. I just want to, if I'm just looking for an API key or something, I just want to kind of authenticate to the service and like get my API key. So I made a nice little utility that really just does just that. So I can authenticate directly to my service. Asks which chain I want. And then it spits out the connection string with the API key, the network and the endpoint that's in use. So you could just copy it directly from the terminal, you can pipe it out into an ENV file, however you want to like handle that. But yeah, that's just like a cool little thing I put together really quickly. And yeah, now you guys get to kind of see the service itself and a little direct demo for you. So you know, any SDK you got, whether it's Alloy, VM, Web3js, like whatever you use, it doesn't matter, it's really all the same. But you just throw in your connection string, you don't need any additional auth headers, and then you can make your JSON RPC call.

So our example here, we're just getting the latest block. We can just change it up. Let's do the safe, yeah. There you go, change it up ever so slightly for the demo. And then we can execute. And it prints this all to JSON.

And that complete quite quickly, hey?

Yeah, yeah, for like a rough estimate. Round trip, that was like 164 milliseconds roughly, but you see like it's time idle. So like a lot of that time was actually just realistically spent just like waiting for the request to come back. But like the actual time that this CPU spent doing work was about six and a half milliseconds. And so once we have our actual infrastructure set up, our round trip response time is going to drop fairly substantially.

Yeah, amazing. And you showed it before but just to reiterate, you can plug and play this RPC endpoint into any existing Web3 framework, correct?

Yeah, you just have to drop it directly in. That's 100% correct. So like even though this is like localhost, this is just going to be the cloud.developerdao endpoint, the DNS, and the transaction gets processed all the same. So it hits the server, gets intercepted by the middleware, makes the appropriate checks to make sure the request is authorized, and then it passes it through to our main RPC service.

And at this point, are you looking to just support EVM compatible chains or any plans for expanding to non-EVM chains?

Yeah, so we do support a bit more than just Ethereum. We do have some Cosmos chains in there if I'm not mistaken, we have Solana, we have Sui support. But yeah, a lot of different chains in the Ethereum ecosystem as well. So I know we definitely have like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base. XRP Ledger, the EVM sidechain I believe we also support now. But yeah, we have a good little selection variety. TechnoKing is wanting Solana, so right on. Yeah, we will have Solana on launch so that will definitely be an option.

Awesome. Let's go. And yeah, I guess I'll save some of my other questions towards the end, but continuing on with your demo.

Yeah, I mean that really is the demo. We got to see the actual application, kind of look through the different phases of that.

Right on. And yeah, one of my questions, and Billy brought it up: for Developer DAO members, are there any special perks they can expect, this being a Developer DAO product?

Yeah, so we are going to offer a generous free tier off the bat for Developer DAO members with, I don't want to like commit to a number, but it's in the millions. It's going to be good for a vast majority of smaller projects and builders that are just starting out or just looking to experiment.

That's amazing. And folks, like free RPC just for being a member, I mean come on, you know RPC providers charge an arm and a leg for those requests. So you'll definitely want to hop on board the DD Cloud train here. And I guess this is a decent segue question as well. If people are interested in signing up, what options are available to them at this point?

Yeah, so today you can go to cloud.developerdao.com. We have a nice little join waitlist function or button that will bring you to a D-Form that will let you put your stuff down. But other than that, I mean everyone is always free to reach out to me, whether it's how do I use this product better correctly or otherwise, investors who are looking to kind of jump in on the hype and become part of the action. And yeah, if you're excited, let me know.

Yeah, indeed. And you alluded to it, but if say there is a protocol out there that does not or is not currently supported and does want to get in on the action, what's the process for them to reach out? Should they just reach out to you directly or where does that become a partner button that you were showing lead to?

Yeah, just reach out directly if we don't support you yet, and we're going to see what we can do to get you into the infrastructure.

Awesome. And can you give us any sort of tease on when DD Cloud might go live?

Yeah, so we're currently eyeing end of the month launch at the moment. We're kind of dealing with a few things in the background. But we're also waiting for the Shannon hard fork cutover for Pocket Network. And once that's fully complete, we're going to be onboarded directly to the chain. So I'm very, very excited. You know, this really has been a long time coming. We're also supported by the folks at the Pocket Network Foundation, they gave us a very generous grant. And so because we have such amazing partners and people we get to work with, DD Cloud is quickly becoming a reality. And so I'm really excited to show the world what DD can actually ship.

Yeah, and shout out to Pocket Network. Those folks are fantastic for sure. And I guess just out of curiosity to pick your brain a little bit, what kinds of things are you looking for people to start using DD Cloud for? Obviously dApp development, but is there any particular thing that you'd love to see somebody build?

Yeah, I think it would be cool to see some lower latency use cases like arbitrage and MEV bots. I think that would be like really, really awesome to see because we're hardcore working to cut down allocations, make sure that you know we can get that six milliseconds down to microseconds. Awesome. And in terms of contributing to the project, is it currently closed source or open source? If people want to start helping you out to continue to build out the functionalities, is there a way for them to do that? So currently it's source-available, so it's not open source but like people could like go and like see the source code, but we do retain all rights. And so I do guess it's on the individual contributor if they do see something that they want to come along and add. But otherwise, we're just like really like battening down the hatches. We have very strict style guides in place and we're really looking to put some of the best quality production code on the market.

Love to hear it, love to hear it. And yeah, as we're closing in on time, just curious to hear your thoughts on like the current state of Web3, like what kinds of trends that you see are exciting for you, maybe like something in the crosshairs of like AI and Web3 or perhaps a interesting EIP you've seen that you think is promising?

Yeah, I mean for me it just goes back to compute, compute, compute. What we're seeing with this generation of chains, I mean especially in the Polkadot ecosystem too, a lot of individual projects that are focusing on DePIN, whether it's being a giant connector to many different chains or services that are replicated across the network like Pocket, or you know something that is more say like verifiable compute or trusted execution environment, something like you'd see from Phala. There's I think a lot of really interesting creative things that are going on just in terms of raw infrastructure. And so like that's making me super excited because besides financial services and things of that nature, I think blockchains can really unlock a very unique economy of scale to commodity infrastructure and resources, especially because you get to coordinate across many different parties in a trustless manner, so people are fairly motivated to play the economic game of the chain and participate given that they are sufficiently incentivized to do so. And so I think this concept, this idea fundamentally has a lot of staying power across both infrastructure and finance.

Well said, well said. And yeah, unfortunately we've come to time, but this has been an excellent overview and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today, Crypto. It's amazing to see the progress you've made with DD Cloud, like really starting it as your own baby and pushing it out and getting it over the line close here. Hell yeah. Thank you so much for having me today, Narb. It's really a pleasure. You know, I've always was saving a very special occasion to come on DevNTell, so I'm really excited to show the world what we got. Love to hear that, man. And yeah, it's going to be an amazing product. I've dropped the link for folks to be able to join the waitlist in the comment section. If you're watching on YouTube as well, after the fact, it's going to be in the description of this video below. So definitely you'll want to get on that list and as Crypto mentioned, if you are a DD member, you will have an opportunity to test drive this product with priority and with a gracious amount of credits. So definitely you want to get your hands dirty with that because at the end of the day, we're all developers, we want to build cool stuff, and why not use a awesome product like DD Cloud to do that? And with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. If you watched us live today, do be sure to grab your attendance badge from BitBadges to showcase that you did indeed watch us live on chain. So if you're into collectibles, definitely check that out. And yeah, I guess we will see you all next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Right on. Cheers.