I’m thrilled to announce that I am joining Chainbase as the Head of Product, helping Mogu and the rest of the elite team to build the world’s best web3 data infrastructure. For the first 7 years of my career, I was deeply tangled in web2, working on a mix of data, engineering, and product. Before diving in deeper — why does someone who spent his entire career in web2 decide to step into web3?
What excites me about web3 is it offers a fundamentally new paradigm of a shared and composable substrate. This shared computing layer allows people to exchange values, coordinate, and innovate.
Ethereum, an open-source platform for decentralized applications, allows you to write code that controls digital value and is accessible anywhere in the world. Because of its openness and permissionlessness, any asset can come to Ethereum and use it to manage its scarcity and settlement between parties. As a result, Ethereum has become the internet of value.
I believe that the future of web3 data companies should also have openness at its core. Reading and parsing data from smart contracts require expertise and time. The company that captures the value can make the data permisioned (private) and then monetize it. But this reduces the composability and the total contribution of data to society.
The same paradigm shift has happened before in the software industry. The early software companies sold “permissive” licenses for the enterprise market, but the new software-as-a-service companies are selling software utilities to make a profit. In his pioneering essay Why Software Should Be Free, Richard Stallman wrote:
A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost (and you can pay this cost by doing the work yourself), so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price. A license fee is a significant disincentive to use the program. If a widely useful program is proprietary, far fewer people will use it.
It is easy to show that the total contribution of a program to society is reduced by assigning an owner to it. Each potential user of the program, faced with the need to pay to use it, may choose to pay, or may forego use of the program. When a user chooses to pay, this is a zero-sum transfer of wealth between two parties. But each time someone chooses to forego use of the program, this harms that person without benefiting anyone. The sum of negative numbers and zeros must be negative.
But this does not reduce the amount of work it takes to develop the program. As a result, the efficiency of the whole process, in delivered user satisfaction per hour of work, is reduced.
It’s the same situation with web3 data because bits on disk are fundamentally free. All that to say — I have been inspired and ready to start something new.
My primary focus at Chainbase will be mainly focused on the product, namely, continuing to build out the innovative features that will enable the developers to build APIs to serve-up on-chain data. Chainbase’s mission is to make it easy for developers to process and use blockchain data. With Chainbase’s product, companies do not have to build their own data infrastructure in-house for using accurate and real-time on-chain data. Beneath the surface is a real-time data infrastructure designed for reliability, accuracy, and openness.
Despite all of the recent turbulences, I’m still confident that today’s builders will create tools that have a far-reaching impact on the future of human coordination. Developers are an extensive group of people with outstanding creativity. The more we can help those developers, the more we help the web3 industry to thrive in the future.
Finally, we are hiring😉. Reach out to me at Email: ds@chainbase.online if you’re interested!
