Cardano’s DePIN Giant Targets ENTERPRISE & NEW Partnerchain Confirmed!

And basically, it will allow us to have an ion-powered white-label solution. This is the potential of the pilot: if successful, every laptop will have an ion-powered cloud service by default. You can imagine how that can scale on the demand side very [Music] quickly.

What's up, Nation? Welcome to DAP Central, your home for everything blockchain and crypto. I'm your host, Fed.

As a part of today's video, we're talking deep, sitting down with Dr Naf from the official Iagon protocol, which has actually launched on the mainnet for a little bit over a year. But there are a lot of brand new things cooking, which we'll be diving into. So without any further ado, let me bring up today's guest, Dr Naf.

Welcome! How are you? Hey, Fed, glad to be here.

Thanks for having me again. It's been a long time since I spoke to you—not so long, actually, in person; we spoke at the Cardano Summit, but it's been a while on stream. Yeah, no, thank you for taking the time.

I know you're a busy man. Maybe that's a good way for us to sort of kick things off, right? How was your experience at the recent Cardano Summit?

Yeah, it was great! The quality of people we talked to at the Cardano Summit was really amazing. The Cardano Foundation did a great job of collecting a lot of intellectual people there, especially from the Web 2 space, who are really looking into Cardano as a first stop for Web 3 and blockchain solutions.

I think it was great connecting with people, great networking, and it's always wonderful to meet people in person. Nice, nice! Now, before we dive into today's conversation, I just want to lay down the foundation for the viewers.

We'll obviously discuss a little bit about you, your background, and what Iagon is. For anybody who hasn't heard of it—I’d be highly surprised, as I cover it pretty frequently on the channel—but after that, you guys have some new targets, right? You guys are now focusing on enterprise adoption, so I'd love to talk about your private distributed cloud services, followed by delegated staking, your Cyclone hardware, and we'll discuss the compute portion of Iagon services hitting the mainnet, and then we'll get some closing thoughts or key takeaways from you, Dr Naf.

So without any further ado, for anybody who might be hearing or seeing you for the first time, do you mind breaking down a little bit about yourself, your background, and what Iagon is generally speaking? Yeah, I'm actually from the healthcare sector, so I'm a dentist by profession. I actually came across blockchain and blockchain technology back in 2013 when I read the Satoshi paper.

That's when I tried to apply that technology to medical data, healthcare data, and patient data privacy. We actually worked on initial concepts and things like that in the early phase, and then I didn’t approach this idea until early 2017 or late 2016 with some of the co-founders: Dr Rohit Gupta, Dr Alot Harrison, who were actually at the summit as well. It was very fun for them to be there and get to know the Cardano community and ecosystem.

Also, Dr Cláudio Lima, who could not make it, but he's also part of the team. With their collective skill set, we molded the idea into a much broader scope, focusing not just on medical data and medical data privacy but in general cloud services. So what Iagon is, in general, from that vision onwards, is kind of like Airbnb for storage and compute.

What we do is connect end users with performant, compliant, one-click data solutions and compute solutions. Right now, our focus is just on storage. We have people providing their idle capacity, so anyone with idle storage or idle compute can provide their capacities to the Iagon network.

In return, they earn IIG rewards and/or Ada rewards, which come in the form of subscription fees that the users are paying. We connect them to end users looking for, let’s say, cost-effective, reliable, compliant solutions, which can be anyone from the web 2 and retail sector, but specifically targeting the Web 2 industry. So there are two navigations, and we're kind of like the middleman, I guess, Airbnb in this sense—we're matching people's needs with the resource providers.

Nice summarization there! For anybody who's hearing about Iagon for the first time or maybe just wants some more information about it, official links will be left down below. The website is available at iagon.

com. That said, maybe we should sort of rehash a little bit, right? What are some of the key developments or some of the biggest highlights leading into the summit, and then maybe we can talk about what comes next?

Yeah, I mean, long-term leading up to the summit, people have to understand we’re still very young as a project, even though we've been in the space for a long time. Startups take sometimes longer than anticipated. We started up in 2017, so it's taken seven years to get to at least the starting phase, or, you know, the starting line if you want to call it that.

We launched the mainnet on storage in December 2020, around Christmas time, so since that time we've had about over 500 nodes providing their storage. . .

capacity to the network and almost eight petabytes of data availability across 51 countries. So, that's been a huge success leading up to the summit, and it's been a big turnaround. Rohit, one of the co-founders, specifically stated that he also attended the last summit, so he saw this big difference in terms of how Iagon has gone from such a smaller player to a big player in such a short time.

We are also now launching a few other things that we've focused on since the mainnet. We've been focusing a lot on Web 2 enterprise adoption, and actually, we’ve been focusing on that since last year. It's taken a while to get here, but we've been focused for a while.

Then, we have the Cyclone device, which is an easy plug-in plug-and-play node for retail users. So, people that want to participate in the network and don’t have the tech know-how can easily plug and play. They can plug in the Cyclone or purchase a Cyclone, plug it in at home, stake IIG, and earn IIG.

These Cyclones are set up in an optimal way so that you don’t have to do any tinkering, but it also gives advanced users the option to tinker because it comes without drives and with drives. You can order it without drives, and if you know how to set it up yourself, you can definitely do that. However, it also comes with a ready-to-go package with the drives as well.

Then, you can just stake your IIG and start earning rewards. We launched this Cyclone at Rare Evo a few months ago in August. It's a pre-launch, basically, so it's a pre-order, kind of like a Kickstarter.

We will be shipping them out in around five months' time. We have to focus on packaging, software, and making sure that very easy and simple instructions are provided when they do get this device. It's a very heavy-duty device; it’s actually comparatively much more cost-effective than similar NAS systems like Synology and QNAP, and things like that.

These are examples of how some of the collaborations that we're doing with some of our partners, like Omen, are taking shape. They have their own skin available and did the artwork; it's a beautiful art piece. We can kind of have these custom pieces for community members and things like that so they can purchase it.

We've been working with a few others as well that are in the pipeline, which will be doing similar artwork. We will also have a referral program that will give a 5% kickback to the people who are onboarding others to purchase it. It's not live yet, but it will be live soon, so watch out for that.

That leads up to the summit; the Cyclone and the mainnet are the kind of the main achievements. There's a lot going on; we also have the compute coming up as well. The alpha's already rolling in.

Kudos to you guys; I have to say, I really appreciate the artwork and the customizability of the Cyclones. For full transparency, I don’t own one yet, but given how simple and easy it appears to be to run, I don’t consider myself too technical, but I would consider this sort of still within my realm. So, I'm looking forward to contributing to Iagon's sharing economy and hopefully getting my hands on one of these Cyclones as one of the quote-unquote pioneers.

Now, let’s jump into enterprise adoption. I sat down with Georgio Zenetti from the Card Foundation, and he spoke about the fact that the foundation is sort of focusing more or less on enterprise. I think that has trickled down to what you guys are doing, so I’d love to hear, number one, why enterprise, and then, number two, why these new solutions when you already have a really working and functional product?

The private distributed cloud service is something that we’re really focusing on for the enterprise. That's currently announced in Catalyst. This is businesses allowing them to provide their idle capacity.

The end users, or the customers, or the consumers of the pilot that we're working with will be providing their idle capacities to Iagon. This also reduces any form of centralization because there are multiple parties involved; it's not just one party contributing to the network. It’s the consumers and users of that specific pilot who are providing the idle capacities.

Not only that, but this creates a private distributed cloud, which is gated—not gated in a sense, but gated specifically for those businesses and clientele within that pilot circle. This allows you to participate in it as a node operator but also as a user; you can use their services. When we have our end users using a specific service, they can actually choose a region, choose a provider; they can specifically use these services.

So, it will be much more scalable and much more performant because these business clients of the pilot have very high-performance devices, very available devices. We're talking about industrial level and further. What’s interesting about this pilot is that once we have this private distributed cloud, what we can do is have a white-label solution on top of the pilot’s laptops.

The pilot produces laptops as well, and basically, it will allow. . .

us to have an ion-powered white label solution. This is the potential, if the pilot is successful, that every machine—every PC, every laptop—will have an ion-powered cloud service by default. For example, some laptops come with certain cloud services; you can imagine how that can scale on the demand side very quickly.

This negates any legalities and, let's say, legal issues that this pilot might face if it were a completely distributed cloud service, meaning that random people provide their services. This is focused on the private distributed cloud, meaning that only the clients of the pilot are providing their idle capacities—people they have already contracted with and vetted. This provides a very easy go-to-market strategy and is easy for their legal team to apply to their products.

Furthermore, this also allows them to reduce the price of cloud services to the end user. Thus, the people who are buying laptops may be paying much more, undercutting the market by a significant margin. There's a win on the user side because they are using cloud services in a much more cost-effective manner, with performance that is even higher than current cloud solutions.

On the other side, business clients providing their idle capacity gain extra revenue that they never had before. The pilot can either share the revenues with these business clients or actually undercut their services to them, reducing their costs. It’s a win-win scenario for everyone involved in this storage economy, and obviously a great use case for IAGON and Cardano.

Thank you, Dr Nath. To make sure I understand the impact of this enterprise solution: This basically opens up the floodgates for big brands and companies to now begin providing their idle computing power to IAGON, thus boosting the available resources for end users looking to take advantage of the IAGON solution. Is that correct?

Correct! At the same time, you're not just providing idle capacities; you're creating a scalable network instantly, something that not only we've had a problem with but something layer ones have had a problem with as well. I think this will provide a solution for a lot of issues.

Perfect! For anybody who just wants to find out more, I believe there's a Catalyst proposal you guys teased out earlier. I’ll leave the links to it down below, but for anyone who isn't already aware, IAGON Skill contains all of the proposals there.

You’ve got all the information as you can see, the amount requested in ADA, and then we have all the details about the actual solution, of course, with the retraction of the actual companies participating as part of the pilot. Now, that said, Dr NV, we have to discuss timelines. When can we expect something like this to hit the mainnet if the proposal is approved?

We're making sure that there's care attached to any kind of deadline, but the current deadline for any kind of adoption would probably be sometime next year. First, the pilot has to succeed; they will be testing out the IAGON nodes and the IAGON node software. If everything goes well there, then the next step is probably the white label solution, and potentially the compute later on.

There are many different variables we can get into once the pilot has succeeded, but we’re looking at between six to twelve months from January. I hope it’s on the lower range because I don't think the pilot will take that long, as long as the software is stable. That's what we are completely focusing on right now; that's why we’ve seen some delays in some of our other releases, like the compute mainnet which was actually scheduled for last month.

However, since this pilot was onboarded, we've been focusing a lot of our work on this. I think the dividends you'll earn from onboarding enterprise clients will be well worth it. I’m not knocking any of your other developments, as I think they are all just as important, but I think enterprise adoption is very much needed.

Let’s maybe shift gears a little bit and talk about delegated staking. For anybody who isn’t aware, can you explain what that is and how it plays a role in the IAGON ecosystem? Yeah, I'm a big fan of ensuring that when you're staking, there’s a purpose behind it.

Staking just for the sake of staking is not useful to me. Additionally, earning yields on it is critical. If there’s utility behind the staking, that makes much more sense.

That’s why we’ve thought long and hard about how to involve token holders who don’t have the tech know-how to set up a node. We obviously took inspiration from Cardano about delegated staking. On Cardano, you can delegate your ADA and earn passive revenue from it in ADA rewards.

We wanted to do something similar, and obviously, none of the Cardano native tokens have done this yet, so it’s relatively new in terms of what we are offering. We're trying to do—uh, what we're trying to do is basically allow you to delegate your IIG tokens to node operators who want to expand their services or even start their services. So, you have, uh, tech-savvy people that know how to run a node, and you have non-expert people that hold IIG tokens, which are idle and not doing any work.

The tech-savvy people have the devices but maybe don't have enough tokens to allocate to the devices. So, we're finding that kind of match in between. People that have tokens can delegate their tokens to node operators that have the capacity and can increase their capacity, thereby creating a marketplace within itself.

People can offer their nodes to anyone who wants to delegate, and they will have a reputation score based on their performance, availability, and the devices they have, as well as how much storage they're looking for. Then, you have token holders who want to delegate; the node operators will also be able to set their profit margins. So, for example, if you're a node operator and you're looking for a certain type of delegation to your node to increase your capacity, you can decide for yourself what your profit margins are.

Is it 50/50? Is it 70/30 to the delegators? Whatever that might be.

And then, uh, we don't want to influence how the market evolves, obviously. So, the market decides on whom they want to delegate to and what kind of nodes they're interested in, same like Cardano, right? You have your margins, you know, different kinds of pledges and things like that, so you decide where you want to delegate your ADA.

The biggest part of ADA delegation is that ADA is liquid. That was another problem we had to solve. Here, it's kind of semi-liquid; it is liquid, so you can dilute your position when you're staking.

But since our model is different, we provide storage to end users, and we need to have a stable kind of use case for end users—they have to have storage availability. You can't just shut down your node and not have storage availability, and if there's a file there, it needs to be migrated. We have a three-month locking period, but during that three months, you're able to have a continuous three-month locking period, meaning that you can unstake and have to wait three months to receive back your IIG tokens.

You can unstake whenever you want, but you can also sell that position—sell that stake—so for a small discount according to the marketplace. You can actually sell that position to people that are looking to buy maybe at a discounted price for staked IIG. All these kinds of intricacies we're looking at involve so much complexity; it's taken us a long time to get to the audit process.

We started the audit process back in August, and there's been back and forth, and even the pilot has kind of delayed certain things because of this audit. The audit has been delayed a little bit as well, also because I recently released an updated version. So, we had to redo some of the contract language.

It's been a long time, but now we're very close to delegated staking. I think people will view this as a first on Cardano; it's maybe even a first in the web3 ecosystem in terms of how it's looking. It looks very complex, but we're trying to make it easy on the front end for users as well.

Kudos to you and the team for taking this approach, right? Obviously, it's not the easy road when it comes to staking. It obviously involves a lot of work, but I think in the long term it will pay off, especially when I look at it from an end-user perspective.

Like I mentioned, I currently don't run a node, but if I hold Iagon, right, that allows me to at least put it to work for me. I may not be making all of the rewards that I would make as if I were a node operator, but I'm at least able to get something, right? So, I think it's a win-win—obviously for Iagon as a protocol, you guys are getting more people up and running.

From a holder's perspective, they can now earn a little bit, and then from a node operator's perspective, if they didn't have enough Iagon to get operations up and running or weren't able to expand, they now have the means to do that. So again, I think it's a really wonderful solution and something that helps the entire ecosystem, including Iagon, continue to grow. Now, we've already sort of touched on the Cyclone hardware, but do you mind breaking down how people were able to contribute to Iagon before the Cyclone and then maybe what the expectations are, you know, once the Cyclones start to ship and go out?

Is that going to be sort of the de facto way for people to contribute to Iagon's storage model? Yeah, so Cyclone won't be the default way; it's just more about creating more use cases and opportunities for people that don't know how to set up a node. We have delegated staking for the non-tech-savvy, and we have the Cyclone for the non-expert, so maybe.

. . You want your own node.

You're not nonch savvy, but you can still participate. We want to try to make it as inclusive as possible, not exclusive. So we want to try to get as much participation from a broader audience as possible.

This is kind of the goal of providing these tools. Even if you don't have the Cyclone, you can still set up node operation through data centers to core locations through your PC. We have different kinds of software available: Linux, Mac, Windows, CLI.

We have NAS support, Synology, KEAP—so a lot of different software is being supported. We’re trying to make the Cyclone kind of the easiest device to get into because it's the optimal setup, in our opinion. That will make it easy for troubleshooting and support and things like that.

So, it won't be a de facto standard, but it will be more so. You can also run a storage node, a compute node, and even a Cardano relay node on one of these devices. You can even run multiple nodes on these devices, especially the Qs Pro, which is able to handle all these tasks.

In terms of compute, we are thinking of releasing that later this year, as long as the pilot is first and all the internal and external audits are done thoroughly. We're thinking of releasing at least the MVP version of the compute on mainnet sometime this year, hopefully. I don't want to guarantee it because sometimes when you guarantee things, it doesn’t work out.

For the compute side, what we're trying to look for is making it also very simple. The initial version we’re looking to do is to enable developers to log into GitHub, upload their repository, and run the repository through the distributed compute. If that instance fails, there's a backup failure for another computer to take over.

It's not completely distributed—just like, for example, storage wasn't in the beginning phase—but the long-term vision is to make it fully decentralized, and that's what we want to achieve. Obviously, at a certain instance, it has to be somewhat centralized before we get to fully decentralized, and that's our aim. For compute instances, we also want the Cyclone to create a marketplace or something easy, like an Android app store or Apple App Store, where you can install certain plugins to run nodes.

For example, let's say if you have a marketplace on the computer and install a plugin, such as a Cardano node, you would just install it, and boom, you're running a Cardano node. That's how simple we want to make it. Obviously, the dev team is going to struggle, and I like making things complex but easy for the user.

So, I think in the end, we will always think long-term about making sure it's future-proof and geared towards future adoption. We're focusing on easy tools, and eventually, in the future, we may also be able to run different types of nodes, like Zerus nodes, for example—any kind of nodes that want to run on that network on that compute instance. Now, will that be able to be done simultaneously?

Because again, you're now mentioning Iagon storage, Iagon compute, Cardano nodes, server nodes. This is all going to be happening at the same time, is that correct? So, not for the Cyclone.

The Cyclone will only be able to handle possibly two nodes: a storage node and a compute node, or a storage node and a Cardano node. Right? So, you can either set that up—that would be the ideal setup.

I mean, you could probably max it out and run multiple nodes on it, but it's not meant for that. We will have a recommendation, and in the app itself, we'll let you know exactly what the limitations are. For example, if you're running without a device and you have a compute subscription to any kind of computing power on the app itself, you don't need any device.

You can actually run compute nodes that are providing their idle capacity. Think about it at a large scale—if there's so much computing power around the world, you can run your own instances on these computing resources if you'd like. You can run multiple instances of whatever you like, as long as the capacity is there.

Yeah, that's almost like Inception, right? You're using Iagon's compute power to then run additional services or additional nodes. Really interesting concept to think about.

One last question before we jump into the very last topic: Can we expect additional hardware from Iagon in addition to the Cyclones? The Cyclone Qs Pro is the latest one. We do have plans to introduce additional hardware—upgraded hardware, even more enterprise-level hardware that might be even more heavy-duty, as we talked about, that includes GPU power as well.

So, there will be more heavy-duty devices in the future, but nothing has been released publicly yet, and I don't think it will be anytime soon. I want to focus specifically on getting the Cyclone right. It is our first hardware, and we want to make sure we focus on delivering that in a professional manner.

All right, so Dr Nav, as we get into our second-to-last topic, there's actually one that just came on my radar. I want to discuss the compute mainnet. So, as a part of or just throughout this conversation today, you've hinted at compute.

Could you maybe expound on the importance of this and sort of how it brings Iagon to the next level? Yeah, so we're able to do a lot of things with computing. We're able to do website hosting, dynamic website hosting, and hosting dApps.

It will create a lot of different use cases. So, when we're talking about the compute mainnet, it's specifically CPU right now, and later we will focus on GPU, which will also provide different services. There are a lot of unique use cases, I would say, that we will be able to do.

We will also be indexing that will help with sharding mechanisms and encryption. All this can be utilized for that, and we're excited to hopefully launch that sometime this year, at least an MVP version, if not at the beginning of next year. So, as we jump into the final questions here, you guys have been working, I believe, as midnight pioneers, right?

You guys have taken an approach, I think, towards bringing— I want to say it's healthcare data—using Midnight or through Midnight. But in addition, there's been a tease of a potential Iagon blockchain. Now, I don't want to assume anything.

Is there anything that you can share here with us as a bit of alpha? Yeah, so we were actually the first ones to get approved for the network exp, which is the partner chain itself, right? So, we applied for Catalyst funding in Fund 12 for Network Explorer, which is working directly with Partner Chain and IOG regarding this setup.

We will be the first to create documentation for other people to follow on how to construct a partner chain. We are looking at obviously building our own blockchain layer for data availability to show, you know, on-chain verifiable data and also showing proof of existence, proof of immutability—different kinds of things that we want to showcase on top of the chain. We don't want to burden the L1 for all that information; I think that it's too redundant and also unnecessary to put too much constraint on the L1 just to get all that information out there.

That's why we're taking this route, and also it's for indexing and for a lot of Web 3 use cases. But we found out there are a lot of Web 2 use cases here as well, such as supply chain proof of supply chain. In terms of that, we also have audit trails, making sure that the file is being shared with the right parties and is geoconstrained in the right locations.

There are a lot of use cases, actually, that we could be using that are on-chain metrics that show in a trustful way that this is correct information. So, there are a lot of use cases that we can dive into for that, but it's going to be using, hopefully—we haven't gotten into the details yet in terms of how it's going to be transacting, what's going to be used—but hopefully, it will use IIG as a transactional currency. But again, this is not finalized.

Yeah, that would be an additional bit of utility for the IOG holders there. Now, I don't want to hold you to it. I feel like we've already built out a long list of to-dos for the developers here.

But any sort of loose timelines for the partner chain or for at least the MVP using the Midnight network? Yeah, for the MVP Midnight, we've actually submitted something to them already. We haven't shared anything publicly yet, but we have submitted something along medical data.

We're waiting for them to get back to us on that. There's interest there on that side, so we’ll see how that materializes and how long. But obviously, it's in the legal phase right now.

We're just making sure that the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted before we proceed there. As for the timelines for the Network Explorer, it will be sometime next year. We're looking at around the beginning of Q2 to the end of Q2.

Obviously, we have to submit something. I think we're slightly delayed on the first milestone submission for the Network Explorer because of all these pilots, so we will be submitting something hopefully in the beginning of November that will showcase the capabilities of Partner Chain. I will definitely be looking forward to that.

Dr Nav, I typically like to close out with closing thoughts. So, this is your opportunity. If there are any key takeaways or just important notes that you want to share with the community, now is your chance.

I mean, there's a lot going on, and it’s so much to catch—so much to think about in terms of Iagon. I think that the biggest takeaway is that we want to try to get everyone to participate in the shared storage and compute economy. It's all about participation.

In the end, if you believe in kind of the distributed way or decentralized way, I think that using apps that cater to that is a good start. I think we're just at the beginning of this phase of web 3 adoption from web 2. There's a lot of good interest in web 2, and we're trying to get adoption into web 3.

So, I think that there's a lot to look forward to as a Cardano community, not just for Iagon, but in Cardano in general. If you guys want to have a look at Cyclone, it's at cyclone. ion.

com. We will have a referral program as well: a 5% kickback to people who refer others to purchase the Iagon Cyclone. I will let you guys know when that's launched.

Also, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter (or X) and Discord; we'll happily answer your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr Naf Gdoal, thank you for taking the time to join me here for today's stream, or for today's, I guess, pre-recorded video. The links to all of the important socials will be left down below, so that's Twitter, X, Discord, Telegram—you name it, check that out down there.

And of course, as I mentioned, go ahead and check out the official Cyclone Qs website if you want to pre-order and potentially get that kickback once that goes live. That'll do it for today's video. If you, the viewer, have found any portion of this to be helpful, please—number one, make sure to smash that thumbs up; number two, consider subscribing to the channel; and number three, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns as it pertains to any of the topics we've discussed today, whether it's just the Iagon storage model, their compute, mainnet, their Catalyst proposals, etc.

, make sure to leave a comment down below. I'll be monitoring those and passing them over to the official Iagon team. That said, and as always, again, Dr Naf, thank you so much.

And for the viewers, we'll catch you all in the next one. Cheers everybody, take care!