NodeOps is scaling DePIN at the intersection of DeFi and AI

0:00I'm Ashen Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have Nean Cobra, co-founder and CEO of Node Ops. Here to talk about DPIN infrastructure, DeFi, AI, blockchain, all of it really combined and where we're at in the industry and what the team at Node Ops has been building in regards to this. Nean, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

0:27Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here as well and looking forward to this chat. Likewise, I've been very interested in decentralized physical infrastructure networks running nodes and as robotics and AI gets better it's all going to tie into to blockchain as well and I feel like deepin is that connector for that and there's so many other use cases as well. I would love to

0:50start off our conversation with hearing a little bit about what you and the team have built at node ops and then we can dive into all those topics. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, just to quickly jump into my background as well, I've been working in web 3 since 2017. You know my journey had been revolving around infrastructure for a while but you know it's been now at a

1:17stage where we are in you know catering to retail and non-technical audience altogether which is keen to participate in securing the network in operating as a validator or coming in as a compute provider across the entire deepen stack as well. The team itself the way we started node ops you know it was like just born out as a very firstand

1:47experience while scaling validator nodes while scaling infrastructure for lot of protocols and networks out there so me Pratik JD the founding team here have been working together for last 3 to four years and before node ops what we were working on is you know operating in cosmos ecosystem where you have so many app chains and the intent

2:13was to provide like staking or validative services to LPS institutional partners and foundations altogether but very soon we realized that how about we simplify this entire experience for node operators that either don't have the technical expertise to maintain and operate it to forget about the setup But to maintain an operator is like one big

2:38head of task as well. And secondly you know they don't have the bandwidth or appetite to spend on developer operations which is DevOps resources overall. How about we just bring up a tooling for them that takes care of everything. And all they have to do is sign in, subscribe and forget after that. Everything in terms of compute, everything in terms of setup,

3:05maintenance, monitoring, all of it been orchestrated by node ops and that's how node ops came to life and that was the vision since day one to provide the most simplified experience that we can towards users, node operators, developers out there. That's very exciting and I think it's absolutely needed even technical people like myself.

3:32I'm I'm sort of weary of like I don't know the intricacies of running a node in a Dpin network. And I need something to make it easier. So this sounds like the ideal solution especially if we're going to target more mainstream adoption outside of you know crypto technical analysts and web 3 people. We need something to target that audience and do the dev stuff

3:57for us. So I really love that. I want to dive into that more. But I would also like to sort of get a more of a high level for those people that they've they've they hear deepin everywhere and there's a lot of different use cases, but they may not understand exactly why would I want to run a node? You know, what am I actually getting into by having node ops help me run the node?

4:21That's a very good question, right? So if you look at the entire deepen ecosystem or even like a traditional layer ones, layer 2 out there, there are like use cases where nodes play like the central heartbeat I would say for these protocols, right? Be it in terms of acting as a validator you know proposing the blocks validating the transactions securing the network

4:47overall or be it like you know an RPC node as well that is more important for you to communicate with those particular networks or now with this entire DA is coming in you can have like sequencer nodes relayer nodes you know verifier nodes watch your nodes so there are like variety of nodes and use cases this associated and at the end protocol wants

5:10to move towards progressive decentralization where they can now incentivize these users to come in and participate and as a newbie to this entire you know node ops or I would say node operators economy here you would eventually want to understand how do I have a single solution that can take care of everything in terms of compute everything in terms of a setup up

5:36maintenance monitoring all of it I where I don't have to worry about anything so that's where node ops comes in and offers an end to end orchestration layer pro covering in and out of whatever is needed to get this coordination in place and for you to be a successful node operator across so we've been serving and supporting more than 60 plus protocols till date close to 150 million

6:02assets under management and close to 78,000 users that have come in on the platform, deployed their nodes or running a validator with us or becoming a compute provider with us. And at the end our goal had always been to just have a simplified user experience for them so that they feel you know to have just one-stop solution for everything in

6:29terms of their operator economy or their node economy overall. And that's where, you know, we've been focused on. Mhm. 60 plus protocols is a great start. There's so many nowadays to follow. But they also have different consensuses and different levels of decentralization and how they're set up. There's there's proofof work chains, there's proof of

6:51stake chains, then there's other ones altogether that are not as popular. What are some of the easiest ones for somebody who doesn't know anything about nodes and they want to start getting involved? Can you give any examples of how quickly it can be done and what are some great examples of the protocols in which you could easily set up? I think all of it that you see on node

7:15ops can be easily set up in like less than 30 seconds. you know if you have your wallets and subscriptions ready you just sign in with your email select the chain that you want to deploy and u just pay the subscription fee and rest as all has been taken care by our no code dashboard which we call console right so you know to name a few like you could literally deploy

7:42a validator node as well to a bit tensor miner to a light client on Celestia IA or ALDA in like a click and we are the only platform that's serving to such a diversified set of use cases and on top of it now if you're looking to venture into more and more deep protocols and you need some compute capacity to successfully register yourself as a compute provider or as a

8:11participant on these DPN protocols as well. We now have something called Node Ops Cloud where you could literally within a single click just rent a machine become a successful computer provider not only on Node's network but now you can get this compute for your own use case and deploy your own templates templates or workloads whatever you want to call it to get

8:34yourself into other deep protocols as well. So that's how the entire user experience is simplified today and we introduced NOOps cloud like 6 months back on testn net. Got around 30,000 computer providers that came in added their machines took the time to actually help us in stress testing and you know regressive testing as well because there were like huge amount

9:01of DDoS attacks as well on test net. But I think the system never failed and that's what we are super proud of as well to now officially push it to mainet stage where anyone can come in and rent these machines for whatever use cases that they want to cater to. So yeah that's that's exactly how it looks like. Yeah that's really exciting. F 30

9:26seconds that's like faster than you can make a coffee. You could be operating a node in a blockchain. So that sounds like one of the key parts to mainstream adoption. Now it's just getting the awareness and the benefits and making these protocols more decentralized. And I was reading into node ops on the docs. It was talking about the combination

9:48of DPIN defy which has been around at least more popular a little bit than than deep for more than a few years and AI which is growing exponentially right now. It's like the intersection of all of those. Can you elaborate on that? Is it just because of the different protocols and deep pin networks you can connect to or is there more to that?

10:10Oh well there's like lot of things on top of it right. So today if you look at the entire node ops product suites right that's now deployed on node ops network we started with console which was like a one-click no code dashboard for deploying all these nodes we introduced. So that was console for retail to come in and participate in this entire node

10:33operator economy. Then we introduced cloud which was more focused towards deepen sector itself for anyone to become a compute provider and deploy whatever templates and use cases that they want. Now once cloud was stabilized we introduced something called staking hub which is where you want to bring in D5 mainstream adoption as well where we can now introduce newer assets on

10:57staking hub where either node ops or node ops community members are running validators or nodes overall and we set up custom incentives for them to eventually bring in a huge amount of assets as DVL as assets under management on staking hub that once this is set, our next set would be next step would be to strategically use this entire staking hub staked assets as collaterals to

11:25bond for the compute that's been onboarded on the protocol. I'll simplify it and break it down for you. To become a compute provider on node ops network, you need to bond some percentage of token. For example, 2,000 node tokens if you want to become an active comput provider. And for every machine that you onboard you need to add additional 200 you know node tokens to

11:49officially bring and make that machine available for workload deployment. Why we do this? First of all, you need to have a strong quality of service for the pro for the compute providers themselves, right? You don't want them to just register and forget. You want them to register, add a machine and keep that active. And they would only do that if there is something at stake,

12:12something at risk for them as well. And that's basically why we want them to bond. But there would be some use cases, there would be some providers that don't have that initial capital that would be required as bonding, but they would have some different assets as well. How about they can use these staked assets on staking hub as collateral and receive

12:35node tokens and now bond these node tokens and eventually get to be an active provider. Why you want to be an active provider on node ops network is because our economics is designed in such a way that you could now enable any form of workloads that you want be it AI workloads as well and receive like 25% revenue share on top. So the way it would work is if anyone

12:59comes in and u you know submits a template on the marketplace and deploys those template for example the deployment cost comes out to be 100 bucks. If those templates are deployed on me as a provider me as a machine on my machine I get 25 bucks out of that entire revenue economy altogether. Now this is a huge win for compute providers who are potentially looking to

13:28double down into mainstream AI adoption as well and that's why we are working with lot of reliable cloud providers who can potentially bring in a strong set of compute supply for us from the GPU side as well and we just double down and ensure that you know we are able to not just incentivize them via you know our protocol incentives but give them a clear skin in the game by having

13:54a direct revenue share as well. So now you look at the journey, it started with catering to retail node operators, then to very traditional cloud providers and compute providers, then introduced the D5 layer which was more focused towards staking hub and bringing these assets to be collateralized and bonded and then bringing in the AI workloads use

14:17cases as well. We've introduced lot of AIdriven products already. One is security hub which you know I won't get too much complicated into it but imagine that you get to have every opensource code bases out there can be thoroughly you know just scanned and you get a vulnerability report and alerts in form of monitoring that if these opensource code

14:44bases that you are consuming is exposed to any form of vulnerabilities you would be the first one to know and we've got like huge amount of interest from developers to potentially integrate this right within their toolings so that every time they push they are very well clear that they're pushing the safe and secured code as well. So that's again truly deployed on the compute of node

15:06ops network itself. Then comes agent terminal which is yeah just a terminal to deploy meaningful agents not token-driven agents but meaningful agents that are participate in help the traditional use cases as well. So that's like the entire product suite and how we have evolved overall so far and we're not stopping here. There are couple of things that are lined up

15:29already for next quarters in terms of how we envision to become like a one-stop solution not just for node operators but for the entire infrastructure economy and right now we are at a stage where we've already generated a decent amount of revenue which is close to 4 mil today and our objective would be how do we grow to 40 mil from here 400 mil from here but not

15:57at the cost of affecting the reliability, affecting the performance, affecting the security of the network. And that is why you see NOOPS transitioning towards NOOPS network where you have like deepen, defy, AI all of it combined together coordinated on our orchestration layer. Wow, that's very exciting. And with the AI part of it, you know, AI is

16:24is so big that much bigger than the blockchain ecosphere in a short amount of time at least with LLMs and eventually here as people find more ways to start agents and the functionality increases and it gets into the hands of more non-technical people. You know, I think the these OpenAI LLMs really helped people understand how we can start interacting with AI agents.

16:51But I feel like the functionality is going to increase exponentially in the near future. And to have something like that with the scanner to ensure vulnerabilities and for open source code, I feel like that's much bigger than the market capitalization of all of blockchain right now. And that's something that could help the whole world.

17:12Yeah, exactly. And that's our goal as well. And you know, we celebrate like even tiny wins like whenever we see a small spike in number of developers coming on security hub, I would take that as a win. And today we've crossed like 2,000 developers actually using security hub so far. I'm talking about unique devs so far. And that's an amazing milestone for us. The

17:38number looks small but you could imagine that. Mhm. Yeah. I don't know those surveys where how many developers exist right now in blockchain world but I'm really happy to see that you know we able to cross like 2,000 developers within like 6 weeks of time so far and security hub is gaining interest although we have not generated any revenue from security hub so far because

18:01we want it to be like mainstream and then we can think about how to monetize it for now it's just going to be open source open for everyone to just consume all together. Yeah, that's really exciting. And you did mention there was like 150 million of assets there and more than a few million in revenue already in, you know, less than two years, which is great. And honestly,

18:25more than most probably 90% of blockchain projects that they really need to focus on revenue and user traction, paying user traction. Because there's so many DeFi and Deepin projects that are great, but there's not a lot of traction, you know. What do you think's been the difference maker in actually getting millions of revenue in a shorter period of time?

18:49Good question. I think the credit goes to like three things here. First one being user experience. That was like topmost priority for us. Second one was customer satisfaction. So you know we like it was a time when the team was small of like five to six members only and I used to spend like 6 hours per day on discord just solving tickets and helping our customers to

19:17like get up to speed apologizing them being humble enough you know because yes they are our users and if they never lie you know users would never lie or you know they're always right if they're facing some challenges you have to respect that. If they're frustrated, you have to respect that. If they're going to call you know something

19:39else, you still have to respect that because for us like these customers were like the primary motivator as well. Because they would always come back and you know this like three of us Pratik, me and JD like we have this internal joke where you know the entire credit always goes to UX and you know everyone that we share our products with like they just come

20:05back and say that your UX is amazing. But yeah we never get the credits for all the efforts that we put and entire credit goes to JD on that. But that was like one thing that we definitely took care of as well which was UX customer satisfaction being second and third one and the most important one was the costings and the pricing model the business model here like we literally

20:31were not only the first one but the cheapest one for the year. Of course we were not running it like at a loss but the intent was you know we should double down for initial years to get as many subscribers as possible and today the LTV on our platform is close to 18 months just to give you a context that means that an average user on our platform has subscribed for 18 months

20:59and that's a win that's a real big win for us and Now the intent would be all right how do we scale from here from 1 to 10 I think 0 to1 journey is done 1 to 10 is more exciting where you get to try multiple avenues you get to market in a different way we never had a marketing team for first 8 months in no ops you know till August there was no

21:29one apart from me doing marketing overall and entire marketing was just focused on tutorials, sending out the product videos, emailing the users, doing activations on Discord. We just add one helping hand to manage Discord and that is it. So that was the journey and wow if I think of it like we had seven figures revenue at the

21:57team size of five and from there scaling it up to multiples I think we've scaled the team as well and yeah can't thank enough for all the contributions by the team themselves. Yeah, it's a great story, Nean. And the marketing part obviously user experience is of utmost importance, especially when there's something technical like this and you

22:23know, even business people, it's it's a whole another world when you start having to try and run a node yourself. And but the different avenues that you spoke about, you know, the AI, the security part, DeFi, DIN, I feel like now to be able to scale this up now that, you know, the tickets have been solved, the streamline the process of getting involved and having

22:50that lifetime value of 18 months is incredible to have people stick around. getting more partnerships with maybe it's with protocols themselves or with deep pin networks. I feel like this is something that could be, you know, on the list of like, hey, do you want to you want to stake your assets? There's this much return. Do you want to actually get involved in the network?

23:11This is the incentives to do so. And it could be very easy for people to join in if there's the right partnerships. So what's going on with making partnerships with some of these platforms that have huge network effects to get more people on boarded? I think you know we always focused on doing work first and announcing it later and that is actually worked really well in our favor

23:39so far. So all the partners that you see on our ecosystem page as well there is some way or the other we've touched their technical integrations or did some contributions from the tech side first and then announced. So all of these partners played a very important role in distribution for us and that is the reason why we never you know had to hire a full full-fledged marketing

24:06team because at the end whatever services we are offering to these partners that is more important and impactful for their community as well and they would want to make it a successful integration and collaboration and that's exactly what our goal was. So partners played a super important role so far in our journey. You know the list is long and I can't take all

24:29the names but you know we're super super thankful for everyone who has been like part of the journey so far. Mhm. Definitely. And you mentioned the road map and continuing to grow. What are the next major milestones for you know the main launch and everything else in and how you're building towards the future? mainet launch I think that's going to be

24:54an exciting one that's the first milestone that we want to focus on to ensure that protocol goes live all things stable we successfully completed like third audit right now today itself so I'm officially announcing it for the first time and this was more important to ensure that things remain secured overall so mainet launch would be the first milestone

25:19soon. After that the expansion of build on node ops ecosystem campaign. This is where the intent would be to have more and more use cases, more and more templates. For us, every use case is like templatized in a oneclick. That's why we call it templates. So it milestone 2 would be to get at least 10 to 15 unique revenue generating templates by the external contributors

25:47on our node ops cloud and have a marketplace ready for everyone to come in and deploy and that's going to be our second important milestone I would say. Third one would be more focused towards how we now scale our security hub towards more vertical integrations as well with other B2B solutions out there. That's third one. Fourth one being you know venturing into like creating

26:15like more consumerf facing interfaces for everything that we have done. So this includes like having a telegram mini app for example for doing everything on node ops network. All you would have to do is just select and you should be good to go. That's that's going to be an important one as well. And last one also you know we've already achieved it but we've not

26:40like rolled it out right now is agent terminal. I think the way it's designed it's like w coding interface that you see today as codeex or every other platform would have that. This entire terminal is like collaborative you know it follows like headless browser architecture where you could share it in form of you know username password and get more collaborators to

27:09come in and like you have three or more concurrent people coding collaboratively as well and having like very reliable underlying infer as well to maintain and manage whatever is needed for the terminal. So like these are some of the milestones that we have in mind right now internally. Yeah, that's a big list and it's exciting to see all those get

27:35achieved and the first thing you mentioned was the mainet launch. Is there any tentative timeline on working towards that? Well, we're already live on pre mainet. Not many people know that but within like next couple of weeks you would see node ops network officially going live mainet. Very exciting. I'm looking forward to it. And what's the best way for people

28:01to you know get that node running in 30 seconds you know if they want to learn more first or if they just want to go straight into it. What's the best way to get started with it? Yeah, if you want to learn more, I think our website plus talks are very well articulated. Again, kudos to the team led by Harry who takes care of our documentations across. So,

28:26docs.nops.network would be the right place for you to learn more. If you want to write right away jump, so just go to nodeops.network and open the app and you should be good to go to deploy anything you want. very exciting. I'm wishing you and the team all the best on the mainet launch here. Continued growth getting more nodes running in decentralized

28:51networks in blockchain protocols deepin AI as well bring some of those people into the blockchain world that would be great u I appreciate your insights into all of this Nean and wishing you and the team all the best moving forward would love to follow up again in the near future. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love the conversation

29:12as well.