Flare Partners with Google Cloud! FAssets, Flare Staking, AI Integration, SongBird SGB, FLR Token

Hugo Philion is the cofounder and CEO of Flare. In this interview we discuss:
– Google Cloud Validator & Data provider on Flare
– FAssets Update
– Flare Staking
– API portal and LayerCake
– AI Integration plans & new use cases
– Crypto Regulations
– SEC Ripple XRP ruling & Bitcoin Spot ETF
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⏰ Time Stamps ⏰
00:00 Intro
01:50 FAssets beta launch
07:07 FAssets launch timeline
08:15 API Portal
09:12 Google Cloud as Validator & Data provider
11:53 How the Google Cloud partnership came about
12:45 Flare Staking
15:57 Flare use cases & 2024 roadmap
21:15 AI and Blockchain
23:53 SongBird update
25:20 Crypto going mainstream with Bitcoin ETF approvals
30:40 Crypto regulations
31:41 SEC Ripple XRP Ruling

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– To not just do validation, but also to do data provision. And this speaks, I think, to the support that we are getting as a network for the vision of being the network for data. And I think when this podcast goes out, we will have announced probably the most exciting institutional infrastructure provider,

Which is Google joining us as Google Cloud, joining us as a validator and a data provider. – This content is brought to you by Uphold, which is a great crypto platform that I’ve been using since 2018. Uphold has all the top cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, and all the altcoins. In fact, they have 260 plus cryptocurrencies on their platform. You can also trade precious metals, stablecoins, and 37 fiat currencies.

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You’re home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With me today is Hugo Philion, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Flare Networks. Hugo’s no stranger to the show. And there’s a lot of great updates around Flare that we are gonna discuss as 2024 kicks off. Hugo, great to have you back on.

– Hey, thank you for having me. – Hugo, we’ve of course been talking over the years. I am a supporter of Flare. I’m delegating we’re gonna talk a bit about staking today. So, there’s been a lot of big updates around, you know, Flare and the things that you guys are doing.

Let’s start off with, let’s say the beta launch of FAssets and how that works and how folks can, and which assets they can utilize. – Absolutely, so that’s on Testnet. So, it’s on our Coston Testnet. And it’s really a training exercise for us and for the community to get ready

For the FAsset launch on Songbird, and then later on Flare. It’s to, firstly, it’s test the code for us. I mean, obviously, we’ve built the code, we’ve audited the code, but wanna make sure that it works in production, that there’s no major teething issues that, you know, that we test out,

You know, the front ends that have been built, those kind of things. Want to test things like liquidation in a simulated very volatile market. You know, what happens if the collateral asset in the FAssets, you know, stays the same, but the underlying asset stay, XRP or Bitcoin goes up,

You know, massively, just want to test those parameters. Make sure that we’re tuning for the right thing. And then, you know, at the moment it’s closed beta, so it is just essentially us and a few select partners, essentially very highly technical partners testing it. We’ll be opening it up to the public in,

You know, not, I don’t want to give a time, but very soon. – That’s exciting. So, I want to maybe go to the very basics for those who are maybe now learning about Flare. You know, maybe they’ve come across this podcast. So, can you tell me which assets are supported?

You mentioned Bitcoin, XRP, are there others? And what does it allow you to do? – So, we’re starting with XRP, then we’ll be adding Bitcoin, obviously, as it’s the largest. And then, you know, the community and us, you know, together probably through governance process, we’ll figure out what else to add.

Obviously, I want to add Dogecoin, I’ve mentioned that before. You know, I think, I think it’s gonna be a process. Wanna start with a few tokens, you know, the majors first, then add a few more. Remember that the FAssets is only for non-smart contract assets.

So, we have a different type of bridge called LayerCake for smart contract assets. FAssets is a trustless way to bridge non-smart contract enabled assets like Bitcoin, like XRP, like Dogecoin, like Litecoin onto Flare. Well, to start with Songbird and then Flare. And it’s a collateral based system

So that it remains trustless as opposed to trusted. Meaning that there’s a, you know, a massive penalty for misbehavior in the system. Unlike existing, say multi-signer bridges. – Interesting, so let’s say I created an FAsset with XRP, FXRP, right? What am I able to do with that asset?

Is it lending, borrowing, what else? – SO, Flare’s expanding as a DeFi blockchain. We announced a couple of weeks ago partnership with a lending protocol called Kinetic. You can see them, you know, in the Flare timeline. They’re called Kinetic Markets. They’ve built previously, they’re part of something called Rome Blockchain Labs.

They’ve built previously several very, very successful lending protocols. Probably the most successful is the Benqi lending protocol on Avalanche. So, it’s the same team behind that, but obviously building bespoke for Flare, using our data oracles from the FTSO. So, lending is gonna be a key pillar.

Obviously, DEX is being able to basically swap your, you know, your Bitcoin, your XRP, or BNLP in the pool, on a DEX pool. I think at the moment we have, you know, several forks of uni V2. I know that someone’s working on a uni V3 concentrated liquidity decks.

So, you know, lending, deck swapping, LPing in DEXs. I think, you know, simple stuff, like transactions, cheap payments, particularly relevant for something like Bitcoin. You know, it’s important. And especially after today, as Bitcoin’s become a much more accepted asset, today is the day that the ETF, you know, yesterday the ETF was approved,

Today the ETF is going live. There’s a lot of speculation over, you know, how much, how many units of the ETF will be, will be created today, what the trading will look like. But clearly, Bitcoin and probably to some extent, the rest of the industry is becoming more mainstream, more accepted.

I think it’s true to say that, you know, we’re very, very much here to stay as an industry and at Flare. So, I think, you know, being able to represent the asset with the largest value on the network in a trustless way is gonna be, you know, a very, very exciting thing

To be able to do. – Yeah, that’s exciting. And I can’t wait for all that to roll out the full production. I know this may be a hard question to answer right now, but, you know, what’s your timeline look like and tentative dates now? We’re not locking you into any hard dates,

You know, as far as this going fully live. – It’s all down to the testing on Coston and then the testing on Songbird. So, you know, we’re currently in closed beta, we’ll be an open beta very soon. You know, if some issue is highlighted by the testing with,

You know, individuals, we’ll have to go back and change it. But I don’t expect that to be a big thing. I don’t expect that to be likely. So, we’ll be trying to smash through that as quickly as possible. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, 2024, we will ship.

You know, is our objective to ship all of our protocols this year, including FAssets, LayerCake, faster data Oracle, so faster price Oracle, FTSO, flood data connector, and relay of our data to other chains. So, those are a sort of key sort of roadmap this year. – Oh, that’s exciting.

Now, there was a question I wanted to ask you about the API portal and which assets are gonna be supported there as it relates to, I believe the FAssets, if I’m not mistaken. – So, API portal is essentially a data service for users, potentially, essentially developers.

API portal will support all of the chains that the FAssets support. And it already, I believe it already does, and it supports quite a few more, I believe. API portal is almost a separate business. It’s more of a software as a… It’s not quite a software as a service business,

But it’s basically, you know, it’s a user-based business revenue generating business part of Flare Labs, but, you know, useful to the network, but also a standalone business. – Oh, great. And then, there was also the onboarding of institutional validators such as Ankr, Figment, Restake, and NorthStake. Tell us about those

And if there are any new institutional validators since the news of these four. – So, absolutely, I think it’s important to caveat that with, we managed to convince validators to do something they generally haven’t done before, and that is to be data providers. Flare is the network for data.

And what’s really important to us is that we have a very decentralized network, or as decentralized as we can possibly get that delivers high quality data. And so, the validator role is not just being a validator, it is emerging between validator and data provider.

In order to run a validator and get rewarded for it, you have to run a data provider. And so, we basically went to those institutional validators, like Ankr and the others you mentioned, and we said, you know, look, we’re building the network for data. We think that you could excel in this role.

We would welcome having institutional data providers on the network. And, you know, we basically got them to change to a reasonable extent, their business model, to not just do validation, but also to do data provision. And this speaks, I think, to the support that we are getting

As a network for the vision of being the network for data. And I think when this podcast goes out, we will have announced probably the most exciting institutional infrastructure provider, which is Google joining us as Google Cloud joining us as a validator and a data provider. So, providing data on the network

And taking part in validation. This is really very exciting to us as the network for data to have Google Cloud joining us as I’m sure everyone on this podcast knows, Google is probably the preeminent data business in the world. – Mm-hmm. Hi, everyone, pardon the interruption. I’m Tony Edward, the founder and host

Of The Thinking Crypto podcast. I have a huge favor to ask you, if you haven’t subscribed as yet on YouTube or the podcast platforms, hit that subscribe button, hit the thumbs up button, hit the notification bell on the YouTube platform and on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcast,

Please leave a five star rating and review. It supports the podcast, it allows me to bring great quality content to you. Thank you for your support and I’ll let you get back to the content. That’s exciting. Really big news and congratulations on that. And how did that partnership come about?

Was it just, you know, your team working hard to, you know, get these folks on board and explain what you’re trying to do? – Well, we’ve worked with Google Cloud for a long time and in fact we moved from Amazon Cloud to Google Cloud. We run a lot of our internal services there.

We run some of our validators there. We have a really strong relationship with Google, both in terms of the blockchain and things that we want to do on the blockchain, you know, going forward. And really, we just got into discussions, you know, they’re very keen on what we’re building.

We’ve also been, you know, articulating certain things that we think data can be used for. Had some very good discussions around that. So, I think, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of synergy there. – That’s exciting. Now, let’s talk about Flare staking. And you and I chatted before the recording.

I’m currently delegating and I’m earning my rewards, both for songbird as well as Flare. You mentioned that the wallet I use, Bifrost Wallet, they now enable staking. Tell us about the staking benefits and how users can participate. – Absolutely, so staking is slightly different from delegation.

Delegation is wrapped Flare delegated to a data provider in order to provide data. And that delegation actually weights the data provider’s data submission in the calculation of how the FTSO price signal is created. Staking today, so we’re in what’s known as staking phase two. Staking phase one was a closed group,

Staking phase two is an open group. And staking phase two allows users, individuals, token holders to stake their, essentially to stake their Flare to a validator on what’s known as the P-Chain, which is a separate chain from the chain most people are using, which is the C-Chain. The C-Chain runs the EVM,

The P-Chain is where the validators sit and where staking is performed. So, with staking, you still get to receive the Flare drops, but you’re not delegating, your staking. And staking has its, has a cutoff piece of rewards from the inflation system. 30% of the rewards go to the staking system.

And that means that, essentially, at the moment, I believe we’re about 9 to 10% staked. That means up until 30% staked, the rewards for staking are higher, generally, than the rewards for delegation. Of course, if you’re delegated to an extremely great provider that’s earning very huge rewards,

You would want to go and take a look at that equation a little more deeply. But with 30% of the total rewards going to staking and only about 10% of the token staked currently, the rewards for staking are very, very much higher. You miss out on the delegation rewards,

But you don’t miss out on the Flare drops. – Mm-hmm, now, with the staking cycle, are you locked in for a certain period of time or can you stake an unstake at any point? – So, you can’t stake an unstake at any point. You… When you stake, you choose your length of time.

Your length of time can be a maximum of how long that validator, the underlying operator of that validator has staked that validator for. So, imagine if a validator has staked for a year, you can delegate your stake to that validator for up to a year, but not longer.

But you can do it in shorter increments. Just one caveat you need in order to be able to stake, you need to hold at least 50,000 player. – 50,000 player, got it. I have to explore that after this ’cause I’ve just been delegating,

But I would love to see if I can earn more rewards, you know, by staking. So, I’ll definitely check that out after this. Let’s talk a bit about use cases and, you know, your roadmap for 2024 and even to 2025. And I know we’re looking ahead quite a bit.

Are there other use cases that you are looking at and maybe it’s in the pipeline that you’re looking to target this year? – Absolutely, so one of the things we’re doing and have done during 2023 was conceptualize and start building what’s known as FTSO V2. If you know the FTSO system well,

It’s Flare’s native price delivery system. It’s kind of what the network’s actually based around, which is the idea that we have these validators who we call infrastructure providers that deliver data onto the chain and they deliver that into two different systems. One called the Flare Data Connector,

Which is for blockchain state and web, essentially data from the web. And one called the FTSO, the Flare Time Series Oracle for price data and other time series data. So, we’ve been working on the FTSO V2. Currently the FTSO V1 operates every three minutes with 15 pairs,

Pretty much tapped out at, you know, at about 15 pairs. So, what we’ve done with the FTSO V2 is figure out how to massively scale it from 15 pairs to a thousand pairs. So, instead of having 15 data series, we can now have, we will be able to, when FTSO V2 comes through,

We’ll be able to have a thousand data pairs. And instead of updating every three minutes, it’ll update every 90 seconds. And then, there’s a second part of FTSO V2 called Fast Updates, which allows that update to happen every block if needed. 90 seconds at a minimum, but every block if needed.

So, that’s kind of a, gonna be a massive utility, I think, for the network. Brings in things like stocks. You know, as I said earlier, we’re expanding as a DeFi protocol. We have perps DEXs coming, we have people talking to us about doing synthetic stocks. You can bring in stock prices, weather prices,

More crypto prices. You could probably add the Bitcoin ETF ’cause ETF price probably gonna trade a little different to the underlying. So, with the Bitcoin FAsset, so FBTC versus, you know, you could have some synthetic ETF derivative, it’d be quite interesting. So, we think that FTSO V2 is gonna really push the limits

Of what’s available in the EVM world. We don’t think that basically anyone would be able to get a better, faster, more decentralized oracle. And so, we think that Flare will become a playground for DeFi through being able to massively expand the price data available for it.

That’s not really the only thing we’re thinking about, DeFi is kind of the starting point, bridging, of course. Talking about roadmap, FAssets, and LayerCake. FAssets, again, to remind the viewers, trustless version of non-smart contract assets on Flare. LayerCake, super fast trustless bridge between smart contract networks. Gonna use Flare as a hub,

So that you can use Flare, essentially to bridge, from, say, Ethereum to Cosmos, to Solana to Polkadot, to, say, to any of the networks. And definitely between Eth Layer 2s as well. And there’s some really amazing innovations with LayerCake such that it is trustless ’cause it has an element of collateral,

But it’s much lower collateral demand than the FAssets. So, because we are able to verify when a transaction happens, so we can immediately give that collateral back to the collateral provider. And that underlying collateral in a LayerCake bridge makes the bridge very, very much safer than an uncollateralized bridge.

So, it’s quite, quite exciting. And then, really, the big thing for 2024 for me is AI. The team, the founders come from a background of AI. Our chief scientist, Dr. Nairi Usher, you know, has a background in quantum computing and in quantum AI.

The team has been working very, very hard on an AI strategy. Obviously, being the network for data, having built this network of essentially collaborative data providers, we are looking at how to extend that into AI. And we think there’s some very interesting opportunities.

In fact, if you want to just kind of take a step back, the FTSO itself can be thought of as an AI model. Every, every data provider in the FTSO is probably running some kind of machine learning model. And then, essentially, the FTSO is an amalgamation of those machine learning models.

Technically, you know, close to being something that in machine learning called an ensemble model. So, the existing FTSO gives you a really good idea about how we can do collaborative machine learning or AI on the blockchain. The question is, what else does that apply to? And we’ve got some really good ideas

And we’ll be rolling out our AI strategy, you know, later this year, which to be honest with you, I’m very excited by. – Yeah, that’s exciting. What are your thoughts, since we’re talking about AI in blockchain being a solution to solve AI deepfakes and the rise of, you know, deepfake media,

I saw this week Polygon and the Fox News Corporation, they were doing something there. Is that something you will also look to explore or is that kind of, you know, outside of your wheelhouse at this point? – That’s not the area we’re particularly interested in. That’s basically data verification.

I’m not sure you can do that in a decentralized way. What we are looking to do is build a market for essentially data providers and engineers, machine learning engineers, AI engineers, to interact with people that need AI, whether they need data, or they need a model, or they need a better model.

What, you know, if you look at existing AI, it comes from an entirely centralized background. The question is, can blockchain provide better AI? And the answer probably is yes. – So, yeah, you have the convergence of those two things and they help each other, like you’re saying?

– Well, if you look at what’s happened in blockchain, you know, I was thinking about what does the Bitcoin ETF mean earlier? And I was thinking, well, actually, the whole movement of blockchain, what it’s done is it’s, you’ve originated value from collaboration mining, right?

If you think about, you know, what does the whole market do? It allows people to get engaged in things that they could never have got engaged in before. So, if you think about an artist, suddenly their work may have value and may be of interest to people

That they have no outlet to sell it to through an NFT, no outlet before blockchain. If you think about machine learning, if you wanted to do machine learning five years ago, you had to go to 1 of 10 companies. – [Tony] Mm-hmm. – You know, if you are a machine learning engineer,

What can you achieve with the, essentially, those centralized silos ripped apart and your customer being able to interact with you in a decentralized way through the blockchain. Those are the kind of things we’re thinking about. I don’t want to give too much away about what we’re, you know, what we’re gonna be

Sort of thinking about building, encouraging, giving grants for, but we’ve been thinking a lot about AI. – Oh, that’s exciting. Now, I wanna talk about Songbird a bit and we know it’s been the testnet, so to speak. And are there any new updates, or any new plans, or change of plans for Songbird?

– So, Songbird is canary net, so live money testnet. The big plan is to move the FAssets on it from testnet. And that’s kind of what it was built for. That’s why it has the FTSO, that’s why it has the state connector. So, looking forward to really testing FAssets

To the limit on Songbird. – And then, for the Flare drop distributions, are those on schedule, any changes, or is just continuing to do its thing? – No changes, does its thing. There was a governance vote, there’s no change after that. – Hmm, are there any other partnerships

Or any other cool things you want to highlight? I know you gave a lot of information on the things you guys are working on, but anything else you want to highlight? – I mean, I think the big one, of course today, well, we’re recording this on Friday,

But I know this is going out on Monday. So, the big one today for Monday is Google, which is very, very exciting. We have a number of different DAPs coming to market. I’ve got to respect their timelines for this kind of stuff, but I think it’s gonna come thick and fast through 2024.

– Let’s talk a bit about the crypto market at large. Of course, ETFs are going live today, trading, you know, what are your thoughts stepping back and looking at this, that crypto seems to be going mainstream. You have Wall Street adoption, what does this mean for the broader industry,

You know, with Flare and other projects and things along those lines? – So, I’ve been trying to think that through for a while. You know, the question is, we’ve built digital money for digital edge. Why do we even care about Wall Street? It’s… What the whole industry is doing

Is it’s unbundling Wall Street. It’s, you know, to borrow a tremendously awful phrase from Silicon Valley, it’s disrupting Wall Street. My guess is, in 10 to 20 years time, maybe sooner, hopefully sooner, the business models of the large financial corporations will be completely destroyed by DeFi and CeFi on blockchains.

Because we don’t need… As a class, as a group of people, we don’t need a class of people in the middle to just leach money out of us through excessive fees, massively long waiting times. So, I think, over the longer term, you know, it’s a, blockchain is a disruption through technical, technological innovation.

I do believe that finance will be heavily disrupted by it. And I do believe that many, many types of existing business model, especially bundled data models, which silo data hoard it for themselves, your data. I think when a better technology comes along, ultimately it takes time for it to be used

Because it takes time for it to be useful, but because it’s cheaper and because it’s faster. And even if you, you know, with all the scaling issues in the industry, frankly, it’s still easier to send dollars to someone on a blockchain than it is through a bank.

And it will be easier to control your data in the future. It will be easier to get a machine learning model built through a decentralized system in the future. The whole, I think, the whole point of what we’re doing as an industry is to disintermediate the centralizing factors that needed to exist

Because we were not technologically advanced enough to be able to have trustless peer-to-peer cash. – Mm-hmm, yeah, I’m in full agreement with you and I’ve been talking a bit about it that, look, in this early phase, there is gonna be the conversions of CeFi and DeFi,

But ultimately we want to get to full DeFi and I think we will get there, but to your point, it has to be further iteration. We have to make it easier for the consumers, educate them. There’s just a process to that. – I think so much of it is about collaboration, right?

You know, it’s, really, if you look at Bitcoin, it’s a collaboration of people, coming together to build this network through expending money to buy mining equipment and buy energy to make it happen. NFTs are a collaboration between artists and individuals that buy NFTs and projects that, you know, use NFTs like metaverses.

DeFi is a collaboration of a market in and of itself, right? It’s basically bunch of people coming together from all around the world. Collaborating to find a price for an asset to give liquidity against, you know, in borrowing is a very fascinating and exciting model. And I think it applies much more broadly

Than many people think. – Yeah, and I’m excited for like secondary markets and, you know, you mentioned just people being able to monetize their data and control it and actually own it. And if they choose to, maybe they can lend it out or sell it, whatever it is, right?

And that could be an asset they own or their personal data. I’m excited for the future in the secondary markets that are gonna be created. – Yeah, I think that’s exciting. And I also think, you know, from an AI perspective, the ability to source, you know, engineering skills,

To have a model trained by someone you’ve never met, but only pay for that model if the error rate reduces to a certain level. You know, these are the kind of things that blockchain and smart contracts enable, is essentially an opening up of markets

That couldn’t exist before because we didn’t have the way to do this because we don’t trust each other. Blockchain gives you a substrate in a way for trust through code. And I think that’s, that can allow revolutionary business models to be built. – Hmm, now, I want to ask you about,

And Hugo, remind me, are you in Europe and are you impacted? – I’m not. – Okay. – I’m not, I’m in Dubai. – Dubai, okay, got it. ‘Cause I was gonna ask about the MiCA regulations that were passed there, the UK also passed regulations, and if that had any impact,

Any impact on your business there? You know, given that there’s more clarity than there is, let’s say in the United States, which we’re still waiting for. – So, I think we are trying to be MiCA compliant. I’m not certain, you know, where we are with that process, that’s up to our lawyers.

But you know, that’s, we are looking to be, I guess, compliant with regulations where we can be. – Sure. – Obviously as a blockchain, you know, we are not, we aren’t the blockchain. The blockchain is its own thing, we are a publisher of software.

But you know, it’s sort of a lot of these regulations don’t necessarily apply directly to us, but obviously it’s very important to be cognizant of regulations and, you know, to try to fit in where possible. – And what were your thoughts on the ruling here,

At least in the United States with between Ripple and the SEC with the judge highlighting that, you know, XRP in itself intrinsically is not a security. Trading on, exchanges secondary market’s not a security, you know, that was certainly seen as a big win by the industry. What were your thoughts there?

– I think it was a big win. Again, I’m not that familiar really with the case. I followed it loosely. I don’t know the arguments of the case. You know, I think it’s fantastic for Ripple, probably good for the industry more broadly. I believe, if I’m not mistaken,

It is being challenged by the SEC, but I could be wrong. I think they want to appeal it. Hopefully that process goes, you know, in Ripple’s favor. Good for the whole industry and particularly good for Ripple. – Hmm, I’m trying to think if there was a question

That escaped me and I was gonna ask you about Flare, but I think we covered a lot and I love the Google Cloud being, you know, those folks participating as a validator. I’m excited for, you know, the updates coming out this year. But Hugo, thank you so much for joining me.

I appreciate you and appreciate the insights and I got to check out the Flare staking after this. – Yeah, well, I know that Bifrost just released their staking and of course there’s another wallet called Solidify that allows you to stake. – Yeah, so everyone listening, if you’re using Bifrost or Solidify,

You can definitely check that out. Hugo, thank you so much. It will have to have you back on maybe another three months as things progress. Excited for the future updates this year, but thank you for joining me. – Yeah, I can’t wait to watch the progression.

The team’s been working incredibly hard, so I’m excited to, you know, deliver and for the community to start engaging with the protocols.