This is Part 2 of a 2 part post. If you want to know more about what Fleek Network is doing, check out Part 1 — Private DMs With Fleek Network’s Co-Founder Harrison Hines.
Who Is Fleek Network For?
Manny:
Help me understand something.
Fleek Network has been described as a platform where developers can build on top of it to build out custom service offerings.
Who do you see as the first people/developers building on the Network and why them for now?
Harrison:
A good mental model to understand how the Fleek Network ecosystem will develop is to think about it similar to a smart contract platform from the perspective that you will have a portion of developers who are actually building services on the network (so compare service builders to smart contract developers).
And then a much larger portion of developers who are consuming/using those services (ex. using a CDN service or edge compute service for their app), similar to how the majority of smart contract platform users are just consuming/using smart contracts, not necessarily building them.
The main difference being on a smart contract platform you are typically developing decentralized financial services, whereas with Fleek Network you are building decentralized web and edge services. And our initial focus will be on those service developers.
Manny:
What do you think would entice developers more to start building on Fleek Network and what do you think is missing?
Harrison:
Service developer incentivization is one of the things we are most excited about. Because besides grants and other traditional tactics, there are incentives for service developers built into the protocol itself.
For example 20% of revenue generated for the protocol is given to the services that are generating those fees. And so if you are early and for example you create an AWS Lambda type service or a DynamoDB type service, and that service gets surfaced in Fleek platform and packaged into a nice serverless functions or database type feature, now you basically have your business model (built in 20% of revenue generated) and initial distribution (Fleek platform) taken care of for you, and all you gotta worry about is maintaining/improving your service code.
Manny:
Sounds like a win-win for developers.
Harrison:
We think smart, opportunistic devs will realize that there is big opportunity to be early and build popular web and edge services on Fleek Network, the same way early Ethereum projects found success by building popular decentralized financial services.
But now imagine if Uniswap for example was getting 20% of all the gas fees they are driving to Ethereum, they’d never need to worry about value capture or token model again. That’s essentially how it will work on Fleek Network, so it’s very exciting for service developers.
Manny:
And what do you think is missing for Fleek Network?
Harrison:
What’s missing is we gotta finish the SDK and add services to the Testnet in September, and then focus a lot on the developer tooling and resources to make building/deploying/managing services super seamlessly.
What To Expect When Fleek Network Is Out
Manny:
What would you say you are most excited about Fleek Network and what could be built on it short-term and long-term?
Harrison:
I’m most excited to prove out the performance of the network over the next few months. Because if we can show that we can be as performant, or potentially even more performant than centralized edge platforms, then I think that will be an enormous unlock for the modern web stack and the type of apps that can be built.
Because as the google data shows, speed is the lifeblood of the web. Loading times are the largest predictor of which apps people use. That’s why CDN’s and edge networks are so popular these days. And so if we can bring that web2 speed to web3 without sacrificing on web3 values, we think a lot of things will become possible.
Manny:
Sounds like a major win for web3 in terms of speed.
Harrison:
Those benefits don’t stop at web3 and are applicable to all devs and all web applications. Everyone needs performance/speed, and those needs are only increasing with the internet’s fast growing global user base, and the popularity of performance intensive use cases like video, streaming, gaming, AI, AR/VR, metaverse, etc..
So, I’m also most excited about the unknown.
Manny:
How do you mean?
Harrison:
For example when Ethereum launched, nobody actually knew what use cases would be big. DeFi and NFT’s weren’t obvious until a few years after launch. For Fleek Network we at least know a handful of web services that have already proven successful on the edge that we expect people to start with, but we are most excited to see people experiment and build things that nobody is expecting.
Manny:
I’d like to run a scenario by you.
Imagine you’re not the co-founder of Fleek Network, but obviously still a 10x engineer.
You read the Fleek Network Whitepaper and you’re sold.
What would you start building?
Harrison:
Depending on my background/interests (ex. more web2 vs. web3 dev) I would either start by building traditional web services that have already proven success on the edge (different flavors of edge compute or serverless functions, edge dbs, CDN’s, container orchestration, SSR, etc.).
Just because of what I was saying above about the built in service developer incentives (20% cut of revenue) and looking at how Ethereum played out (biggest winners were the early ones who built decentralized alternatives to the biggest traditional financial services: trading, lending, derivatives, etc.).
Or if I was a more web3 native dev I would probably build things that I know web3 devs need that are currently centralized.
For example gateways, hosting, IPFS/IPNS pinning, graphQL backend, running nodes or validators for certain networks, etc.
You talk to pretty much any web3 project and you will quickly find points of centralization in their stack that they would love to decentralize. Or also I would maybe experiment with some more exotic things, like building an EVM service, or new types of rollups, or exploring topics like State Rent, or snapshotting blockchains for fast node syncing, etc.
Manny:
Sounds like a lot of great ideas for devs to start building.
Wen Fleek Network?
Manny:
The Fleek Network Whitepaper outlines a pretty big dream, but when can developers start building with it?
And if they can’t start building now, what should devs be learning/researching/focusing on in preparation?
Harrison:
So the initial phase 0 alpha Testnet will go out next week [this week]. But as mentioned that first phase will be focused mostly on nodes.
The next Testnet phase in September will introduce the SDK and services and that’s really when people can start building.
If I was a developer interested in building services for now I would be researching and ideating on the first service I might try to build, and maybe reach out in Discord with any ideas/questions so we can help guide your thinking as we are releasing more information on how to build services.
Manny:
[Just to going to paste this here for the Discord link — https://discord.com/invite/fleekxyz]
Harrison:
We put a bunch of examples in the Whitepaper to get people’s brain juices flowing.
What’s fun that we do internally is just think of all sorts of different web3 infra/projects/use cases and think about if/how those things make sense to put on the edge.
Surprisingly you will realize that a lot of things could make sense to build as edge services, much like we are seeing happen in the modern web.
Manny:
I’m pretty pumped at the all the ideas that you could build with Fleek Network.
How Do I Keep Up To Date With Fleek Network?
Manny:
Fleek and Fleek Network has a lot going on.
What is the best place to keep up to date on… well, everything and who should they be following on socials?
Harrison:
The best place is prob to sign up for the mailing list, but also twitter, discord, and our blogs are great places to keep up to date on things. Besides following the @fleek_net and @fleekxyz accounts I’d say following @parsaisback and @daltoncoder is a good move.
They are the Fleek Network lead engineers.
Manny:
Done.
Harrison:
They are pretty heads down building right now but this fall they will start sharing more useful content. I will also try to share more helpful content as we start releasing more.
Manny:
Awesome!
Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule and reply to my DMs and to @itsnicoggi for setting this up.
Harrison:
Thanks Manny.
Enjoy This Article?
Make sure to like this article, and also follow me on X (Twitter) to see when the announcement will be made at @codingwithmanny.
Manny thanks to @harris0nhines for letting me ask him so many questions.
