The Future of Security and Messaging with Matthew

What is up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi group podcast. And today I am joined by Matt, the founder of satellite. How's it going Matt? It's going great. Glad to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to dig in and unpack a little bit more about satellite before we do. Let's talk a little bit about your origin story. What got you into? The web three

space. Yeah, it kind of goes back quite some time. Honestly, since I was about 13 to 15 years old, I got into the gaming space and was working closely with a bunch of content creators and stuff like that. Jumping around some hosting companies and eventually found myself on a team building something called beam pro, which was reprinted a mixer and sold to Facebook and all that

and really didn't get much from that. I was very one and my very early on in my dev career, but not a lot of friends and continued to kind of explore the the content creation space and kind of got bored. Like many years later, I was working for like DOD doing government work and it was just so lackluster. Just knowing that like the work that I'm

doing, like it doesn't really get shared with everybody. It's like some core secret group of it. It was just it wasn't for me. So I eventually moved on to working at shapeshift. A decentralized exchange and helped out with a project called prism over there. And that kind of kicked off my love for like taking the crypto site of things serious in the development sector. And kind

of just started toying around some ideas with some content creators. We had some issues with discord having kind of garbled audio quality when you had more than a couple people talking at once and a slew of other issues. So ended up making a tool that I was trying to come down. Something, I was working on with prodfish and I worked with other people but they told

my book I actually, me and polish, I had no comfort right after the first naturally. I was told rockin per nooice, ok, two or 3 years and this was my last book. I was told to see the code you're running on. So, sort of getting a bunch of open source collaborators and it was pretty awesome and you know things just kind of grew from there to

the point where people were like, hey we'll give you money to hire all these people that are working together open source and build this thing and you know I'm like, heck yeah let's do it. I believe in the vision of this thing. If we can get paid to make it happen, I was going to do it in my free time anyway, like let's do it. And

so, sadly, just since growing to about a 30 person company and yeah we're all over the world, Italy, you know, Ukraine, Portugal, everywhere, we just, we have an awesome group of people, everyone's super passionate, they all have different things that secure messaging means to them and different areas that increase privacy could help their daily lives. So, it really helps to have all these different perspectives and

honestly just jazz to be working on the project and that's kind of where we're at now. Nice, very nice. Yeah, with telegram and signal and all these sort of, secure chatting platforms, I've seen just such a surge in like people in my everyday life using them and I've been using Telegram for so many years now but I get a notification when a new contact joins and

it's so clear to me with the amount of people in my contacts that have joined Telegram over the last year even, last maybe two years, people that I would not consider tech savvy, just average normal people that, you know, like, yeah, like co-workers that maybe wear managers or something at a time. Exactly, exactly. So, what do you think about, you know, where we're shifting towards this?

users they have going through their platform is insane. But when you look at things like Discord or Facebook Messenger and things like that, the scope is so much broader and I think the real win and the real way to get mass adoption is to sort of make the best chat app, make the best thing for your mom and dad to use to FaceTime you on holidays

or not FaceTime a video call you. I'm sure they'll still call it FaceTime. But, you know, all these little things that people might want to do, like sending pictures and stuff like that. A lot of the applications out there right now just don't have high enough quality to send pictures. Like, God forbid, you actually want to use like a DSLR or something and send a larger

image, you know, that you're going to have to upload that to Dropbox or something like that. Up until recently, you couldn't even upload like Android or iOS screenshots to a lot of the platforms because the file size limit. So, you know, all these little things that are struggles that people have that maybe aren't necessarily revolving around privacy are the things that you have to fix first.

And then once you fix all those things, it's just kind of like icing on the cake that makes you like the clear choice to say, hey, we're better at voice chat. We're better at video. We have way higher file storage limits. You know, you can do shared collaborative folders. You can do desktop sync. Oh, and by the way, everything is encrypted. You know, at the start,

we don't have any servers that the data is proxied through. It's entirely hands off. The thing can operate if we cease to exist. Like, you know, these sort of things are just like, wow, that's awesome. And it's like, you know, sealed a deal sort of thing. But at the end of the day, you've got to make the best messenger. And you've got to, you know, bring

everyone onto the platform because it makes our life easier. And security has to be something that comes as an addition to all those other things. If you just make the most secure platform, people are going to be like, wow, this is cool. Like I respect that. But they're going to, you know, eventually go back to using whatever they're using before that happened to be easier. So

that's been our focus to just make things super easy. We don't really call ourselves a crypto or a blockchain company. We're a messaging company. We're looking to build the best messaging client out there. It just so happens that we're using blockchain and Web 3 tech behind the scenes. And it happens that privacy is of the utmost importance from our development flow. Got it. Very cool. Yeah.

I think that that's sort of the future of how a lot of this stuff is going to work. And rightfully so, it can move into the background and it can, yeah, it can totally thrive in the background. Absolutely. So one thing that I think is really key here is I want to walk through some of the things that you guys are doing differently because storage is

a problem. I mean, at least from everybody I've talked to in the Web 3 space, storing things on chain is just becoming, you know, a lot of things that you can do. You know, a bit of a bit of a headache. So I'd love to understand a little bit from a high level how you guys are doing it in a simple way. So everybody can understand

how you're dealing with storage and how that works. Yeah. So let me think about this. So the simplest way that I can describe it is we take your files and we encrypt them locally. Once they're encrypted, they're really just a bunch of data. And it doesn't matter where, how they're stored. There's a bunch of information that is encrypted. So we allow you to choose where you

want your files to be stored. Right now the option that we ship with is IPFS by Protocol Labs. And what that does is just we handle all the storage stuff. You don't need to worry about it. Like as far as you're concerned, you upload a file and you can share that file. But behind the scenes, we put that on IPFS and we front the pinning cost.

In order to keep the costs. Fair. What we do is we give you kind of like a bucket size. We give you a place that you own that is four gigabytes of pin file storage. And however you choose to use that is up to you. So if you want to upload a three gigabyte, you know, video recording or something like that. You can do that. But

it's going to use a lot of your storage. And perhaps as you increase or as you use more things, you'll have to choose to unpin some old things. But personally, I think that's a good thing. And secondly, I found that that's not such a big deal because a lot of times you're sending memes that you've copy pasted from the internet. You're sending, you know, potentially like

screenshots of issues that maybe you found at work. These things perhaps don't need to live on forever. So if you use up that storage space and, you know, a couple months later, it just says, Hey, your storage space is full. Like, do you want to go ahead and unpin an old file and then pin this new one. Or you can click don't ask again. And we

just do it automatically. We kind of just give you this, this certain amount of space that you're allowed to use and we'll pay for it. And things can roll in and out of it. Now, of course, in the future, our plan is to support different ways to upload and store files. Perhaps there will be web to alternatives that are cheaper. And as long as we don't

need to run the server. And there's a way to do it locally on your computer perhaps that's a choice for you. Once it's encrypted on your machine, it doesn't truly matter for things like, you know, short term file storage or even long term file storage. Of non sensitive information perhaps you don't care and you just want a really cheap place to store it. So, you know,

it's all about options. But early on, I think while we're still figuring things out, our goal is to. Front the cost for all the users and let us figure that out. I think that's kind of got to be on the businesses that are trying to operate in the space. You shouldn't really experiment on your users. So we're still figuring out in truth. But we have a

lot of great ideas and really as we grow, we're just going to see how they work and adapt and evolve. Got it. Got it. Very cool. So what stage are you at? I mean, I know that when I was doing research for this, it says you can get early access. Does that mean that you guys are in beta? Are there people using this? Where are you

guys? Yeah, there are people using it. We're in a pre-release state. But we've always been, you know, really excited to show people what we're working on as soon as we possibly can. So you can go on our website and you can use the early access web version. We also have coming up very soon. We're going to be doing a very shortly product called uplink, which is

more akin to like a telegram type solution built on top of our stack. That is being built in Rust and will be deployed as, you know, native applications. So a.exe, a.dmg, flat packs for Linux and stuff like that. I've even had it running on our Dweenos. So we'll have this sort of core simplified version of our stack available. Hopefully in the next month or so. Really,

it's, you know, kind of we release one when it's done, when it's ready. We do try to move fast, but we found that setting, you know, specific deadlines and things like that is often counterproductive because you don't want to release something until it's ready. And obviously every, you know, companies like, hey, we got to get something out of here. It's been a while. But once you

start setting dates on that, you sacrifice functionality just to make a date. So you know, it'll be kind of rolling releases. And the best way to keep up with those is, you know, obviously on our social social networks, and for community stuff, we're sitting in discord and telegram for right now. So those releases will continue to go out over the next couple of months. And we're

hoping within the next hopefully six months or so. We'll have a product that supports everything we want from, from our core set. So we'll have communities. We'll have all the voice and video streaming available on all of our platforms. We'll have the file sharing there. And a huge part for me will also have extensions, which allows people to extend the UI of our application and go

beyond just text bots and things like that. If you, you know, want to record your podcast or something, you might add the recording extension in there, which allows you to save the recordings automatically to separate audio tracks on the MP4 or have everyone's audio saved and synced up to MP3 files that you can download in a zip. You know, extensions really will allow people to make

the platform. Whatever they want in their daily lives, whatever makes their daily lives the easiest. So that's the feature I'm most excited for. But yeah, really exciting things coming up over the next six months or so. And, you know, every month or so, I'd encourage checking in because we do do rolling releases. So there may be major changes every couple months or sometimes every week. Every

time we have a milestone completed, we release a version of our application to the public. So it's best just to stay tuned because death lines and releases are kind of out in the air. Got it. Very cool. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of payments. Now Facebook, as we all know that it's been in this space for a little while with

Libra, that got kind of snuffed out for lack of better way of saying it pretty, pretty quickly after they announced it, it was like overnight they could snap their fingers and be the largest financial institution in the world, essentially doing it through messenger. And I noticed that you guys are planning on doing like a building built in kind of payment rails for the app. So I'm

curious as to what you can share about that and, you know, how this is going to look when I'm using an application like a signal or a telegram. You know, I know that there were other applications like kick and things like that. Everybody has really sort of hinted towards this. But I'm curious what your take is on how that's going to be implemented. Yeah. I mean,

it really is. It really comes down to traditional institutions allowing us to use their systems when it comes to things like Fiat payments. Of course, being built on top of, you know, blockchain technology, supporting cryptocurrencies is pretty non-trivial comparatively. So what we'll likely end up doing is we will support crypto payments first and foremost. If you hold a token or cryptocurrency and you like to use

that to pay your friends, we'll have some kind of conversion API in there to peg it to your local Fiat currency. And, you know, mom and dad don't want to know like, oh, like how much crypto am I sending you or whatever they just want to know like, oh, I'm going to send you five bucks or whatever. So we'll make that all easy. But the end

goal is to have an opt-in option. And I think it's going to have to be this way. Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to not have any servers or any KYC, these institutions want to make sure that, you know, money that you're getting from these banks when people spend Fiat with credit cards or whatever, they want to make sure that it's not going into spending your

money on things like securities and gambling in the crypto space. They want to make sure it's just God's honest. Like, I'm just using this as a technology. And we're sending money. So it's unfortunately a little bit difficult to find the right partner. And that's something that we're still working on as it stands. But the goal on our side is to find a partner that's willing to

work with us. That understands that we're not a cryptocurrency exchange. We're not a platform to start hedging and trying to make money. We're genuinely just trying to make people's lives easier. And once we find that partner, we will have a opt-in service. You know, you'll go to hit pay and it'll say, do you want to pay with Fiat? Obviously, we'll say like, do you want to

pay a few US dollars if they're US American users? Do you want to pay with euros or whatever? We'll translate the text. But we're going to have to have some kind of KYC, I think, to be able to deal with these institutions, unfortunately. So it's a trade-off. You have to decide if you're willing to make. Although they're not going to be able to track, like, you

know, your what you're typing and sending messages and start targeting you for advertising, it will no longer be completely anonymous when you start to use traditional banking. And I think that's just, you know, a part of what traditional banking is. So I suppose I digress. If we can find the right partner, we will immediately support Fiat payments. If we can't find the right partner, right off

the bat, we will support crypto payments, regardless of if we find a partner for Fiat payments. Got it. Yeah, I think there has been a real groundswell around KYC and things like that with the biggest operators in this space. Basically, I know a lot of people that have, you know, large platforms with their onboarding users. And in the last two years, I think, you know, two

years or so, the push to KYC has been so immense because you have to follow a lot of the rules. And more recently, I think one that was pretty obvious was when a war breaks out internationally. In sanctions come in. You have to follow the rules. Or else you don't have a business. So I think there's, there's so much to be said about that. And there's,

you know, I think, you know, I think that's a big deal. So I think that's, you know, push back from various people in the space about it, but ultimately, you know, we all live in the physical world where we have to abide by different jurisdictions and different laws and things like that in order to run an actual business. So I think it's, it's a good move

that you guys are doing there and trying to find the great of the best partner that understands the business being thoughtful around that means a lot. And I think that that's very important to really highlight. Absolutely. And I hope it gets better, you know, even the biggest names in the decentralized space right now still kind of have a lackluster solution to things like that. You know,

if you go on Amazon or something like that, you want to buy something, you punch in your credit card number, you put in your billing address and you're off to the races. If you want to purchase crypto, you have to take a picture of your driver's license, front and back. You have to put in your social, your full address, all these things. You know, I went

through the process recently with Coinbase and it's just, it's unfortunate, but it's, it's a difficult thing that I don't think we've solved as a community yet. And I hope we do because, you know, I personally believe it is good to have some accountability and money. You know, some people are wise enough to manage their own money, but there are some people who will easily get scammed

and targeted. And I think that's a, you know, a certainly a trade off of crypto is that you're taking your financial response. And it's a responsibility into your own hands. And it'd be nice to have solutions where that's not the case. If you get, you know, scammed, you should, it would be nice to go to open the dispute and say, Hey, this person, you know, said

they were going to sell me this thing on Etsy and then they never delivered it. I would like my crypto back instead of just, you know, gambling. So, you know, we haven't really made it simple. I don't think in the space yet. Until we get to the point where people can just add a credit card or link a bank account and be off to the races.

We're not quite there. And I think it really just comes down to regulations and these institutions having a solid plan for crypto type payments. And I hope we get there, but we're not there yet. And we, you know, as a company, we're going to do our best to support what we've got right now without reinventing the wheel and fighting the battle again. Well said, well said.

So what's, what's next for you guys? I want to get to the finale question of course. But what is, what is coming? What can be done? What can people expect in 2023 from satellite and what can you share that people can get really hyped about? Yeah. I suppose one thing to get kind of hyped about is, like I said, we're not really toding ourselves as a

blockchain or a crypto company. We're very excited to be a crypto company or a blockchain company. And we're proud of that. But we don't think it should be a marketing opportunity. So with that, we are going to be doing a larger marketing push to the content creator space. Obviously, I've got a bunch of friends in that space that are, you know, truly passionate about the product.

We're looking to go out to just to start probably around a hundred million subscribers worth of channels. But we want to make sure we're ready first. The gaming space has been. It doesn't have a lot of trust in the crypto or blockchain space. To them, there's no difference between crypto and blockchain. There's no difference between the board eight yacht club and and satellite. So we've got

to earn their trust. We've got to make sure it's perfect. You know, if there's any bugs or anything like that, it's going to live with us till the end of existence. So we hope to be able to tackle that market. And as we push into that market, start pushing into other traditional spaces. And I think why that's exciting is that we're not really targeting, you know,

hey, like use us because we're a crypto product. Like, hey, guys, like we're a fellow crypto company. Like that's not what we're doing. We're truly trying to take crypto and bring it into the masses or it should clarify my own words. We're trying to take a decentralized Web 3 tech into the masses and show them that it can be used in a painless way. It doesn't

have to be about gambling your money on NFTs and things like that. You don't have to use chains that are incredibly expensive to use. You know, we're building a new view that target the average user. A lot of times we're building exchanges. We're building wallets. We're building protocols. We're building all these things that are really tailored towards people already in the crypto community. Even the games

that we see are, you know, so full of cryptoverbidgen forcing things like NFTs down your throat. And I think I'm really excited to just see how the world kind of adapts a product that doesn't really toe itself as a blockchain company on the surface level. It just uses that as an awesome technology behind this. And just seeing how people react to that and kind of working

to build back some trust in the gaming community on behalf of the crypto and blockchain space. I think that's very exciting. I think the most exciting thing crypto is people actually using it and getting adoption. Not, oh, you can make this much money off of this token or whatever. Like I could care less about all that. I'm just very excited to kind of show the world

that hey, it's not also bad. These all don't need to be all the projects don't need you to do. You consider refinancing your home to to get in. We're just trying to make a cool product. And it just so happened that blockchain was the best solution for it. So I'm just excited to see what people think. And, you know, we'll continue to build these extensions. I

think we're going to be massive. I think satellite will be turned into things we couldn't even imagine by the community when we give them full access. So there's a lot of exciting things to talk about. And I'm a rambler from way back. So I could talk about it for far too long. But yeah, I think I there's just a whole multitude of things to be excited

about. Got it. And that's a perfect segue into our finale question. So outside of satellite, when you get up at the morning, what is it that you're checking your phone on before you're you're looking at is a price of a VNFTs or I don't it doesn't strike me that you're the type of, you know, crypto day trader type person. But I'd love to know what it

is that you just bust at the seams excited about when you get up in the morning outside of what you're building. Yeah, for me, I think truthfully, it's just new technology that makes life a little bit easier. You know, it sounds so nerdy, but I get excited when there's new features that get added to rust or if there's like, you know, I've been really like a

side dream of mine is to make a really nice or find a really nice Linux laptop. So like stuff like that. Like technology new technology is really exciting to me. You know, things like analog. We were doing like retro cases for old like Nintendo stuff. Like geeky stuff like that gets me excited. And you're absolutely right. I don't think I've checked the crypto prices in the

past year. It's just like a non object to me. I want to use it as a technology. I want to use it as, you know, something that can actually be used. And frankly, the cheaper it is like that the cheaper it is for us to. It's just like a bit of a big deal. And just like that forever. There's a sort of secret space. But these

80's are really cool. So I think the bottom part is we're going to live in each States of America, space and, you know, maybe a tiny tangent, right? Maybe a tiny rulers. Maybe a bunch of these. Because at the end of the day, the only reason a lot of people are getting into investing in crypto is because it's easier than things like gold or stocks and

bonds and things like that. But at the end of the day, if crypto wasn't around, would you really be syncing your entire paycheck into the stock market, probably not. You're kind of just excited and getting roped into gambling. So I truthfully, like, I believe in crypto as a payment opportunity. But I don't care so much about that at this time in my life. I care more

about building. So when new protocols, new pieces of tech come out, new hardware, that's what I get excited about. And that's when my eyes light up. Awesome. Awesome. Well said, spoken like a true innovator. Love it. Love it. All right. Well, those are all the questions I have for you. Matt, where can people go and learn more about satellite? Yeah, satellite.im is our site. We're also

on Twitter, satellite under our score. I am. And truthfully, the best place right now, I'm on it. We're probably 18 hours a day is our discord. We'll soon be migrating over to a satellite community as soon as that's ready. But until then, hop on over to discord. Ask questions. I actually really love talking to the community and having think tanks. And, you know, if you've got

hard hitting questions, whatever they are, like, come on. Don't be afraid to ask if you've got feature ideas. Like, I'll tag you on the issue on GitHub. And you'll be able to see as soon as your feature makes it to the application. Just come on. Let's chat. And if you're excited about it, then get excited about it. I will say if you're expecting a full product

and the next big thing to replace Telegram or Discord or whatever, maybe wait a couple months before joining. But if you want to be an early, you want to chat about things, I always love talking, obviously. So be glad to have everyone. Awesome. Awesome. Well, those are all the questions I have. And wherever you guys are listening on iTunes or Spotify, all the links that Matt

mentioned will be in these show notes. But thanks so much for coming on and sharing everything that is satellite Matt. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.