Jonathan Schemoul - Founder of Aleph.im Ep #48

Jonathan "Moshe" Schemoul is the founder of aleph.im, a cross-chain p2p storage, computing network and first decentralized indexing provider for Solana.

00:36 – Intro & how did Jonathan Schemoul got in crypto

02:09 – What is Aleph and how does it work?

06:48 – Is Aleph database a blockchain?

09:20 – Understanding core nodes and Aleph’s economics

11:22 – How does Aleph interact with DNS?

15:29 – How does Aleph get verification of certificates?  

21:44 – How does Aleph check integrity of computation?

25:06 – What is Aleph’s vision?

30:32 – Will Aleph always be project facing or will it one day be user facing?

32:28 – What load can Aleph currently handle?

39:00 – How do the economics work for people providing hardware and bandwidth?

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Anatoly Yakovenko (00:12):

Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Jonathan Schemoul with me, who's the founder of the Aleph.im project. Really awesome to have you.

Jonathan Schemoul (00:22):

Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today.

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:25):

Cool. We usually start these with a simple question, how did you get into crypto? What's your story? What's the origin story?

Jonathan Schemoul (00:36):

Well, into crypto it's a long story. I started way back in time, a bit on Bitcoin then I stopped because it was only money back then. And that wasn't the end game for me. Then I came back into crypto in 2015, 2016, and I started doing a bit of development because I saw that I really wanted to be part of Web 3, to do nice things with it. I started developing as an open-source developer for a few projects. One of these is the newest project which is Chinese blockchain layer one. I'm not really involved with it anymore.

Jonathan Schemoul (01:16):

But working with them as a community open source developer, I saw that there was some missing links somewhere that you couldn't decentralize all the stack with just layer one, it is not the one that they were building back then. So that's how the Aleph.im project is born. For me, besides that, I've been developing for a lot of companies before in the IOT space and also for big banks sometime ago. I've been a developer for a lot of years.

Anatoly Yakovenko (01:48):

That's great. I mean, that's a great background. The thing that you're focusing on with Aleph is this idea that Web 3 is just a small part of the piece, but you still need UI front-ends, business logic and things sitting on top of the blockchain. How does that work?

Jonathan Schemoul (02:09):

The idea is that, okay, now you can have smart contracts on Solana, that's great. You can even do way much more on like just money on smart contracts, that's great. Now, you need to have a front-end. So you need to have storage for that front-end. That's not all because a smart contract, a program doesn't have all the data that you need. So you will need some kind of indexing to get history. You will need a back-end for that.

Jonathan Schemoul (02:37):

Most of the DeFi application that we see have some centralized back-end behind them. They're running on AWS, sometimes on dedicated servers or stuff like that that is still centralized. If a government, and we just saw something about it today, wants to shut down the DeFi protocol that is organized like that, they can. With Aleph.im what we are trying to do is decentralize the last mile, because for that last mile most projects are using AWS, so we need to decentralize AWS.

Jonathan Schemoul (03:11):

So we provide storage, as in file storage for the front-end files, database storage, because most applications are just databases and also an equivalent to Amazon Lambda, where you start small functions that will be launched on a decentralized cloud, where there is place for them and will get you a return value, and these can be written in any language and connects the web and also a PC from blockchains here at Solana obviously.

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:42):

Got it. Super Cool. So this i