In this interview, Nate Holiday, CEO and Co-founder of Space and Time, delves into the intricacies of trustless data processing, including their development of a ZK database and Proof of SQL technology. He explores how these innovations are addressing critical challenges in blockchain scalability, data verification, and the integration of on-chain and off-chain data, potentially transforming industries from GameFi and DeFi to traditional finance and auditing.
Can you elaborate on the importance of trustless data processing in Web3 applications?
I think it’s pretty straightforward from a DeFi perspective. We all know that there are prices being fed to decentralized financial applications, and you need to be able to trust those prices. You need to be sure that the price is correct, especially if there are exchanges happening between two different parties.
Likewise, there are a lot of applications being run today all over the world on centralized databases that are tamperable. Now, blockchain solves a critical need, which is a financial ledger, but all other application data today sits in a centralized database off-chain.
How does Proof of SQL work, and are there any advantages over traditional data processing methods?
Generated SQL runs against the full history of the blockchain data. If your question is about Ethereum, it’ll run a full database scan of the Ethereum data from origination to date, depending on the question you’re asking. Then, you get the results.
The neat thing about the result is it’s not just a list; it’s actually graphs and visualizations. Цу predict what types of graphs and visualizations we believe are most interesting based on the query you ask.
Do you have any plans to implement other AI-powered solutions?
We’re working on a verifiable AI solution right now. This includes the ability to verify sources, and track understand drift within a large language model, and understand drift within a large language model. These are all things that we continue to work on on the AI front.
Can you elaborate on how ещ connect and index blockchain data with off-chain data sets?
When you talk about a ZK database, specifically in Web3, you need to understand that the index data coming into the database has to be accurate. For this, you can use a ZK-compatible indexer that brings the index data from blockchains into the database.
If you want to say everyone who has reached level 20 in the game gets a certain NFT, you need to be able to combine on-chain and off-chain data. You need to take data from the chain and ensure that data is accurate, and then you need to take all the game-level data that’s sitting off-chain. Based on what’s happening in this game, the achievements, where they live, who they play with, and what they’ve achieved, you’re going to give them a reward for that.
You need this off-chain data and this on-chain data to come together in a tamper-proof way where you can’t spoof it. People are actually earning these rewards, and they need to be limited to just those who have earned them.
What about scalability, especially when talking about large data sets and complex queries?
The limit of smart contracts is scalability from a data perspective – it can’t hold terabytes of data or process terabytes of data within a block time. Data warehouses have been around for a long time. They make the process parallel thanks to many different nodes, compute nodes, so it’s very fast and can handle large data sets.
How does your approach to blockchain data indexing differ from other solutions on the market?
We worked with a lot of different vendors and providers, and we realized that their indexing solutions, although making progress, weren’t up to the standards required for a ZK proof within block time. The difference is in how we handle reorgs within certain blockchains. We actually index a blockchain multiple times and have a ZK-compatible process which verifies multiple times and continuously the blockchain.
Do you think that Web3 companies are not consumer-focused but developer-focused right now?
There are a lot of people trying to solve the infrastructure needs within blockchain, and rightfully so. If you wanted to build on blockchain in 2020-2021, it was very hard to do so. It’s getting much easier now. We’re solving the infrastructure problems, and now you’re starting to see a lot more applications being developed that are exciting for users.
You already mentioned GameFi and DeFi. Are there any other industries where blockchain solutions can be beneficial?
There’s a lot of interest today in financial institutions. Many large banks and financial institutions are using blockchain for auditing and traceability or to build new types of blockchain capabilities within the banks. I can also mention GameFi since it’s quite popular right now.
How do you see the role of verifiable compute layers evolving as the Web3 ecosystem matures?
We believe that verifiable computing will change the computing paradigm in the future. In ten years, we believe a database will be processing verifiable data through ZK technology, and most users will not even know that it’s happening.
So, over 22% of the world’s computing is happening in the cloud. Fifteen to twenty years ago, it was all happening on-premise. There were these on-premise data centers corporations had, and if you were using any type of application, you were using an on-premise database solution, on-premise servers. Now, a lot of that workload has moved to the cloud.
Ten years from now, we believe this will be the same with verifiable data. Corporations, applications, and user demand will dictate the need for verifiable computing. The end-user won’t really notice that there is a difference – there’s not going to be a lag, it’s not going to be more expensive.
Think about all of the processing in the world today being done mainly on centralized databases that can be manipulated. In the future, we believe that all that computation is going to be verifiable.
What challenges do you foresee in achieving widespread adoption of blockchain and ZK, and how are these being addressed?
The challenge with ZK technology in the past was that people believed that it’s slow and expensive. We’re really excited about where this is going because we do believe that the world of computing will be changed in ten years.
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