SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
Nate Holiday is the founder and CEO of Chainlink BUILD project Space and Time, the first decentralized data warehouse for blockchain applications. Holiday joined Malandrino to discuss how Space and Time is utilizing Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure to make real-time blockchain data available to developers from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Space and Time connects onchain and offchain data in one environment, then uses its Proof of SQL protocol to deliver analytic results back to a smart contract along with cryptographic proof that the data was not altered. At last year’s SmartCon, Space and Time announced its partnerships with Microsoft and Chainlink Labs on the heels of a $20 million strategic funding round led by Microsoft’s M12 fund.
Space and Time’s recent collaboration with Microsoft through its Co-Innovation Lab leverages generative AI to simplify complex SQL queries for developers using natural language.
“You can be able to generate SQL without even understanding SQL,” Holiday explained. “You can have results come back to you without even being a programmer or an engineer and you can start to understand blockchain data or SQL data in a way that you can just ask normal questions.”
As AI systems become more prolific, Holiday believes the need for verifiable data and computation, which Space and Time provides via Proof of SQL, is ever more important.
“We can prove that the origination and attestation of data hasn’t been tampered with. We can prove that the storage within the database hasn’t been tampered with and we can also prove that the query results from a database haven’t been tampered with.”
During this year’s SmartCon, Space and Time announced that Proof of SQL will run its zk-Verifier natively on Chainlink nodes. Holiday underscored the important role Chainlink plays in this process.
“You need a decentralized network to actually verify that the proofs haven’t been tampered with,” he explained. “Our ability to do that through Chainlink is very, very important.”
He said this and other SmartCon announcements were met with unmatched enthusiasm for building a Chainlink-powered verifiable web.
“This is a lot bigger than last year; there’s a lot more excitement,” he said. “If you think about building a verifiable data future and verifiable applications in the future, the big players are here. You have, of course, Chainlink sponsoring this whole event, but you also have Microsoft and Google and AWS and Space and Time. So if you want to build this verifiable data future that we’re trying to build, the big players are here and it’s really exciting.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Nate Holiday.