Nate Holiday is Co-Founder and CEO of Space and Time. He sat down with Jessica Abo to discuss her company and the intersection of data and blockchain.

Jessica Abo: Nate, tell us a little bit about space and time.

Space and Time is a decentralized data warehouse. If you think about data warehouses, it’s where companies process data to better engage with their consumers on a regular basis. Companies around the world run their data analytics on data warehouses. That ability to power applications and businesses has been around for a long time. We are now decentralizing that process and that data to interact and run with blockchain data in decentralized applications.

And why is that important?

There are many different types of blockchains around the world, and more and more people are starting to interact with various blockchains. So it’s very important that companies that are built on the blockchain, or companies that are what we call ‘off-chain’ or Web2, start interacting with that data because that’s where their customers are.

If you want to better understand your customers, be able to interact with that data, and understand what they are doing with the different types of applications and services that are delivered through the blockchain, it is very important to have tools, analytics, and capabilities that you can combine data into. chain of a blockchain with data off-chain of business systems.

His company aims to move data analytics from enterprise companies to the blockchain. Why would someone do that?

That is a fair question. Look, I don’t think companies are moving to blockchain wholeheartedly. They have years and years of data infrastructure and analytics architectures that have been built. They spent billions of dollars building this architecture and data infrastructure. So taking all that capacity that they’ve built and just moving it around and reusing it for the blockchain is something that I don’t think is going to happen. But what will happen is that they need blockchain data to be able to interact and integrate into their large investments that they have made over several years and billions of dollars.

So we provide this bridge. We allow them to take all the data from the blockchain, wipe it and index it into relational data stores and bring familiar tools that they can integrate into their overall system. So now they can combine all the years of architecture and data and analytics that they’ve built over that time period with new data that’s coming from analytics and from blockchain, and combine this into a single cluster and provide analytics at scale.

Stepping back from this for a second, what do you think is wrong with the way big data analytics is done today?

Well, the first thing I would point out is that everything is centralized. So if you think about the last few years, everyone has been moving all of their data analytics and infrastructure to the cloud and the cloud service providers are all centralized. There are many points where data can be manipulated in that architecture.

First, cloud service providers can determine what apps and software run within their cloud, and they see it all over the world where they decide what types of software to run; while certain types of companies can participate in your cloud, others cannot. Since companies are building this software in the cloud, service providers now have access to all of this data. They can manipulate and control the data if they want to.

Now if you’re building a company that has customer data in software that’s on that cloud provider, and the companies have access to a lot of data that’s also centralized. So if you think about this lineage of data from cloud service providers, software makers, companies that capture and use their customer data, obviously these companies have employees who have access to all of this data. And when you think about doing no harm, always do good in a centralized data architecture, you have all these points of failure where it’s centralized and can be manipulated and altered.

And what would be the benefits of decentralized data analysis?

Space and Time offers an alternative to the centralized data architectures the world has built. And that is, first of all, the servers on which we run the analysis. We do not own all servers. They are decentralized. No one can own all the servers in a decentralized network, which would defeat the purpose. So therefore anyone can participate in the operations of the node and the servers running the actual software. The software we are building is oriented towards open source software. And so, because the software runs on all of these nodes, we don’t really have access or ability to tamper with or alter the actual software.

On top of that, we have built crypto collaterals. Because data is processed in space and time, if someone changes, manipulates, inserts, or deletes data during a query process, cryptographic proofs would fail. This means that you couldn’t actually return data, for example, to a smart contract on the blockchain, which requires tamper-proof data delivery; that’s why we’re building this cryptographic proof, which we call SQL Proof. People cannot interact with the data as bad actors to change, manipulate or transform data favorable to them and not to the customer.

Nate, can you tell us about some of your partners?

We have very strong partnerships within the Web3/blockchain space. Chainlink is helping us bring data to and from the blockchain. So if you want to interact with smart contracts, you need decentralized oracles. Data going in and out of smart contracts requires those oracles, that’s really important. And Chainlink is a leader in the space around data and oracle decentralization.

We are also working with Polygon, Mystenlabs, and Avalanche to bring Web2 customers to the blockchain. See more and more news articles about Web2 companies starting to use blockchain data.

One of the most exciting partnerships that we just announced was with Microsoft and M12 Ventures who invested in Space and Time. I think the reason it’s so important is you’re starting to see data industry leaders like Microsoft from a Web2 perspective and Chainlink from the Web3 industry starting to see how we put all of this data together. How do we bring best-in-class off-chain data and on-chain data analytics capabilities to a single, general data-only platform that interacts with blockchains and interacts with customers, wherever those customers are?

Finally, what do you want to say to people who are skeptical about all of this?

One thing I always say is don’t confuse blockchain technology with cryptography. There is a lot in the news today about crypto exchanges, about trading exchanges, where there are bad actors participating in centralized formats. If you think about, for example, these exchanges that are failing, they’re all centralized. Blockchain technology, Web3 technology, was created to decentralize all of this. And as we think about the data infrastructure that we’re building to further decentralize the ability to own your data, to own your funds. And so all of this plays a role in the purpose of building the blockchain and Web3 technology.