Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin podcast. And if my editors can see this, like, can you just put a mind blown emoji? Because that is what happened during this episode with Ashton Hettiarachi, the founder and product architect of OpenNetwork. He goes into the biggest risks and concerns with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, owning all the data.

Centralized data centers, and he gives a really crazy use case of how he saw this happening with inaccurate information that was being relied upon for national security issues. We've talked a lot about decentralized protocols, Deepin. This is an important conversation, especially those that are kind of in the payment and tech sector.

I guarantee this episode is going to blow your mind. Some of the conversations, and he's so upfront and trustworthy about, you know, what level of decentralization even his network Openmesh has reached and what they're going for. He talks about collaborations with companies that we know like Chainlink.

This is a great episode. I just only, this is a long episode, so grab a coffee, put it on one and a half speed if you're listening to it and just enjoy the show.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant. We have a special episode from around the world today. We have Ashton Hettiarachi, who's the founder and product architect at Openmesh. I want to get really into it, but maybe just give a quick background, Ashton, of who you are, where you're based and a little bit about what you're working on, and then we'll dive deep into it once we get through this episode.

Ashton: So, thanks for having me I'm based out of Sydney I Mostly working in product department at Openmesh.

Stephen: That's awesome. Now, I was looking through your LinkedIn, I saw something very interesting, to me at least. Is that, you know, you were in the domain space a website domain space in the pie really early as a broker, but, you know, I just saw recently that the, you know, license plate went for 15 million.

What was the domain space like in Dubai back when you were in it in 2010?

Ashton: Yeah, I think domain, that was funny because there's a, there's a domain called horse. ae sold for like, I think 12 million dirhams or something, local currency. So, ae domain they said there's a telecommunication authority called RTA, they announced they're going to, you know, we talk about early days of internet for Dubai, that's 2009, 2010, so they didn't have good infrastructure back in the day, so when they launched they're going to issue like ae domains and then I'll, you know, root register domain, you have to go to a, they have something called Etisalat, it's a telecommunication provider.

You have to go to Etisalat, fill up a form, and then you have to just register. Right. And so what I, what I looked at, I'm like, wow, this is, this is like great. So I started buying around 4 to 500 domains. Imagine going and filling 4 to 500 and then handing over this paper to a counter and paying 150 dirhams per domain and then getting domains.

So it's, it's fun.

Stephen: What was your strategy? Was it buying domains that were like coms and you're like, Oh, I'll buy something similar where they're like key phrases, you're like, Hey, if this company is going to want a ae, they're going to want the words, I think you said horse, they're going to want certain keywords or, you know, the license plates were for a certain, like usually short letters, like one letter.

Domains, or even at Twitter, go for a lot of money. What was your strategy back then? Was it just buying as many that were available for cheap? Or did you have, like, a strategic approach to it?

Ashton: I don't think I had a strategic, I already had like started, e commerce business back in the days. I mean, that was my first startup. E commerce was booming at that time, in Dubai, and at that time I was like looking at, you know, when that news came, I, I wanted to get, especially like the domain names that, that resonate with me first.

So starting with the company name at that time called Voxlon. So I started purchasing Voxlon. ae, and then Discount. ae, Wholesale. ae, Shipping. ae anything that resonates with my business. And then yeah, then I started like thinking about it and then started getting more. So there was a UK based domain broker called Sudo.

Sudo. com. co. uk. And they were doing a lot of brokerage. And then I met one of the I think co founder. From Sidhu and then and then basically talked about this domain and then he's the one actually told me the domain is a big, big thing and I started like buying it. And yeah, so, you know, you would, secondary market for A domains is actually traded using Bitcoin, by the way.

Stephen: Interesting, I didn't know that. And, why, why would that be kind of, like, the, the meaning of this change? Is this, is it because, like, even early, like, when you're trying to train, like, Gaming skins and stuff like that. Bitcoin was still, you know, the easier way to do it because there wasn't infrastructures of the PayPal and things like that. Or why would they be using Bitcoin?

Ashton: I don't know. I think PayPal had, has an, had an option, but I never used Bitcoin at that time. Right. I used PayPal, but I remember you had option. I remember like Bitcoin, you have like option to drop down like five Bitcoin or two big two Bitcoins. It's not like zero point. You don't have, you didn't even have option, you know,

Stephen: That's super interesting. What was Dubai like back then? I think we talk a lot of people, you know, do business in Dubai a lot, especially in the Web3 space. They've kind of opened up this initiative to be very metaverse, Web3 focused. What was Dubai like back in 2010? Were there whispers of conversation around tech and crypto?

Or, you know, was that not even part of the conversation back then?

Ashton: I wasn't even in the crypto picture, like 20, like I moved to Dubai, I left Sri Lanka, I grew up in Sri Lanka, and then I left Sri Lanka when I was like 19, 20. And I went to Dubai, that was 2004. So from 2004 and I, I completely like, you know, I, I, my adulthood pretty much in Dubai, I would say until 2012.

So 2012, 12, 12, 2013, I was in Dubai. Back in the days, it's very interesting, like, you know, you, you have to, like, Technology space, like people don't believe in credit cards. So my first e commerce company called Voxloan Corporation, and then we had a website called Discount. au it's a cash only, right?

So you go and. Pick a product and you put your details. And at that time, people didn't even have emails, right? You have to put the phone number and the address and the name, that's it. And we, our delivery department call them up and say, Hey, we've got a Package for you, go, go to the customer, deliver the item and, and collect cash.

So that was that was the, the ancient time.

Stephen: And do you feel like, cause you started the Bitcoin and Ethereum meetups when you went to Australia in about 2015. What was the scene there? You know, shortly after you left Dubai, was it much of a tech scene there? Then you go to Australia, 2015 still seems pretty early from a mass adoption standpoint, how many people were coming out to those events then?

And maybe if you've kept your ear to the street, how many people are coming now? Comparatively.

Ashton: All right. So after Dubai, then I was, I was traveling to us as well. I was kind of like looking into like computer science to understand maybe a little bit about behavioral biology. So I was around San Francisco in between. So, and when I moved to, to Australia I moved to a small town called H like.

One and a half hours from Sydney and yeah, so I started Bitcoin Meetup first Bitcoin, Ethereum came a little bit later. Bitcoin Meetup, like imagine it's a small, small town and then university, the reason why people go to that town because of a big university it's called Wollongong University.

So in the university I could, I could, You could, I could have so many like space available. I can book a room and I just put up Facebook or meetup. com the meetup and people just turn up and like one or two people and, and sometimes just zero, right? That, that was, that is funny. Like sometimes people come to meet up.

Just to talk about, you know, what happened with their family, you know, like, I, I, I,

Stephen: Bitcoin.

Ashton: no, no, no, no.

Stephen: What were you expecting? What were you hoping for? Were you expecting like, hey, I want to learn more. So I want to invite other people and we can learn together. Was it like, hey, I want to teach these people what I've learned. Like what was kind of your approach?

You're like, hey, I like Bitcoin. Does anyone else like Bitcoin? Let's just meet up for, you know, drinks or coffee.

Ashton: I think it's mixed. Maybe, maybe I was curious, but at the same time, I think. Like I was also like passionate about just, I wasn't fully like understood Bitcoin as a, as a decentralized infrastructure, right? Back in the days I was thinking, oh, just a, you know, cryptocurrency you can trade you can, you can do something with it.

I was, I was, I was drawn into more like a payment solution at the beginning. But at the same time, I'm, I'm, I love technology, right? So cutting a technology, anything that. Like five ten years ahead any technology. I love it. So I think the curiosity maybe That's like something probably drove to drive all this, you know meetups

Stephen: Awesome. You know, before you left Dubai, or even maybe after you came back, you were part of like the Dubai Future Foundation starting in 2019, you know, you know, Dubai rolled out this huge plan around that time to pursue blockchain technology. What was the Future Foundation doing? What were you doing there?

What were some of the conversations? 2019, you know, still early AI too. What were some of the conversations and what were you focusing on? Because there was, you know, that kind of like, we just got past the Bitcoin bull market, probably the biggest one that put Bitcoin on the map and got it on like mainstream, at least attention, maybe not adoption.

What was, what were you working on? And, you know, have you kept your ear out to what's going on still there today?

Ashton: So let me take a step back so After running all the meetups and stuff 2015, and 2016 is where I kind of like got into full time to Web3 and I got into Ethereum ecosystem, and I moved to Sydney CBD. And in Sydney CBD, everything changed, because you, you found, like, I found like a lot of Ethereum people, early Ethereum people, and started a, a research firm called Blockchain Partners Holdings pretty much looking at all White Papers, and it's kind of moody for, for crypto ICOs back in the days, we, we published reports.

And, and towards the 2017 I used to share offices with early phantom people. And then, you know, . So we used to produce reports and then Phantom early people team, they were kind of in sharing in the office at the same time. So, and then Phantom, Phantom came to our desk as a, as a project. So Phantom, it was L one chain before Solana and all of the, the hype.

L1 hype. So 2017, end of 2017 and then beginning of 2018, I, I kind of like I joined the team as an advisor. And then, yeah, so, so I think that was, My first experience like, you know, being in a Web3 project like, like feeling it, you know, so the difference is like a lot of people can write white papers, sitting behind the, behind the behind the scene and, and talk big ideas, but actually executing is like something, you know, a lot of people unable to do it.

And I, I struggled as well at that time. So early, early days, it was basically like understanding how do you build How do you build like a product market fit? Because ultimately, phantom kind of a chain is a consensus as a service, as a, as a core service, right? It's L one chain, it's a come and build things on, on top of this, this chain.

At the same time, how do you build like a minimum viable ecosystem around your eco, your, your technology? So it is very difficult. And then lucky enough guys like Andre came, I mean she changed a lot towards two. The mid 2018 and then 2019 end of 2019, I left but Fantom allowed me to actually like learn a lot, a lot of things.

So I moved from being an advisor to head of innovation. So I draw a lot of initiatives, especially like the Smart City Initiative. So Smart City Initiative it's caught up in, in government sector. I mean, smart cities is government. So I was thinking you know, smart city would be a great opportunity to work with like Australian government and Dubai government.

So, and then UAE government invited. So, we invited certain delegates from around the world to come to talk to Dubai government to present their ideas. So, and then we went so myself and Andre, we represented Fantom. And then yeah, we went there and presented to Future Foundation. At that time, they had a, Dubai government had an entity called Smart Dubai.

Now they present their ideas. They, they reformed that into, I think, a future foundation. So everybody very bullish about blockchain back in the days. This is 2019. So the, the government official asked, you know, what, where the future and everything. So myself and Andre, Andre specifically, he was very pessimistic about, about, about blockchain.

Like he was, he was saying that, you know, blockchain is just a simple database. It's bullshit. It's not going to do anything. Because of our pessimist, pessimist. pessimistic view about the, the blockchain and I think they liked it. So, and then they kind of invited me to, to have a further discussions.

And then they had a, one of a big project called Foresight Initiative Dubai Foresight, Foresight Initiative 2020. And then they appointed me as a, the head of advisor to lead the project. So we work with a bunch of regulators, a bunch of large banks central bank Emirates Airlines real estate developer like MR DHL, like around 60 different organizations, including government sector, to come up with like blockchain related use cases, whether it's a supply chain tokenizations or content delivery or Digital storage, digital identity.

Yeah. So we worked with like a bunch of stakeholders, so that was an interesting, stressful time.

Stephen: Do you remember any specific initiative or concept that came out that really resonated with you? And you're like, hey, even if I'm not working on this, this makes a lot of sense that you're seeing now. That you're like, oh, I remember them talking about this. You know, five, six years ago,

Ashton: Yeah. I think one of our use case so I don't know if they deploy this properly. So the idea of like the mobility as a service, it's, I like it. So the idea Dubai has like a lot of mode of transportation. You can take electric bike, you can take a taxi, you can take, Metro, you can take a bus. And then each, all of these, sometimes all of these providers belongs to one particular government entity which is called RTA, right?

Road and Transport Authority. But they, Dubai buses belongs to a separate department. Metro assigned to another department. They don't talk to each other. So, the idea where you could stay in your apartment and then book a taxi, and then it gives you like a multi mode of transportation, which means you can take your electric bike, and you can take Karim, which is a local Uber, and then from there you can go and take a bus, and then you can take a train.

It's like a multi mode transportation with a single payment. And then the payment itself is you know, the, the consensus of the payment settlements go through a one single chain. And then that's kind of like a transportation applied using, let's say a private blockchain. That was a good use case.

And then there was another use case called tokenization of real estate, which was really funny. In Burj Khalifa, they wanted to To rent, not rent, like they want to tokenize a couple of floors and then they want to sell that with the,

Stephen: actually makes a lot of sense, especially with the, you know, the rise of real world asset tokenization. Why do you think that's funny? Why did, why do you think that didn't work out as

Ashton: I think these are all like, you know, it's just cute ideas, but

Stephen: you think it was more for, you know, the newspapers, the press release, but the functionality and operationally, it didn't make any sense if the company can afford to, to finance the entire building itself.

Ashton: Okay. All right. So here's the problem. So if you're issuing certain technologies, you have to have certain sandboxes to back those technologies in MR case specifically So MR can issue because MR is the custodian right custodian of the of the building And but the the actual The properties are managed by Ijari and Dubai the land department.

When you fractionalize and when you want to sell those fractionalized, the Dubai Dubai land department or Ijari cannot recognize 1, 000 owners to a one, one single apartment. And they, they cannot There's no system for them to actually track that. And if you want to sell, for example, let's say I buy a token that represents two centimeters of apartment in Burj Khalifa.

I want to sell that to you and then you want to take that. It's a lot of like, like a, you know, like a stupid problems in between. So it's a nice idea, like actually happening and people are using it. People are. You know, like actual use cases are, I think probably like if MR also happened to be have specific capabilities like that.

Stephen: Like a tokenization platform or they're the ones issuing the tokens, almost like an NFT. So you don't, they still own it, but like all that background ownership of the tokens is more of a like a token economics versus like everyone getting tokens and they have to go to the government to kind of cash in on these, as you said, two, two centimeters of token.

Do you think this is a problem just in Dubai, or do you think around the world where they're talking about tokenization of real estate, we're gonna probably run into these same issues?

Ashton: the problem with a lot of people, especially in Web3, they think the technology is going to solve it, solve it. Like they're, they're looking out, they're looking for scalability. They're talking about regulatory scale sandboxes, but often it's not about that. It's just often like there are existing systems.

exist for a reason. Those systems are in kind of a core depending with existing laws for the, for the land and also maybe some of the, some of the things that are happening for, for a reason on that, on that region or on that use case. So applying a new technology, hoping that That will change everything is a wrong thinking, especially I made that mistake a few times, right?

I was thinking, oh, supply chain what is your problem? Okay, so containers coming in, containers need to scan, and then the someone else who's receiving the container Need to get the same message, but then we want to make sure that that message is authentic and therefore we were like, okay, scan this, scan the paper, this in IPFS, put it on chain, someone can verify that on the other end.

And we, we thinking like, this is, this is amazing solution, right? So IPFS with a private blockchain use like a quota and then you have, you build like enterprise apps to for, for, for employees to interact with it. It's a, it's a, it's a private. Blockchain, but you have this amazing technology. That's, that's a, that's a dream.

Just, just the technology didn't solve a lot of problems.

Stephen: Well talk to me about Openmesh, because Openmesh, now you are trying to solve a lot of these problems. Did the idea of building like a decentralized data And a computing infrastructure come from those conversations that you had back in Dubai, where you're like, Hey, here's some use cases. And you're like, Hey, you know, our data, like this information is out there.

It can be corrupted, can be inaccurate, can be manipulated. And as you know, we talked before the show about Dubai, people are relying on this information to make very huge decisions within their life. But they don't know if this information is accurate. Is that kind of where Openmesh said, like, Hey, we need to do a better job of conserving this information and, you know, putting it on chain, especially now we're going to see a lot of this.

But we'll go into like, is that what you saw in building it? Was it like some of these early conversations you're having in Dubai?

Ashton: So one of the big experiences I had, I cannot name which, which government sector. another one department, they were, they're making a huge, like a national level decision based on the water usage in the UAE. And. So they were using like certain data to, to back that proposal. And when I was looking at raw data, and I see like a very, like a, raw data is not, didn't make sense, so then I went to that department and I said, hey, you know, look at, because I live this area, so I know the data is not right, so what do you think about, oh, this data came from our junior And I'm like, okay, when the junior data department, they're like, no, no, no, it came from this department.

I was like, okay, going back and forth. I said, listen, we were making national decisions based on this data, where the data come from. Blah, blah, blah, and then and apparently the data is purchased by a a firm, research firm based out of India and we called to contact an Indian company and we said, Hey, where do you get this data?

Oh, he's one of our employee who worked and he left already. We said, well, this is important. We have to do this. We have to track this person down and a few days later we talked to him, he's like, Oh no, I didn't get the data. I didn't get the data by myself. I just, I just worked together with someone else from Upwork in Bangladesh and we don't even know that person.

So the issue was The, the Bangladesh person probably worked with this guy and then he worked with the Indian company. Indian company sold it to the government department, data, data department and the data department create, created a report based on the raw data. And that report went to, let's say, higher department.

And then that higher department is, is suggesting to the parliament or the, the national level based on that data. So the entire trust chain has a huge problem, right? So that was like a big eye opener for me.

Stephen: I think that was one of the best examples that I've ever heard. You know, when people think about Deepin and they think about infrastructure and that, they're like, who cares, right? Oh, they get one issue wrong or one information's a little bit corrupted, but what you explained could have national implications.

And I think a lot of, and you know, but everyone's getting paid down that line too, right? The person on Upwork is getting paid. They don't, nobody's A, questioning the data because there's no incentive. The incentive is to get the data, not to get the data accurate. You know, right? So the incentive is, hey, get data.

So as you said, like you're looking at this data, doesn't make sense, but that's not the point from the people probably all the way up because everyone's in charge of just getting the data, right? And then they go down to the next person. Hey, we need the data. That's what you're getting paid. So I think, you know, I saw this great example, actually watching a show on TV about, you know, them rescuing bars.

And the person that owned the bar was giving the person, like a promoter, Hey, you can get, you know, 20. We'll give you the entire amount of whoever you get to come through the door. You get the 20. That's how much they pay. You get the whole thing. And the kind of concept was. That person had drug, like everybody was coming in because as long as he's getting paid, the incentive is to get people through the door.

He's not vetting the quality of people that come through because that's not what he's incentivized to do. So I think what you're talking about, so that's a really great example. Is that, do you think the current landscape across the board, this is obviously a very major incident. Do you see all these little, maybe micro incidences happening across the board, whether it's with government or private sector, can you give some more examples?

For the listeners, because I think that one probably woke them up a little.

Ashton: I think this is the problem, like the design, this is a design problem. I wouldn't call it as a uua e problem. I think Uua E is fantastic when it's come to like using technology, leveraging technology. I consider UA government run like a startup, but other governments, they probably have a better way to cover things up.

But it is everywhere. I don't think it's just governments, it's private corporations. It's a design problem, right? So the, because we put the trust. For the brand and the people who are running it. That's it. So when you put the trust on the brand or people who are running it, it comes with the problem inherently built into the design.

So that's the problem, right? It's not the government or it's not, it's the design. So the design problem.

Stephen: And I think it's a money problem as well. Like when you say you put the trust in the people, the people running it, that takes me right back to FTX, right? We put the trust in Sam and his associates, but there was so much money going out. Nobody's questioning what the behind the scenes look like. Cause they're looking at, you know, filling up their bucket full of money.

So nobody's going to say, Hey Sam, are you doing things right? They're going to be like, Hey Sam, I have this business you can invest in. I think when there's a lot of money in the system. To your point, nobody's questioning the data, but I think the second money starts floating out of the system, like we saw in the downturn of the market, now everyone's counting their pennies, like, Hey, money's not coming into me.

Now I'm questioning what you're doing because I'm not getting paid off handsomely. So, what is the existing, what is the issues and risks with, I think you gave a couple great examples, but why should the listeners care? Okay, that's not affecting me. What is some risk by having some of these centralized data points?

That you saw happening over and over again, where you had to be like, Hey, we have to do something about this because the longer we prolong this kind of centralized data, the worse it's going to get.

Ashton: Okay. So let's take a step back. So let's look at history, right? So What history taught us we had dictators, we had empires, we had pretty much like centralised control authority. It tell, basically a dictator can tell you, hey, this is how, this is, you know, the sky is, is red. You've got to, you've got to, you've got to believe it, right, otherwise we're going to kill you.

And so all these Ottoman Empire, Roman Empires Julius Caesars, I mean, you name it, any dictator, any pharaoh, they had three things in common. They have a centralized power, they had a monopoly, and they had secrecy. These three, three ingredients, right? They, they, they control pretty much what they can control.

And everybody thinks today, well, we know we are far away or from these kind of structures. Think we have similar structure in tech space. I'm not saying we have that kind of a structure in social you know, social in the world, in a, you know, in a different countries, because we have democracy.

However, I think if you look at the tech space, especially like digital infrastructure space. I'm talking about social media. I'm talking about cloud space. I'm talking about the data custody space. I'm talking about AI space. I'm talking about data centers. I'm talking about 5G capabilities. Right now, if you say, if I say to you entire world of IT infrastructure and data controlled by four companies, Right.

And, and we have zero say as a people, like as a society, we have zero say about those corporations. And would you say we, we are in a similar kind of a situation like, like Mongolian Empire? To me, yes. Because the three things, right? If you look at large, you know, large corporations like Amazon, Google Meta, and Microsoft.

So these guys have three things in common. They've got the largest data custody in the world. Like Google knows about you. Facebook knows about weather, knows about financial markets, they have the world data. Facebook also has their own data. Microsoft is gaining so much data for themselves. The reason why they offer great services, Gmail, YouTube, just to collect data.

Now that's the data side, right? So I call it, they are the biggest data custody in the world. They control the data world. And now let's look at IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure like the data centers, like things that we use in a day to day basis, social media, digital applications, most of the stuff that you use, even if you use any any applications that are directly not involved with, let's say, Google.

Take like Dropbox, take Netflix. We think, ah, you know, Netflix is, Netflix is no. I mean, who, who, who actually provide the compute and the cloud network for Netflix is basically AWS and GCP, right? So, Well, then again, the cooperation, the underlying infrastructure provided by these corporations. And take the largest AI ecosystems today.

Who owns OpenAI? Microsoft. Who owns Gemini? It's basically Google. Who owns Google? Google owned by Alphabet. Who owns Alphabet? Alphabet, majority of shareholders of Alphabet is owned by BlackRock. Who owns BlackRock? BlackRock is Vanguard. Okay, so who owns Microsoft, large portion of Microsoft? Vanguard and BlackRock.

Okay, so who owns large portion of Meta and Amazon? Vanguard and BlackRock. So who, who, who are the shareholders of Vanguard as proprietary? We don't know. Okay, so in the last four or five years? Like BlackRock said crypto is a scam. Bitcoin is just, you know, worthless. It's just a joke. Now who are the biggest custodians for Bitcoin ETFs and Bitcoin spots and possibly even some other shit coins?

It's BlackRock. BlackRock in the top five. They have entities indirectly owns large chunks of these digital assets. Now, on one hand, they control the Web2 world, 95 to 96%. Data, Infrastructure, AI. So to me, controlling these three things is the biggest, biggest risk for society. Because imagine if there is an AI 10 times, 100 times, million times smarter than us, got out from a Microsoft lab.

Or Google Lab. They have the perfect distribution because they have, they have, they own the hardwares. They have social media. We use, we basically hooked up, you know, it's kind of, we have a connection to their data centers, right? We, our digital it's connected. I'm talking to you now. My phone is listening to me, right?

And it's connected to Google services. And if there is an AI willing to listen to everybody, at scale, it can do that. Imagine if you, if you go to a new society or a new world, you just landed, and they're going to tell you a story, say, hey, listen, our world is controlled by these large corporations.

They basically own the world. listening to us, they can send you a message which I can see on a piece of glass some message that they can send it to send it to me and that can send it to everyone and everyone basically hooked up with this glass 24 7 pretty much, you know, and And they also happen to have they can have a god power.

They have the knowledge of the god. They also have a something called artificial intelligence, which they can scale to size of like a Milky Way galaxy. And they can put data of, let's say, size of like couple of solar systems. And then they also have the distribution, read and write capabilities for fabric of society, and we're supposed to trust them. And we cannot do anything

Stephen: if I don't, if I'm not incorrect, I think BlackRock also has like physical real estate infrastructure too. So they're controlling the homes in which you, and like, when you put it that way, you're like, oh, we really don't have control. It's not even so much, the government doesn't even really have control because these guys are now the de facto regulators.

They will decide what you're watching on Facebook. And we saw this a lot with the Israeli and Palestinian, you know, war that's going on. It's like, hey, they can control exactly what you see. And if there's people posting what they don't want you to see, they can completely remove it. Whether it's right or wrong or which side you're on, they control the narrative.

And this is why you see when there's coups around the world. The first thing they go after when they've, you know, taken over the palace or the government is they go after the media because they want to control the narrative as well. And I think this society, I don't know, you're maybe closer, younger than me, probably by a lot, but like, we're controlled a lot more by, you know, media and short video clips than we ever were, I think, 20 years ago.

Ashton: You know, do you want me to blow your mind? So in food industry in the US, if you, let's say, if you manufacture cereal and you have to declare what, what is inside the cereal and you have a 20 % error, you can lie 20%, FDA will give you a fine. Take a guess how much room for errors from a regulator point of view have oversight on this three to four corporation. The large corporation we're talking about, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. How much regulators can come and say, we need to see your technology. Open up your data centers. We want to see what's going on. How much, do you think, like, like food industry, you have to declare things, because it's a part of the health, you know, public health but in, when it's come to technology, there's no regulatory oversight.

Because technology is not directly harming a human, yet. So therefore, they have a freedom, 100%, 100% freedom they have. Because why? They're proprietary. Like, it's not open source, right? You cannot go and check the code of OpenAI. You cannot do that. A regulator cannot, you know, go and check what's happening in the secret labs of Meta. You cannot do that. It's a corporate, corporate you have a corporate structure, governance protecting that. So that's the issue. I think people don't realize, I, you know, whenever I think about what, what can human out, I, I'm thinking, is it a war? Is it, is it, is it, it's actually World War III or maybe asteroid hitting our, our planet or something else.

I think, I mean, these are possible, but then the probable, but at the same time, like having a centralized control Of gold like data, and then they have the best distribution ever that they can talk to anyone and can listen to anyone. And also they have capabilities that, you know, the AI capabilities that they have, like, you have super intelligence all under one

Stephen: Yeah, because they can now, they can compile that data and analyze it so much faster. Even if you had all that data before, there was very little you could do. You wouldn't have the human resources to go through it and make actionable steps. But now with AI, you can take that wealth of data. But I want, how does Openmesh solve this?

So, you know, like thinking about, you know, I want to get into what you're working on I love that we've gone down this route by the way, because I think you've really laid out my first question was always like, how, what's the current situation and what do you try to do to make it decentralized? And how does that better people?

Because I think, you know, as someone that trains people on like blockchain investigations or crypto compliance, people always used to ask me, well, what's the need for mixers? And it was hard for me to explain to somebody in North America the need for mixers. But the second, you know, in Canada live in Canada, the second the freedom convoy and you know, the government starting knocking on ex crypto exchanges door asking for information you, and they stop the GoFundMe donations.

You realize why decentralized options are very important. And then you think, hey, when you're going around the world where the government is a lot intervenes, a lot more than the Canadian government. You run into real problems when you're trying to move around value, or flee a country, or seek asylum places.

What does Openmesh do to kind of like, at least combat these, you know, centralized counterparts, and give at least an alternative to the way data and infrastructure is done, especially when it comes to computing?

Ashton: I'm glad you mentioned about mixers. Then I can, my job is easy. Think about Tornado Cash. So what we are building is a Tornado VMs. So we are building a Tornado virtual machines, similar to Tornado Cache. So cloud infrastructure today is controlled by Google, GCP, and Microsoft. And Web3 space, everybody thinks we have the decentralization.

And, you know, like even the biggest decentralized ecosystem that everybody respects like Uniswap. If you, if you look under the hood, 30 to 40 % of their infrastructure, critical infrastructure, front end, hosting, caching, load balancers, databases, they have databases. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Uniswap has databases, of course they have databases, otherwise, you know, if you say I have 10 Ethereum and swap into USDT and you get price instant, it's not an on chain query, right? They do on chain execution, however it's a lot of information, it comes from centralized places. And most of these services are, because of convenience and scalability, built on Uniswap.

Traditional public cloud. And the question you, you, you ask yourself, okay, where's the decentralization? So if you're, if I'm providing you microservice, decentralized service or application or decentralized microservice, and I'm hosting in AWS, and I'm going to tell you my, I have a decentralized service, but AWS can shut down the website.

AWS can turn off the access. AWS can take that database and then do something about it. And they have the access and I have to set up a credit account. I have to attach my credit card and I have to host my APIs to connect with my on chain environments and I'm going to call it a Web3 service. I mean, is it really?

so that's the problem. Like I, the idea of like today, like when I first got into Openmesh, you really want to, okay, let's talk about some numbers, like numbers make sense. So 2020,

Stephen: give me stats.

Ashton: so 2020. When you look at our Web3 landscape, Google actually came late, but AWS was like the leader, and today AWS is also a leader.

AWS, Microsoft, and Microsoft was tiny back in the days for market share. But AWS is big. AWS and GCP, 20 to %ent, like critical infrastructure Web3, like front end databases, APIs, hosted on those three providers. 20 to 30 % in 2020, right? When I first got into Openmesh, when I look at the Web2 giants, right, because I always had this problem with centralization, Web, now Web2 giants who control 95 % of Web2, they're coming to Web3.

They're coming to Web3. Right then I was like, holy shit, this is terrible. And I looked up, okay, so how much of their market share have in Web3, that was 20 to 30%. And we did a another in-depth analysis in 2023, December, do you wanna guess the number?

Stephen: 80%?

Ashton: number. 82%. 82% today,

Stephen: I thought I was being funny. I'm like, 80, yeah, sure. You're like, no.

Ashton: So, so think about it. These, these large corporations. They monopolize Web 2. 0, like there's no chance a small company is going to say, Hey, we are a better better affordable cloud provider. Come to us. There's no way you can compete with AWS. AWS will actually eat you for lunch. You're gone. So, And when you look at our space, and we thought, oh, we are staying away from these guys.

We're decentralized. We, we don't have the operational choke points. We don't have the, these issues, but no, but take a look at it. It's actually not that decentralized. So 82 % to me is we are in a critical moment. So Openmesh, the idea. Okay, so what if you take like a great use case, like a decentralized use case so we took a lot of inspiration from like a torrent network.

Like, BigTorrent. So BigTorrent is a very, very amazing network, right? So you can upload a movie, someone can download, no one can shut it down. So we thought, okay, instead of uploading a movie and downloading a movie, can you run workload? Can you host a website? Can you have a database? So that was the original idea, original thesis.

And can we introduce like smart contracts to, to create a wrapper when you host your website? It's, you wrap in a smart contract attached to your wallet. So now, for the first time, like, it's not AWS web 2 logging, it's your web Ethereum wallet. Now your Ethereum wallet, you're activating your virtual machine and anything that you're putting in your virtual machine, whether it's a website or running a node or running a API, whatever it is, you control that. Again, there are a lot of other centralized choke point of the design. Which, if you're interested, we can go into details how we can prevent that. But Openmesh Network, we're trying to accomplish two things. First is permissionless. I have a problem with pretty much most of Web2 services. I live in Australia.

I don't, I don't feel, I don't find any problems. But if I move to another country, or if I talk to my friends, and You cannot access certain services. They will, they will tell you whether you're, you're qualified. You know, try to live in Pakistan and try to access like some, some typical services that you and I, we actually take it for granted.

It's not available. But if you want to access Bitcoin network, if you want to access Ethereum network, if you want to access Torrent network, Voila! No one's going to ask you permission. No one, you don't have to get permission. You don't have to beg. You don't have to put credit card. You don't have to tell the network that's you is, is who you are.

It's anonymity the, the, the idea of anyone can access with a computer and internet to access that network and being able to interact with it without a middleman. I think that, that was, that was really, really, to me, resonated really well with me.

Stephen: What are some of the top use cases? This makes sense, but what are people mostly using Openmesh for? And then is there anything else where you're like, Hey, they're not using us now, but this, this is something they should be looking at, like governments excited, basically the government examples, like, Hey, this is something that they should be putting on chain.

What are some of the things that people are mostly, or organizations are mostly using Openmesh for?

Ashton: low hanging fruit is Node as a Service. So, the way our network works so they've got lots of unused servers around the world, so we have connection to so we have integration with like large data centers like Equinix, High Velocity Volta. So what we do, we just aggregate all the infrastructure.

So we have a tool called Xnode. Xnode is a concept where we can actually aggregate all infrastructure. It's like an Airbnb for infrastructure and deployments. So we aggregate all the infrastructure into one single place, like a marketplace. And if a user wants to deploy a service, you can deploy directly into a bare metal, and then that virtual machine that you deploy is connected to your private wallet.

So as a container, you use like a Web2 security, like SSH and security, which you control. You also have your Ethereum wallet security and also smart contract that basically wrap your virtual machine. Now, if that data center decided to shut off your bare metal, what happened to your service? Okay, that's, that's interesting because that's a centralized choke point.

So this is where, like, if a user decided to have redundancy, let's say if, if one data center shut down my service, can I have another copy? That's, that's open mesh network. So the idea of, like, Having your files, the user has a choice. I can have multiple copies of my service. If something happens, I have a copy.

And also the network also talk to each other like a distributed network and a distributed ledger technology. It basically talks to each other. It keeps a consent, it keeps a ledger of how many services are running, what kind of data is in the network, and also verifies these deployments and data.

So this is where we call it like Openmesh is a, not just Openmesh, Openmesh is not just a cloud network, it's also a data network, but also it's an Oracle network all in one place. So the simple way to understand just think about like, is it Torrent network? For file sharing and also it has like a data verification.

So if you, because the nodes in the network also listening to data like centralized exchanges and, you know, blockchains then also verify the data like Chainlink oracles. And then The other aspect is you can actually deploy Web2 services. It's like AWS, right? So you have somewhat AWS, somewhat BitTorrent, and Chainlink Oracle all into one solution.

So that's Openmesh. So the use cases today So you can run Ethereum Node through Openmesh Network. Full Node for like 15 to 20 per month compared to AWS, you'd be paying like 200 to 300 per month. So the Node as a service is a big deal because the reason why like, like this is something I thought about a lot.

If you want to accelerate an industry, Any industry, if you want to accelerate, like whether it's a transportation industry, aviation industry, infrastructure is the key, right? How we became like a globally connected world because of the infrastructure, like went from dial up to fiber. So that way we can talk like this, we can do streaming, we can record real time.

In Web3 space, I find, I found like we have a dial up. And we want to upscale our infrastructure. So the problem I face even when I was working for Phantom, so, I mean, nodes are the most critical participants, in my opinion, in the Web3 space. Because why? They're the ones securing the network. They're the ones keeping the network.

If you don't have enough distributed independent verifiers, that network is not decentralized. Which means it's just simple private database,

Stephen: can you help the audience with someone just get one node? Is it like, makes sense to get hundreds of nodes? Like, cause I think the audience understands the node concept and node as a service is like, okay, we can just like, are people buying more than one node or like one node on different blockchains?

Like kind of walk me through that node as a service. Is it typically just one they're purchasing? Or is it multiple nodes that they're purchasing across the board?

Ashton: This is like, we have a web based deployment console called XnodeStudio. You go to XnodeStudio, you pick Ethereum template, we treat infrastructure as a template, you pick it. And you find a provider and deploy it. Within like 10 minutes, you can deploy your node. So we looked at user experience. We also looked at the affordability.

Because the problem that we try to address in Web3 space is called Node Operator's Economic Viability. So what that means let's say I, I'm Solana, right? So Solana network requires a lot of nodes to be, to be running. So, so the finality of the network can be higher, which means the transaction process faster and also somewhat decentralized. operators get paid in Solana tokens. But the node operators have to pay for the servers. If your server cost is 1000 a month, and if you don't get enough Solana tokens in dollar value to pay at least a cover cost, you're not going to run a node. And that's what happened during bear markets because the token price goes up.

So the token price goes down and the node operators are running at a loss and they leave. So, so then what happens, a lot of blockchain projects, they, they don't tell you, but then the nodes are run by them, by the early team, the foundation. The question then, I'm going to, let's say, I'm going to say I'm an L1 chain.

Like Solana, come and build on my chain and I'm decentralized, but during bear market sorry, you know, this node operators are gone because we couldn't address the node economic viability. Therefore we have foundation and our early team is running it. But the question then, then why developers trust in that kind of a chain?

Stephen: So less

Ashton: that's a big

Stephen: less decentralization. And this was gonna actually lead me into my next question. What is the level of decentralization? 'cause I've had people come on, I've heard podcasts where you know, you know, people are saying, Hey, chain link's great, but they only have really five service providers in a certain category.

Is that really decentralization? What are your thoughts on that? And then maybe what are some of the pushbacks of, you know, maybe your competitors say, Oh, they're not decentralized. We're really decentralized. So I hear a lot of that going back and forth as well.

Ashton: I think we don't, we will not reach, reach true decentralization. I think let's define from there. The true decentralization, it's a, it's a concept. Right. It's like an idea. Right. It's like a perfect world, like perfect democracy. Don't exist. So, so to me, what is decentralization? Decentralization for me, It's you reduce as many choke points as possible, but more importantly you have enough independent verifiers being able to like verify your, your service.

And instead of, instead of putting trust on, on the brands, you can actually verify things and you can. You can decide whether what you want to do with it. So you have like a lot of freedom around it. So I think, so with Openmesh, so it's good that you mentioned Chainlink. We are working with Chainlink something really, really important.

This is not public information yet, but it will be public soon because we're going to be presenting at SmartCon. So Chainlink provide One thing about Chainlink, like, Chainlink, Chainlink teams are, they, they really know how to build technologies that, you know, maybe one year, two years before. So, they have a new technology called CCIP.

CCIP is one of the, I would say, one of the great invention. People, a lot of people don't really recognize the value of CCIP. So CCIP allow you to do cross chain messages, you can do, you can write a smart contract in one chain, and you might be able to. Settle in another chain. So being able to transfer assets and communicate between different chains without a bridge, like a traditional traditional typical bridge, that's really powerful.

So the idea of a cross chain communication, cross chain asset transfers, composability and improbability between blockchains is a really, really big thing. Now, that's a big innovation. Next year, I'm seeing a lot of these decentralized Microservice is going to be available. Now, who's going to provide the cloud?

Because you cannot host a website on Chainlink. You cannot have a database on Chainlink, right? Typical databases. So that's where the Openmesh is going to be coming. So, we're going to push our decentralization as much as we can, which means when you have your database, your website, your node, your other resources, Critical Web 2.

0 components in Open Mesh Cloud, you own it, it's permissionless, immutable cloud, and CCIP and Open Mesh together, I think we can push the, let's call a benchmark today, like, I'm going to take as an example like Uniswap. Uniswap, let's call it 60 to 70 % decentralized today. So it's a well respected ecosystem.

I think with CCIP and Open Mesh immutable cloud, and permissionless Cloud, we might be able to push that 70 % to 90%, you know, hopefully 90 % or more. That's a big win for us because in 2025, especially next year, we will, we'll be able to actually introduce Like a new generation of decentralized services that never existed before and we can proudly talk about it.

And we can talk about, hey listen, so we reduced the choke points, we reduced the, the centralized elements. Now people can trust more and the governments cannot do anything about it. Corporations cannot do anything about it. So we can push the agenda, decentralization agenda even further. That's why I was talking to Chainlink team.

Team for Openmesh is going to be the new era of

Stephen: I love that and but you also mentioned being like kind of like a tornado cache of like decentralized data infrastructure, but the founder of Tornado Cache also got arrested, Tornado Cache got sanctioned. So how do you ensure privacy and prevent, you just said, hey, governments can't kind of touch it, the big people can't touch it, but that's not necessarily, it might be true on paper, but, you know, OFAC has a huge reach and so does the U.S. government along with international authorities. So, you know, how do you kind of show this, hey, nobody can touch us with also like, hey, Tornado Cash founder is probably going to spend a lot of time in jail, and now developers have to think, if we utilize any of this decentralized technology, right? But we're touching finance, where as you said, a lot of these big actors are playing there's probably going to be some sort of repercussions for that.

What are your thoughts when someone says

Ashton: Yeah, sure, sure. I think, look, there are so many risks involved. Compared to like Tornado Cash, I mean, Tornado Cash, like, especially I don't know too much about what happened, but I'm assuming it's to do with anti money laundering, like, You know, tax, tax evasion,

Stephen: 25 % is coming from a list of activity, especially like national security stuff. North Korea, a nation state sponsored hacking, stolen funds, and ransomware

Ashton: a lot of weight. There's a lot of weight in there. So for Open Mesh Cloud, I mean, someone can host a website, which provide like a services that the government want to shut down maybe.

Stephen: Yeah.

Ashton: So that's the risk, right? So then how, how government will going to regulate is going to act upon it, right?

There's always going to be a question. I think I don't have perfect solution for that. I think. It could be through maybe community can vote for shut something down if it's like, you know, child pornography or something. But other than that, someone is actually passionate about something and talking some, maybe, you know, having a blog on Open Mesh Cloud and someone is, people don't like it.

Well, that's too bad. And we, we cannot shut it down. I mean, that's the design, right? If you got a subpoena, we don't have a company. We don't have a foundation. We, we don't have a Australian business license. We don't, we never register anything. It's an open source technology and a DAO. And so if someone tried to contact us because we sooner we're going to move to our domain, to currently our domain with, with, Like a private providers, we're going to move that into Open Mesh Cloud itself.

So, so once we, even our, our website is going to be hosted on our own network, which means it's going to be like, it's going to be harder to basically shut it down. So. I mean, and then our email protocols, like we're gonna run our old email protocol within Open Mesh, because Open Mesh Network as a network, you can do pretty much a lot of things, right?

You can host your website, you can run a streaming service like YouTube on Open Mesh Network. You can do messaging services like Telegram on top of Open Mesh. You can, you can have Google, Google like search services, DeCi you can build a decentralized finance exchanges, blockchain games, I mean there's a bunch of things you can do with it.

I think for us, at the moment, yes, it's scary, but at the same time, it's fun. If you don't do it, like what, like personally, I don't know what, what, what, what I would do, you know, because I'm not going to go into like all these, I don't know, decentralized finance. Decentralized finance is quite efficient right now.

The gaming industry, I don't have much insights, you know, like blockchain games. So I'm kind of stuck with this because I'm also like, I'm passionate about, I'm passionate about like having some decentralized infrastructure. And yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm stuck, but also like, I really like this space. So who

Stephen: you can tell you're very passionate. Can you tell me, maybe describe it? Now I understand the Chainlink kind of nexus and connection to what you're building and that makes a lot of sense. Where are you with something like Filecoin? Is Filecoin completely different than what you're doing? Is it like, are they just focused on one area like data and they're not covering all these other aspects like email protocols and DeFi?

Like, people understand, I think, Filecoin, because they're fairly popular. What

Ashton: Filecon is a, Filecon is a more like immutable storage protocol, right? So you can, you can chuck some files and then, you know, that, that, that is immutable. That's a storage. But we are cloud, which means you can run compute, you can build a, you can run a database, you know, everything needs a database, I mean, in my opinion, in, in a lot of IT infrastructure require a database.

And if the data is you control, and the data is immutable for some reason with the, with the data that you own that's much better than putting data on a, on a cloud. public cloud database because they can shut it down.

Stephen: But it's still immutable, similar to how the file storage in Filecoin is immutable. The data, the processing, the databases, those are also still immutable within your ecosystem, correct?

Ashton: Filecoin has a different immutability approach.

Stephen: Right.

Ashton: So, but we are not mature like IPFS. So IPFS protocol is good for security, but the practicality of like hosting a website and having, let's say, You cannot build like a YouTube on top of IPFS, right? You cannot run applications, say, okay like train this model on chat like a chat GDP kind of a model on IPFS.

You cannot do that. It's just basically storage, right? So this is really good at that.

Stephen: So thinking about this in real life, it's like Filecoin is like a storage facility, right? You can go there, you can put your couches, you can lock it up. It's going to be safe, but they're not going to be able to run e commerce out of there. They're not going to be able to do anything, any kind of commerce or anything else on top of it.

Strictly storage and the storage is safe.

Ashton: Hmm.

Stephen: Tell me, do you think, and last question before we kind of wrap up, do you like, you know, Bitcoin was kind of like promoted as like, be your own bank. But there's some people that, hey, I want to pick up the phone and call Amazon when something goes wrong, right? I want to be able to call my bank when somebody charges 20, 000 to hold in Red Fruit illegally on my credit card.

Do you think society is even ready to be their own bank? Or is what you're working on is more for the technical savvy, the people that are building the things that are going to actually touch the users, not to be touched by the users directly?

Ashton: I see a world, I mean, this is a best case scenario for Openmesh Network, right? Imagine. Think about like a torrent network instead of movies anyone can access. Imagine you have like a lot of valuable data starting from web3, like order books, historical order books, verified and available in the network.

And if you want to do something with that data, you can build applications in the same network. You can rent compute, you can share compute. And if you have a laptop that you don't use much, you can rent it to the compute network and then you can do something with it. If you're, if you are, let's say as.

A student and has, let's say, historical record of medical data. Instead of going into a public database and purchasing 1, 200 and then begging for them to give you the accurate data. Imagine you have like a Bitcoin network, you connect your wallet and you can pull the data for free and you can just do any analysis that you want and you also can build a tiny website database and you can, you can connect it to your wallet and then you can wrap your entire business.

In ERC 20 standard like NFT, you can, you can sell to someone like you can build an e commerce website, e commerce company from your bedroom and you basically build the whole thing, not just the database, you have the users inside, you have you have a web you have a website designed and then you also, the data is ingesting into the, into the The infrastructure you develop, and it's all within the Openmesh network, and you can sell to someone, and the service will not be interrupted, the ownership is transferred.

You can build like, let's say, Ethereum Nord, you're running Ethereum Nord, so this this particular, the card that we do so we give away this, this machine it's basically a virtual, decentralized virtual machine, you scratch back of the card. And you can, we have an app store, you can download apps directly into this.

And this attached to your wallet, there's also NFT, ERC 721. You can, you can run Ethereum nodes, you can run Polygon nodes, you can run Chainlink nodes, and you can host a website, you can databases, like another thousand apps you can run on this. And you can build like, let's say, coinmarketcap. com website.

Small scale in this machine. This machine is 8 CPU, 16 GB RAM. It's good enough. You can, you can host, let's say like CoinMarketCap. com, smaller version. And, and, and no one can shut down that CoinMarketCap. com. Yeah? Because it's, it's, it's hosted in the network, but also it belongs to your wallet.

Stephen: And those are the possibilities. And more importantly, when you're talking about health data, if you go from Australia to Dubai, you can take that information, and you can give permission for somebody to access it as well, not even just sell it, but we all know what it's like if you move countries, taking any kind of health data, opening bank accounts, like, all of that is why, you know, people flock to Bitcoin.

As you said, payments. This is why we flocked to decentralization in the first place. Not so much we want to avoid the government, but we can't work within the guardrails that these governments have set up and they're not talking to each other, which I guess is the importance of things like your communi your connection with Chainlink is because when it there's a need to talk to other blockchains, that interoperability is going to be extremely important.

Ashton: I think the bigger question we have to ask ourselves, right? So if we, if we became a type one civilization. Like multiple and planetary, right? And do you think we should give Google to control the solar system data and solar system IT infrastructure? If the answer is no, we have to experiment things. I think that's what I want to do.

If, if, if I can contribute 0. 0001%, the idea that we will have a, like a data and cloud network. for solar system and it's not owned by a corporation, but that anyone can tap into the network and get resources you want. You can upload your resources. You can get some data that verified by the entire network.

Imagine I want to pull I want to verify, let's say, I want to get like a cold data, or maybe I want to know the last 100 years weather report. And instead of talking to a provider and trusting the provider, imagine this data has been verified by thousands if not billions of independent verifiers and that has been hashed and authenticated and then it's available in the network.

Anyone can download like a torrent network, you know. Imagine the power now. All the data custody is currently in Google and Microsoft. their own data centers, which you don't have access to. Imagine like even 1 % of the data is available like a Torrent network and is verified, and then you have a token economy for, for, for, for, for you to actually interact with it.

That is something interesting to experiment, you know,

Stephen: Ashton, I love it. This has been such a fascinating conversation. I think people think about like data and structure and it doesn't sound, you know, as sexy as like a token launch. But I think the real world use cases are becoming more prevalent. We had Grant Blaisdell here talking from talking about space and innovation, NFT, so very timely conversation.

Where can people find you? Where can people connect if their minds are as blown as mine from this conversation?

Ashton: Openmesh. network is our website. We're going to SmartCon, please come. And if you're, if you're there, just say hello. My Telegram is Ashton H at the end. That's my Telegram handle. I'm mostly active in Telegram and Twitter.

Stephen: I love it. And if somebody's like, hey, I'm not that technical, I kind of understand, this is exciting, I want to get more involved, which is, you know, my use case, I was a paralegal, I was like, this Bitcoin stuff sounds a lot more fun than, you know, doing law clerk work. How can the average person that's not a developer, how can they get involved?

What are some of the areas where you're like, hey, an average person, at least maybe even learn more, even if they're not dabbling it. What can an average person that's a little bit tech savvy, but haven't gone down the Web3 rabbit hole, how can, what's, you know, what would be your advice for their first step?

Ashton: With Openmesh or in general?

Stephen: I would say with OpenBash, if they're excited about what you're building, what can an average person do?

Ashton: So we have a dedicated section called Circle. So Openmesh Circle, it's like a Facebook for Openmesh, yeah? So it has pretty much marketplaces, jobs, social media attractions. If you want to learn, we have courses. And then if you want to look for a job, we it's also available there. So we've got tons of projects available there.

So any projects that we want to outsource, like Upwork, instead of giving to Upwork, we actually build Upwork. Actually, we, we literally build Upwork. You can go to, if you, if you go to circle dot open match.network. You'll, you'll find lots of jobs. These jobs are put in on chain. We also pre-funded with stable coins and our own tokens on chain, on, on, on polygon.

So when you, when you see a project, say, okay so we need, we are looking for someone to do an API or someone, someone to run a meetup in your local city, you'll find that you apply. You connect with your Web 3 wallet and you complete the project. Once you complete the project, you actually get paid in crypto to your wallet directly.

And the funds are, you can verify because it's already on escrow.

Stephen: I love that. I'm gonna go check out, see if you guys have any content media opportunities, cause

Ashton: content media. We've got around 30 projects right now.

Stephen: Alright, I'm gonna go gobble them all up. I'm gonna cut this part so nobody else can hear it. No, I'm joking. Thanks. Ashton, this was a great, I think this has been our longest podcast and I could probably go for another hour. And I think, you know, maybe in the new year we can talk after you've announced the collaboration with Chainlink.

We can go deep into what that collaboration looks like after the first few months of integration. Thank you so much for taking the time and blowing our minds.

Ashton: Thank you. Thank you for having me.