Pete (aka BFG) (00:00)
Hello everyone. Welcome. I'm back with Web3Magic Podcast with the Builder Spotlight. And today I'm super excited because I have Viktor with me. And before we get into chat with Viktor, don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to tell your friends because we are talking to builders who are building something super cool on the blockchain rails. So Viktor, welcome.
Victor (00:18)
Thanks for having me, inviting me, Pete.
Pete (aka BFG) (00:20)
It's great to have you because you're working on a thing which I'm a big fan of and also I'm a little bit afraid of, so both sides. Yeah, because I, for example, definitely love the interactions online with humans, I'm not against bot answers, but I like to know that I'm asking the AI or somebody. I like to chat.
Victor (00:29)
We'll figure it out.
Pete (aka BFG) (00:43)
with people, not with bots. On the other hand, you know, I'm a little bit afraid of like giving away my data, scanning my retina for some sort of UBI or anything like that. So we'll get into it, but let's start with the question, which we always kick off with. How did you get to blockchain? When was it? Are you like the old time guard Bitcoin maxi or how did it start?
Victor (01:05)
Yeah,
kinda, kinda. So I first sort of say encountered blockchain back in 2013 in university. Everybody was talking about the Chinese ban and how badly it influenced the price of Bitcoin, but nobody knew what it is. And I went into blockchain full time in 2016, only three years after that.
Pete (aka BFG) (01:17)
Okay.
Okay, impressive.
Victor (01:34)
Yeah, and well, it was kind of very important step in life for me, I would say. I was working a lot on traditional startups. And to be honest, I had a little bit of even a slight depression for half a year. Yeah, yeah, but then kind of blockchain showed me the way, I would say.
Pete (aka BFG) (01:43)
Mm-hmm.
⁓ from the old startup world?
Nice. So you basically jumped into the space around 2016 and you stayed until now. Nice.
Victor (02:03)
Yeah, almost. Soon it be 10 years. It's hard to get out of here. Especially when you started something that is not finished yet.
Pete (aka BFG) (02:06)
Impressive.
True. So how did it start?
Victor (02:13)
I mean, 2016, it was pretty boring. People were mining around in their homes, you know, through decentralization back then, not like right now. And, well, you just hear about it. Then you start digging into it. And, I quickly checked out how I could earn more money there. But then I quickly found out that.
Well, if you focus on money, you're most likely going to lose it. So just focus on fundamentals more. And yeah, started researching a lot back then. And in 2018 already, we went deep into proof of stake market. So I mean, being validators, participating in the first governance of proof of stake networks like Tezos, Cosmos, Icon. There was a few of them.
Pete (aka BFG) (02:54)
Mm-hmm.
I see.
Victor (03:06)
And, well, you pretty much should understand now how it led us to human node. Cause, ⁓ back then in 2017, we understood that proof of work has the economies of scale, right? So the more capital you have, the cheaper you can buy the equipment. And right now. Home miners, where are they?
Pete (aka BFG) (03:10)
You
Victor (03:30)
I believe, well, if we find one, will be very lucky. Right.
Pete (aka BFG) (03:31)
Mm-hmm.
Right, yeah, I would like
to talk to him or her.
Victor (03:37)
Yeah, and then we tried out proof of stake as well. Of course, money is also not decentralized. It also has economies of scale. And we were there governing the blockchains, kind of decentralized blockchains in private telegram chats of 15 people, deciding who gets the money, which updates are going to get through. you know, nothing changed since then. Seven years later, we're still proof of work. We're still proof of stake.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:00)
I see.
Victor (04:04)
And yeah, that's why we're like, we should build a network where one human can only launch one node. And finally in 2020, we got the idea of how to build it, like architecturally speaking.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:19)
Okay, so nice. Pretty long journey through all the different things which we call issues now around decentralization got you to Human Node. Was that based on like some academic research project or you guys basically were just tinkering with the idea how to improve, you know, proof of stake and proof of work and how to make it a little bit more decentralized?
Victor (04:43)
I don't know, it's just based on ideas coming out of our minds. So it was me and Michael Founder Datto, we've been through it all together. So we're talking to each other all days long during the last 12 years. And during one of the talks, just came up as an idea. Well, we researched even three years before Can Wrap with Human Out.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:47)
Okay.
Victor (05:07)
How can we do this? You know, it sounded like sci-fi to be honest. Like how can you figure out that the person is unique without knowing who he is and give him opportunity to run a node to create a network where every node is equal in terms of computation and voting power. It was really sci-fi. mean, there was even sci-fi book called...
Ticada probably, something like that. Which kind of described the world where we're all together like ants and not like proof of work or proof of stake. And finally, we were researching nonstop. mean, crypto, I'm one of those people who never buys stuff from top 100. Usually I...
Pete (aka BFG) (05:32)
Okay.
Victor (05:52)
Appreciate those things that are below 500 when they go to top 100 simply sell them. So, and always on the edge, so to say. And yeah, one day just came up to us that, Hey, the biometric industry actually is pretty much mature now in 2020. And we checked out the accuracy parameters of matching faces one to another.
We checked out the privacy research that already was there for a few years. And of course, liveness detection, which is figuring out if there is a real person in front of the camera right now, or is it the hacker trying to bypass the video feed and inject deep fake? So, and well, we were pretty much fascinated by the current accuracy and it's actually, it,
Pete (aka BFG) (06:31)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (06:37)
It was progressing a lot back then, but now it kind of stopped more or less, I mean, the rise of biometric accuracy, but it's enough for a million people in terms of facial recognition.
Pete (aka BFG) (06:48)
Okay. Okay. So I think two co-founders is always a good story. Not too many, not too few.
Victor (06:57)
Yeah, yeah,
well, it's a rare thing when you have two people, not one person.
Pete (aka BFG) (07:03)
And so what is human node in short? Just give us a short pitch.
Victor (07:08)
Okay,
short picture, blockchain layer one, where one human can only launch one node. And of course the consequences, the governance of, you can build democratic, meritocratic, isocratic, whatever governance, which is not just plutocratic like what we have. And we do it by merging biometrics, cryptography, blockchain itself.
So that's pretty much it. mean.
Pete (aka BFG) (07:34)
Is there, so
is there like a official pathway how to prove that I am human, which is standardized, happens in some places or can happen anywhere? I'm just referring to Worldcoins, you know.
Victor (07:50)
⁓ sure, sure.
So we wanted to be as inclusive as possible. We were also thinking about some specialized hardware in the beginning. But when we checked what we can do with simple facial recognition available from any device, so yeah, you can do it from anywhere, we chose for now this modality is the main one. So.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:09)
Mm-hmm. Wonderful.
Okay.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:14)
nodes
Victor (08:14)
We were also, to be honest, thinking in the beginning to use specialized hardware. But eventually we checked out the accuracy of facial recognition available on any device. And we think that it was already enough back then for a blockchain scaling to millions of people, which is already a huge network.
it's totally enough to have facial recognition available on any device. So we went with this biometric modality for now. Of course we want to add more.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:45)
Okay.
So.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:47)
Yeah,
Because I like the part that you guys went with facial recognition. I'm not really sure if there was any other option back then in 2020, which would be, you know.
Victor (08:57)
I mean,
even now there is no option if you want to get rid of specialized hardware. Because I mean, second to facial recognition available on any device is voice recognition, which is much, much worse, like a hundred times worse. And for high quality things like retina in your eye or palmar recognition. ⁓
Pete (aka BFG) (09:19)
Fingerprints? Yeah,
fingerprints maybe.
Victor (09:22)
Fingerprint,
we don't have it on iPhones or PCs, many of those. It's not inclusive. Will you buy a new smartphone? Just for...
Pete (aka BFG) (09:25)
Yes,
Victor (09:32)
just for scanning your finger
Pete (aka BFG) (09:32)
Great.
No, I won't. But I already have it, so it's fine.
Victor (09:36)
Exactly.
Well, you're lucky user of some Samsung probably.
Pete (aka BFG) (09:42)
Yeah,
so I'm Samsung and iPhone user a long time.
Victor (09:47)
okay, so you have both. Nice, nice. So yeah, I mean, there was no other option, still no other option. But using face recognition, of course, would be much better if you could even not use your face because you're afraid that the protocol will use your face for something else. But we can talk about the cryptography part later, if you will.
Pete (aka BFG) (09:53)
I see.
Yeah, we definitely can. Well, let's jump into the security of information which you gather. I'm not really familiar with the way you guys store data. And I'm not even sure you need to store the data, right? So once I prove I'm human, you can basically just tick me off and take me as a human. You don't really need to store anything for that, or do you? Okay.
Victor (10:34)
we do. We actually do.
There is a there are two ways to do that. Okay, like full cryptography mode where you encrypt the data locally and You sent it to the well, let's say some decentralized storage in a hashed version kind of your face the problem with this approach is that Hash is deterministic, but biometrics are probabilistic So biometrics are neural networks
Pete (aka BFG) (10:52)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (11:01)
which basically in our case compare one face to another, right? And if you just hash them, you will always have the probability of having several hashes from one person, and that's already a Sybil attack, I mean. You have few hashes, you can pretend you are few people. you, one address, one of your,
Pete (aka BFG) (11:05)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Got you.
Victor (11:23)
blockchain addresses is attached to one of the hashes, another to another. And that's a simple attack. So we actually need to decrypt the data, the biometric data to compare it. And in order to make it completely secure, what we do is, well, we still encrypt the data locally on the device, which you're using, for example, your phone.
Pete (aka BFG) (11:45)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (11:45)
The data we extract on your phone locally is anonymized 3D face map. So it's kind of a representation of the points on your face in three dimensions, which don't already look like your face. In order to reverse it back to original, you have to know the weight of the neural network that we're using.
Yeah, this is step number one. Step number two, this, anonymized encrypted data goes to the confidential virtual machine. So what is that? It is a, basically servers with the encrypted memory.
Pete (aka BFG) (12:17)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (12:24)
And we make sure that even we don't have access. How? We build them so that when the server launches, it rotates the key inside it. So only the server has the key to decrypt the data, compare the data, and give you the answer if the person is unique or not. that's how we secure it. And one beautiful thing about our...
Pete (aka BFG) (12:42)
Okay. ⁓
Victor (12:48)
Encrypted servers is that in the next version users will be able to verify in their browsers If they are really talking to encrypted server or not, so it's kind of user-based attestation of the hardware encryption not just trust Intel or trust AMD
Pete (aka BFG) (13:06)
Okay, nice. let's talk about the human node part. So what hardware do I actually need to run a node and why should I?
Victor (13:15)
Okay, why should you? That's a beautiful question. The hardware part is easy. So we're for now, we don't need, we don't have a lot of transactions going through our blockchain. So we don't really need expensive hardware because of that. Once we get to 10 K transactions per second, which is a lot, right? In terms of adoption, we don't need more than
10, 20 bucks servers if you rent a cloud server. potentially, we discussed it just yesterday. You could use your Android device as a server, actually. If it's always plugged in and if it's directly connected to the internet for the good internet bandwidth, you could actually run it on your phone.
Pete (aka BFG) (13:42)
Okay.
Victor (14:00)
At home, of course, always 24 seven connected until your phone dies because it's not created to do this stuff. But yeah, you basically set up a server same as in proof of stake, but the requirements we have are pretty low. So 10, 20 bucks maximum. Actually, what you get in return is not much as well. We used to.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:16)
I see.
That's what I would expect.
Victor (14:23)
Yeah, we used to cover the cost of validators. So imagine we have 1,800 validators right now. And everybody who has nice uptime, around 98 % at least, gets $25 a month in humanoid terms. So all you can do is do x2 on your costs.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:31)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (14:48)
unless you just run it from your home and it's pretty much free for you.
Yeah. So becoming a node is not hard. one important thing you have to scan your face every week. The, the harder, yeah, it, saves us from sock puppeting. So there is a Cibyl attack, which is when a person creates tens or hundreds of accounts on his own. Okay. But, since we have biometrics, we're kind of got rid of a Cibyl attack with the high probability.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:58)
Whoa, okay.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (15:20)
And there comes the sock puppeting. Sock puppeting is like taking other people, you know, and using their faces for your own needs. So unless we scan people every week, they will start sock puppeting 100%. And for now, people do sock puppeting, but they're kind of doing it only with their close families, you know, which is fine because the whole family is kind of supporting our blockchain.
Pete (aka BFG) (15:29)
Okay, yeah.
Right, right, that makes sense.
Victor (15:46)
Yeah.
And of course the incentive part, we try to keep it as low as possible because it's not about incentives for us. It's about building a network of real human beings coordinating together in order to maintain the ledger of truth compared to proof of stake networks when you just give the ledger of truth. So to say to the
big for-profit companies. And this is the whole difference.
Pete (aka BFG) (16:14)
So how do you call your network? So it's not proof of stake, it's not proof of work, it's proof of what?
Victor (16:20)
Yeah.
So we call it proof of biometric uniqueness, just like that. But I would call it just the humanoid consensus. It's a new consensus mechanism.
Pete (aka BFG) (16:31)
Okay,
human node consensus sounds good. Yeah, we should coin that term. technology wise, how do you guys fit into the bigger, know, Web3 ecosystem with all the like Cosmoses, Bitcoins and EVMs?
Victor (16:43)
Okay. We actually built our new consensus mechanism by building a few modules playing with Polkadot SDK. So we really love Rust. We think that Rust is ideal language for building the things like that. And in terms of security, in terms of basically memory control and
Pete (aka BFG) (16:51)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (17:06)
Well, we have EVM, but we're not restricted to EVM only. That's the beautifulness again of Polkadot SDK is that we can change consensus, algorithms. We can have as many virtual machines as we want. So yeah, the idea is that we will still be the network of humans. But we can evolve together with the technology, so to say, and with the demands of developers.
Pete (aka BFG) (17:30)
Okay, so I cannot help but ask, so are you trying to be the L1 blockchain which I will use, for something, like voting, maybe securing the network instead of proof of stake.
Or you're trying to be the blockchain for everything. So meaning, you will actually plan to build the whole DeFi world and gaming world and deep in world and everything else on top of human node. What's the plan?
Victor (18:01)
So as you understand with our new consensus, we are kind of weird for the funds and the big whales existing in crypto, right? Because, well, we don't give them passive income on just staking their assets. It's not what our consensus needs. It's really hard for us to compete in terms of money. So we chose like the dual way, I would say. In the beginning, we focus on
biometric verification not only for our nodes, for any other means, airdrops, incentives, governance for other projects. And we already scanned over half a million people during the last two years since mainnet launch by basically providing this private biometric tech to other companies.
Pete (aka BFG) (18:34)
Mm-hmm.
right.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (18:50)
But in the long run, yeah, we are going to be the chain for everything because we are sure that, well, people will get it finally. People will get that proof of work proof of stake are not decentralized. Of course, the likes of BlackRock are gonna use Ethereum because they're gonna own Ethereum. You know, they're already owning Ethereum through Coinbase, probably through Binance, so that, and Lido.
because it will be less visible if you own Ethereum through different staking pools.
Pete (aka BFG) (19:22)
Yeah,
Victor (19:24)
Overall, yes, we are going to be the blockchain for everything and we have DeSci AI projects and gaming launching this year on our chain. And we think it will be pretty successful projects. We support them as much as we can.
Pete (aka BFG) (19:38)
Okay. I think then the inevitable question is always, so what are the preferred like verticals which you guys want to attack? Because, you know, I mentioned gaming, you mentioned DeSci. There's a lot of hope around DeSci.
so what would be the strategy to actually get people on human node? Because I like the idea that, you know, it is a chain which is proved by humans and that the money doesn't matter. And I think a lot of people would agree with this. The problem is money is actually running the world and people with the money would not agree with this because they have no reason to. Unless...
5 billion people will be on human node and only million with the money will be on Ethereum. Which is a hard thing to do.
Victor (20:26)
yeah, yeah. That's
actually what we're seeing with with bearer chain, know, bearer chain, they build proof of liquidity incentives for the rich, so to say, right, or for farmers, whatever. And they have less than 100,000 daily users right now, like 70 K something. But you have more consumer focused chains, which do not focus on total value locked. And they can have half a million like BNB.
Pete (aka BFG) (20:30)
Yeah.
Victor (20:53)
or some of the others. yeah, in short, what we care about is the more transaction fees our chain gets, the more validators can it subsidize. The more validators we have, the more decentralized the network is, the more secure the network is. Okay, because the attack on our network is the coordination of unique humans scattered all over the world. So the more the better.
the more the more secure. And what we're focused on is getting consumer applications on chain, which will drive as many users as possible who are going to pay transaction fees in order to grow our network. That's pretty much it. know, growing the GDP of the network, so to say, is our goal. And yeah, we focus whatever is consumer oriented. Gaming is perfect, but it's hard to find good games. So we stick to one game we like.
And if they're gonna get millions of users, we're gonna get millions of users. That's it.
Pete (aka BFG) (21:51)
So one thing which comes to mind obviously, which is about onboarding a lot of humans is of course like social networks, social fi, things around human, you know, human conversation and human coordination in general. Any social fi shaping up on human node?
Victor (22:03)
Yeah,
So unfortunately, social fi, they don't have a SIBO resistance problem yet because they don't have that many users. mean, unfortunately, warp cost is, it's almost dead if you see it. Like even we, crypto companies, we're thinking should we post there or not because it's nobody, nobody looks at it, unfortunately. Since this is, yeah.
Pete (aka BFG) (22:30)
You should.
Victor (22:35)
This is a problem, but in gaming it's different. People just play games because the game is good. And that's it. And in terms of DSi, we actually are helping pretty interesting project which is focused on turning the speculative money, who want to speculate on meme coins or whatever which is growing or falling down fast.
Pete (aka BFG) (22:42)
Yeah, true.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (23:01)
and give this money to the labs, give this money to researchers by creating hypothesis markets. So there is a hypothesis that we will cure cancer by 2027. People bet on it. Transactions fees go to researchers.
Pete (aka BFG) (23:18)
I see. Well, that's pretty neat. It's kind of like Polymarket matched with pump.fun.
Victor (23:24)
Yes, matched with science as well.
Pete (aka BFG) (23:26)
matched with science, sure. Okay, yeah, that's possible. So how many, let's say, monthly active users you guys actually have on Human Node right now? Because you mentioned you have around 1,800 validators. So how many users? Or wallets?
Victor (23:38)
currently we're-
Yes. Yes. Yeah. I would say
currently we're pretty low in terms of on chain, especially our most popular product is off chain discord integration. You can vote in this court one human one vote. can distribute rewards in this court. Yeah. So this there we have up to 100,000 monthly users. So last month it was 100,000. Yeah. And on chain we're
Pete (aka BFG) (24:04)
Wow, nice.
Are you working by any chance with...
Victor (24:11)
on chain we have, I think less than 10K monthly usually, depending on different periods as well. as I said, we're just helping the first native apps. Consumer focused to get out to the market this year. So it will change pretty soon.
Pete (aka BFG) (24:16)
Okay.
I think, you know, the human proof might be super interesting, going forward for many communities that might be your flagship product which gets people to your blockchain.
Victor (24:46)
Yeah, hopefully that's what we're doing. We have on-chain solution, which different dApps can use, disconnected from the validation side again, just for the users. And we're currently connecting it to other blockchains so that, you know, the main contract, the main verification center is happening on humanoid blockchain.
Pete (aka BFG) (24:55)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (25:07)
But then you can transfer this verification to any chain that you need. We connected to like 10 of them this year and it's not the best UX so far, but we're gonna solve this problem because you have to switch from chain to chain, things like that. But yeah, Pete, totally we agree here with you and that's what we're building currently for the further adoption of our biometrics and the chain.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:11)
great.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Sucks.
So I should probably ask that before, but how big is the team now?
Victor (25:35)
We've been stable 20 plus people for the last four years and almost the same people all the way.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:41)
I see.
great. Mostly engineers, I assume.
Victor (25:47)
No, no, no, no, of course not. We have a BD team, five people, you know, trying to prove the industry that guys, you need civil resistance or your incentives will go to one person and he will dump it all into the market in one click. So we have, of course, the media team pushing the articles nonstop.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:53)
Wow.
Victor (26:14)
communicating with the community, so it's never just about engineers. Otherwise, you don't have community or distribution of your product.
Pete (aka BFG) (26:23)
yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I basically just assume it's engineers because it's what I mostly hear. So your 5BD number looks like huge, especially on web3 side of things.
Victor (26:34)
Yeah, well,
two of them are just starting, but it happens so that we have community members who are really active and they don't want to be community managers anymore. They want to provide more value and they want to try themselves in BD. And that's how our BD team emerged. It's all community people. We never hired somebody from like outside, so to say, in the BD terms. They're all believers. They want to shill our stuff every day.
Pete (aka BFG) (26:52)
awesome.
Right. congratulations on the strong community.
Victor (27:05)
Yeah, thanks.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:06)
You guys live in Discord,
right? I assume.
Victor (27:08)
sorry?
Pete (aka BFG) (27:09)
You guys live in Discord, like the community, mostly.
Victor (27:12)
⁓
Well, frankly speaking, a BD person myself, it's impossible to make BD in Discord. yeah, sure, the community is in Discord pretty thriving, but Telegram is the only thing that really gives you access to the people you don't know yet. That's the place where people read your direct messages. The only place, pretty much.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:27)
Okay.
I see.
Okay, That's actually true. So what are the last three chains you guys integrated? trying to keep the pace around 10 a year.
Victor (27:43)
no, no, 10 was this year, but the pace is like one a week on average. Yeah.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:47)
nice! So the latest
ones?
Victor (27:50)
The latest ones were Manta, which is like the layer 2 build on Celestia. And then there was... my god, Junction! So many of them. Junction is an interesting one. It's the layer 2 build by Jasminecoin. Jasmine is the biggest meme coin in Japan and the biggest by market cap coin in Japan totally. Like it's the only top 100...
Pete (aka BFG) (27:54)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
I see.
Victor (28:17)
coin from Japan
Pete (aka BFG) (28:18)
do you guys have a lot of members in Japan?
Victor (28:21)
One member in From the media team, Shannon. Peace.
Pete (aka BFG) (28:22)
Okay, that's neat.
And
so when you guys expand to a new chain, is it connected with some collaboration or project with them or you basically just integrate their chain and hope something is gonna happen?
Victor (28:40)
No, no, sure. We need users. That's it. We choose the chain based on the fact whether they have users or not and whether the apps or the chain itself needs Sibyl resistance or not. Okay. So some chains, their foundations are looking into democratizing the governance process, not just using token-based governance, but also using
Pete (aka BFG) (28:52)
Okay.
Victor (29:04)
well, verified humans as representatives and they well then we surely let's go. Guys, we want to make governance finally better in crypto or with the well, Janktion and Jasmine, they're still on testnet. And apparently there is use case of
Pete (aka BFG) (29:20)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (29:23)
Verifying testnet participants or mainnet participants before token generation event. I mean this was our main use case so far, airdrops. Pretty boring, but people need it because that's where the Sybil attack happens. Have you heard? So there is now one hot chain that we are looking to integrate with which is called Monad and the numbers there are really hilarious.
Pete (aka BFG) (29:33)
Mm-hmm.
Sure. ⁓
yeah, sure.
Victor (29:51)
So can you imagine how many testnet accounts that the transactions they have just out of your head?
Pete (aka BFG) (29:57)
I just remember there were like tens of millions accounts. I was one of them, but...
Victor (30:04)
They... yeah.
Oh, okay. So they have over 100 million accounts right now. But most of them are like Sibyl-resistant. You don't even need Sibyl-resistant to cut them out because they have just one or two transactions. And yeah, but anyway, you have still like six, five million of decent accounts left. And in our experience, 95 % usually bots.
Pete (aka BFG) (30:10)
It was a hunter, okay, nice.
I would guess,
I totally believe that.
Victor (30:33)
Yeah, so that's where we're useful. A few of the places we're useful.
Pete (aka BFG) (30:36)
So are you
guys actually being paid by the, you should be, by the foundations of larger L1s or L2s to integrate the human thing?
Victor (30:46)
No, no, no, they usually
they don't pay. So we have like few different business models. Actually, we have a few products. Okay, we have this core integration, which is completely free. It's our go to market. Okay. That made us like a little bit popular brought us users, but the on chain thing, of course, to get something on chain, have to pay a fee. Somebody has to pay a fee. And we for now let users pay the fee.
Pete (aka BFG) (31:09)
somebody.
Victor (31:14)
because the fee is like less than half a bucks and it's just like paying your regular transaction fee without even looking at it and it makes things more civil resistant because when you actually have to load the address with your money and pay the fee it will be a little bit hard to sell it to somebody else you know so sock puppeting unless you know the person
Pete (aka BFG) (31:17)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (31:39)
physically becomes pretty hard because you don't just give away private keys on left and right.
Pete (aka BFG) (31:45)
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm learning about human node, but it just appeared to me that your obvious customer is maybe not the end user, but someone different. And your end customer should probably pay you.
Victor (31:59)
You know, people, the companies, first of all, the competition is pretty hardcore in terms of user verification. So as a Sibyl resistant chain, one human, one node chain, for some reason, nobody copied our approach. I mean, we even have open source network, but nobody copied our approach. But in terms of user verification, the competition is there. And well.
Pete (aka BFG) (32:16)
Okay.
Victor (32:21)
We have this kind of model where we also can say, hey, if you want direct integration, we can give you a separate biometric server and you can pay us for it. But nobody done it so far in all these years. They're not ready to pay for it.
Pete (aka BFG) (32:36)
Hmm.
Yeah, This is just, you know, what obviously stands out when you talk about it. So let me ask one esoteric question before I ask my last question. And that's always is, so who will benefit the most when you actually succeed? Apart from the team, of course, because you will have all the satisfaction of great work. But who else? Yeah. Yeah.
Victor (33:00)
who will benefit the most when we succeed, right?
Well, apparently the token holders will benefit a lot. Let's be clear, we have a token. Some people have more with some people have less of it. At the same time, of course, once we succeed, there will be lot of transactions to the network. We will be able to support many, many more people more than 2000. Well, 10,000 in a few years.
Pete (aka BFG) (33:12)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (33:28)
which means that there are 10,000 people somewhere in the world getting their 10-20 dollars per month, which is something in some countries, you know, and basically the thing is the more transaction fees we get, another person benefits somewhere in the world compared to proof of work and proof of stake where only the for-profit companies running this validator entities are
profiting off the network. Ethereum Foundation itself is not even getting anything and Ethereum Foundation is running out of money, but yeah, the validators probably will support it later on because they have more money than Foundation right now, but still, it's a pretty different picture. And I hope that once we truly succeed, there will be a country, at least a small one, which is going to say
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, every citizen will be a human node. every transaction going from one person to another inside of the country, the fee is paid equally to all the citizens in the country. And you pretty much have
Pete (aka BFG) (34:24)
Okay.
Victor (34:37)
a kind of UBI but for something useful, not just giving people money for free so that they can continue their meaningless existence, so to say, in a dystopian future.
Pete (aka BFG) (34:49)
So it now actually reminds me, it would be nice if your human node would run the same way Minima does. Do you know Minima Global? It's basically a blockchain which runs on everything and combined with the proof of, with you know, your.
Victor (35:03)
Yeah, Minima is very interesting. Unfortunately, it can't
be EVM, too heavy would be. Maybe in the future it will be possible, but yeah, sure, it would be nice if people could just run it on phones. If you don't have to rent any server and you can connect, disconnect anytime.
Pete (aka BFG) (35:10)
Yeah.
Exactly.
think provenly it worked with what 500,000 people being connected. So, yeah, 500,000 nodes,
Victor (35:30)
Right now we say that we should scale together with the economic substance to scale for it. We won't just give tokens to people out of nowhere by printing them. We want to build a real economy around it.
Pete (aka BFG) (35:44)
Yeah, well, you
So my last question what's the question I forgot to ask about something you really wanted to talk about, which is important for Human Node or the team or the project. Everybody should know about, and I basically, you know.
Victor (35:57)
Well, it was a question that you asked me in the very beginning. it was about Worldcoin and comparison to other people in the space.
Pete (aka BFG) (36:04)
Right, yes,
okay, great. So how do you guys compare to WorldCoin and the similar projects in the space?
Victor (36:12)
Well, there are no projects in the space that are working on biometrics and on the validator level, on the layer one level. All of them are working on the software as a service level, I would say, where there are used to prove humanity of people, but not used to decentralize the very core of our industry. Okay.
Pete (aka BFG) (36:20)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (36:36)
Of
course, decentralization is not what we value currently as an industry. We forgot about it. would say centralized things get more traction because they have better UX and less costs. But I mean, it turns our industry into a joke unless we focus on the real values that we had initially. And
Okay, how do we compare the world coin is well, they have a great vision as well because They are actually giving out the money for free to people just for scanning once I think I got over $600 so far but yeah, of course, yeah after after the drop of the Price, I think I'm now getting ten times more from my human node than from just world coin air drops
Pete (aka BFG) (37:17)
Whoa.
Okay.
Victor (37:29)
And
basically the vision of WorldCoin is again, it's in terms of biometric part. They use specialized devices which allows them to use better lightness detection because of the infrared scan of your eye and scanning your eye is actually gives you 10 to 100 more accuracy. So meaning scalability.
across people all over the world than facial recognition. You have some things like not availability in 100 countries, which is a problem, but scalability is nice. And basically, as you see Sam Altman, he's building OpenAI, probably they're gonna get to AGI, the first ones, and WorldCoin will be a basis to feed people.
so that they can live on without having a job. And it's kinda, you know, I wouldn't say it's like they will be feeding people like cattle and all this stuff like other people imagine. I mean, it's still nice to give people something when they have nothing because of how technology turned out and because of the fact that we're still in capitalistic stage of our society.
But yeah, we're different so that we actually empower people to run the network. They're earning money because they do valuable stuff. And we don't give out money just from nothing. We are based on real economic activity on the network. And that's only when we grow to millions of people, not from the very beginning. So.
Their approaches are very different. The only thing we have in common is biometrics and cryptography, I would say.
Pete (aka BFG) (39:08)
That's my question answered. And, you know, definitely last question should always be what should people go and try on human node? I assume if you are user, you don't really need to validate that you are human or do you?
Victor (39:22)
What do mean you don't really have to validate people are human in terms of using the blockchain itself?
Pete (aka BFG) (39:25)
I mean, if I am just... Yeah, if
I just want to go and try the game which you guys have or any app which runs on Human Node...
Victor (39:32)
So,
this is true, you can use the dex know, the basic infrastructure, the bridge, without verifying yourself, but the really interesting things start when you verify yourself. Because that's what we're focused on. Okay, so the games that are going to launch on our chain, you will have to verify yourself to get rewarded. But you can try the game without verifying yourself. So, for now, I would say...
Pete (aka BFG) (39:45)
Got you.
I see.
Victor (39:57)
Go launch the human node because soon we're going to launch the DAO and that's where things really will get interesting. For now it's just a network without voting, without on-chain governance, but I think next year things are going to get really interesting and we build a novel reward system.
which we call bio-staker. So you basically stake your liquidity in the dex just provide tokens, right? And the less your share in the liquidity pool, the more percentages you get. So we have these unequal distributions, more to small holders, less to the whales. ⁓
Pete (aka BFG) (40:35)
⁓
Reversed. Nice.
Okay.
Victor (40:41)
Yeah, yeah, I bet we would have more liquidity if we would have done the opposite. But that's not what we think we should do.
Pete (aka BFG) (40:50)
Probably, yeah, but it may definitely encourage broader participation from smaller accounts.
Victor (40:57)
Yeah, In our case you have almost 1,000 people providing liquidity and for less than 1 million total value locked at the same time so it's 10k per person.
Pete (aka BFG) (41:12)
Okay, so the assumption actually works. More small accounts, nice.
Victor (41:13)
No, sorry, it's one K per person.
So we can decentralizing liquidity layer as well here by doing that
Pete (aka BFG) (41:22)
Yeah. Okay. If I provide liquidity, do I still need to scan my face every week?
Victor (41:30)
No, no, we made it there half a year. It would be too hardcore. So people are stockpuppeting it more than our chain, but it's not that crucial for security, so we let it be.
Pete (aka BFG) (41:41)
Sure, sure, that makes sense. Okay, wonderful. Viktor, where can people find you, where they should go and follow you? Any last words?
Victor (41:50)
Well, on Twitter. My Twitter account is tech underscore mingler. So I'm starting to be active there lately. Especially when I got sick, I was not able to move and I just started scrolling Twitter, replying to people and I'm finally getting how to do this because before that I was like, my God, how are you doing that? How are you wasting your time on that thingy?
Pete (aka BFG) (41:56)
Wonderful.
He's bored.
Hmm.
Victor (42:15)
But yeah, it seems more fun now.
Pete (aka BFG) (42:18)
Okay, I'll definitely put all the links into show notes, of course. Thank you very much for being here.
Victor (42:22)
Thanks.
Yeah, thank you very much, Pete. It was an awesome conversation.
Hello everyone. Welcome. I'm back with Web3Magic Podcast with the Builder Spotlight. And today I'm super excited because I have Viktor with me. And before we get into chat with Viktor, don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to tell your friends because we are talking to builders who are building something super cool on the blockchain rails. So Viktor, welcome.
Victor (00:18)
Thanks for having me, inviting me, Pete.
Pete (aka BFG) (00:20)
It's great to have you because you're working on a thing which I'm a big fan of and also I'm a little bit afraid of, so both sides. Yeah, because I, for example, definitely love the interactions online with humans, I'm not against bot answers, but I like to know that I'm asking the AI or somebody. I like to chat.
Victor (00:29)
We'll figure it out.
Pete (aka BFG) (00:43)
with people, not with bots. On the other hand, you know, I'm a little bit afraid of like giving away my data, scanning my retina for some sort of UBI or anything like that. So we'll get into it, but let's start with the question, which we always kick off with. How did you get to blockchain? When was it? Are you like the old time guard Bitcoin maxi or how did it start?
Victor (01:05)
Yeah,
kinda, kinda. So I first sort of say encountered blockchain back in 2013 in university. Everybody was talking about the Chinese ban and how badly it influenced the price of Bitcoin, but nobody knew what it is. And I went into blockchain full time in 2016, only three years after that.
Pete (aka BFG) (01:17)
Okay.
Okay, impressive.
Victor (01:34)
Yeah, and well, it was kind of very important step in life for me, I would say. I was working a lot on traditional startups. And to be honest, I had a little bit of even a slight depression for half a year. Yeah, yeah, but then kind of blockchain showed me the way, I would say.
Pete (aka BFG) (01:43)
Mm-hmm.
⁓ from the old startup world?
Nice. So you basically jumped into the space around 2016 and you stayed until now. Nice.
Victor (02:03)
Yeah, almost. Soon it be 10 years. It's hard to get out of here. Especially when you started something that is not finished yet.
Pete (aka BFG) (02:06)
Impressive.
True. So how did it start?
Victor (02:13)
I mean, 2016, it was pretty boring. People were mining around in their homes, you know, through decentralization back then, not like right now. And, well, you just hear about it. Then you start digging into it. And, I quickly checked out how I could earn more money there. But then I quickly found out that.
Well, if you focus on money, you're most likely going to lose it. So just focus on fundamentals more. And yeah, started researching a lot back then. And in 2018 already, we went deep into proof of stake market. So I mean, being validators, participating in the first governance of proof of stake networks like Tezos, Cosmos, Icon. There was a few of them.
Pete (aka BFG) (02:54)
Mm-hmm.
I see.
Victor (03:06)
And, well, you pretty much should understand now how it led us to human node. Cause, ⁓ back then in 2017, we understood that proof of work has the economies of scale, right? So the more capital you have, the cheaper you can buy the equipment. And right now. Home miners, where are they?
Pete (aka BFG) (03:10)
You
Victor (03:30)
I believe, well, if we find one, will be very lucky. Right.
Pete (aka BFG) (03:31)
Mm-hmm.
Right, yeah, I would like
to talk to him or her.
Victor (03:37)
Yeah, and then we tried out proof of stake as well. Of course, money is also not decentralized. It also has economies of scale. And we were there governing the blockchains, kind of decentralized blockchains in private telegram chats of 15 people, deciding who gets the money, which updates are going to get through. you know, nothing changed since then. Seven years later, we're still proof of work. We're still proof of stake.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:00)
I see.
Victor (04:04)
And yeah, that's why we're like, we should build a network where one human can only launch one node. And finally in 2020, we got the idea of how to build it, like architecturally speaking.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:19)
Okay, so nice. Pretty long journey through all the different things which we call issues now around decentralization got you to Human Node. Was that based on like some academic research project or you guys basically were just tinkering with the idea how to improve, you know, proof of stake and proof of work and how to make it a little bit more decentralized?
Victor (04:43)
I don't know, it's just based on ideas coming out of our minds. So it was me and Michael Founder Datto, we've been through it all together. So we're talking to each other all days long during the last 12 years. And during one of the talks, just came up as an idea. Well, we researched even three years before Can Wrap with Human Out.
Pete (aka BFG) (04:47)
Okay.
Victor (05:07)
How can we do this? You know, it sounded like sci-fi to be honest. Like how can you figure out that the person is unique without knowing who he is and give him opportunity to run a node to create a network where every node is equal in terms of computation and voting power. It was really sci-fi. mean, there was even sci-fi book called...
Ticada probably, something like that. Which kind of described the world where we're all together like ants and not like proof of work or proof of stake. And finally, we were researching nonstop. mean, crypto, I'm one of those people who never buys stuff from top 100. Usually I...
Pete (aka BFG) (05:32)
Okay.
Victor (05:52)
Appreciate those things that are below 500 when they go to top 100 simply sell them. So, and always on the edge, so to say. And yeah, one day just came up to us that, Hey, the biometric industry actually is pretty much mature now in 2020. And we checked out the accuracy parameters of matching faces one to another.
We checked out the privacy research that already was there for a few years. And of course, liveness detection, which is figuring out if there is a real person in front of the camera right now, or is it the hacker trying to bypass the video feed and inject deep fake? So, and well, we were pretty much fascinated by the current accuracy and it's actually, it,
Pete (aka BFG) (06:31)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (06:37)
It was progressing a lot back then, but now it kind of stopped more or less, I mean, the rise of biometric accuracy, but it's enough for a million people in terms of facial recognition.
Pete (aka BFG) (06:48)
Okay. Okay. So I think two co-founders is always a good story. Not too many, not too few.
Victor (06:57)
Yeah, yeah,
well, it's a rare thing when you have two people, not one person.
Pete (aka BFG) (07:03)
And so what is human node in short? Just give us a short pitch.
Victor (07:08)
Okay,
short picture, blockchain layer one, where one human can only launch one node. And of course the consequences, the governance of, you can build democratic, meritocratic, isocratic, whatever governance, which is not just plutocratic like what we have. And we do it by merging biometrics, cryptography, blockchain itself.
So that's pretty much it. mean.
Pete (aka BFG) (07:34)
Is there, so
is there like a official pathway how to prove that I am human, which is standardized, happens in some places or can happen anywhere? I'm just referring to Worldcoins, you know.
Victor (07:50)
⁓ sure, sure.
So we wanted to be as inclusive as possible. We were also thinking about some specialized hardware in the beginning. But when we checked what we can do with simple facial recognition available from any device, so yeah, you can do it from anywhere, we chose for now this modality is the main one. So.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:09)
Mm-hmm. Wonderful.
Okay.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:14)
nodes
Victor (08:14)
We were also, to be honest, thinking in the beginning to use specialized hardware. But eventually we checked out the accuracy of facial recognition available on any device. And we think that it was already enough back then for a blockchain scaling to millions of people, which is already a huge network.
it's totally enough to have facial recognition available on any device. So we went with this biometric modality for now. Of course we want to add more.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:45)
Okay.
So.
Pete (aka BFG) (08:47)
Yeah,
Because I like the part that you guys went with facial recognition. I'm not really sure if there was any other option back then in 2020, which would be, you know.
Victor (08:57)
I mean,
even now there is no option if you want to get rid of specialized hardware. Because I mean, second to facial recognition available on any device is voice recognition, which is much, much worse, like a hundred times worse. And for high quality things like retina in your eye or palmar recognition. ⁓
Pete (aka BFG) (09:19)
Fingerprints? Yeah,
fingerprints maybe.
Victor (09:22)
Fingerprint,
we don't have it on iPhones or PCs, many of those. It's not inclusive. Will you buy a new smartphone? Just for...
Pete (aka BFG) (09:25)
Yes,
Victor (09:32)
just for scanning your finger
Pete (aka BFG) (09:32)
Great.
No, I won't. But I already have it, so it's fine.
Victor (09:36)
Exactly.
Well, you're lucky user of some Samsung probably.
Pete (aka BFG) (09:42)
Yeah,
so I'm Samsung and iPhone user a long time.
Victor (09:47)
okay, so you have both. Nice, nice. So yeah, I mean, there was no other option, still no other option. But using face recognition, of course, would be much better if you could even not use your face because you're afraid that the protocol will use your face for something else. But we can talk about the cryptography part later, if you will.
Pete (aka BFG) (09:53)
I see.
Yeah, we definitely can. Well, let's jump into the security of information which you gather. I'm not really familiar with the way you guys store data. And I'm not even sure you need to store the data, right? So once I prove I'm human, you can basically just tick me off and take me as a human. You don't really need to store anything for that, or do you? Okay.
Victor (10:34)
we do. We actually do.
There is a there are two ways to do that. Okay, like full cryptography mode where you encrypt the data locally and You sent it to the well, let's say some decentralized storage in a hashed version kind of your face the problem with this approach is that Hash is deterministic, but biometrics are probabilistic So biometrics are neural networks
Pete (aka BFG) (10:52)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (11:01)
which basically in our case compare one face to another, right? And if you just hash them, you will always have the probability of having several hashes from one person, and that's already a Sybil attack, I mean. You have few hashes, you can pretend you are few people. you, one address, one of your,
Pete (aka BFG) (11:05)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Got you.
Victor (11:23)
blockchain addresses is attached to one of the hashes, another to another. And that's a simple attack. So we actually need to decrypt the data, the biometric data to compare it. And in order to make it completely secure, what we do is, well, we still encrypt the data locally on the device, which you're using, for example, your phone.
Pete (aka BFG) (11:45)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (11:45)
The data we extract on your phone locally is anonymized 3D face map. So it's kind of a representation of the points on your face in three dimensions, which don't already look like your face. In order to reverse it back to original, you have to know the weight of the neural network that we're using.
Yeah, this is step number one. Step number two, this, anonymized encrypted data goes to the confidential virtual machine. So what is that? It is a, basically servers with the encrypted memory.
Pete (aka BFG) (12:17)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (12:24)
And we make sure that even we don't have access. How? We build them so that when the server launches, it rotates the key inside it. So only the server has the key to decrypt the data, compare the data, and give you the answer if the person is unique or not. that's how we secure it. And one beautiful thing about our...
Pete (aka BFG) (12:42)
Okay. ⁓
Victor (12:48)
Encrypted servers is that in the next version users will be able to verify in their browsers If they are really talking to encrypted server or not, so it's kind of user-based attestation of the hardware encryption not just trust Intel or trust AMD
Pete (aka BFG) (13:06)
Okay, nice. let's talk about the human node part. So what hardware do I actually need to run a node and why should I?
Victor (13:15)
Okay, why should you? That's a beautiful question. The hardware part is easy. So we're for now, we don't need, we don't have a lot of transactions going through our blockchain. So we don't really need expensive hardware because of that. Once we get to 10 K transactions per second, which is a lot, right? In terms of adoption, we don't need more than
10, 20 bucks servers if you rent a cloud server. potentially, we discussed it just yesterday. You could use your Android device as a server, actually. If it's always plugged in and if it's directly connected to the internet for the good internet bandwidth, you could actually run it on your phone.
Pete (aka BFG) (13:42)
Okay.
Victor (14:00)
At home, of course, always 24 seven connected until your phone dies because it's not created to do this stuff. But yeah, you basically set up a server same as in proof of stake, but the requirements we have are pretty low. So 10, 20 bucks maximum. Actually, what you get in return is not much as well. We used to.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:16)
I see.
That's what I would expect.
Victor (14:23)
Yeah, we used to cover the cost of validators. So imagine we have 1,800 validators right now. And everybody who has nice uptime, around 98 % at least, gets $25 a month in humanoid terms. So all you can do is do x2 on your costs.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:31)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (14:48)
unless you just run it from your home and it's pretty much free for you.
Yeah. So becoming a node is not hard. one important thing you have to scan your face every week. The, the harder, yeah, it, saves us from sock puppeting. So there is a Cibyl attack, which is when a person creates tens or hundreds of accounts on his own. Okay. But, since we have biometrics, we're kind of got rid of a Cibyl attack with the high probability.
Pete (aka BFG) (14:58)
Whoa, okay.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (15:20)
And there comes the sock puppeting. Sock puppeting is like taking other people, you know, and using their faces for your own needs. So unless we scan people every week, they will start sock puppeting 100%. And for now, people do sock puppeting, but they're kind of doing it only with their close families, you know, which is fine because the whole family is kind of supporting our blockchain.
Pete (aka BFG) (15:29)
Okay, yeah.
Right, right, that makes sense.
Victor (15:46)
Yeah.
And of course the incentive part, we try to keep it as low as possible because it's not about incentives for us. It's about building a network of real human beings coordinating together in order to maintain the ledger of truth compared to proof of stake networks when you just give the ledger of truth. So to say to the
big for-profit companies. And this is the whole difference.
Pete (aka BFG) (16:14)
So how do you call your network? So it's not proof of stake, it's not proof of work, it's proof of what?
Victor (16:20)
Yeah.
So we call it proof of biometric uniqueness, just like that. But I would call it just the humanoid consensus. It's a new consensus mechanism.
Pete (aka BFG) (16:31)
Okay,
human node consensus sounds good. Yeah, we should coin that term. technology wise, how do you guys fit into the bigger, know, Web3 ecosystem with all the like Cosmoses, Bitcoins and EVMs?
Victor (16:43)
Okay. We actually built our new consensus mechanism by building a few modules playing with Polkadot SDK. So we really love Rust. We think that Rust is ideal language for building the things like that. And in terms of security, in terms of basically memory control and
Pete (aka BFG) (16:51)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (17:06)
Well, we have EVM, but we're not restricted to EVM only. That's the beautifulness again of Polkadot SDK is that we can change consensus, algorithms. We can have as many virtual machines as we want. So yeah, the idea is that we will still be the network of humans. But we can evolve together with the technology, so to say, and with the demands of developers.
Pete (aka BFG) (17:30)
Okay, so I cannot help but ask, so are you trying to be the L1 blockchain which I will use, for something, like voting, maybe securing the network instead of proof of stake.
Or you're trying to be the blockchain for everything. So meaning, you will actually plan to build the whole DeFi world and gaming world and deep in world and everything else on top of human node. What's the plan?
Victor (18:01)
So as you understand with our new consensus, we are kind of weird for the funds and the big whales existing in crypto, right? Because, well, we don't give them passive income on just staking their assets. It's not what our consensus needs. It's really hard for us to compete in terms of money. So we chose like the dual way, I would say. In the beginning, we focus on
biometric verification not only for our nodes, for any other means, airdrops, incentives, governance for other projects. And we already scanned over half a million people during the last two years since mainnet launch by basically providing this private biometric tech to other companies.
Pete (aka BFG) (18:34)
Mm-hmm.
right.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (18:50)
But in the long run, yeah, we are going to be the chain for everything because we are sure that, well, people will get it finally. People will get that proof of work proof of stake are not decentralized. Of course, the likes of BlackRock are gonna use Ethereum because they're gonna own Ethereum. You know, they're already owning Ethereum through Coinbase, probably through Binance, so that, and Lido.
because it will be less visible if you own Ethereum through different staking pools.
Pete (aka BFG) (19:22)
Yeah,
Victor (19:24)
Overall, yes, we are going to be the blockchain for everything and we have DeSci AI projects and gaming launching this year on our chain. And we think it will be pretty successful projects. We support them as much as we can.
Pete (aka BFG) (19:38)
Okay. I think then the inevitable question is always, so what are the preferred like verticals which you guys want to attack? Because, you know, I mentioned gaming, you mentioned DeSci. There's a lot of hope around DeSci.
so what would be the strategy to actually get people on human node? Because I like the idea that, you know, it is a chain which is proved by humans and that the money doesn't matter. And I think a lot of people would agree with this. The problem is money is actually running the world and people with the money would not agree with this because they have no reason to. Unless...
5 billion people will be on human node and only million with the money will be on Ethereum. Which is a hard thing to do.
Victor (20:26)
yeah, yeah. That's
actually what we're seeing with with bearer chain, know, bearer chain, they build proof of liquidity incentives for the rich, so to say, right, or for farmers, whatever. And they have less than 100,000 daily users right now, like 70 K something. But you have more consumer focused chains, which do not focus on total value locked. And they can have half a million like BNB.
Pete (aka BFG) (20:30)
Yeah.
Victor (20:53)
or some of the others. yeah, in short, what we care about is the more transaction fees our chain gets, the more validators can it subsidize. The more validators we have, the more decentralized the network is, the more secure the network is. Okay, because the attack on our network is the coordination of unique humans scattered all over the world. So the more the better.
the more the more secure. And what we're focused on is getting consumer applications on chain, which will drive as many users as possible who are going to pay transaction fees in order to grow our network. That's pretty much it. know, growing the GDP of the network, so to say, is our goal. And yeah, we focus whatever is consumer oriented. Gaming is perfect, but it's hard to find good games. So we stick to one game we like.
And if they're gonna get millions of users, we're gonna get millions of users. That's it.
Pete (aka BFG) (21:51)
So one thing which comes to mind obviously, which is about onboarding a lot of humans is of course like social networks, social fi, things around human, you know, human conversation and human coordination in general. Any social fi shaping up on human node?
Victor (22:03)
Yeah,
So unfortunately, social fi, they don't have a SIBO resistance problem yet because they don't have that many users. mean, unfortunately, warp cost is, it's almost dead if you see it. Like even we, crypto companies, we're thinking should we post there or not because it's nobody, nobody looks at it, unfortunately. Since this is, yeah.
Pete (aka BFG) (22:30)
You should.
Victor (22:35)
This is a problem, but in gaming it's different. People just play games because the game is good. And that's it. And in terms of DSi, we actually are helping pretty interesting project which is focused on turning the speculative money, who want to speculate on meme coins or whatever which is growing or falling down fast.
Pete (aka BFG) (22:42)
Yeah, true.
Mm-hmm.
Victor (23:01)
and give this money to the labs, give this money to researchers by creating hypothesis markets. So there is a hypothesis that we will cure cancer by 2027. People bet on it. Transactions fees go to researchers.
Pete (aka BFG) (23:18)
I see. Well, that's pretty neat. It's kind of like Polymarket matched with pump.fun.
Victor (23:24)
Yes, matched with science as well.
Pete (aka BFG) (23:26)
matched with science, sure. Okay, yeah, that's possible. So how many, let's say, monthly active users you guys actually have on Human Node right now? Because you mentioned you have around 1,800 validators. So how many users? Or wallets?
Victor (23:38)
currently we're-
Yes. Yes. Yeah. I would say
currently we're pretty low in terms of on chain, especially our most popular product is off chain discord integration. You can vote in this court one human one vote. can distribute rewards in this court. Yeah. So this there we have up to 100,000 monthly users. So last month it was 100,000. Yeah. And on chain we're
Pete (aka BFG) (24:04)
Wow, nice.
Are you working by any chance with...
Victor (24:11)
on chain we have, I think less than 10K monthly usually, depending on different periods as well. as I said, we're just helping the first native apps. Consumer focused to get out to the market this year. So it will change pretty soon.
Pete (aka BFG) (24:16)
Okay.
I think, you know, the human proof might be super interesting, going forward for many communities that might be your flagship product which gets people to your blockchain.
Victor (24:46)
Yeah, hopefully that's what we're doing. We have on-chain solution, which different dApps can use, disconnected from the validation side again, just for the users. And we're currently connecting it to other blockchains so that, you know, the main contract, the main verification center is happening on humanoid blockchain.
Pete (aka BFG) (24:55)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (25:07)
But then you can transfer this verification to any chain that you need. We connected to like 10 of them this year and it's not the best UX so far, but we're gonna solve this problem because you have to switch from chain to chain, things like that. But yeah, Pete, totally we agree here with you and that's what we're building currently for the further adoption of our biometrics and the chain.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:11)
great.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Sucks.
So I should probably ask that before, but how big is the team now?
Victor (25:35)
We've been stable 20 plus people for the last four years and almost the same people all the way.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:41)
I see.
great. Mostly engineers, I assume.
Victor (25:47)
No, no, no, no, of course not. We have a BD team, five people, you know, trying to prove the industry that guys, you need civil resistance or your incentives will go to one person and he will dump it all into the market in one click. So we have, of course, the media team pushing the articles nonstop.
Pete (aka BFG) (25:53)
Wow.
Victor (26:14)
communicating with the community, so it's never just about engineers. Otherwise, you don't have community or distribution of your product.
Pete (aka BFG) (26:23)
yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I basically just assume it's engineers because it's what I mostly hear. So your 5BD number looks like huge, especially on web3 side of things.
Victor (26:34)
Yeah, well,
two of them are just starting, but it happens so that we have community members who are really active and they don't want to be community managers anymore. They want to provide more value and they want to try themselves in BD. And that's how our BD team emerged. It's all community people. We never hired somebody from like outside, so to say, in the BD terms. They're all believers. They want to shill our stuff every day.
Pete (aka BFG) (26:52)
awesome.
Right. congratulations on the strong community.
Victor (27:05)
Yeah, thanks.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:06)
You guys live in Discord,
right? I assume.
Victor (27:08)
sorry?
Pete (aka BFG) (27:09)
You guys live in Discord, like the community, mostly.
Victor (27:12)
⁓
Well, frankly speaking, a BD person myself, it's impossible to make BD in Discord. yeah, sure, the community is in Discord pretty thriving, but Telegram is the only thing that really gives you access to the people you don't know yet. That's the place where people read your direct messages. The only place, pretty much.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:27)
Okay.
I see.
Okay, That's actually true. So what are the last three chains you guys integrated? trying to keep the pace around 10 a year.
Victor (27:43)
no, no, 10 was this year, but the pace is like one a week on average. Yeah.
Pete (aka BFG) (27:47)
nice! So the latest
ones?
Victor (27:50)
The latest ones were Manta, which is like the layer 2 build on Celestia. And then there was... my god, Junction! So many of them. Junction is an interesting one. It's the layer 2 build by Jasminecoin. Jasmine is the biggest meme coin in Japan and the biggest by market cap coin in Japan totally. Like it's the only top 100...
Pete (aka BFG) (27:54)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
I see.
Victor (28:17)
coin from Japan
Pete (aka BFG) (28:18)
do you guys have a lot of members in Japan?
Victor (28:21)
One member in From the media team, Shannon. Peace.
Pete (aka BFG) (28:22)
Okay, that's neat.
And
so when you guys expand to a new chain, is it connected with some collaboration or project with them or you basically just integrate their chain and hope something is gonna happen?
Victor (28:40)
No, no, sure. We need users. That's it. We choose the chain based on the fact whether they have users or not and whether the apps or the chain itself needs Sibyl resistance or not. Okay. So some chains, their foundations are looking into democratizing the governance process, not just using token-based governance, but also using
Pete (aka BFG) (28:52)
Okay.
Victor (29:04)
well, verified humans as representatives and they well then we surely let's go. Guys, we want to make governance finally better in crypto or with the well, Janktion and Jasmine, they're still on testnet. And apparently there is use case of
Pete (aka BFG) (29:20)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (29:23)
Verifying testnet participants or mainnet participants before token generation event. I mean this was our main use case so far, airdrops. Pretty boring, but people need it because that's where the Sybil attack happens. Have you heard? So there is now one hot chain that we are looking to integrate with which is called Monad and the numbers there are really hilarious.
Pete (aka BFG) (29:33)
Mm-hmm.
Sure. ⁓
yeah, sure.
Victor (29:51)
So can you imagine how many testnet accounts that the transactions they have just out of your head?
Pete (aka BFG) (29:57)
I just remember there were like tens of millions accounts. I was one of them, but...
Victor (30:04)
They... yeah.
Oh, okay. So they have over 100 million accounts right now. But most of them are like Sibyl-resistant. You don't even need Sibyl-resistant to cut them out because they have just one or two transactions. And yeah, but anyway, you have still like six, five million of decent accounts left. And in our experience, 95 % usually bots.
Pete (aka BFG) (30:10)
It was a hunter, okay, nice.
I would guess,
I totally believe that.
Victor (30:33)
Yeah, so that's where we're useful. A few of the places we're useful.
Pete (aka BFG) (30:36)
So are you
guys actually being paid by the, you should be, by the foundations of larger L1s or L2s to integrate the human thing?
Victor (30:46)
No, no, no, they usually
they don't pay. So we have like few different business models. Actually, we have a few products. Okay, we have this core integration, which is completely free. It's our go to market. Okay. That made us like a little bit popular brought us users, but the on chain thing, of course, to get something on chain, have to pay a fee. Somebody has to pay a fee. And we for now let users pay the fee.
Pete (aka BFG) (31:09)
somebody.
Victor (31:14)
because the fee is like less than half a bucks and it's just like paying your regular transaction fee without even looking at it and it makes things more civil resistant because when you actually have to load the address with your money and pay the fee it will be a little bit hard to sell it to somebody else you know so sock puppeting unless you know the person
Pete (aka BFG) (31:17)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (31:39)
physically becomes pretty hard because you don't just give away private keys on left and right.
Pete (aka BFG) (31:45)
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm learning about human node, but it just appeared to me that your obvious customer is maybe not the end user, but someone different. And your end customer should probably pay you.
Victor (31:59)
You know, people, the companies, first of all, the competition is pretty hardcore in terms of user verification. So as a Sibyl resistant chain, one human, one node chain, for some reason, nobody copied our approach. I mean, we even have open source network, but nobody copied our approach. But in terms of user verification, the competition is there. And well.
Pete (aka BFG) (32:16)
Okay.
Victor (32:21)
We have this kind of model where we also can say, hey, if you want direct integration, we can give you a separate biometric server and you can pay us for it. But nobody done it so far in all these years. They're not ready to pay for it.
Pete (aka BFG) (32:36)
Hmm.
Yeah, This is just, you know, what obviously stands out when you talk about it. So let me ask one esoteric question before I ask my last question. And that's always is, so who will benefit the most when you actually succeed? Apart from the team, of course, because you will have all the satisfaction of great work. But who else? Yeah. Yeah.
Victor (33:00)
who will benefit the most when we succeed, right?
Well, apparently the token holders will benefit a lot. Let's be clear, we have a token. Some people have more with some people have less of it. At the same time, of course, once we succeed, there will be lot of transactions to the network. We will be able to support many, many more people more than 2000. Well, 10,000 in a few years.
Pete (aka BFG) (33:12)
Mm-hmm.
Victor (33:28)
which means that there are 10,000 people somewhere in the world getting their 10-20 dollars per month, which is something in some countries, you know, and basically the thing is the more transaction fees we get, another person benefits somewhere in the world compared to proof of work and proof of stake where only the for-profit companies running this validator entities are
profiting off the network. Ethereum Foundation itself is not even getting anything and Ethereum Foundation is running out of money, but yeah, the validators probably will support it later on because they have more money than Foundation right now, but still, it's a pretty different picture. And I hope that once we truly succeed, there will be a country, at least a small one, which is going to say
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, every citizen will be a human node. every transaction going from one person to another inside of the country, the fee is paid equally to all the citizens in the country. And you pretty much have
Pete (aka BFG) (34:24)
Okay.
Victor (34:37)
a kind of UBI but for something useful, not just giving people money for free so that they can continue their meaningless existence, so to say, in a dystopian future.
Pete (aka BFG) (34:49)
So it now actually reminds me, it would be nice if your human node would run the same way Minima does. Do you know Minima Global? It's basically a blockchain which runs on everything and combined with the proof of, with you know, your.
Victor (35:03)
Yeah, Minima is very interesting. Unfortunately, it can't
be EVM, too heavy would be. Maybe in the future it will be possible, but yeah, sure, it would be nice if people could just run it on phones. If you don't have to rent any server and you can connect, disconnect anytime.
Pete (aka BFG) (35:10)
Yeah.
Exactly.
think provenly it worked with what 500,000 people being connected. So, yeah, 500,000 nodes,
Victor (35:30)
Right now we say that we should scale together with the economic substance to scale for it. We won't just give tokens to people out of nowhere by printing them. We want to build a real economy around it.
Pete (aka BFG) (35:44)
Yeah, well, you
So my last question what's the question I forgot to ask about something you really wanted to talk about, which is important for Human Node or the team or the project. Everybody should know about, and I basically, you know.
Victor (35:57)
Well, it was a question that you asked me in the very beginning. it was about Worldcoin and comparison to other people in the space.
Pete (aka BFG) (36:04)
Right, yes,
okay, great. So how do you guys compare to WorldCoin and the similar projects in the space?
Victor (36:12)
Well, there are no projects in the space that are working on biometrics and on the validator level, on the layer one level. All of them are working on the software as a service level, I would say, where there are used to prove humanity of people, but not used to decentralize the very core of our industry. Okay.
Pete (aka BFG) (36:20)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Victor (36:36)
Of
course, decentralization is not what we value currently as an industry. We forgot about it. would say centralized things get more traction because they have better UX and less costs. But I mean, it turns our industry into a joke unless we focus on the real values that we had initially. And
Okay, how do we compare the world coin is well, they have a great vision as well because They are actually giving out the money for free to people just for scanning once I think I got over $600 so far but yeah, of course, yeah after after the drop of the Price, I think I'm now getting ten times more from my human node than from just world coin air drops
Pete (aka BFG) (37:17)
Whoa.
Okay.
Victor (37:29)
And
basically the vision of WorldCoin is again, it's in terms of biometric part. They use specialized devices which allows them to use better lightness detection because of the infrared scan of your eye and scanning your eye is actually gives you 10 to 100 more accuracy. So meaning scalability.
across people all over the world than facial recognition. You have some things like not availability in 100 countries, which is a problem, but scalability is nice. And basically, as you see Sam Altman, he's building OpenAI, probably they're gonna get to AGI, the first ones, and WorldCoin will be a basis to feed people.
so that they can live on without having a job. And it's kinda, you know, I wouldn't say it's like they will be feeding people like cattle and all this stuff like other people imagine. I mean, it's still nice to give people something when they have nothing because of how technology turned out and because of the fact that we're still in capitalistic stage of our society.
But yeah, we're different so that we actually empower people to run the network. They're earning money because they do valuable stuff. And we don't give out money just from nothing. We are based on real economic activity on the network. And that's only when we grow to millions of people, not from the very beginning. So.
Their approaches are very different. The only thing we have in common is biometrics and cryptography, I would say.
Pete (aka BFG) (39:08)
That's my question answered. And, you know, definitely last question should always be what should people go and try on human node? I assume if you are user, you don't really need to validate that you are human or do you?
Victor (39:22)
What do mean you don't really have to validate people are human in terms of using the blockchain itself?
Pete (aka BFG) (39:25)
I mean, if I am just... Yeah, if
I just want to go and try the game which you guys have or any app which runs on Human Node...
Victor (39:32)
So,
this is true, you can use the dex know, the basic infrastructure, the bridge, without verifying yourself, but the really interesting things start when you verify yourself. Because that's what we're focused on. Okay, so the games that are going to launch on our chain, you will have to verify yourself to get rewarded. But you can try the game without verifying yourself. So, for now, I would say...
Pete (aka BFG) (39:45)
Got you.
I see.
Victor (39:57)
Go launch the human node because soon we're going to launch the DAO and that's where things really will get interesting. For now it's just a network without voting, without on-chain governance, but I think next year things are going to get really interesting and we build a novel reward system.
which we call bio-staker. So you basically stake your liquidity in the dex just provide tokens, right? And the less your share in the liquidity pool, the more percentages you get. So we have these unequal distributions, more to small holders, less to the whales. ⁓
Pete (aka BFG) (40:35)
⁓
Reversed. Nice.
Okay.
Victor (40:41)
Yeah, yeah, I bet we would have more liquidity if we would have done the opposite. But that's not what we think we should do.
Pete (aka BFG) (40:50)
Probably, yeah, but it may definitely encourage broader participation from smaller accounts.
Victor (40:57)
Yeah, In our case you have almost 1,000 people providing liquidity and for less than 1 million total value locked at the same time so it's 10k per person.
Pete (aka BFG) (41:12)
Okay, so the assumption actually works. More small accounts, nice.
Victor (41:13)
No, sorry, it's one K per person.
So we can decentralizing liquidity layer as well here by doing that
Pete (aka BFG) (41:22)
Yeah. Okay. If I provide liquidity, do I still need to scan my face every week?
Victor (41:30)
No, no, we made it there half a year. It would be too hardcore. So people are stockpuppeting it more than our chain, but it's not that crucial for security, so we let it be.
Pete (aka BFG) (41:41)
Sure, sure, that makes sense. Okay, wonderful. Viktor, where can people find you, where they should go and follow you? Any last words?
Victor (41:50)
Well, on Twitter. My Twitter account is tech underscore mingler. So I'm starting to be active there lately. Especially when I got sick, I was not able to move and I just started scrolling Twitter, replying to people and I'm finally getting how to do this because before that I was like, my God, how are you doing that? How are you wasting your time on that thingy?
Pete (aka BFG) (41:56)
Wonderful.
He's bored.
Hmm.
Victor (42:15)
But yeah, it seems more fun now.
Pete (aka BFG) (42:18)
Okay, I'll definitely put all the links into show notes, of course. Thank you very much for being here.
Victor (42:22)
Thanks.
Yeah, thank you very much, Pete. It was an awesome conversation.
