Kate: Hello, and welcome to PodRocket. With me today is Noah Hein. Hi, Noah. How's it going? Noah Hein: Good. How are you, Kate? Kate: I'm doing well. Noah is the technical content editor at QuickNode. And he's joining us today to talk about Web3 and all that fun stuff. Also with us is Paul. Hi, Paul. Paul: Howdy. Kate: Paul is one of our engineers here at LogRocket. So, yeah. Thanks everyone for joining. And Paul, do you want to get into it? Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Kate. So, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us, Noah. We wanted to kind of take this podcast and talk more about the fundamentals of Web3 and blockchain because it's a confusing topic for everybody that's already technical and deep into this stuff. So, I feel like the best place to start would be this question that I'm sure you get asked all the time: what's the deal with blockchain and Web3? Are they different? Are they the same thing? What's the TLDR on that? Noah Hein: Sure. So, that's... man, you're coming at me straight out the gate with the good questions. So, I would say the difference between blockchain and Web3 is that I think of blockchain as kind of being the infrastructure level, whereas Web3 is kind of like the entire ecosystem. And where you want to kind of draw the lines is where you start getting into those hot Twitter takes and all the debates and everything. But as far as a concrete answer, if you hear someone talking about Web3, I'm generally speaking of any part of the ecosystem, any blockchain, anything that is involving a blockchain or interfaces with it gets the Web3 label slapped on it. Paul: So, would it be fair to say we could take Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano and throw that into the blockchain category? And all the dApps we use, like ShibaSwap, Uniswap, all that stuff would be a Web3 category? Noah Hein: Yeah. I would- Paul: Is that [crosstalk 00:02:22]? Noah Hein: Yeah. I would definitely say all of those can be Web3. I would say all of those are Web3 because I would specify that blockchain still fits within Web3, but it is like the infrastructure layer. So, Web3 is like the general huge bubble that just encompasses everything, whereas the kind of apps that you had mentioned, I would specify those as dApps or decentralized applications. Paul: Got you. All right. That's good. Yeah. Thank you. Kind of talking about it as a fundamental layer. And it's kind of like a square is a rectangle, right? Or how does it go? You know, one of them's the other one, but the other one's not the- Noah Hein: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Paul: [crosstalk 00:03:02] it's encompassing. Yeah. Noah Hein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go with Web3 is the rectangle. And the infrastructure or the blockchain is the squares. Paul: Right, right. We're thinking about the same thing. Awesome. So, where would you say you're focusing a lot of your time? Is it on the application and user layer? Or are you really focused more on the fundamental blockchain layer of things? Noah Hein: Yeah. So, it's an interesting question because I do quite a lot across the entire stack, given my role as a technical content editor at QuickNode. QuickNode itself is on that infrastructure layer. If Web3 is this big gold rush, we're the picks and shovels of Web3. So, if you don't want to host your own server, that's a very big proponent of why we're all saying, "Okay, this is a really fundamental change in how we think about technology. Everyone's going to be running their own servers." And that's what a lot of people do. Noah Hein: For example, on the Ethereum blockchain or on the Bitcoin blockchain, people will run their own nodes. And you have to be technical to do that. And you have to kind of have a sysadmin. Like, if you are running a node, if I'm going to make an analog, I'm going to say you're like a DevOps person. You're- Paul: So, what would we say is a node, just for anybody that might not be able to relate? What is this node that you're talking about that people need to run? Why do they need to run it? Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. So, to answer that, we kind of have to take a couple steps back actually, which should give us some good context here. So, a node is going to be a client that you're running on your computer. And this node will talk to other nodes. And so, this is why we call blockchain a peer-to-peer network. Each peer is a node. So, you could also call it a node-to-node network, although you'd certainly get a couple of sideways glances for calling it that. So, everyone here has the ability to run an Ethereum node on their computer. And it is going to talk to any other Ethereum nodes that it can talk with in whatever- Paul: To support the network? To support the [inaudible 00:05:03], right? Noah Hein: Yeah. And so, all of these together create the blockchain ecosystem that we refer to as, like, Bitcoin or Ethereum, but any one individual person is a node operator. So, someone that's running this node operator, like I was saying, you would kind of be the DevOps or SRE kind of equivalent of the Web3 world. And so, QuickNode allows you to kind of abstract that away. Just like a lot of people are like, "Yeah, I'm a front-end web developer," you don't necessarily worry so much about the deployment. Everyone talks amazingly about these companies like Vercel and Netlify because it's just like, "I don't have to worry about that. I just am an application developer. I build the website. And the rest takes care of itself." QuickNode is kind of that replacement for those companies I had just mentioned. Paul: So, how does running a node that supports the Ethereum blockchain... I'm on board with you there. It's creating this network that's running all this stuff. Now, let's say I want to develop a dApp, I want to develop something that looks at my personal transactions and tracks them. How does having this node help me do that as a developer? Yeah, I'm trying to make the analogy between me writing a [NextApp 00:06:16] and just throwing it at Vercel versus how can I draw a line to me writing this blockchain app for myself to track my transactions. And how does running a node or QuickNode, I guess, in this context, help you? Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. So, in the same sense that if you want to host a website or something that you're going to need to deploy it somewhere, in this case it'll be a server, what QuickNode is going to allow you to do is create this kind of app level. It gives you access to the blockchain. Noah Hein: And so, in the case that you're talking about like, "Okay, I'm creating maybe a dashboard. And I want to plug in my wallet. And I want to see all of my beautiful graphs on a bunch of dashboards of all the money that I've lost since I started buying crypto." And so, if you were to do that, you don't need to run your own node. It's not going to benefit you in any meaningful way. If you're the kind of person that wants to run a node, there are kind of incentives that are involved in the network. And so, running your own node can kind of be seen as its own thing. Whereas if you want to develop an application and I just kind of plug in QuickNode, I can start asking QuickNode. I can say, "Hey, what kind of data am I looking for?" I can start asking it, "Okay, if I have all the transactions that I'm looking for, I can ask my QuickNode URL for that." Noah Hein: So, every single dApp or really anything that is interfacing with the blockchain needs to have some sort of connection to the blockchain, but they do not have to be the person running it, just like you don't have to have a server rack in your living room if you want to deploy your applications and have an actual server running. You can offload that to AWS, for example. And that's the same thing that people are doing with QuickNode is running these nodes takes quite a lot of time and it's like its own kind of specialty. I really tell people it's that DevOps equivalent. They're kind of like the magicians in the background that you're just like, "I'm not entirely sure what they do, but I know that they let me run my applications at the end of the day, and make my life a lot easier." Paul: So, running this node, it's almost like it's keeping track of all the blockchain data as it's happening and it's downloading it all so you have it ready to go. And that's a lot of data, right? I'm just thinking about the blockchain. It's huge. So, does QuickNode sort of give you a way to... or running this node arbitrarily for yourself, does it give you a way to scan through it quickly? What happens when you want to ask, "Do... " would it be on the developer to sort of keep track of these events as they come in and maybe put them in a database or something? Or if you're on the developer side, how would you kind of approach that problem? Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. And so, there's actually a difference here that people can run. So, like I mentioned, anyone can run a node, but there are actual several different nodes because not everyone has all of the memory to run what's called an archive node on their computer. And that's something that you're referring to. Like, if I want everything since Ethereum started from that Genesis Block up until five minutes ago, an archive node has all of that historical data. And I can go and traverse that from front to back and see every single transaction and every single state that the blockchain has been in since its inception. Yeah. And that's an archive node. Noah Hein: But there's also an alternative kind of lighter client called these full nodes that you can run. And that's only going to keep track of the state of I want to say the last 128. I may be wrong on that exact number. But it's going to keep kind of like an up-to-date record and it isn't going to hold all of that historical data. Noah Hein: And so, you can think of if you want all of that historical data, for example, if I want to get all of the transactions that a user has sent for their entire history, that's a lot and you're going to need... and you don't need an archive node yourself, but you need access to one because if you just had the full node, you'd be like, "Hey, I want that block from 5,000 blocks ago" and your node's going to kind of shrug and be like, "Ah, sorry, man. I don't have that," whereas you don't need to cash that necessarily in a database, but you could. Noah Hein: That's what you see a lot of... you hear a lot of talk about like write operations. People complain about gas fees being really expensive because to write to the blockchain, you have to pay these gas fees. But if you want to take these read operations, those are free. And so, like I said, that's a lot of compute power that you need. So, you may want to cash that if every single time a user has to wait 30 seconds for your processor to go through all of that historical data. It'll certainly make your app more performant, but it isn't necessary. Paul: Right. So, it sounds like there's a whole slew of levels that a developer kind of approach getting to Web3. There's whole nodes. There's archived nodes, depending how much history you want to have. There's variability in, what is the workload of your app look like? What type of data do you want? Do you want to cash this in database? Maybe you can just scan through the blockchain. There's a lot of different ways, but I guess that kind of gives a good starting point for things for people to Google, right? It's like some different terms to start looking at. Paul: So, kind of stepping away from I guess the developer's point of view, if we're looking at Web3, a little more globally, obviously there's a lot of criticism about Web3, and a lot of it is very valid, of course. There's a lot of questions about, "Is this... " excuse me. "Is this more optimal? Why would it be more optimal? If it's not more optimal, why would this still work in certain ways, in certain applications?" So, do you think you could fill us in a little bit, like, some of the criticisms that you've seen that maybe you mull over in your head a little bit, and how you process those? Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. And I mean, that's actually why I got into the space originally was I had a big interest in the technology. And I was like, "Hey, this is kind of cool. I see it as something that I'm interested in. I'm learning tech. This is a new tech. I'm obviously... " most tinkerers or engineers are kind of interested in playing with new things. And as I started playing with it, I was looking around in my Google searches and I'm like, "Man, there isn't anything. I cannot find any resources. All I can see is that Shiba Coin is up 30% and I've got a bunch of people on Twitter losing their absolute minds over it." And so, there was this huge amount of hype in the space, but couldn't find this actual technical content that I was looking for that's just like, "Yeah, this is what a blockchain does. And this is what it is." And it's just kind of bare and dry. That's what I was looking for. I wasn't looking for this page-turner novel of what everyone's speculating on. I just wanted the core basics. And so, for me, a lot of criticism I think towards the space comes from that. Noah Hein: And it's like a lot of sensationalism. It's like, "Oh my goodness. All of this is here." I think there's a lot of excitement because we see this as a technology that can disrupt these kind of incumbent players that we come to think of because you see in the news, like, every single day, Facebook paying millions of dollars to not appear in front of Congress and all sorts of scandals. Apple is installing data that's going to look on your phone for the name of like, "Oh, we're going to catch bad people that have sensitive data from other people on their phone." All sorts of stuff of just constant breaches of privacy. And the kind of, I guess, mission goal and why everyone's so excited about that is a lot of people say that you own your data. Noah Hein: I don't necessarily like to think about owning my data, although you certainly could make that argument. But, to me, it's more important that I have access to it. That's the thing. So, even if I'm using a centralized provider, like QuickNode that kind of goes against the I guess ethos of, "Everyone should be running their own node." That's not going to happen. Not everybody wants to run their own server. But the thing is if I'm deeply integrated in QuickNode and I've been using it every day, and one day, I just want to be like, "I don't like QuickNode anymore," it's not the same as if I'd been using an AWS server or anything like that because all of my data is still publicly available to me. QuickNode isn't going to be able to turn around and sell all of that data because who's going to buy data that you can quite literally query yourself? And so, for me, that's what's exciting about the space. Noah Hein: And I think a lot of the criticism comes from people getting too excited because they're like, "Oh yeah, this is the future. And we are going to have everything. Everyone's going to be able to run their own nodes. Everyone's going to own their own data. And this is our wonderful user utopia." But then people that are like, "Oh, well, that actually sounds interesting." They come into the space. And then to send $10, they have to pay $10. And they're like, "Okay, well, that seems like not very well. If I'm using Venmo or something like that, it costs me two pennies and it happened in half a second. Whereas now, I'm in this weird pending state where I send someone money and I'm waiting for the blockchain to confirm this transaction and that takes five to 10 minutes." And that's just a lot of... it's a harsh reality is that like this technology is early, but people talk about it like it's not. Paul: Yeah. I think that, from what I've been reading online, that's a big like reality. It's very early. It's nascent, honestly. There's still a lot of discovery to happen on all sorts of fronts and on different blockchains too. I think that's another thing that people should start Googling and learning about from my perspective. There's Solana and there's Bitcoin. They're two separate ends of the infrastructure spectrum, right? We have something that produces a block every 400 milliseconds. So, you have new data being shot out into the world, like, less than a second. And then you have blockchains, as you said... Bitcoin, excuse me, it takes 10 minutes. So, there's different applications, different user spaces to kind of explore. And it's just the beginning for sure. Paul: Why don't we take a quick step into DAOs as well? So, that's another mystery term, right? And there's been a lot of exciting developments with DAOs in 2021. I know there was some legislature official in Wyoming, right? Noah Hein: Yeah. Paul: Where you can now make a DLLC. So, could you fill in on, what is a DAO? And a real world example maybe, if there's one out there that you could talk about. Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. So, first of all, DAO is an acronym. It's a decentralized autonomous organization. And you can kind of think of this as like... I'll give you the prophetic kind of example of like, "This is an LLC that is software." So, instead of me having this business and this business pays me, I just have smart contracts. That's a DAO. And whenever I do work for the DAO, it just streams me a real-time income like, "Okay, I started this thing and I'm getting paid, like, every second." The peak DAO thing is, "I didn't sign any contracts. I was just able to prove. And this decentralized council was like, 'Yeah, Noah knows what he's talking about. He can start this project.' And the treasury just started giving me money. And they know that I'm going to get the work done." Noah Hein: What they are now is new, is a good word for it. For example, I think what they're being used for right now is really a way to coordinate communities via their tokens is kind of what the core value that they're being used for now because there's not a ton of legal structures. Unless you live in Wyoming, you don't really have the option to set up a DAO or an LLC. And there's already been a couple cases where DAOs get sued, like, the individual contributors to these DAOs get sued because it's really, as far as the court at least in the US looks at it, it's like, "Yeah, y'all are just a group of people doing stuff. And that's great that y'all are doing stuff and you got this token or whatever, but that doesn't really cut it." And so, what DAOs are trying to do right now is kind of get these frameworks involved. Noah Hein: And so, I think the idea is that this DAO, instead of having a CEO, has some appointed leader. And for example, you could have a CEO be the leader for three years in a row, but then suddenly they start to lose trust of the community, and they start acting out of place, and they get voted out. So, you kind of have this democratic, corporate entity almost that allows everyone to not only partake in this particular organization, but also reap the benefits of it. For example, no one that I know got paid to use Facebook as it came out. No one got early-adopters fees for Facebook. Noah Hein: But ENS, the Ethereum Naming Service, is one of the more popular DAOs currently. And last year, anyone that owned a .ETH domain, you see it on Twitter all the time. Somebody has their name and it's just .ETH. ENS is enabling that to happen. And an ENS airdrop happened retroactively. So, they said, "All right, everyone that's in this community that has this and has been using this and has been giving us this product feedback, we're giving y'all this ENS token." And now, ENS, instead of being this just typical centralized entity is now a DAO. And they're holding these snapshot discussions where people that have this ENS token that they got from using the product, they're now able to turn around and decide where the organization is going to go. So, it's a way to really enable your users to capture the value that they created by using your system. Paul: And maybe just to help make that a little concrete. This is an organization that is a name service. So, it's taking these big, long, smart contract or addresses on the blockchain and it's wrapping them to a human readable, nice little name, kind of like our IPv4 DNS lookups. And I don't know about you, but sometimes I think of it in my head like, "Oh, wow, who's controlling that? Who has the names? What's that weird, big company? Some big internet company that... " and this is what it is. We have a DAO. It is a coordinated way for people to come together and hold this token. And I didn't know that it turned into a DAO. That's really neat. Noah Hein: Yeah. And you can see. Like, if you go right now, you can... not only is it valuable to the people, because obviously if you have this token that now has monetary value because people put a monetary value on being able to vote in these, they're called snapshot proposals, where you don't have to pay gas, the blockchain knows that you have this, and then you can vote. And so, that ability to vote allows people to be like, "Okay, that has value. And now, since I have a vested interest in making this company more money, I am now kind of aligned with them in making sure that the proposals are good proposals." Noah Hein: You see all the time people make these changes to the platforms. Twitter, for example, all the classic API rug pulls of like, "Okay, yeah. There's the new Twitter API and it's awesome. And it's shiny." And then it's like, "Yeah. Actually, no. We don't like that. You're not running your own Twitter client. This is like, we're locking it down." That's not able to happen because in order to do that, you would need to change the smart contracts in some way. And in order to change these smart contracts, it's in the code that says there needs to be a proposal with this amount of votes that pass. And so, if you have a voting proposal that comes up to the blockchain and says, "Hey, y'all. I would like to revoke all of your tokens. And just all of it goes to me. And I'm going to go off to the Bahamas and enjoy my vacation." Obviously, that's not going to pass. So, it's really tightly coupling the users to the platforms and making sure that they're beneficially working with each other in a symbiotic manner, instead of a parasitic manner. Paul: It's almost like shareholder votes on the stock market, except its open and transparent, right? Noah Hein: Yeah. Exactly. That's a great analogy. Paul: It's set in code. It's set in the blockchain. You can't change that. Paul: And circling back to a word you used just a minute ago: gas, gas fees. Tell us all about gas fees, the joy of where we are now with gas fees, what they were meant for. Noah Hein: Yeah. Sure. Paul: Why are they so high? Noah Hein: Yeah. So, you can see, like I said, the technology is early, but it's gained a huge amount of momentum. If you look at any technology in the last 10 years, like, if you're able to look at the whole industry as a growth curve, I think I would struggle to find one that's gone as parabolic as Web3 has in the last couple years. And so, the technology hasn't quite caught up to all of the users. Noah Hein: And so, I have to take a step back and kind of tell y'all why gas needs to exist in the first place because that's back to the Web3 criticisms. Everyone's like, "Why do I need to pay money to change my information? If I'm changing my username for some website, why do I need to pay upwards of, like, $100 at times to do that? That's ridiculous." Noah Hein: And, like I said, people are running these nodes on their computers. And so, that's just CPU. CPU in the 21st century is equivalent to money. I could be spending that CPU power doing something else that would be making me money. And so, to incentivize the network to run more nodes, because the more nodes there are, the harder it is to censor the network or bring the network down in any meaningful way, because if you're thinking about redundant databases, Ethereum is, like, number one up there. You don't have more redundant data than the blockchain since it's just replicated so many times. Noah Hein: So, we see this as a good thing. We want this to be a highly available redundant, globally-distributed system. But in order to do that, people need to run nodes. And to run nodes, people need to get paid for it. And so, that's where gas comes in is people are running these nodes. And as a reward for running those nodes, they get a certain amount of gas fees. Noah Hein: And so, anytime that some block, if you're thinking about, like, CRUD operations, if I'm reading something, I don't need to add anything to the blockchain, but if I need to update something or I need to create something, then, all right, somebody is going to have to run cycles on their computer to make that happen. And so, they get rewarded with a portion of your gas fee. So, you're essentially paying the network instead of paying a server, for example. A lot of people have really high AWS bills or whatever for their server. You can kind of think as, instead of one company, if I'm thinking, like, Twitter subsidizing that server cost. It doesn't cost me anything to use Twitter. It's completely free, outside of my attention and time that I give it. That's completely free. And Twitter is able to take my time and energy and convert that somehow into money that they use to pay their servers. So, instead of Twitter subsidizing those server costs, it's just distributed to everyone and all of the users that are using the network on a daily basis. Noah Hein: And right now, gas fees are really high because the technology that allows us to make all of these transactions and processes have not caught up to the huge parabolic curve of just widespread adoption that we've gotten in the last two years. Paul: So, it's really a bandwidth problem. There's too few nodes for the amount of things that need to happen. So, the premium on that CPU time for each validator, for each node to process that is, it's prime. Would that be a fair summary? Noah Hein: I'm not going to say that there's too few nodes because it's not like all of the nodes are maxed out. This is kind of a design philosophy of Ethereum is that we're thinking of a blockchain, it's a linked list, essentially. You're familiar. If you did some DS and algo course, you saw what a linked list was in your course at some point. And so, it's this linked list. And you can only fit so much data in each block. Noah Hein: And so, what we're working towards right now is not necessarily creating more blocks. For example, that's what Solana does. And it's kind of Solana's solution to the problem is, "Okay, well, all these blocks are getting filled up really fast. Let's make more blocks." That seems like an easy solution. Whereas Ethereum has this capped block size. So, you're not paying necessarily for the node operator. You're competing against other users for the blockspace. And that blockspace is capped. So, it's like, "If there's 20 people and only 10 spots on that particular block, how much is that block worth to you?" And right now, the gas fees on Ethereum are high because everyone values that blockspace quite heavily. And yeah. I'll leave it at that. Paul: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's at a premium now just because of how intense it is to write to it and there's a limited amount of blockspace. Paul: So, that kind of makes me think then, what's... I don't want to make a DAO now on Ethereum. Who does, right? Because it's impossible, with the gas fees being so high for you to really deploy and expect a lot of adoption if you're doing the Layer 1 right on Ethereum. So, what do you think is going to happen in 2022? From your perspective, working at QuickNode, seeing all this content coming in, seeing what's going on in the world, from this high point of view, what does it mean specifically for web development and also DevOps in the background? Because the land of DevOps and blockchain has also been changing every single year as these protocols come up. Noah Hein: Yeah. Absolutely. And you can start to see this trend, I'll call it, throughout 2022, is going to be Layer 2s. So, all the blockchains that we've been talking about are what are called Layer-1 blockchains. So, Bitcoin is a Layer 1. Ethereum is a Layer 1. And Solana is a Layer 1. And what Ethereum is coming onto at this point in time for its kind of ecosystem growth is we're getting these Layer-2 chains. And Layer-2 chains are attempting to kind of compact more transactions into these blocks. Noah Hein: So, like I said, we're not necessarily paying for the... well, we're indirectly paying the node operators for their services. What we're actually directly bidding on is that blockspace. And so, what Layer-2 solutions are attempting to do is cryptographically off-chain so that there's no gas fees involved, is cryptographically kind of bundle a group of transactions together and then submit that as a single transaction to the blockchain. So, that is called a zero-knowledge proof. And there's also a thing called a Optimistic Rollup. So, there's a couple different scaling solutions that are being brought to the table, but this particular one that I'm talking about is really trying to bundle up all of these transactions, and that is kind of making your blocks more dense while still being the actual same amount of data. And so, for example- Paul: But it's all going to the same chain. Noah Hein: Yeah. But the thing about this is if I'm able to process off-chain 20 transactions and bundle them into one big one and then submit that to Ethereum, you still have all of the security that Ethereum gives you in being this highly redundant, highly censorship-resistant, all of the buzzwords of like, "This is secure and I can guarantee that this data is safe," without having to pay for that one. So, instead of there being, like I mentioned, 20 slots, we essentially opened it up to be 40 slots, but still have the actual same amount of bits in each block from the actual... not the technology perspective, but the actual, underlying bare-metal perspective. Nothing changed. It's still the same amount of size for every single block. And so, everyone that's running the nodes doesn't have to eat that cost. Noah Hein: You see chains like Binance Smart Chain is another Layer-1 solution. And they did the same thing of just more blocks. And so, to run a Layer-1 blockchain, like Binance Smart Chain or Solana, your computer has to be way, way, way stronger than it does to run Ethereum. And so, as a result of that, there are less nodes. And that's why you see criticism of these chains because they are more centralized because only people with a lot of money are able to run these chains because the actual requirements to run the node are so high. And so, Ethereum's focus has very much been keeping nodes as simple as possible to run so that we can have more of them, and dealing with these harder problems on like, "How do we stuff more transactions into these blocks without gas fees going through the roof?" Paul: I remember looking at the recommended specs for a Solana validator. And I have a really good gaming PC that I don't use anymore, but when I used to game, I used it. And then it said the recommended RAM was 120 gigabytes. I don't have enough slots to make that happen on my computer, I believe. So, yeah. You need a beefy, beefy computer to do that, from the little that I've read. Paul: So, what do you think... yeah. What do you think this is going to mean for app developers? Or what is it going to mean for me trying to buy a latte with Ethereum? Noah Hein: With Ethereum. Paul: Yeah. Noah Hein: So, I think what you'll see is you'll start to see developers will not build on Layer 1. Whenever I'm building my dApp, I'm not going to deploy it to Ethereum; I'm going to deploy it to a Layer-2 chain such as Arbitrum or Optimism. And so, these Layer-2 chains, for example, me personally, I use Optimism. Or not Optimism. Arbitrum for all of my personal use. And so, for me, whenever I'm doing daily trades, it's still expensive in the sense of, like, compared to free, which is everywhere else. But my transactions cost me between $5 to $6 on Arbitrum, whereas on Ethereum, I'm paying $100 to $120. And Arbitrum is a Layer-2 chain and it uses... I didn't go into it, but Optimistic Rollups is the technology. If anyone wants to look into that further, that's the kind of keyword that you're looking for. And so, you'll start to see all of these app developers and all of the users will be on these Layer-2 chains. Noah Hein: And you're starting to see interoperability between all of these chains. So, ideally, I shouldn't care about any of that. And that's what I think you'll see in maybe... I don't know how long out it is or how far out it is, but, say, 10 years. I'll just say some arbitrarily long time. And in 10 years, I'm not going to care what chain I'm on. I'm not going to care that it's Arbitrum or it's Optimism because we'll have that user experience nailed down and we'll have all of the kind of connecting Lego pieces in place, where I can just not think about it and I can just use the app. Noah Hein: And that's kind of what I think a lot of Web 2.0... I hate the term Web 2.0 people because it puts a bunch of people in a box that have been just building web applications for the last 10 years and don't necessarily care about all these things and suddenly, they're being called legacy developers. I've heard that term. But they are expecting that. Like, cookies, for example. Imagine if there were five different specs for cookies. How hard would it be to build on your web appropriate? And how hard would it be for users to use your web app? It'd be much more difficult. And we're kind of like- Paul: [crosstalk 00:34:17] ecosystem to grow is... Noah Hein: Yeah. And so, right now, we're in that stage of like, "Okay, we're figuring out all of the primitives. And okay, we got those figured out. Now, we need to figure out how to kind of link them all together." And that's what you'll see over the next couple years I think is it won't matter what chain or what Layer 2 or Layer 3 I'm on. I'll just end up using it. But for the time being, if you're a dApp developer, you're going to deploy your applications on a Layer-2 chain because it's just much cheaper. Paul: This kind of reminds me of the first stock I ever bought, which is actually Heinz Tomato Ketchup [inaudible 00:34:55] in my life. That was the first stock. And I paid $14 to make that trade. But now, you just trade for free because of the whole warehousing of shares and they figured out a new technology to go and talk to let people trade for free. So, hopefully, what we believe will happen to this space and we'll continue to move in that direction of finding more efficient ways to get the same end goal done for the user because, as a user, we don't care about the fact that they're warehousing shares. You just want to trade it. And you want to trade free [inaudible 00:35:27]. Noah Hein: Yeah. Exactly. It's all about, at the end of the day, the user experience. And I think the ideal goal that I think a lot of Web3 developers are going towards is the same experience that we get of just seamless user experiences, where I don't have to think about doing things, I just do it and it works, but without a way where you're so easily exploited for the data that you're generating while using the platforms that you're on. Paul: Right. So, I guess to wrap this up then, what are you going to work on through 2022? What are going to be your projects that you're going to be working on, or things that you have your eye on, other projects maybe that you're not working on yourself, that are going to help the space. Noah Hein: Yeah. So, I think a really interesting problem that I'll probably look into more... so, I spend a lot of my time on that kind of application level just showing people how to build the products. I think what we'll see is these decentralized storage and decentralized identity solutions that will start becoming more prevalent. And so, for example, if we're thinking about these blockchains as being decentralized compute, obviously we need decentralized storage as well. If we're going to have all of this data, we need places to put it. And so, that's what I think you'll see in 2022 is a lot of these companies that are doing this are starting to get better and better user experiences and starting to be more and more replicable and cheap. And that way, whenever you're posting all of these, you can know like, "Okay, this isn't just in one person's. It's not just in Amazon. It's not just in Google's server. I have this available across the entire network." I think you'll see a lot of interesting things come up around that. Noah Hein: And the other thing that I mentioned is the identity solutions. Right now, you can create kind of arbitrarily many addresses from your one private key. And you'll probably start to see that because people don't want to be kind of hinged on just the one address. Like, if you're thinking about in your day-to-day web world, web surfing, your email is kind of like your central point of identity, where if I have your email, your email is attached to every single service that you're using. And that's not good for users, at the end of the day. It is a highly concentrated source of like, "All of this stuff points to this one guy or girl or they." And at that point, it doesn't matter. And it's just, I have their email and if I get access to their email, God forbid, that's just an entire disaster after that. Whereas I think you'll see for these decentralized solutions, you won't be able to pinpoint, "Okay, hey, Noah used SushiSwap and he also used Uniswap, but he used a different one." So, it's not so easy for corporations to kind of aggregate all of your data and sell it to typically advertisers, I think you'll see in the near future. Paul: Cool. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I think a lot of people are curious about what's next on the future, like right away. And the identity thing, I've seen that floating around, but it's going to be interesting to see that actually come into a usable state where you can have a decentralized, like, [inaudible 00:38:45] zero or something on the blockchain. That would be really cool. And I have seen other people talk about how that would be the first, one of the first, awesome, real-world, attainable pieces of fruit that we could pick and put on the blockchain. So, it's cool to hear another confirmation about that. Noah Hein: Yeah. Definitely, definitely. Paul: Yeah. I think I've kind of asked everything I wanted to ask, Kate, unless you had other things you wanted to pick his brain about. Kate: No. Noah, if there's anything that you wanted to plug or have our listeners go look at, we want to give that option as well. Noah Hein: Yeah. Definitely. So, you can find me on Twitter. I'm @NHeinDev. And I work at QuickNode. That's just @QuickNode or QuickNode.com. And I think that's everything. I write a lot of guides for QuickNode. So, if you're interested in learning about all of the technologies I've been talking about, go to QuickNode.com/guides. That's me and the rest of the content team over at QuickNode trying to give y'all that kind of education that I didn't have when I was entering the space. We're not here to tell you about everything that's going up. I'm not about prices go up. I'm about showing the technology that gets built. And I hope other people can get onboarded easier than I was. Kate: Awesome. Great. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. And yeah. This was actually a listener topic sent to us from a listener. They wanted to learn more about Web3. So, for our listeners, if you want a topic, especially in this space, let us know and we'll get an episode together. Thanks so much, Noah. We appreciate it. Noah Hein: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at@PodRocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me, even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.