Sepana.io

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 builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on in Web3. This could be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit 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 Web3 community. And today I am ecstatic to have Ron and Hector from the Sepana team, Sepana.io, who will be giving us an overview of their product. So welcome gang, happy to have you on. Perhaps we can start with brief introductions about yourself, perhaps a background and how you got into Web3 and what you do at Sepana.

Sure, so I'm going to start. I've been in the space for the last few years. Apart from being a crypto enthusiast and a Web3 activist, I'm also a digital nomad, like a world traveler. I was actually a few years ago in a digital nomad conference in Spain, in the Canary Islands, and I met there an amazing speaker that started talking about blockchain and crypto and Bitcoin and all the decentralized revolution. Right after the conference, we became best buddies and we started working together on a crypto project, what later became Alpha 9. Basically, what we tried to establish back then—he was like the CEO of the company, I was the CTO—basically what we tried to establish back then was we found there is a big problem with elders' houses. Basically, you take older people, they are living out of low income usually, but they possess and own their house. If we thought that if we can give them the ability to liquidate this house and continue living with it, it can be quite amazing. And one of the most amazing and fascinating ways to do it is with our new economy, with the new economy building blocks, DeFi tools and blockchain and crypto. So this was basically my first project in the crypto space. Since then, I did a lot like trading bots and NFT collections, and consulting to other firms and public speaking and stuff. Then I founded another company, Decentralized Science. The idea was to solve the big issue of academics. There is currently—I don't know if a lot of people are familiar with this, but researchers from all around the world are getting paid pennies and they simply devoted their life to improve humanity. So we kind of like developed—we kind of embed DeFi into academic research and kind of like develop a unique protocol where you can mint academic literature on-chain and can basically connect—basically create on-chain citations. I was a co-founder and the CTO of the company, it was pretty cool. And then I left and joined the Sepana. I'm currently the VP R&D of Sepana. We're doing amazing, and I would be happy to share more and more about Sepana and what we are doing and what this project is all about, and our amazing team and our amazing project. But yeah, let's first let Hector introduce himself.

Awesome. Yeah, so I'm based out of Canada. I got into the crypto space like in 2020. I actually started as like a TikTok influencer, so I was like making videos on TikTok. A few of the videos went viral by accident, and all my content was about crypto. So I used that on my resume to start applying for jobs like in social media or community management positions, because I was like, 'Hey look, I have 100K followers on TikTok, I know how to use TikTok and I know about crypto.' So yeah, I got my first job in crypto like two years ago. I worked for a mining company that was creating like a hash power marketplace. And I continued making content and learning about the crypto space in general. And then Bitcoin kind of went down and I was laid off for a bit. And then started applying for more jobs, and I came across Sepana through one of the—I was looking at like—I think I was looking through Protocol Labs' like investor-invested companies, and I clicked on Sepana because I thought they were interesting for building a Web3 search engine. And yeah, I went on the website and I applied. They didn't really have a position for community manager, so I just kind of applied randomly and said, 'Hey, I can help with anything you need.' So now basically, like I help them with their social media kind of content stuff and I do some BD, so help establish some protocol relationships. And yeah, it's been great.

Excellent, love to hear it gang. And again, pleasure to have you on. What do you have in store for us today?

So I will take the lead, and Hector I will be happy if you help me anywhere you have any comment, feel free obviously. I'm just going to share my screen. Do you guys see my screen?

Yep, we do.

Excellent. So I was thinking if to make slides or no, but honestly I thought that the best way to demonstrate and showcase and talk about Sepana was simply like showing all the stuff that we built, including our website, our team, everything. So yeah, let's just jump into it. Sepana is doing search into Web3. And we recently been in ETHDenver, and every time we said 'search to Web3', it's always popped up some questions and like 'what is search for Web3?', 'what exactly do you guys doing?', 'what can I search for?'. And I want to make this introduction a bit more narrow and more specific. Basically, search—what Sepana is trying to do is like search infrastructure for Web3. We can give dApps creators the ability to integrate a search engine inside their dApp, and by this provide strong search capabilities to their end consumers.

And before explaining what this basically means, and before showcasing some of how to build an engine and what a search engine means for us and what like public engines and all the top-notch features that we launched recently, I want to talk like a bit like in broader range about Sepana. This is like the Sepana team. We have Daniel and David, our two amazing co-founders, they're like brothers. This is basically our entire team, we are around 20 people around the globe. We have people from Israel, India, Ghana, Georgia, US, Canada, etc., etc. Our team is really diverse and really amazing. And we have people like from a wide range of technologies, like from cloud developers and full-stackers to data engineers, machine learning developers, and from protocols, decentralized search infrastructure, ZK proofs and more. So Sepana is really like a really deep technology company. It's quite fascinating to see the stuff that this team is able to execute and the depth of technology and the technology discussion that we have in Slack, it's actually quite fun.

And yeah, so this is basically our team. Everyone is more than willing to apply, we are continuously hiring. This is some of our photos from the latest ETHDenver. I don't know if any of you guys had been there, I think we definitely deserve to win best swag of the conference. Definitely. We get so many compliments about our swag, 'Proof of Beanie' and 'Proof of Jacket', and people was like scratching the card to win a jacket or a beanie. And we have some like funny jokes that 'Okay, you didn't win a beanie or a jacket, but you win an invisible Tesla', or 'you win a meeting with Carl Satoshi Brother'. And it was basically—it was hilarious and like created amazing buzz around the company and it's fun to see how we know to demonstrate our values and our DNA of the company outside in these kind of events. We have some amazing advisors with us. And basically the way Sepana is started is by integrated with some of the top-notch crypto projects out there. We aim mainly for social content, and we start ingesting and indexing data from DeSo, from Mirror, and from Lens. And we kind of become like their native partner and their native search. This is like Cloutavista, it's something that we built for DeSo. And basically with this tool, you can navigate and search inside of DeSo, and this become like their native search. So it's kind of big for us. Created a way to search on-chain and off-chain content for some of the top crypto projects out there. You can filter like by content, NFTs, bio, and a lot of like other cool stuff and get like super relevant, super like specific with your intention results. And this for example from DeSo chain.

Another amazing tool that we built was AskMirror. I've been a fan of Mirror like for a while, Mirror is definitely one of the top projects in crypto. And it was always annoying for me as a user that there is no search, like right? You can post on Mirror, you can get the Mirror link, but you can't discover Mirror—there is no easy way to discover Mirror posts. Then Sepana just simply used Sepana infrastructure and created AskMirror where you can search for relevant content from all around the globe. This is a post by Daniel, our co-founder. And really get like relevant content from like Mirror posts. And the third and another cool tool that I want to show you that we developed, it's basically Sepana for Lens. I guess everyone is familiar with Lens Protocol social. And again, Sepana is developed—Sepana is in strong relationship with Stani and with Lens. and Sepana is build this like Lens by Sepana, and again, a search engine and search platform where you can search inside Lens posts and content and followers, publications, comments, etc., etc. Lately, me and Hector had a conversation with someone from the Lens team, and he said 'Okay, there is people that launching for example a campaign over Lens and they want to see how many times their name got mentioned on this Lens campaign.' And currently they don't have any way to like filter this type of result from inside Lens. And with Sepana it's so easy to integrate Sepana and to get this insight and this results like out of the box basically. And soon I'm going to show you the tools of Sepana and what Sepana is actually doing and what is the like underneath of Sepana. But this is just a demonstration of some of the cool tools that we built.

As you can see here in AskMirror, Sepana raised $10 million around the end of last year. And basically we continuously growing, the company just grown from like five people to almost 20. Unless there is any question until now, I would be happy to demonstrate what Sepana is actually doing. Let me just jump into our app. And this is like our app, I already like logged in before. And inside our app, you can create a search engine. Pressing simply pressing on the 'Engine', create your engine with a name. I just created this one. And this is my new search engine. In my search engine, I get engine ID and I get an API key. With this engine ID and API key, I can basically use Sepana API in order to integrate search inside my dApp. So for example, if Mirror want to—if I was the owner of Mirror and I want to embed search inside my dApp, all I need to do is sign up to Sepana, create a new search engine, yeah, with the name that I want. And using the API with the engine ID and the API key and simply embed this API inside my app and get all these search capabilities out of the box. After creating a new engine, I can start uploading data. I can use our dashboard to upload data, or I can use the API to upload data. All the data uploading is designed for scale and everything has been managed in an asynchronous way. This is why I just don't want to upload anything right now, it's basically super simple and like can upload stuff from my like from my local environment or from an external API and index data into it. And I want to show you some like engines that we already being created, that already been created and some data that we already like have on the platform. And this for example engine of Ethereum transactions. So again, I simply pre-created this engine, upload data through all the dashboard or through our API, and then I get all this data inside the engine. I can filter and aggregate and manage this data out of the dashboard. And basically eventually I can just take the API with the engine ID and embed it inside my dApp. And this is how I can get like search capabilities out of the box. Recently, we've been working on Web3 features. Some of them is like IPFS resolver, it's something that we really proud of. It basically mean that if inside your data you have links to IPFS, we search not only the links themselves, but rather we know to search inside the actual content inside IPFS. It's kind of new and it's like I think it's one of the most fast way to search inside of IPFS content what Sepana is doing. So this is like a super basic introduction on our dashboard. You can also check our documentation, it will give you much more like better information of everything that we are doing and like background of Sepana, roadmap and stuff and a way to use our API. And yeah, this is basically it. If there is any further question, I would be happy to talk a bit more about future roadmap.

Uh, I had a couple questions. Um, I guess just to confirm my understanding. Uh, so what you can do once you log into this dashboard is essentially create a data source and an API um to be able to read from that data source, correct? So if I want to create a data source, say for um my smart contract um events, I can copy the JSON contents representing those events and paste them there and have a API out of the box being able to parse and filter through those events, correct? Am I on the right track?

Exactly. Super accurate. Indexing data and then using the API to integrate this search engine to your app, yeah.

And does the process of porting over the data always have to be a copy-paste? Can I specify an API, for example if I have another API that I want to read in like further fine-grained filter through that? Is that possible or maybe something on the roadmap?

Yeah, so you touch right in the exactly. You touch just in the point. This is like something that we soon going to add, that we're planning to add soon as part of our future roadmap, definitely. Beauty.

And uh, we have a question from the crowd. Um, WP asks: 'Can Sepana work on Polygon projects?'

Yes, yes, yes, definitely. Lens for example is a Polygon—it's a Polygon project. It's—and yeah, definitely we are native. We are cross-chain by definition. Gotcha.

Beauty. Yeah, uh, that is uh it for now. Uh, continue uh with the roadmap and then we can follow up with more questions.

Of course. So I just want to share like a few—like a few of our latest feature stuff that are in the pipeline, that been recently launched and like might—that we planning to launch pretty soon. One of them is the engines. Public engines. And it's kind of relevant to the question that you asked like—we provide to our customer the ability to not only ingest their data, but also to use pre-made indices. Like for example, we already ingest all the data from Snapshot, all the data of DeSo and Lens and Mirror, Farcaster, CyberConnect and there is much more in the pipeline. So we can—so we give our customer the ability to publish a public version of their engine for other user to use it. And we're also—the team, the internal team is continuously uploading more and more engines in order to to give to dApp creators the ability to integrate to pre-made engines. So it's kind of give you the ability to do something that's called federated search. It's basically the way to—like if you are a dApp creator, you can give your user the way to search inside your own content, but also integrate to content from Farcaster or from Snapshot and that way your user can like search, simply search inside all these databases, all these like indexes in one place. So this is one major feature that we recently launch. Another feature is like basically everything that is related for data streaming and data indexing, as you mentioned, as Hector mentioned, it's on the pipeline and the way to like just set up an API or just set up a smart contract and we take it from there and streaming data by ourself. One tool that—one streaming that we currently made is from Lens, Lens BigQuery, we integrated with them. And I want to show you like mockups if it's okay, of like something that we are working on. It's basically a 'Search All' through Sepana because of that we have so many so much data and we have so strong search capabilities, we thinking of providing like search across Web3 and basically together with like ML capabilities, integrated with—we thinking about integrating ChatGPT here. And basically with GPT capabilities and new ML capabilities, we want to provide the ability to search and aggregate through all Web3 data in one source and in one place. So it's kind of different than our current offering than just integrate search engine inside your dApp, and we want to create one place where everyone can search content through all Web3. And again, we're we're super excited to integrate GPT there and our ML devs are like working hard to integrate this as part of the product and there is a lot of UX challenges and like data data mapping challenges, but yeah, we are planning to launch this pretty soon I guess.

That's—that's actually a great segue. Nice. That was actually a question WP had, whether or not you guys were doing anything in AI and GPT. So uh question answered. And actually uh on that, I think it would be pretty cool if um you were able to make like a GPT plugin for that um to be able to like search Web3 things through GPT um using um Sepana as like a source of truth. But uh I'm sure you guys are thinking about stuff like that. Yes. Nice. Yeah, we working hard of of integrating GPT, yeah. Love it.

And uh we don't have too much time, so I guess uh another thing, um what's the best way for folks to get started with Sepana? Um, is it free to sign up and and uh start building? Um, what's the process?

Yeah, so if anyone's interested in using the API or playing around with it, uh you can check us out on Twitter, you can DM us on Twitter and we'll give you the early access code. Uh and that way you can start playing around with the API engine. Um otherwise then you can message one of the team members as well on Twitter, but the best way is just to directly contact us. Uh the Twitter is Sepana_io. Um if anyone wants to play around with the API, you can just follow us on there, send us a DM, the DMs are open and then we can set you up with your early access code. Awesome, love to hear it.

And uh yeah, the and the other thing I was going to ask, you mentioned earlier that there was uh opportunities for people to apply um for jobs. Um, um could you just repeat that um process and how people can...

Yeah, so if anyone's interested in in applying for Sepana or working with us, uh that's also on our website. If you just go under the team section, uh at the bottom there's an apply button, so it's a big apply button. Just hit apply, uh then upload your resume and yeah, just uh directly apply on the website.

Excellent. Thank you so much Ron and Hector. Uh really appreciate you guys coming on. Um it's really awesome to see something like this getting built out and and I'm sure there's lot of us who thinking of 'Oh when are we going to get indexed searching on Web3?' and like Sepana.io brought it to you right here. Um so really looking forward to seeing the project uh continue to grow out here and uh yeah, feel free to sign up for DevNTell again in the future uh if you have any more new features to uh to show, and love to have you back on. Awesome. Thank you so much for having us on. My pleasure, my pleasure. And uh just before we leave off leave off here some admin things. Um so from our Developer DAO server did you know we have a group of operators that can help you take your project to the next level? So our DD fundraising operators, Chuck and Wiggs are here to help you fundraise for your projects. In their fundraising hub in the Discord server—that's the Developer DAO Discord server—you can find support in running grant applications, learning about fundraising, budgeting, pitching, and they could even introduce you to grant leads from other other protocols. So be sure to drop by their office hours twice a week or schedule a one-on-one with them. And finally a note on our POAPs. Um so typically how we shared POAPs um at the end of this was through a Google sheet. Um today we're trying something different. Uh so what you'll need to have um downloaded on your mobile is the POAP.xyz mobile app. And what you're going to do—um you'll have from um the top of this hour um to 15 minutes past—uh so that's uh 9:00 a.m. PST to 9:15 a.m. PST—uh sorry about the time zones—um to be able to claim uh using a secret phrase. So I will now speak to this phrase, I will not type it. Um and you'll need to enter that code into into the POAP.xyz app and you will be able to claim. So the phrase is: paper-beautiful-cold. One more time: paper-beautiful-cold. So you'll have 15 minutes um in the next five seconds to be able to claim that. And uh yeah, um just thank you again gang for coming on and uh yeah, looking forward to seeing Sepana.io uh rocket. All right gang, all the best. Thank you, bye. See you next time, bye-bye.