Face-to-Face Interview Arweave Ecological Project - Sarcophagus

Face-to-Face Interview Arweave Ecological Project - Sarcophagus

Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!

Author：Xiaosong HU @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Translator: Xiaosong HU @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Sarcophagus

The risk in choosing to start something new is never that the project will fail; the risk is in never starting in the first place. The only method with a 100% failure rate is not trying

Dear partners of the Web3 ecosystem, in the past month, the entire Web3 can be described as "crazy". First, the most popular topic - whether the inscription of BRC20 will disappear along with the "vulnerability" repair of the BTC network has become the "Sword of Damocles" in the entire market. Secondly, at the macro regulatory level, the BlackRock Bitcoin Spot ETF finally Whether it can be approved by the SEC (U.S. Securities Regulatory Commission) has also become the focus of much attention; the rest is emotion, half of the people are in FOMO, and the other half are waiting for the retracement of the Christmas market. . .

However, Arweave's ecological projects are still immersed in work, and top projects continue to deliver new results: for example, the cross-chain token payment protocol based on the Arweave storage consensus paradigm - "everPay", has recently released a series of updates aimed at Improve user experience and explore more product possibilities. The star project "Sarcophagus " has just officially announced the launch of the Ethereum second-layer network Arbitrum mainnet. There are many more examples. This also illustrates the developers of the entire Arweave ecosystem from the side. They are a group of pure geeks who are not affected by the emotions of the so-called "currency circle".

So why did we want to do this series of interviews? Because the entire blockchain world feels so "magical" to people, many people have "arrogance and prejudice" towards practitioners. The author also wants to take this opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews with the practitioners of the Arweave ecological project during such a bear market and share some feelings from their perspectives and industry experiences, which may be able to help those who want to All in Web3 during the bear market. Provide some cases and templates for reference.

At the same time, we hope that the PermaDAO division of labor and collaboration model, everPay, and future everVision-related products can be experienced and felt by ecological parties. In the past, most of the contributors to PermaDAO were mainly Chinese-speaking. As the interviews continued to deepen, more and more The more project parties started to log in to PermaDAO, they are also trying to understand our tools in depth and ultimately hope to become a tool commonly used by the contributor community of the entire Arweave ecosystem.

Today we are interviewing Zach Hamilton, the founder of Sarcophagus. Before that, I would like to briefly introduce the background of the Sarcophagus project to you:

（Zach Hamilton： Zach Hamilton, the founder of Sarcophagus）

About Sarcophagus’ Project Profile

Regarding the background of the Sarcophagus project: Kyle, our researcher at PermaDAO, has written an in-depth research report on the "Sarcophagus". He has made a detailed analysis of the Sarcophagus from the underlying technology, business model, incentive model and other aspects. Please click on the link. Read directly:

The following is the official content of the interview:

Part I: Regarding Sarcophagus

Q1: Hello Mr. Zach! I'm glad you can accept our interview today, Could you please introduce the background of Sarcophagus and how it was established?

A: Sarcophagus started after the founders spent years in the blockchain security space working with hedge fund, VC, and HNW clients. The original motivation for the project was to introduce a novel protocol to the market that would allow users to take advantage of the power of cryptography to protect their assets and to make the recovery process for data much easier.

Q2: Can you give us an update on the project? Any scoop?😀

A: The project has been progressing nicely through the doldrums of the 22-23’ market, spending time building important features and integrating feedback from testing in the real world. The most recent advance has been the launch of our L2 integration patterns, allowing a user to take advantage of what Sarcophagus can offer in a much, much cheaper way than possible on the ETH mainnet. Currently, Sarcophagus is live on Polygon, with Arbitrum and many other L2s launching very soon.

Q3: Why would you want to name the project “Sarcophagus”?

A: Given that our application is a dead man’s switch, which is used to communicate secrets in the event of the user’s removal from control of their account, we thought that naming it after an ancient vessel for transportation to the afterlife was prudent. We often use Egyptian metaphors for the process of creating, maintaining, and recovering data in our system because it can make the process more fun to interact with and easier to understand.

Q4: What are some significant milestones in the history of Sarcophagus?

A: Over the course of a few years, we have iterated the design of our dead man’s switch system to be more robust and more fault tolerant. Starting with a centralized proof of concept, moving to a 1:1 system where the user chooses one node to guard their secrets, and then finally moving to our current architecture where users can select an arbitrary m-of-n recovery scheme, employing as many nodes as they wish, and the fault tolerance of their recovery. I would consider this release to be our largest milestone, it was very hard to build while keeping the game theory and security tight, but also allowing near unlimited flexibility for users and future integrators.

Q5: What is the future vision and plan for Sarcophagus?

A: The plan for the future of Sarcophagus is to continue to build a dead man’s switch primitive that is robust and secure, with a focus on longevity and finality over speed and efficiency. While our base-level primitive is meant to be general purpose, we will also work to expand use cases and integrations with partners that only need basic functionality. We built the protocol to work for the heaviest security needs, but we also want users to be able to employ Sarcophagus to solve more simple needs as well.

Q6: Is there a specific timeline currently in place, and what additional resources are needed for its implementation?

A: There are current internal development timelines for specific functions or issues we are trying to solve, but we work on a rolling launch basis where new updates are integrated into the application as they are built and tested. Since we use an Omni-chain system where tokens are bridged out to other networks from ETH rather than launched separately on networks like Polygon, we can roll out new versions of the application on a given chain seamlessly.

In terms of additional resources - the community is our greatest need. We need people from outside the project who have an interest to come run nodes, test things out, send in bug reports, claim bounties, and participate in incentivized testing.

Q7: How many full-time staff members are currently working at Sarcophagus, and what are the ways for others to get involved? How do you incentivize participation?

A: Currently Sarcophagus has 6 FTE staff members, along with many more contributors who help with specific projects that fall in their domain. We also work with https://www.decent-dao.org/ for many core operations and are able to leverage their full staff of employees for projects.

Q8: Can you tell us a little bit about Sarcophagus DAO? What is the mission of this DAO, what tools do you use for DAO collaboration, etc.

A: The Sarcophagus DAO was formed in a purely decentralized way to facilitate the ongoing operation of a decentralized dead man’s switch. We didn’t choose to start a DAO because it was easy or just because it was cool, we chose this structure because a DAO is the only way to give the application the autonomy it needs to keep running regardless of input from the core contributors. It’s mission is to support the development and ongoing operation of the dead man’s switch primitive.

Tools used in the DAO are pretty standard for the industry, starting with the Aragon platform, custom governance and vesting contracts, also including tools from Gnosis (SAFE). It has always been the goal of the DAO to keep everything simple, and not allow complexity to creep in and make things less secure.

Part II: Regarding Zach Hamilton

Q9: Could you please share your educational background and professional experience?

A: While I did attend university to study business at Arizona State, I wouldn’t consider this relevant the the crypto-economy. My education has been mostly self-directed in the tech sector over the years being involved in startups and venture capital. Once out of university, I started working with https://hingecapital.com, helping the partners invest in tech companies. The opportunity to be exposed to so many entrepreneurs, their business, and the funding mechanisms behind them was truly better than any university could ever teach, it was the real world.

After working with the VC fund I started a business in 2016 to help hedge funds and VCs protect their crypto investments, which eventually led to the genesis of Sarcophagus, born from the unmet needs recognized while helping these clients.

Q10: How did you become familiar with Arweave?

A: I was doing exhaustive research on decentralized storage providers when Sarcophagus was just a side project with a collection of research docs. At the time there were very few options, IPFS was just released but FIL was years away. Most storage at this point in time was literally on the blockchain == far too expensive for our use case. This is when I heard about a founder who was presenting a novel mechanism for decentralized permanent storage at a conference in Berlin, so I flew there, met Sam Williams, learned as much as I could and started building Sarcophagus using ETH and Arweave. Sarcophagus requires long-term, highly-replicated, decentralized storage; so it was a natural fit.

Q11: In such a bear market environment, what advice do you have for those who want to enter web3?

A: Bear markets are the absolute best time to get involved. The signal-to-noise ratio is much higher and there are dramatically fewer scammers and distractions. Just like any investment (with your time, your money, your emotions), it is generally prudent to make placements when the market is near lower cyclic bounds.

My advice would be to learn as much as possible by testing things out, playing with new applications on-chain, and knowing that any capital expended in this “play” is the cost of learning. With L2s and alt L1s, it is now possible to get started and perform on-chain operations with very little money spent, but the upside of the learning is the same.

One who is just entering this market should seek out disparate opinions and news sources. There are many factions that have formed in the “maxi” category of any one ecosystem or chain, and their views tend to be myopic. While many of these maxi’s will turn out to be correct in their assumptions, many more will have missed the forest through the trees. Seeking information from wide-ranging and dissenting sources is key to forming a more accurate view of the landscape.

Q12: Are you under a lot of pressure in life and work right now? Have you ever regretted it?

A: Leading any project of consequence will always include some pressure on the core contributors, but this pressure does not need to be taken as a negative. The ability to transmute external pressure into forward motivation is an extremely important skill for founders of any type of project to learn, and I think our team has done a great job of this so far. I have never regretted starting this project, or any other project for that matter. The risk in choosing to start something new is never that the project will fail; the risk is in never starting in the first place. The only method with a 100% failure rate is not trying.

Part III: Regarding PermaDAO and everVision

Q13: Have you seen the research report on Sarcophagus produced by PermaDAO? Any comments?

A: Yes! I was very happy to see the report come out and really appreciate the PermaDAO team taking the time to help educate the public on what we are building! I thought the report was accurate, and I admire that it was not a hype-based piece. It focused on the real utility dead man’s switches can provide.

Q14: How do you perceive the team and business development of everVision?

A: I think the launch and development of everVision is an important step in the right direction of a full-spectrum ecosystem in crypto. The world benefits from solutions that match the exact profile of a given project’s vision. For some that is full decentralization an anonymity, for others that is speed and visibility, the market needs both.

Q15: In your view, how should PermaDAO and SarcophagusDAO collaborate in the future?（please give us some specific suggestions）

A: I would love to find ways to work together in the future that can help more people get involved in the Arweave ecosystem. That could be something as simple as storing their first file or creating their first Sarcophagus. I would love to see hackathons where new devs can introduce novel ideas into the market and have them supported by existing players like Sarcophagus and PermaDAO.

Q16: If we invited you to come to PermaDAO on board, would you be interested in participating?

A: Depending on the structure and the commitment, absolutely.

Q17: Lastly, is there anything else you would like to say to the audience?

A: Thank you! Thank you for taking the time to read about our project, and I hope that we have built something that can be useful to you in your life!

Conclusion

In fact, when I learned about the Arweave ecosystem, the first thing that attracted me was not everPay (the first product of everVision), but the "Sarcophagus" project. Later, I asked some practitioners around me, and I would like to thank the Chinese translated name is "Dead Man's Switch". Such a "thrilling" translation that does not conform to traditional Chinese culture immediately attracted everyone's attention. But this interview is a real in-depth exchange with the project side. The overall feeling is that as a Founder, all of Zach Hamilton’s conceptual expressions are very real and pure. Maybe this is the overall atmosphere of Web3~

After the interview, we also introduced PermaDAO’s collaboration tools to the “Sarcophagus” project party, and invited members of the “Sarcophagus” project party to board the ship to experience it, and receive incentives for their contributions. We also look forward to PermaDAO being able to provide more ecological project parties with Excellent service. Welcome all ecological bosses to contact us~~~

🔗 More about PermaDAO：Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Medium | Youtube