I finally did it! I managed to (digitally) corner Harrison Hines, the co-founder of Fleek Network to talk to me more about the newly released Whitepaper.
After a little bit of back and forth, Harrison and I agreed to publish a series of questions I had asked him via direct messages.
The Fleek & Nothing But The Fleek, Please
Manny:
Gm gm, Harrison. It’s a pleasure to e-meet via tg.
I’ll jump right into it. For those who are going to be reading this later, could you give a brief overview of Fleek as a whole, what was the motivation behind building it, and what level of science degree do you need to interpret the Fleek Network Whitepaper?
Harrison:
For sure. Fleek’s mission as a whole is to help free the web and make web3 a real thing.
When I joined the Ethereum space in 2017, I realized there were a lot of smart people and projects focused on building decentralized financial infrastructure, but not nearly as many focused on decentralizing internet infrastructure, and so that is where I felt we could have the biggest impact and contribution to web3.
While certain pieces of the infra stack were starting to get decentralized (ex. smart contracts), we realized that unless you decentralize the full stack, everything is at risk.
Manny:
Is that when you decided that Fleek was the missing piece?
Harrison:
It kinda took a while for the decentralized web infra side of the space to get going, and so we watched and experimented for a while as things evolved until we were confident about how to approach things and where we could best fit in to add the most value to the web3 stack.
Last year was when everything culminated into Fleek Network and building a decentralized edge network.
The Whitepaper was us putting everything down on “paper” and we tried to make it as digestible as possible, but the subject matter made that a bit tricky lol.
We will def produce some easier to read material in the coming weeks/months, so stay tuned for that.
Manny:
I definitely had to read it a few times myself to get the full picture.
Small plug from me, on the Competition Winning X Thread I did, if you haven’t seen it yet.
Fleek.xyz, Fleek Network, I’m Confused
Manny:
I noticed on Twitter (I mean X), people see Fleek.xyz and Fleek Network.
How do these differ and/or are potentially complimenting each other, and more importantly why two X accounts?
Harrison:
Great question.
Essentially Fleek Network represents the protocol (the decentralized edge network). And Fleek.xyz is the developer platform built on top of Fleek Network and other protocols.
Think of it kinda like how there’s the Uniswap protocol, and Uniswap the dapp and wallet, which essentially just serve as distribution tools for their protocol.
That’s exactly how we view Fleek.xyz, just a distribution/discovery channel for web3 infra protocols as well as for services built on Fleek Network.
Manny:
Would you say Fleek.xyz is sorta like the Vercel of web3?
Harrison:
Very close.
If you look at other modern dev platforms like Vercel and Netlify they work in a similar way.
They have the underlying infra/edge platform that powers their products/features, and then they package it all into a super seamless UI/UX.
Packaging the infra into a seamless UX is what enabled them to compete with incumbents like AWS, Cloudflare, etc. and drive distribution to their infra, and so we plan to follow that exact same approach as a way to drive usage to Fleek Network and other protocols.
Manny:
Sounds like a lot of infrastructure foundation and a polished product to show off what devs can do with it.
Harrison:
Yeah, which is why we probably have two X accounts.
We feel the two (network and platform) do very different things, and have very different developer audiences (network = infra devs; platform = app devs).
Combining them both felt like it might confuse everybody.
Manny:
That makes sense.
What Does Fleek Network Look Like, Not On Paper?
Manny:
Fleek Network seems like a massive idea as a whole. I guess that’s why there needed to be a Whitepaper.
What do you see as the big idea behind, in terms of implementation, for Fleek Network?
You’re Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel is your masterpiece, but right now I’m now seeing a blank canvas. Help me understand where we’re going.
Harrison:
So, good news!
We are pretty far along in terms of implementation.
We will have an initial alpha testnet next week that will start testing some of the core network functionality and performance.
Manny:
That’s next week, as in August 28th at 12:01am PST? Can you tell I want access to the testnet?
Harrison:
lol. Maybe not that exact date and time, but next week for sure.
But what’s also very exciting is in September we will introduce the SDK and Services in a second testnet phase.
That is where things start to get super interesting because then anybody can start building web and edge services on the network.
Manny:
Super cool. I can’t stress how cool that sounds. But I have a feeling you’re going to pull a Steve Jobs and say “one more thing.”
Harrison:
Guilty 😂. Shortly after the second phase will be followed by a few additional testnet phases throughout the remainder of this year, leading to a full mainnet launch most likely in Q1 2024.
Manny:
There we go! 🔥🔥🔥
Harrison:
And services can be deployed and run performantly and reliably already at the Testnet stage.
We will start surfacing some initial features/use cases/services in the Fleek.xyz platform starting in September/October to make it easy for people to experiment and get usage on the services they build.
Manny:
Why do I feel like it’s my birthday year?
Part 2 — Fleek Alpha — Coming Soon (Now Out)
Make sure to keep follow my Medium page for the second part of the conversation, and also follow me on X (Twitter) to see when the announcement will be made at @codingwithmanny.
I’ll also make sure to update this article with the link when Part 2 is out.
Manny thanks to @harris0nhines for letting me bombard him with messages.
Part 2 is out!
Second part can be found here:
