Steven Waterhouse, CEO of Orchid Labs, on DePIN, AI, Decentralized VPNs, and Fighting for Internet Freedom | Ep. 307

cryptonews.com:

Cryptonews’ Matt Zahab recently sat down with Steven Waterhouse, CEO and co-founder of Orchid Labs, an open-sourced, decentralized marketplace for Internet services that aims to provide the building blocks for a better, freer Internet.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview, the CEO discussed:

Or read on to learn what he told Matt.

The concept of decentralization or distributed systems goes back to the very early stage of the Internet, Waterhouse said.

The core routing design, infrastructure, and protocols at the lowest level, are designed to be fully decentralized. Centralization came after.

Therefore, he said,

“The actual Internet itself is decentralized architecture. It’s designed to withstand a nuclear attack.”

You could do all sorts of different applications across “big decentralized distributed clusters of machines.” The backends of Apple, Google, and Amazon, for example, are all based on these.

“So we kind of went from decentralized to more centralized, and now we’re going to decentralized again inside the data centers,” he added.

However, the companies’ business models, which are mostly supported by advertising, don’t lend themselves very well to being decentralized. It’s economic interest.

But “along comes crypto” and, with it, the idea of having decentralized architectures that are widely available – not just side data centers. “And that becomes the collection of blockchain families that we know and love,” the CEO said.

Now, people decided to “try and do what we did before with making things in data centers, not just one machine but more, and do the same across a wide area. And that’s DePIN,” said Waterhouse. “It’s like decentralized machines doing things that are connected and incentivized using crypto.”

And if you want