During the 2022 Chainlink SmartCon event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup at the MarketSite Studio in Times Square with some of the conference’s 100+ expert speakers from the Chainlink ecosystem.
After speaking with Arbol Founder and CEO Sid Jha about how on-chain parametric insurance can close the global climate risk protection gap, Malandrino sat down with Nate Holiday, Founder and CEO of Space and Time, the first decentralized data warehouse for blockchain applications.
During 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. Earlier in Malandrino’s SmartCon lineup, Microsoft’s Yorke Rhodes III highlighted Space and Time as one of the promising new technologies in Microsoft’s investment portfolio.
Holiday said working with Chainlink and Microsoft “makes perfect sense” for Space and Time.
“Chainlink’s a pioneer and a leader within the data ecosystem for on-chain data. Microsoft’s been building off-chain data within applications and databases for multiple decades now. So our ability to bridge these two partnerships and bring a bridge that combines on- and off-chain data with tamper-proof analytics that can deliver data back to smart contracts is really exciting for us.”
Space and Time connects on-chain and off-chain data in a single environment, then uses its Proof of SQL protocol to deliver analytic results back to a smart contract along with cryptographic proof that the data is untampered. Holiday said this technology will drive much broader use cases around smart contract automation in industries like DeFi and GameFi.
“Being able to combine on- and off-chain data is a requirement to power applications in order to better engage with your customers,” he explained. “We’re actually enabling smart contracts to be able to consume a lot more data and to be able to have a lot more complex analytics behind that.”
Holiday emphasized data privacy as paramount to building decentralized applications for the future. “This is something that the world doesn’t have today,” he said. “If you’re building decentralized applications, you’re forced to build on centralized databases.” For this reason, he sees web3 users continuing to increase, regardless of what’s happening in the crypto market.
“As we move forward, we’re moving the power of data – the power of your data, of businesses’ data – back to their individual use cases. People have been centralizing data for the last decade in the major cloud providers and it’s given a lot of benefit to a lot of customers and a lot of businesses. But now we’re at a point in time where we need to decentralize that and we’re at the forefront of it and we’re excited.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Nate Holiday on Nasdaq TradeTalks.