On 8th January, we are glad to have Matt Hawkins the founder & CEO of CUDOS, and VP of sales-Pete to talk about how CUDOS can solve today’s blockchain problem.
Intro
Pete: Hi Everyone, I’m Pete Hill, VP of Sales for CUDOS, My background is in the cloud and network services, and worked alongside our CEO and founder Matt Hawkins at his previous business. Matt has previously built tech and internet businesses since the late 90s and inception of the internet. His last business, C4L, was one of the UK’s largest cloud and data center providers.
We ended up providing 1% of the UK’s infrastructure and had a global backbone providing connectivity around the world. We ended up being the UK’s data center's largest marketplace and listed as one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies. I sold that business in 2016 so we could build CUDOS and build the first blockchain solution truly capable of scaling to the world's growing demand of cloud computing, by using the world's spare computing capacity.
We have aimed to build a global computing network that powers blockchain and traditional computing. By using the spare computing that is available in the world of over 500 million suitable and underutilized devices to create a greener cloud computing that exists today.
So CUDOS is a cross-chain decentralized compute network designed to power Web 3.0. It enables anyone to sell their computing or consume decentralized computing resources either via blockchain/smart contract or via more traditional cloud computing APIs.
In essence, what this means is CUDOS is one of the few networks which can power other blockchains and scale to the demands of cloud computing required today.
The rest of the team comes from scalable cloud computing, big data, or blockchain backgrounds. Between us, we have built some of the largest networks and data platforms in the world. There are around 30 core people in the team. We also have a great board and advisors on the team. We have Chris Deering who is ex-president of Sony entertainment and ran Playstation for 12 years, Maggie Fang who was one of the major investors in Alibaba and Uber (and our network essentially merges those 2 by connecting any buyer and seller of computing resources in the world). Sean Lie, one of the first Docker team and built Kitematic and Fortmatic & David Juxon who was a Managing Director of Merryll Lynch…….
Thank you, for those who know the UK, about 85% is either BT or Virgin networks, so 1% was a good size for a private company
Elson: Can you tell us some use cases about CUDOS token?
Pete: Sure, I’ll break it down into a few different ones.
Providing turing complete solutions to non-turing complete networks:
Algorand is a good example, we have a partnership with Algorand. Algorand is a low-cost fast transaction network, but because of the design choice it is limited in its functionality and it not Turing complete. Working with Algorand we are integrating the CUDOS network so that Algorand smart contracts will be able to do full Turing complete work using the CUDOS network. The network can run this in WASM, Docker, or VM’s.
Providing a global scalable Decentralised compute for blockchains and smart contracts:
We have other networks we are working with like NKN, Noia Networks, etc.. that are lined up to use the CUDOS global network to expand their own network coverage.
Providing Scalable Cloud Computing:
Resources can be consumed on the network as required in the same way as traditional computing but in a greener more efficient manner.
Lowering the cost of compute/transactions and DeFi on blockchains:
The transaction costs and compute costs on the CUDOS network are substantially lower and scale better. Able to scale on EVM, eWASM, Rust, and other languages. Also, this provides greater language flexibility.
Connecting blockchains to external API’s and data feeds:
Using our Oracles, which will initially be live on Ethereum, Algorand, and then Cosmos, the network provides direct access to external APIs and data feeds. We can support this with each blockchain we bridge onto…….
Elson: Thank You, Pete! Do you have any news/ann you would like to share with our community before we kick start the live AMA session?
Pete: Some big news as of yesterday, we completed our private sale of $3m! 🙌
AMA begins
Q1: What are the ways for CUDOS to generate revenue in the long run? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
Buying compute resources on the CUDOS network is 100% in CUDOS. Validators are paid in CUDOS and any workloads they have to distribute off-chain will also pay those compute nodes in CUDOS.
We are working with blockchain ecosystems like Algorand (partnered already) so that we can provide Turing complete compute to all of their ecosystem developers, meaning they can attract more people to dev on Algorand
Also, companies like Cryptocompare and Coinmarketcap will be amongst the first dApps
Q2: Cudos is a Decentralized Oracle Platform that offers a good 2 layer solution, but what makes you unique considering that exists other good Oracles like Chainlink?
Where Chainlink and DIA Data are data oracles, CUDOS is a compute oracle. Compute and data and symbiotic which means that we not only have the blockchain developers as customers, we also have the data oracles
Q3: Why do you think $CUDOS token is necessary for your project? What is the main role of $ CUDOS in your project? What are the benefits of holding $ CUDOS in the short and long-term?
CUDOS is fundamental to the network. Its functionality supports not only the governance of the network but also opens the use cases mentioned at the start of this session.
We believe we have built solid economics. We worked with industry leaders Delphi Digital who also advised ETH 2.0 and will be providing staking incentives to encourage staking on the network protecting the supply
Q4: Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake, Dapps..) and what are your goals for this year?
The good thing about our design is that it opens up lots of use cases. We are essentially building an Infrastructure-as-a-service platform where blockchain developer or traditional cloud consumers can connect via an API to a significant distribution base of computing power
This will benefit DeFi and data feed services from the blockchain side that need decentralized computing (through our validator network) and also traditional cloud such as AI, video rendering, simulations, etc… that just need scalable compute at a lower cost than the hyperscalers
Q5: Are you planning to add more features for CUDOS?
💯As with any network/platform, it will evolve. We have huge plans for the CUDOS network and our focus on channel business will accelerate the way we can scale the userbase and development of these features.
Q6: One of the best ways to help communities grow is through ambassadorial plans, my question is what qualities do you look for in a person to be an ambassador? Do they need to be in a specific country or can anyone apply?
We are about to launch our ambassador program @Jeff_Ell is managing that from our side. We are looking to build a highly active global community. Different cultures, backgrounds, ideas, and languages. Community is king and we wouldn’t be where we are today without our existing ambassadors.
Q7: Looking through the website I found two terms “CUDOS” and “CUDO”. Can you explain to us what is the difference between these two and how they are interconnected for proper functioning?
I was trying to find a previous answer to the Cudo/CUDOS name question but I have too many screens open!
Writing fresh….
Cudo is the underlying platform. Now has over 30k active devices in 145 countries. CUDOS is the decentralized validator network providing a bridge between on-chain and off-chain.
Cudo is Latin for coin/money when used as a verb
CUDOS means to give praise.
As we are building a more sustainable computing network where anyone can be a part of it, we just thought….. CUDOS to that
Q8: CUDOS currently has about 20,000 nodes worldwide. Do you expect to increase that number this year in 2021 or will you work with that number of nodes until further notice?
By the end of this year, we will have over 1 million active nodes through big channel partnerships we have with AMD and Ultra who are/have integrated our tech.
We also have a real focus on datacentre located supply as well and this is why we started with GPU miners and cloud service providers such as THG Hosting and Hydro66
Q9: Some DeFi projects were recently “hacked” as per their explanations. How do you think these recent events on other DeFi products affect the trust by users? What can Cudos do in order to ensure crypto enthusiasts that #DeFi is safe and reliable?
It’s still a new market, problems are natural at this stage for new technologies. We saw the same in 2008/2009 at the start of the cloud computing market. Service provider environments were crashing, corrupting, etc… But the technologies are maturing rapidly.
Part of our partnership with AMD is because of their SEV encryption tech. Our Validator network will be full SEV or SGX (Intel’s version). Both of these techs have been developed because of the transition to distributed and decentralized computing.
Q10: Can you tell us some of your most cherished achievements in Q2 2021 and how relentlessly are you working in ensuring you achieve all your goals in your Roadmap?
2021 is a very important year for us and we have 4 key milestones that we will reach:
1. CUDOS testnet and staking
2. Layer 2 oracle service launch for 1st 2 chains (Eth and Algo)
3. CUDOS mainet
4. Compute marketplace
There are lots of ‘sub’ milestones that fall under those 4.
Q11: Your project is looking so good. Can you tell some about your team and their experiences in the market?
We’re an internal team of 28 now with a further 5–10 external contractors for blockchain & smart contract development and 10+ world-class advisors including the former President of Sony Entertainment Media (Playstation), Chris Deering, and the current Director of Blockchain for AMD, Joerg Roskowetz.
Our internal team have backgrounds in building and scaling and SaaS with our CRO Andrew Walker founding Clicktools, a business acquired by SurveyMonkey, and two of our core developers Pete Willis and Richard Poole building software for Vodafone. Our CTO, Andrew Sturmey, VP of Sales (me), and Head of Project Management all joined Cudo from my last business and offer vast experience in scaling cloud infrastructure platforms and customer bases. Our VP of Partnerships has over 15 years of experience in securing big brand and high-value partnerships including AMD. All in all, we have 14 internal developers across backend, frontend, design, hardware optimization, and networking, with the rest of the internal team including marketeers, operations led by our CEO Lee Woodham with 25 years of experience in scaling financial services and tech companies, finance and business development.
Q12: Covid-19 is still causing huge losses in many countries, how has Cudos adapted in the context of this ongoing global pandemic?
It’s been tough for so many people and businesses. Our hearts go out to those badly affected by the pandemic.
As a tech business, the transition to working from home was fine for us and we are so busy, that we rarely leave home anyway! : )
What the pandemic has done, not just for us, but for the tech sector and blockchain… is accelerate adoption. Businesses are forensically checking their costs and this benefits a platform like ours that offers lower-cost compute to the hyperscalers. People at home are looking for new ways to earn, to contribute towards bills, and especially with the current buoyant market, are assigning their gaming PCs to earn whilst idle, so we are seeing user numbers increase significantly. Service providers are always keen to realize additional revenue streams with underutilized hardware and lastly, blockchain has well and truly entered the spotlight for big businesses now that institutions are heavily participating in the space.
We want our tech to be used for good causes and at the start of the pandemic, we collaborated with 5 other companies to provide GPU power for Covid research
Q13: What is the difference between Public Cloud and Private Cloud? Also What are cloud provisioning models?
Public cloud would be a platform such as AWS or Azure, where you are renting shared resources. Security-wise, it is all partitioned, but you do not have the full resource of the underlying tin.
Private cloud is dedicated hardware private to that one customer.
Cloud provisioning is how the servers are setup/reached. for eg, through an interface or an API
Q14: There are 3 core issues prevalent in crypto and blockchain: Security, Interoperability, and Scalability. How does CUDOS plan to overcome these issues?
Security: Validator network governance all built into smart contracts and audited by Certik. SEV / SGX deployment. Token staking for jobs builds a Trust Score per device (reliability, security, and availability). Consumers will be able to filter down to the exact environment. E.g. workload is sensitive and therefore needs to be executed in Tier 3 data center in X region, with SEV enabled
Interoperability: Integrating multiple blockchain smart contracts and working closely with the ecosystem to integrate tooling for interoperability. CUDOS enables you to scale out compute on EVM/eWASM, Docker Containers, and VM’s on a global computing network.
Scalability: This is why we have focused on the supply side of the network first over the past 3 years, to ensure we have a globally secured distribution base of different environments (DC and consumer edge), before launching the demand side services
Q15:Few week ago Cudos announced a partnership with decentralized cloud platform Gather network, but considering that you are a cloud too, why did you need an association with other clouds?
Good question and this comes back to my previous answer about supply. This is our background in scaling large infrastructure environments. There are several other distributed/decentralized platforms coming into the market all with their own carved focus. Gather, Kings, OTOY…etc. These distributed technologies see us as a scalable infrastructure and that is the way we built the business. We are the foundation that anyone can build upon.
IExec has a similar model to us in the way they are building a compute marketplace. They first focused on demand which is where most started. Their supply though is AWS, Azure, GCP and so it is taking those workloads back to the hyperscalers where costs are higher.
I’m not saying that’s a bad model, I like that team. But we decided to take a different approach
Our vision is Make Better Use of the Worlds Computing Power, a true two-way cloud computing marketplace that operates over a distributed network; CUDOS is to compute, what Filecoin is to storage.
CUDOS is the decentralized layer to the Cudo network, providing a bridge between blockchain and off-chain computing power.
Q16: Looks good but it confuses me that there are so many other Blockchain projects. What should I pay attention CUDOS to give it the importance it deserves? What are you planning to achieve with your project? Thank sir
The vision for us is very clear and all drills back to one sentence:
‘ To make better use of the world’s computing power’
To achieve that:
- the model needs to be environmentally sustainable (use existing hardware rather than produce more)
- Allow everybody to earn (the sharing economy and philosophy of blockchain technology)
- Decentralisation (transparency and fairness)
On the last part as someone else has asked about decentralization.
Blockchain is decentralization, the move to provide not just immutability in the record of data, but also to provide fairness and transparency. For blockchain-based applications to then use centralized cloud platforms is counter-intuitive. However, blockchain as a layer 1 protocol is expensive to scale and limited in what workloads it can support due to its highly distributed topology, and in the case of some blockchains including Algorand; it’s designed not to offer Turing complete compute to achieve a higher TPS rate. So a solution is needed that can both; provide decentralized compute and that can offer both clustered and distributed infrastructure to match the optimal environment for any workload request. CUDOS fills this gap. It is a layer 2 and therefore provides decentralization (through its validator network) along with different infrastructure environments through its underlying supply base (service providers, miners, and gamers).
Q17: what we know AmaZix had a lot of bad results in past years, what CUDOS still select them for marketing?
We actually started to use AmaZix in 2019. Originally we were planning the token launch last April but because of the market at that time and Covid, we decided to put the brakes on a revisit now. So we have not used AmaZix since early 2020. I’m not overly familiar with their projects this year but they are a good team from my experience.
This time we have used Delphi Digital who also advised on ETH 2.0
Q18: Does the price of the token matter to you from an operational perspective, if the token price is $1 or $100?
No, not operationally. The token is a utility that unlocks multiple use cases and carries far more function than just a medium of exchange. It’s not a profit instrument. We have built solid economics along with big partnerships, so the value of the network is what we are focusing on growing. If the token does the same, that’s great for everyone here, but our focus is the network
Q19: How do you see your competitors?
I’m pinching this comparison from a Tweet Jamie Burke from Outlier Ventures sent:
‘CUDOS is to compute, what Filecoin is to storage.’ We are actually starting to work with Filecoin and will likely be integrating it into our stack.
ANKR, DFinity, Golem, Sonm…. these are all projects building distributed and decentralized infrastructure services and what is great, is that each has taken a slightly different approach. Cloud is a huge market, so there is room for multiple players in this space, just as there is in the traditional cloud (24 hyperscalers and 1000’s smaller service providers).
We always see collaboration opportunities rather than out-an-out competition. : )
A little more meat for the bone though:
Traditional cloud: The Hyperscalers
Decentralized cloud: IExec, Golem, Filecoin, Near, Matic
Because the team comes from a data center and cloud provider background, we took a different got to market approach. CUDOS is bridging the gap between traditional cloud (Which is a $200bn per year industry) and blockchain enabling the scalability and flexibility of the traditional cloud with the decentralized and trustless nature of blockchain.
At the moment, if you want to scale computing you typically need to use large hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Alibaba, etc… These are very expensive resources and you pay a premium.
CUDOS enables traditional cloud computing to scale on the CUDOS network and use the spare computing capacity. You also expect to consume these resources via known API’s which is what is used to scale. CUDOS provides this capability.
CUDOS was designed to use already existing computing capacity, we have a desktop client and OS which makes use of the device's spare computing. This will run on a PC, games console, or in full data center environments.
The closest you have to this at the moment in my opinion is Filecoin for storage, we are doing the same for Computing. We are actually working with the Filecoin / Protocol Labs team on the storage integration side.
There currently isn’t a successful cloud computing marketplace that does this the moment that can also service non-blockchain compute. There are leaders in the protocol space. These include the likes of Near Protocol, Oasis Protocol, Matic Network. The vast majority have focused purely on smart contracts. You of course have Ethereum and the upcoming Ethereum 2 as well.
CUDOS enables you to scale out compute on EVM/eWASM, Docker Containers, and VM’s on a global compute network.
You do need to come from a service provider background as we have. We spoke with several other projects in our space whilst in early development and all were approaching from the demand side, underestimating the complexities of the supply side. Given our background, we knew that securing the distribution base of supply first was critical to scaling. We have over 20,000 compute nodes and over 150,000 users which are scaling quickly, which gives us substantial global compute capacity. We have AMD rebranding our technology which you will see in the coming weeks, and Ultra integrating our compute engine, between them is due to expand the network to over 1 million nodes in 2021. We are currently live in over 145 countries. As well as this network, we have been busy signing up global data center providers and bandwidth providers to expand the network further.
The difference is we took a market approach first and applied the technology to that which is what is giving us the quick scale of network and users. I say quick, but we have been working on this for 3 years now!
Q20: Are you planning to burn or buy back any tokens from the market in the future? Do you have such programs?
We have designed our economics to limit the amount of circulating supply at all times over its 10-year release schedule. Token allocations closed in our private round carry vesting periods. Staff token is locked for a term and then vested based on hitting key development milestones (10 milestones) which make up our vision, advisors are locked in and then have vesting…. We have staking, and our staking rewards will be high to incentivize those with circulating tokens to stake on the network.
We were originally discussing burning but we have since taken that out after consultation. Although we understand the purpose, we achieve this control through the rest of the economics. Going forwards, the US will be a big market for us, and burning is seen negatively under US law.
Q21: Does your project have features or benefits that make it competitive with peers? Why did you choose AMA on Telegram to advertise your project instead of advertising on other social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Google?
The strongest and most engaged communities in our opinion are right here on Telegram. We will be doing YouTube promotions as well and we have made a lot of our own material including founder interviews and panels. Check it out! CUDOS youtube
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