How Fleek is building Web3 cloud hosting services

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Harrison Hines the CEO and co-founder of Fleek Harrison welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thanks for having me you're very welcome let's just dive straight into it I'd love to start off our conversation by just hearing how you

0:23got into blockchain and started Fleek and why you think it's necessary sure so I joined the space back in 2016. Before that I was involved with the whole Equity crowdfunding jobs Act movement it didn't take off the way I thought it

0:50would due to some of the regulatory just the way the jobs Act was written and the restrictions around it but then when I saw ethereum launch the first use case that was taking off was crowdfunding and icos and so I just had this sort of like aha moment that's what felt like what crowdfunding always should have been so I was living in New York at the

1:15time I seeked out Joe Lubin because he was kind of the only guy backing ethereum-based businesses at the time started a project out of consensus that was called token Foundry back in the last Bull Run like 2017 Ico days thought could bring some standards to the whole token sale token kind of Ico side of the industry did that for like two years then

1:45Decided I wasn't as interested in the decentralizing Wall Street narrative as I was in the decentralizing the web narrative so that's where I'd left in like 2018 to start Fleek and really focus on you know trying to help really decentralize the web amazing and I agree even in web 3 a lot of these applications they're still using like web 2 infrastructure and it's

2:14not really you know the true decentralized web3 and I'm sure you have some insights into that so from there let's dive into what exactly is Fleek and the suite of products that your team's working with yeah so Fleet today most people know us as being like the web 3 hosting platform so a lot of the dapps or just web 3 apps whatever smart contract platform they're

2:43building on they all still need to host their applications somewhere so what Blake provides is just a really seamless developer experience to host those web 3 apps but leveraging like web 3 storage protocols under the hood to do so ipfs is definitely the most popular one but other protocols as well filecoin are we have support being added

3:12to the platform soon things like that's what the current product is today a lot of Hosting storage related seamless kind of developer experiences and flows packaged in like familiar like products or use cases that's really what we're trying to focus on is there's this whole new class of infrastructure of decentralized

3:39infrastructure but how do we kind of package it and present it to developers in a way where they can sort of you know be used to the what like how they how they build or the different pieces of infrastructure they use but get the benefits of this new decentralized infrastructure under the hood and we just try to make like abstract and make that as seamless as

4:04possible that's a great Point Harrison and it's sort of alluding to the to the note that I made just before this and is that a lot of the internet is like hosted on Amazon you know they almost host most of the internet applications including the blockchain ones as well and we're not really going to get to you know the full web 3 experience until we move to a

4:28product like Fleek which actually is more of a decentralized cloud hosting because even if you have you know a decentralized product it's hosted on Amazon they can shut it off so it's not really decentralized and I've seen you know these Cloud hosting providers whether it's for just file storage or more importantly you know application storage and database and platforms

4:53We although these alternatives are there maybe it's just not that it's hard to compete with Amazon or it's not as a intuitive experience and as good of experience because obviously Amazon is a huge company where do you see the industry at right now with actually trying to move all these applications onto actual web3 infrastructure yeah I would say

5:20you know definitely the decentralization aspects and you know more censorship resistant aspects matter to a portion of the dev Community but to the much larger like developer audience performance and seamless developer experience is still I would say Superior or more important or more prioritized

5:49and but I think you're starting to see a shift on a number of problems the first is I think people are taking censorship a lot more seriously you have things like the Twitter files being released just a lot of the nonsense going on in the media these days where like people are becoming less trusting of Legacy institutions or corporations and so I do

6:14think the idea of building on a corporate cloud is gonna seem like Silly by the end of this decade because it's just why would you take that extra risk of some corporate board or in some jurisdiction with a government that maybe doesn't like your country or whatever to be able to have so much control when there's Alternatives like what's being built in

6:39the web 3 space for decentralized web infrastructure that is less opinionated and you know jurisdictionless and sort of censorship resistant but at the same time you know I do think that with exactly what we're building with fleeknetwork you know today the current Fleet platform is very much what I call these web 2.5 businesses they're providing web 3 services but

7:07they're built on a web 2 stack we wanted to move more in the web 3 Direction and so that's why we about a year ago came up with the plan to build Bleak Network as sort of this decentralized application delivery Network or Edge Network what have you when you talk about how do you compete against AWS or cloudflare these big companies you know we take a lot of

7:35inspiration from the netlifies and verses of the world and the reason for that is because they are the ones who pioneered this concept of an application delivery Network they took the concept of a Content delivery Network where you're trying to put content on the edge close to the end users requesting it so you have as low latency and as fast load times as possible to

8:01provide the experience modern application or kids you know expect for the apps they use then they were like well why don't we just put compute or you know some other functionality for the app on the edge to make it extremely performant if this works for Content why can't this work for other things and that's where you saw a move from like these monolithic

8:24structures of like ec2 more to like modern apps that are more like jam stack serverless functions and stuff like that and so but the way that net will find versel were able to compete with the Legacy platforms is really on the developer experience side of things like they made such a seamless just workflow and developer CI CD pipeline that met the needs of a modern developer

8:55way better than some complex AWS or you know type platform where it's got all these options and all these products and the developer you know doesn't know how to use or what to use any of them for they just want to link their GitHub click a few buttons deploy a site have all the other ancillary infrastructure or things they need based on use cases they want and that's how they were able

9:20to basically compete and become a big player in an already crowded and like you know with big incumbents in the cloud Market so if you think about and that will find Versailles those are just proprietary application delivery networks or Edge Networks they just set up 20 to 30 locations and different geographies but they all they manage it all themselves and that's

9:47actually their largest cost is managing all that infrastructure which is why they don't go above 20 to 30 locations so with Fleet Network we're essentially just a decentralized version of a netifier versus application delivery Network instead of us controlling all the infrastructure we just have crypto economic incentives that will encourage groups all over the world so we should

10:12be able to have many more locations but also the cost and performance should exceed these existing application delivery networks because we'll be able to have much more coverage much closer to the user and because we don't have the cost of the network to maintain and like the human cost related to I.T we do think that we'll be able to like and also these Cloud

10:39platforms and you know cloudflare they're marking up the cost of these services like bandwidth significantly so I do think that we'll be able to compete on a Custom Performance perspective compared to these web to existing Solutions but you really and what we're focused on with the new Fleek platform we're building is we really need to make sure the experience is as good if not better

11:06than the current developer experience because ultimately that will get them to switch if Fleek is a better developer experience period than existing platforms the whether the infrastructure underneath is decentralized or not I think that will be one of the main factors but yeah I do think the trend is going in this Direction people are understanding the importance of

11:31decentralized infrastructure but definitely you know we know that like first and foremost we have to make sure it's a good experience and that's why we focus so much on leveraging these different underlying infrastructure protocols but packaging them in things that developers are already familiar with so you don't need that you know new education or

11:53understanding or tokens of how to pay for these things we could just abstract that all away you use this new infrastructure it's more resilient it's more trustworthy it's probably more cost effective eventually as or better performing and so yeah we think those those will are definitely good merits to win on but developer experiences is definitely I

12:20think the key to all of this I completely agree and I've personally been into you know the back end of Amazon web services and you almost need a four-year degree just to figure out what's going on because there are 2 000 functions that go into so much detail and there's a lot of there's probably a lot of stuff that you don't use so you know just making a seamless

12:43experience and I agree it's not just you know well it's it's decentralized but it's harder to use so we'll do it anyway you know it's like whatever works best for the business the fact that it's decentralized will then be like a byproduct of the fact that it's a better experience because of the way of the distribution of it and the economics and I'm excited to see how

13:05that plays out and for what I'm understanding you know Fleek is a continuing continuing Evolution and the network part is something that you're still growing so where exactly is this at right now so we just announced Fleet Network and released the current draft of the white paper last Thursday you can run nodes you can see on the fleek.network homepage how to do so

13:33But the plan is over the coming months we'll spin up a devnet a test net an incentivize testnet and then probably ending with a mainnet launch probably around maybe May or June of 2023. The cool part is you know the current Fleet platform once that launches all traffic will just immediately switch over and use Fleet network from cloudflare what we currently use and

13:59that's what we're hoping to convince a lot of other web 3 projects because every single web3 project pretty much today uses cloudflare anyone you know using ipfs or rweave or any of the storage ones anyone who's hosting anyone using ens you know Cloud players powering a lot and it's becoming like a big central point of failure for the industry because they're able to you know it's

14:25like they're the ones delivering all the digital content all over the world they serve 10 of all internet traffic and so yeah so that's our goal everyone needs the Slayer but yes we're it's like we've been building it for a year but yeah over the next six months we'll continue to build and get it to like mainnet and yeah around June of

14:54of 2023 but like just to clarify we have Fleet Network so that's like the underlying infrastructure layer that's the edge Network initial Focus really on content acceleration with the trends we're seeing in blockchain and it's all about kind of like specialization and unbundling so instead of these monolithic chains that we've seen up until now you know now what we're

15:20seeing especially on like the decentralized web infrastructure side of things much like the current web there's going to be a lot of specialization like if you want to build the best database product or best you know serverless function compute product you probably don't want to carry a bunch of storage around or you know like you so that's where I think like with Fleet Network

15:42we're very much focused on just like this Edge fast starting with content delivery but as we've seen with netlifine Versa we could add other Edge services that make sense to put on the edge like some like compute like Edge handlers or serverless functions or stuff like that but we've never the cool thing about Fleet network is we don't compete with anybody with

16:03any protocol storage protocols need us because we or data protocols need us because they don't factor in performant delivery to their incentive models so they're stuck needing to rely on something like cloudflare to performantly get it to their application and end users that's where Fleet Network comes in but for these smart contract platforms every user every project using any smart

16:26contract platform they need hosting and they need performant delivery doesn't matter if your defy nfts whatever you need to host your apps and your UI somewhere and you need to performantly serve it to users otherwise they're not going to stand to use your app if it loads slow and especially if you have content that's really like video content especially and with the growing

16:46decentralized social trends like that's really where content delivery networks Thrive is you know all this you know Netflix YouTube Tick Tock all those videos you store them once but you're serving them around the world millions or billions of times and that's really where these CDs these content delivery networks like become really valuable so that's the infrastructure layer then the

17:09fleet platform you could think of as kind of like the distribution layer because I think the mistake you've seen a lot of protocols make is they just focus on the protocol and they do not focus on the go to market and the distribution and they're getting absolutely Smoked by protocols like polygon who do focus on those things definitely similarly with Fleek the Fleek platform is sort of

17:37our distribution much like versella netlifies uis are just distribution channels for their own proprietary application delivery networks same thing with Bleak but Fleek the platform is not a distribution distribution Channel specific to Fleet Network we are actually just the distribution channel for all web 3 protocols that's why you know we surface things like ipfs

18:02filecoin are we Akash all these different decentralized web infrastructure protocols because a that's what a developer wants in terms of an experience they don't want to go use six different interfaces for their storage and then their compute they want that versa-like experience where everything they have is in one seamless unified interface they could access all

18:26these different infrastructure pieces they need for their app stack and just that's it deploy it seamlessly so that's really where the Fleek platform comes in and we just feel if we support other protocols as well that's just gonna bring more customers who will ultimately then use fleeknetwork because if they're using you know they're building their

18:48app there they're most likely going to host it there or you know accelerate their content there so that's sort of our strategy but it is unique because it's like yeah like we're more like a wallet in the sense that we're an interface sitting on top of other infrastructure rather than a traditional web 2 developer platform where it's like we're just trying to push you to use our

19:10infrastructure so we can monetize so it's a it's a much more open it's a much more collaborative and it's a much I think better approach but it's definitely new and there's definitely challenges that come with that but it'll be fun definitely and great insights Harrison and I agree it's great to you know I've spoken with quite a few of the other sort of

19:35cloud storage and decentralized web networks and it's great to work together you know rather than compete because it's a huge movement to move the infrastructure of the internet into web3 truly web3 and there's still a lot to go you know it's like less than less than decimals of a percent of applications you know even the web 3 ones that aren't really hosted on full web 3

19:58infrastructure yet so I'm really looking forward to it we don't have a lot of time left Harrison but for people that want to learn more about like the infrastructure and just how Fleek network is going to work and the roadmap to the launch as well what is the best way for them to learn more and to stay involved yeah I would say Twitter for the fleet Network it's

20:22just Fleek underscore net Discord we will definitely be putting out a lot of content in the coming weeks and months leading up to network launch about you know all different participants people interested in running nodes you could run nodes in the future at home on your computer as long as you have a good internet connection and upload speed you could be a good

20:44cache provider for Fleet Network there are some nodes in the network that require more sophisticated infrastructure but it is cool that anyone could participate and then for projects or potential consumers of bandwidth whether you're a you know an app or an nft project or Marketplace or whatever or even just a web 2 company who just wants to save money on

21:10bandwidth or you know have better performance yeah I would say Twitter and Discord are probably best but people are also free like free to I would say also check out the current Fleek platform because that's for Fleet network but if you're just a developer you want to get started you know hosting a site on ipfs fleet.xyz is the new platform that will

21:39start beta next week but in the meantime we have the Legacy platform Fleek dot Co which people could go and deploy a site or do whatever they want today great well yeah the best time to get started is right now and I will leave those links for the platform and the socials you mentioned as well in the description box below I appreciate you taking the time Harrison

22:03good luck with the growth of Fleek and I'm excited for the Fleek Network launch and let's definitely follow up in the near future thank you very much it was a pleasure