Peeranha

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody! Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they are passionate about or have worked on. This can be an awesome project you've worked on, demonstrating testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community here. And today, I am happy to introduce to you Sergey and Philip, who will be giving us an overview of Peeranha. Take it away, gang.

Hello? Hello, Sergey?

You can't hear me? No, we could not hear Philip. Oh, I see. He was planning to give a quick intro before me. So Philip, if you have issues with the microphone, I can start. But once you have the issue with the mic resolved, just speak up, please.

So I'm Sergey Ilin, and I am CTO of Peeranha. Let me just start screen sharing with my presentation. And what Peeranha is... oh yeah, we can...

Sorry about that, I was just having some technical difficulties here.

All good, all good.

Let me just give a quick intro. Hey guys, I just wanted to introduce Sergey and the protocol Peeranha. Peeranha is a fully decentralized Q&A protocol with some really interesting features made for Web3 communities. You can think of it as a decentralized Stack Overflow. So I found it a few months ago, and I've been following it and communicating with the team, and I gotta say, I'm a big fan. They're continuously delivering, and yeah, great team so far. So I'd like to hand it over to Sergey. Take it away.

Thank you, Narb. Yeah, so as I started telling you about myself, I'm Sergey Ilin, I'm CTO and co-founder of Peeranha. And at Peeranha, what we are building, we call it a knowledge-sharing protocol for Web3, built on Web3 technologies. A little bit about myself: I've been in software development for over 15 years now. I spent about 10 years building enterprise software. I was doing coding, architecture, design, leading development teams, all went well until I learned about decentralized tech, Ethereum, and Solidity specifically. And that's where I got super excited about the blockchain space, about all of its possibilities and just about the technology itself.

So at that time, I quit my enterprise traditional software development job and I joined a blockchain startup called BloXroute Labs, located in the Chicago area. It was very exciting to work there, spent about three years at that startup, then I was interested in the DeFi space, and that's why I joined a small crypto startup doing arbitrage on decentralized exchanges. I spent two years at that place, but during all these five years, one problem was very important to me: discovering knowledge in Web3 technologies. Because comparing to my previous experience in traditional software development, my experience in Web3 was significantly harder. It was difficult to find information, actionable solutions, and so on. Initially, I thought it might be because the technology is young, but over time it was proving that it's not the only reason. One of the reasons was the tools that we are using for sharing the knowledge.

So I'll speak a little bit more about that in details, but a couple of words about Peeranha. So we were part of the first Filecoin Techstars accelerator, that was based on Techstars Seattle. The company is backed by Protocol Labs, Mysten Labs, and Techstars. Yeah, so we have very exciting partners.

And to give you the initial overview of what we are doing, I would like to show a quick promo video that I think is doing a good job explaining it in a very short time. Just let me know if you don't hear the sound, then I'll do it myself, but I would like to show this quick video.

We don't hear sound, if there's supposed to be sound.

Okay, okay then, canceling the video. Imagine... yeah, okay. Then I'll just continue my explanation the way I was describing the problem, because it was my personal pain, kind of finding technical information in Web3 was much harder than traditional software development. And what I learned and we did some research with my co-founder, the main reason was the tools that we are using. A lot of us in Web3 technologies, the main tool that we use to exchange knowledge is various channels on Discord, Slack, and Telegram. Those tools seem convenient when a community is small, but over time it creates a problem of knowledge being lost within those Telegram, Slack, and other channels.

That knowledge is not discoverable from the outside of those channels. You cannot find it in Google or some other search engines. And that knowledge is not curated by the community. And additionally, there's not much incentives for the community to help each other. So if you think about Peeranha, the closest analogy would be Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange. Someone who is a developer, I'm sure used it and probably use it at least once a week. But for someone who is not exactly a developer, you can think of it as a very technical Quora, a question and answer platform designed specifically for the developers. And usually when you have a development question, you can find the answer on the first page of the Google search which will give you exact solution that you need.

So this was the experience that I want to bring to the Web3 community as well, and our whole team is passionate about that problem. But we also understand that Stack Overflow as it is, whatever worked for the mainstream like standard software development, does not necessarily work well for Web3 communities. So I would like to start with just a quick presentation and show you a couple of the screens of Peeranha in action and then move into a little bit more details on our vision. So again, for someone who is familiar with Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, we're trying to build an interface that is very close, simple, and easy to use.

But Peeranha is different in several ways. Number one, from talking to developers who use Stack Overflow a lot, we discovered that many of them experienced times when their post was deleted from Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange because it's not hard enough, but it was very important to them, and this kind of pushes away people from Stack Overflow. So for that reason, we added an additional type of post that we call Discussions, and this is where people can exchange reviews, opinions, or brainstorm on various things. Then there's Expert Q&A, which speaks for itself, and that would be the format of very technical Q&A or something that requires knowledge research or some experience to provide the answer. And when we look at this type of post, the structure here is very specific and kind of proven by the years of existence of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. There's only one answer, reply allowed per user. There is a concept of the best answer that is always appearing at the top, and all of the remaining answers are sorted by the number of the upvotes. There's a separate comment section for various back and forth between the users, but this section takes less space and is less visible. So this is proven to provide the easiest way to find the most helpful information on the page. Instead of going through long threads, you just know that the best answers curated by the community will always be above.

Additionally, we're adding Tutorials, and this is kind of the blogs or articles for someone who wants to share a certain knowledge, but nobody asked about it. They just learned how to do a certain thing and the user just wants to share it with the community. So the part of Peeranha, of course, is a reputation and reward system, which is kind of a very important part of creating incentives for users to contribute. So if we look at one of the users, for example here, what users earn, they earn reputation and statuses within the communities whether they participating. They earning NFTs for their contributions. Right now we have just limited edition NFTs, kind of collectible NFTs with limited edition, but we also introducing soon soulbound NFTs for achievements within certain communities that can serve as a proof of the expertise in the certain areas of the user.

And later on, something that we are not launching immediately, but planning to grow the community first, there will be token, like a protocol token that will reward users for their contributions. One of the important things for me as someone who's been using Web3 applications and being in this space for a while is a user experience. So we're trying to make sure that users who are new to Web3 and experienced Web3 users can find their ideal way for interacting with the applications. So for that reason, we kind of providing several ways for users to login and use the app.

Important thing that I did not mention, we're trying to make it look as a traditional Web2 app, but under the hood, it's fully decentralized. So that application is built on the smart contracts on Polygon blockchain and Filecoin and IPFS. So all of the logic rules and so on, all of the history of the interaction with the protocol is tracked on Polygon blockchain, but we're not storing the text content on the blockchain itself because it's very expensive part of the blockchain. We store text content on the Filecoin and IPFS. So for this specific post, you can see that the text content is on Filecoin and IPFS, and the hash of that document is just kept within the smart contract, stored on-chain to cross-reference the text content that is outside of the blockchain.

So yeah, with that said, it's fully decentralized application, uses Filecoin, IPFS, Polygon, smart contracts, and as a querying layer, there is The Graph that indexes all of that data in a format that is easy to query, kind of fast and easy. And I was transitioning to the experience. So we want to accommodate various types of the users, that's why Peeranha supports different types of the wallets. Like for someone who is more advanced, there's MetaMask, WalletConnect, kind of to connect with wallet of their choice. But for someone who is new to Web3 and especially for like social media application, it may be not as critical kind of to fully own your keys, we providing the wallet Torus that allows to sign in with email or various social media or for example what I use is Gmail. So that allows users to interact with the protocol in a convenient way for them, kind of to find the balance between privacy of their private keys and the convenience. Another important consideration on the UX side is the fact that we're not requiring users to purchase any tokens. Like as you can see, my wallet has zero balance, but I'm still able to interact with the protocol and submit transaction. Let's say if I'm updating my profile, for example, that is also stored on-chain, that transaction... so we allowing users to relay their transactions on their behalf, we use what's called meta-transactions. So that meta-transaction requires me to sign the request, but transaction is routed by the account that is paying the gas fees on the Polygon blockchain. So this way anyone who doesn't even own any crypto can use the application.

Continuing kind of forward, Peeranha is broken down into communities. We have like seven communities at the moment. And the interface that I'm showing at the moment is the interface for the end user who is interested asking and answering questions in various communities. But also for each community, we provide a unique interface that is kind of sub-Q&A of that specific community. I'm showing right now example of the Functionland, one of our early clients. So as you can see, that Q&A is styled for their design and brand. It's different from the main Peeranha Q&A site, and it also shows only the posts related to Functionland, nothing else. So it can be moved to their own domain and this way it feels like it's separate Q&A belonging just to Functionland, but under the hood, it all goes into the same protocol.

So on the UI part, I think that's enough. That's kind of on the surface what Peeranha is, but under the hood, it's actually much more in our vision what we are planning to do here. Let me just go back to my slides and show you one diagram. So if we look at some Web3 community today, how it manages the knowledge, right? Let's say there's some blockchain that shares knowledge among its community.

Typically that community will have some documentation website, maybe some Notion pages, kind of static content that is posted by the project team or leadership team of that community. And this is typically the only part that is indexed by search engines like Google for example. But majority of the communication actually happens in various messengers like Telegram, Discord, and Slack. And all of this knowledge exchanged here is, first of all, it's siloed. Like someone who is using Discord is not aware what's happening in Telegram. It's siloed between the channels. Like people using more channels over time, kind of not aware what happens in other channels. And there's also siloes by languages. Like a lot of projects, they would do different channels for people speaking different languages and yeah, people usually not aware what's happening in the channels that speak different languages. So we have a lot of siloes. All of that knowledge kind of stays within those channels where it's not curated, very hard to find, and that knowledge is basically over time is just lost. Nobody checks Discord messages from couple months back. Right, it's... yeah, it's just not possible. Discord is not the tool for that.

And once the project realized that this is the problem, what they would typically do, they would just start a separate forum. The top projects would use something like Stack Exchange, like Ethereum Stack Exchange. But the smaller projects, they are too small for Stack Exchange, they just unable to create their community there. And what they would use, probably something like Discourse. And then they will do all possible to push people away from Telegram and Discord to the forum on Discourse and usually it's not doing well. Like users don't see why would they go somewhere else when they used to being on Discord or Telegram and they see that the shortest way to the answer. Right, so there's no incentives for them to go somewhere else to ask their questions and wait longer.

So our solution to that in our vision, instead of pushing people away from the channels where they want to be, we are integrating with those channels. So the UI that I showed you just recently, that's Peeranha with its protocol and web interface. We recently released the first version of our bots for Telegram, Discord, and Slack. Those bots right now can just push the notifications to the channels about the new posts. The next iteration will allow those bots to allow users to post and reply using those bots directly from the channels. We are also working on auto-translation bot that will translate the content posted on Peeranha to various languages automatically and then will allow users to improve on those translations. And the third piece of our vision is auto-answering bot that attempts to automatically answer questions from the users based on the knowledge base available on Peeranha. And just to visualize for you a little bit how it changes the flow, I'll give you just one example.

Let's say we have a person who prefers to use Telegram and speaks English language. That person is asking question on Telegram. And now with Peeranha, the only thing that they have to do, like when they post the question, the only thing they have to do is just tag Peeranha Telegram bot on their message. This way that bot will know that this post need to be created on Peeranha as well. It will create it there automatically. The translation bot will be translating it to languages that are important for that community, configured for that community. And then other bots will pick up the notification that the new post was created and will notify appropriate channels, appropriate messengers in appropriate languages about that new question. Now let's say somebody speaking Mandarin Chinese and who prefers Discord, happens to know the answer. They see the question in their language that they prefer, they know the answer, and just reply directly in their Discord channel to that notification. That way Discord bot knows that this is a reply to the original question that is being propagated back to Peeranha as a reply, again translated to all of those languages, and then Telegram bot notifies original asker that there is reply to your question.

So we closed the silo between people using different tools and speaking different languages. But what's even more important for the community in general, that all of this communication is now recorded on Peeranha protocol and available through the web interface where it's indexed by search engine, it's indexed not just in one language, but it's indexed in all of the possible languages that community configured. And now that knowledge can be curated, improved, updated, commented, and so on. It stays there for the community forever and kind of allows to build that knowledge base. So this is our vision that we going after, we're planning to complete that vision probably like the first iteration of everything to be done end of this year, beginning of the next year. Yeah, so we are Peeranha and basically that's what we are doing. We're helping users get vetted answers, improve the community management, increase community engagement, and help communities attract new users through their organic SEO.

Thank you for your attention and I would love to hear your questions.

Yeah, man, this was very, very interesting. And I agree on your point that all the knowledge in Web3 at least is held behind these siloes and it's very paradoxical because we're trying to get away from the siloed world. But yeah, tool like this really would put us ahead in terms of getting there. One question for me is to be able to post something on Peeranha, do I have to pay a token to or pay something to do that? Or is it free? Yeah.

Yeah, it is free. We see Peeranha free to post and free to answer. And our long-term goal is reward both: users asking questions and users answering questions. Because if we think of value created for the community, someone who ask the question and then the answer, it was answered by someone else, even though that person received immediate help of getting the answer, overall that person provided the value for the community because there will be thousands of people coming back to that question and instead of asking someone, they will get their answer immediately. So we see that value is created on both sides by asking and answering questions.

Gotcha, gotcha. Makes sense. And there was a question in the chat: Aayush asks, are you planning to import existing question answers from Stack Overflow?

Not really. We don't want to duplicate the content. Right now we are focused primarily on the communities that are kind of don't have their Q&A, this is our primary focus. But we're also going kind of wide on the Solidity and other general Web3 development topics. But if our users want to create some kind of wiki or some knowledge base and they want to post something that is maybe exists in some way on Stack Overflow, that's okay. But we are as a team, we are not planning to scrape anything from Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange. We believe that there's enough knowledge created in Web3 space every day. It's very fast developing kind of space where the new technology is coming up every day, something changes all the time, and that's just enough of new information posted.

I had a question. Yes, please. I wanted to... so in the DAO, we're building something called the Developer DAO Academy, and it's a series of like lessons and content that way. But we'd like to sort of move toward like proof of competency and maybe soulbound NFTs and this tool... and one thing we want to build too is potentially a forum for discussing lessons and... so this seems amazing. It has a lot of features that I could imagine tying well in with the academy-type pieces. So I guess what's the process for creating a community and that sort of thing?

Sure, let's connect. So right now we are in private beta. All of the communities that we are creating we are whitelisting first. But there's also advantages coming with it. For all of the new communities right now, we providing what we call white-glove service. So for those communities, we taking care of setting up their whole community with the styling and so on. We also providing dedicated client success person who is basically serving as extension of the community management team for our clients. So we see it, we see our client success as our own success, and just doing all possible to build a useful tool for our first clients before we start scaling. So yeah, definitely would love to chat. My contact information is here or even Discord if you can message me directly on Discord, I would love to chat.

Yeah, that's great, I'll kick off a conversation. Thanks so much, this is amazing. Thank you.

Developer DAO, Peeranha community coming your way. You heard it here first. So would I. We have about three minutes here left gang. Any questions? Any other questions from the crowd?

If not, I was going to ask, do you have a grand vision of what the Peer token is going to basically drive in the community? Do you see it as like a reward for people getting crossing a threshold for like number of best topics or thumbs up?

Yeah, we try to be very careful about the token. So we haven't launched our token yet, and we don't know when exactly we're going to launch it. Our strategy is to create the product, the tool that is really helpful and solves the problem that uses decentralized technologies and philosophies under the hood. And then once we are confident that people use it not just because of the token, but because it's really something valuable that we've built, that there is a community around it, only then we want to be careful about introducing token and incentives where we see that appropriate. Because we don't want to incentivize bad behavior. There's so many Web3 projects in this space where the only difference from Web2 tool is we are decentralized and we have a token. And usually this is just passed to the failure if this project doesn't do anything better than just these two criteria. Typically these are worse projects but with just two criteria where they are different. We want to follow different approach, we want to compete with Web2 projects on the features and only then introduce the token incentives as additional advantage over the traditional Web2.

Beauty. Well said. Yeah, I totally agree. A lot of projects start out with a token right away and don't really end up succeeding and plus there's all the gray area around is the token a security or not. So yeah, lots of tiptoeing around legal stuff. But yeah, I see we have one minute left. Any final questions here for Sergey or Philip?

Going once? Going twice? Sold! All right. Well, if you ever do, there's the contact information for Peeranha and Sergey himself. So please do reach out if you have any questions or just want to tell them how awesome the app is like we all saw. But thank you so much, Sergey and Philip for coming on. This was really awesome to see and we're really looking forward to seeing Peeranha continue chugging forward here.

Thank you everyone, thank you for your attention. It was great being here.

Thanks everyone! Yeah, for sure. And thanks so much, look forward to getting in touch with you. Appreciate it. Likewise, 100%.

And be sure to be on the lookout for the POAPs that I'll be dropping in the chat here as well as the general chat. And we will see you back here next week. All right gang, all the best. Cheers.