Supercluster Labs

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 the 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or been working on in Web3. This can 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 excited to have back on again Kai from Supercluster Labs, who will be sharing the latest development with Supercluster. So Kai, maybe would you want to do a brief re-introduction of yourself for folks who may not have tuned in last time?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm Kai, CEO and co-founder of Supercluster. And essentially, what we're building is a way for decentralized communities and decentralized teams to be able to collaborate effectively. Like our goal is to be able to not use Web2 platforms to be able to share files with your teams or even just collaborate on any kind of documentation with your teams. With Web2 platforms, it's not the best, as many of you know. So we're starting with file sharing and we're building a decentralized file sharing service that can be controlled—the access can be controlled—via Web3 primitives.

And we're going to expand that to not just file sharing, but really any kind of DAO collaboration tools out there. So today we're going to show a little bit of the file sharing platform that we've built out, which runs on IPFS. But yeah, I'll also show a little bit of what we're going to be building towards and yeah, it's going to be awesome and super excited to show it.

Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to it. And you're in Denver, right, for ETH Denver?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's awesome out here. Love the energy. There's so many DAOs out here. Everyone's building. It's great.

Are you taking part in the hackathon as well, or just there for the networking piece of it?

We are actually part of the hackathon. So we're building a bit of our tool and a couple of adapters and getting people excited about the project, really. But yeah, we're also definitely here for the networking, here for meeting other DAO tooling platforms and getting them to be excited about Supercluster and also understanding what their problems are and how we can try to help.

Excellent. Excellent. Love to hear it. Yeah, so if you want, we can get into it whenever you want. You can share your screen and I'll get it on.

Cool. All right, I will share my screen. Let me know when you see this.

Yep, we are good to go.

Okay, great. So the main thing with Supercluster is our access control layer. So this is what I really kind of want to focus on today. So the first thing I wanted to show is we minted a Supercluster DevNTell NFT. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to send this NFT to a wallet that I created. And this NFT is going to either give or block access from a cluster of files that we're going to create. So just going to set the user flow here.

So when you go in, you connect your wallet. I'm going to connect this wallet, Account 2, which already has the NFT that I was just showing. So we go ahead and connect it. This is a test cluster that we previously had created. But I'm going to go ahead and create a new cluster and we'll just call this Developer DAO Test Cluster. You can provide a short description as well. So we can say Developer DAO private files that are NFT gated.

We're not going to choose admins. So what you can do here is actually you can add in any ETH address or any ENS domain and you'll be able to have other people have admin permissions for your cluster. In this case, we're not going to use that. And also I want to show that we have multiple different types of gating for your cluster. And actually afterwards, I'll kind of show some of the other access parameters that we're integrating. But for this instance, I'm going to choose NFTs.

And then we pull up all your NFTs. So I already sent this NFT to Developer DAO, and I'm just going to use that as the access control parameter. And you'll see here that a new cluster was created for Developer DAO Test Cluster. Okay, so going back here, I haven't uploaded any files yet. You go in and it's kind of blank right now.

I'm going to go back here and I'm going to actually transfer this to another wallet that I created. Actually, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to create a new account here. We'll just call this DevNTell Test Account. And I'm going to copy this address. Go ahead and transfer this. Wait a little bit for the transfer to go through. Cool. Okay, so now this address that I just or this wallet that I just created should have the NFT for access control, right?

So I'm going to go ahead and connect it. And I'll go ahead and connect the test account that I just created. Once you go in, yeah, you should see that you now have access to the cluster that I had just created. And basically what we're doing here is we're checking all the NFTs that you have in your account and then we're seeing what clusters or what teams that you have access to.

So I can go in and now there's one member in this and I can upload a file. So I'll just go ahead and upload a file here. So now it's uploaded and you'll see that this is all pinned to IPFS, right? So this is the CID, what the size. You can actually delete it as well because you're the one who actually uploaded it. Go back here and you'll see if I refresh, now this account also has access to this file.

So this is a rudimentary way, but this is the first way that we're providing access control to files essentially. Like instead of using, you know, Google Drive or Dropbox that's really email based, we're using NFTs, tokens, and ETH addresses as a way to gate your files and make sure that the right people in your DAO has access to the right files.

The last thing I want to show here is this is kind of what we're building towards, right? So you have your list of files, you can go in, you can create a cluster, provide the basic information, very similar to exactly the flow that we actually just went through. And instead of just having access or not having access, you can actually choose a write and read access requirement. And I showed the NFT portion and we already have ERC-20 as well as just ETH addresses.

But we're also integrating with Snapshot, Coordinape, Otterspace, Discord. Like all of these kind of access primitives that are already being used within your team and either on-chain or off-chain. We're integrating all of these platforms together into an access control management platform that you'll be able to use for your files.

So for instance, let's say we want to go ahead and say, okay, well we'll pick Snapshot as a access requirement. We can say, oh, we only want people who have voted three times in your DAO to be able to have access to your files to—sorry—to be able to have write access to your files. And then we can confirm that rule and then we'll have that stored here. And then we can also say, you know, this person needs to have 50,000 Bank tokens in order to do this, right? Like for example, this is for Bankless DAO.

We can confirm that rule. And then we can also choose different requirements for read access, right? So for read access we can say, oh, you know, they can have a specific POAP, which is the Bankless community call. We can confirm that rule. We also say that they have 25,000 Bank tokens. And then, you know, this becomes your access requirements at a more defined level for your cluster.

But really our goal with this is that once you define these, they can be used in any kind of DAO tooling platform. So our goal is to be able to integrate with things like CharmVerse or Snapshot or anything to be able to provide access requirements for them and they can plug into us for that user management and access control layer. But yeah, that's currently what we're building now. We're actually building our first integration with Otterspace within—I want to say—the next week. But our goal is to have API ready pretty soon that you can play around with.

That's awesome. And is the plan just to focus on access control for files? Do you envision perhaps expanding to access control for maybe entering a DAO, whether that's in Discord or suppose there's like another Friends with Benefits kind of mobile app experience that requires the user to basically be a member to be able to access that experience? Do you foresee going down that route?

Yeah, actually it's a great question. Our goal is to not just integrate with kind of the native Web3 DAO tooling platforms, but we're also looking at ways that we can integrate with traditional Web2 platforms, right? Like we don't want to have to make you switch from let's say Notion if your team's using Notion or Google Drive or whatever. If your team's already on there, what we want to do is provide this access control layer that will essentially allow you to gate access to all the tools that you're currently using using Web3 primitives. All of that data is on-chain. We're essentially providing the user management layer that are all based on these on-chain activities.

Gotcha. Excellent. And is there any particular reason you went with IPFS for the file portion of Supercluster? Did you do any comparison between other storage providers out there? Like what led you to IPFS ultimately?

Yeah, I mean IPFS is a technology that we're super bullish on. So we kind of love the ecosystem. It was super easy for us to integrate. But you know, honestly, our goal is to allow the user to be able to choose what kind of storage provider that they want, right? We understand that most people or most DAOs don't want to run their own infrastructure in order to like host their IPFS cluster. And so we are going to allow them to essentially choose what decentralized storage provider that they want, whether it's Arweave, Sia, they can even use aggregators such as Filebase to be able to store their files and access their files. We are providing really kind of the access control mechanism that sits on top of it.

Beauty. And I may have missed it earlier, but when you were showing the NFTs that granted the access control, did you create that NFT through your platform or was that created outside of this platform?

It was created outside of this platform for now. But really our goal is for any of these like NFTs or tokens or let's say Otterspace badges or POAPs, if you don't already have that created, we're going to allow you to create the access control mechanism through our platform. Right? So like as you're going through this flow right here, which is creating your cluster, instead of just choosing what's already in your wallet or what you already have access to, we're going to allow you to actually create it on the spot.

Dope. Yeah, love to hear it, man. And I guess if people didn't catch it the first DevNTell around, like what were some challenges early on that you faced when you built your first iteration up to this point where we were talking earlier that you had to pivot a few times to get to this iteration?

Well, it's funny because we are, you know, from what I showed today, we're, as you can tell, we're kind of pivoting a little bit, or I guess more like we're focusing on a certain aspect. What we really want to provide is this access control layer, right? And so when we started showing our product and getting people to use our product, what became clear to us was that the major value that people were getting from our platform was at the access control management portion of it, not so much like specifically the decentralized storage portion, right? So really our goal, and we're creating a kind of architecture diagram that will show this a little bit better.

But really our goal is to integrate with multiple platforms out there, not just Web3 platforms like CharmVerse or Snapshot or whatever, but really Web2 platforms. And most teams that we've talked to, most DAOs that we've talked to, they're currently using Web2 platforms, right? They're using Notion, they're using Dropbox, and the problem with them is that the access control is typically user-based and typically identity-based. So it requires people to go in and remove and add emails, right?

We have better ways of dealing with that right now, right? We have better ways of dealing with that using ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, Snapshot proposals, Otterspace badges. Like all of these are kind of the engagement primitives that we already have. And really our goal is to kind of provide this access control layer that any team can define what it really means to be a contributing member of your DAO and then have that integrated to every platform out there or platforms that they're already using.

And so your original question was how we're pivoting? Well, it became clear to us that that was the major value add and we want to make sure that like users and DAOs and teams can use their Web3 primitives as access control for any tool out there, not just for file sharing, but any tool out there.

Love it. Love the answer. And I guess a couple final questions. I'll let you get back to ETH Denver. Is the project currently open-source and or are there plans to make it open-source?

Yeah, yeah. We are going to be open-sourcing, I want to say the majority of it. Obviously, there's some parts from our original implementation that we have to rip out and re-architect. But our goal is to have most of the project open-source. We want everyone to be able to contribute to it and to be able to build the adapters for their protocols and the platforms that they want to use into our access control layer.

Dope. Yeah. And final question for me is what's the best way for people to keep up with the progress of you and your co-founder Gov, who wasn't able to show up today? But yeah, how can people get the latest and greatest from Supercluster?

Absolutely. We will post a link into the chat—if I can find it here—for our Twitter as well as our Discord channel. We, obviously since our kind of slight pivot, we are kind of re-architecting and rebuilding our channel and we will kind of have a new direction that we want people to get on board with. And so anyone is interested in helping out and building those adapters and letting us know how this project, how Supercluster can be beneficial for them and their team, please join our Discord as well as just follow us on Twitter and kind of see the updates for the platform.

Awesome. And yes, I'll also be sharing those same links in the YouTube description of this video as well as the accompanying blog post that will come out sometime today or tomorrow. But with that, I just want to thank you so much, Kai, for coming on while you're at the conference. Really appreciate it. Love what you guys are doing. Looking forward to seeing the progress here. Excellent. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Yeah, definitely. One of the asks, one of the immediate asks that we have: if you are a DAO member, if you're a DAO, especially if you're a DAO team lead, we would love to better understand the tools that you guys are using right now and the different engagement primitives that you guys are using. So please reach out. I will also have my Twitter personal Twitter handle out there and please reach out and we'd love to hear how you guys are engaging with your team and integrate those things first. So appreciate it.

Excellent. Yeah, looking forward to it. And before we end off, I just wanted to make a brief note here about our operators, Chuck and Wickist. So did you know that DD's funding operators, Chuck and Wickist, are here to help you fundraise for your projects? In their fundraising hub on the Discord server, you can find support in running grant applications, learning about fundraising, budgeting, pitching, and they can even introduce you to grant leads from different protocols. So if you're interested, be sure to drop by their office hours twice a week or schedule a 1-on-1 with them. And with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and those of you in Denver, enjoy the rest of the conference here. And we will see you back here next week. And I will be dropping a link for the POAPs in the YouTube chat here as well as the Discord server. But once again, Kai, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Cheers, king. Take care, y'all.