Interview with Alessandro Konrad (SpaceBudz)

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado and today we're joined by a very special guest from the cardano community alessandro conrad alessandro welcome so much and thank you for coming on where are you based thank you so much charles for the invite this is such an honor and yeah i'm from germany i'm from munich munich i love munich it's absolutely beautiful part of germany and i so assume you go a little south and enjoy the force from time to time sure yeah of course okay so for the audience's benefit let's start with your background and a little about who you are and then we can talk about space buds the project you're building on cardano sure so i'm alessandro and i'm a computer science student and i'm from germany munich and i'm doing my bachelor's degree at the moment and basically i joined the cryptocurrency space back in 2018 so this was around about the time when i got into computer science and into my studies for the first time and yeah so i got into bitcoin first then into ethereum then i started out developing smart contracts on ethereum so this is also where i made my first experiences with nfts i built these erc 721 contracts but then a little bit later on in 2020 i think it was the beginning of 2020 i discovered cardano and i basically saw the major and huge advantages of ethereum and yeah then i committed myself more to cardano and then i started out my first steak pool called berry pool which is probably or was probably the first one on raspberry pies oh hang on so that that pool did you start as part of the itn program or were you a when did you come in as a stake pool operator and i think it was with the first test net in june the state pool pioneers program with the haskell testnet yes exactly okay so those were some rough times yeah there was a lot to do in a very short period very busy yeah yeah what's exciting so what attracted you to cardano you said you heard about in early 2020 what what what for you was the big differentiator between cardano and ethereum so i think one was of course like watching your videos they were definitely very inspiring and also i mean i'm a tech guy as i was building contracts on ethereum and then i saw it like okay how it will be done on cardano and i saw it from a tech perspective and it was just obvious for me okay coronado will do it a lot better and just all the scientific approach and stuff like this has just yeah attracted me to cardano okay so you discovered cardano in early 2020 and then you decided to become a state pool operator and you're running the berry pool b-e-r-r-y yes exactly okay and and then so you started running a stake pool and at some point you said hey i want to use these programming skills these as i'm learning in munich so you decided to move into the nft space and so what's that all about what are you doing with space buds let's talk about that sure so space plus essentially started in october of 2020 and it was actually not my idea so as i said i was building smart contracts on ethereum and people knew about it that i can build and it was actually my co-founder's idea so i didn't know him back then but he was reaching out to me and i actually asked me if i want to build another nft platform for him because he was really into nfts he had like communities and some platforms but he wanted a new one and he already asked me if i can build a platform called spacebots on ethereum but at this time i was already way more into cardano and i mean i think in october of 2020 the fees on the ethereum were already pretty high so it was like probably not going to do it on ethereum it's not sustainable and it's not very interesting for me right now and then i suggested to him what about if we try to do it on cardano i know there's not much stuff out there yet so but i know tokens and metadata and contracts will come very soon so what about if we if we tried to do it on cardano and then basically he agreed on it and then we we started out building okay so did you write any code at all on ethereum or try to do anything on ethereum so if i came to you and you were a contract programmer and i'm consensus or something like that and i said all right go build space buds on ethereum what would that actually look like how how would that actually work in practice setting fees aside yeah i think i could easily build that on ethereum so initially it was a plan i mean all i would need to do is build these erc721 contracts but a lot of templates out there so it's very easy to do just connected to some marketplaces out there like openc or something like this and then you can just do it but this was not very interesting and right and and then of course you have the high fees and then the latency and all this other stuff that exactly exactly okay so there's the standard erc 721 and are you familiar with the the native multi-asset standard for cardano have you spent some time learning about that sure i mean i had to otherwise i could have lost space but but yeah so initially it was not very clear for me how this will all work on cardano but i think it was in december when the first test had launched with the native tokens and my idea of what i had always in mind was this erc721 contract i wanted to have something very similar the idea of of it and then i saw the native tokens and played around with it and i understood the concept pretty quickly and i was like okay nfts are basically tokens on cardboard or native tokens with a quantity of one right and the next thing i i thought about was like okay how do i actually attach this metadata how do i create this link between the token and the metadata because this was like this is the essential part of the erc721 contract and this is something i also thought about and i came up with the solution phrase shall i explain this yes okay so it's probably a little bit more technical but i mean it tokens on cardano are native so it's not a contract where you have these functions you define and you can call them it's really just you have this policy and the name and and that's basically it this is a token and then you can move it around but i really wanted to have this this link to the metadata and i wanted to to make it of course like no one can break this link it it doesn't matter where you send the token you can always try trace it back and find the correct metadata so what i did basically was i appended the metadata to the mint transaction because this transaction no one can basically mint more tokens except the policy owner or if the policy even allows it to if it's not if it does not allow it metadata stays as it is so what you do basically when you have your token in your wallet you can just verify it and just go back to the mint transaction this is where the metadata are in so i created this very similar concept to the erc721 contract and you're able to somehow graph that onto what we've done with with cardano how long did it take you to do that so i think where when the test is launched in december i think i was ready with the solution in january or in the middle of january so what i did i proposed this metadata idea on the cardinal forum because i was not 100 sure if this is a good solution maybe there's some something more efficient out there but i actually got some nice feedback and it was interesting so i thought okay maybe this works and i actually went with this approach that's pretty cool so you came up with a clever idea in december he said hey this is a crazy idea and then you went to the cardano forums and who helped you on the forums how'd that work well i just created this post and then some people [Music] saw it and i also posted it on twitter so it got some yeah some attention but not very much i first of all after the release of space plus then it got some attention okay let's let's get to space buds so what is space buds for the audience's benefit sure so space buzz is essentially an nft platform on top of cordano and space was a little astronauts so there are 10 000 of them out there and they're all unique so they have different types of gadgets or features or and there are different types of animals so the dino a bull elephant or they hold a hockey stick something like this so it's a little bit fun but also just showcases the concept and it's like pokemon cards but in a digital form okay so how if i wanted to first off these 10 000 have they already been created or are they being created kind of over time and and a lot of them are still open for discussion of what they're going to be yeah they have the augmented but they have been minted during the sale so this was probably the hardest part to solve hardest part to solve yet because when i defined this nft standard so how i could basically create a tokens but what is still missing is are the contracts so it was not that obvious for me how do i basically distribute this token these tokens i mean 10 000 tokens i can't do this manually and also i didn't want to be a lot older probably and the other thing was i wanted to have a great user experience i wanted to feel it it is a contract and i mean i had experience with experiences with contracts so i i thought about the solution how it could actually replicate the idea right now without contracts and what i did essentially was i i had a server running and the server had a wallet on and this wallet was always triggered when certain transactions were coming in so when you go to the website you could basically just buy or just simply all you had to do was pay a transaction to a certain address and then you get back to token and the token was minted on the fly it was minted in the transaction so these tokens didn't exist they were then created when the transaction was coming in it's kind of a vending machine or something like that yeah yeah yeah and and do you get to choose what you get minted like if i wanted a bunny astronaut could i get a bunny astronaut or are they are they a vending machine where you just kind of pick them pre-minted yeah we wanted to make it completely random because we wanted to have a fair distribution and this was probably also the other reason why i went without my contracts yet because probably this would have not been possible with smart contracts except i have some articles because i have this randomness inside and so i thought like this is a good solution i go with this one right now and every so everyone was just like paying a certain amount of data to this address and they got some something very random back so we we had very nice distribution that's pretty cool okay so you created a vending machine for animal astronauts on cardano using the native token standard because it was batteries not included you had to create your own standard for metadata handling and that's pretty cool that's really exciting and so far what's the uptake from the community you said there's ten thousand that have been minted haven't how many have been sold all of them so wow what was the oil price 58 58a whoa yeah yeah so yes it's crazy and actually so the whole platform was hidden until i was like okay we are ready now so we we have everything set up then we told it a few people and they already started buying like crazy and then i think on the next day we went completely public and then two days later it was sold out okay it was insane so when i own this token obviously the token can live in dead lists but how do you visualize the the token is all the picture information representing that token in the metadata on chain or is there a server off chain that stores that so actually the name and like some these gadgets i i explained like if they have a hockey stick or something like this this is actually on chain okay what is off chain is or on another server is the image okay it is on ipfs and are we which is another decentralized file storage solution so it links just to it but in the end it's actually all everything on chain wow that's incredible and you did this in just a few months okay so have you signed up for the plutus pioneers program yet i did yeah did lars accept you i think he's actually close he's in regensburg which i think is close to munich yeah it is yeah and yeah i i got excited and i'm in and i'm already learning but i had been also playing around before a little bit with the simulator so you got the whole idea behind how old of this stuff works and how it could actually proceed later on when i enable trading and stuff like this right that's so cool that's so cool so at the moment trading is is not quite enabled i guess if someone's holding the asset they could always do an otc transaction but you're planning what's the next step are you planning to build a marketplace for space buds and issue new lines of space buds or where where are you going to take this idea over the next six to 12 months as pollutus turns on yeah so this is actually i really just want to enable trading but really in a decentralized way so i see people doing it on discord already they have it was not my idea so these people like build around their own tools and they have like these escrow services with middlemans and they get get paid five percent it's really cool to see but for me i really wanna make this decentralized i want to learn pluto's and want to see if i can do that and yeah okay so decentralization of the trading of the space bus now are you going to go through catalyst for that for funding or how are you planning on putting a team together and taking your protocol to the next level i haven't decided yet actually so actually i actually want to make it on my own may i want to see like if i could do it but if it it's really more work than i expect i definitely get some people but for now everything i've built on my own so so maybe i can do that again it's really impressive so in less than a year you've gone from learning how to be a stake pool operator to being one of the first developers on cardano to build deploy something and 50 50 ada per space but that's almost 500 000 aida if my math is right wow that certainly pays for college congratulations on that and thank you we're so proud of you yeah the i'm gonna try to make this a regular series where as people create projects on cardano big or small i give them 15 20 minutes and just come and interview them and give them a chance to introduce themselves to the world and also provide a little bit of clarity on how they did it so you started with the forums and you work with the community so if some young future alessandro comes to you and says hey i want to be a cardano developer i want to build a project on cardona what advice would you give them so what tools i actually used were like some very cool api apis and they were very helpful so like for example the block frost api and the gimbal apps api so they helped me a lot with the development and otherwise i would check out so i created a library which is basically a wrap around the cardano cli which is in javascript which allowed me to like to to make server stuff and cardano stuff very seamless so this is very cool so these tools are very helpful and so if you this will definitely make it very much easier for developers okay and you think cardano forums are a good place to go for advice and help yeah sure it is and yeah actually yes okay and what about would stack exchange be helpful i know there's a big community effort right now to try to get a cardinal specific stack exchange running probably yes but i'm not too much involved in it yet but probably need to get it into it yeah okay well over the next 60 90 days there's going to be a huge improvement to documentation a lot of services set up and we're also going to try to create some dedicated development firms who can co-source development do pull request review and other such things so jeremy our director of operations has already negotiated five different firms to come in and build a bunch of pedagogical applications for oracles to dexis to other things as soon as the pollutus test net is turned on still looks like may and that we hope will lead to the emergence of tools and lead to the to design patterns and tutorials and all kinds of things to get developers bootstrapped but i'm just so incredibly excited that you've already had so much success in such early days and i cannot wait to see what you guys do you and your partners over the next six to 12 months and i would love to participate at some point we are getting involved as a company in nfts i think you already spoke with tamara hassan at some point yeah i did yeah yeah and we've been putting a whole group together specifically for nfts everything from standards to the legal side of nfts to discussions about marketplace mechanics to other things like custodianship and insurance because let's say your nft becomes worth a million dollars maybe you don't want to store that on your laptop or your cell phone i want to store that in a secure place and insure it and so forth so that's going to be very exciting to see and as you are now a cardano developer of course you will have opinions on standards for cardano which is always super exciting too to me so standards groups and committees are coming and some of the things you're doing might end up as a crc cardano request for comments in addition to the cip process so thank you so much for joining us alessandra i really appreciate it and sharing your project if people want to learn more about space buds where should they go they can simply go to spacebots.