Talking with Deon, 4EVERLAND’s founder, about their new AR-hosting services and more
Some days ago, 4EVERLAND announced the introduction of their AR-hosting services, following the announcement, we decided to engage in a chat with 4EVERLAND’s founder, Deon. Below, you’ll find what came out: an exclusive interview covering a little more than just their last implementation.
Q: Hi there Deon; I’m glad that you offered us the opportunity to have a chat about 4EVERLAND and your plans regarding Arweave. I want to suggest you play a little pretend game with me:
Let’s say that a junior Web2 developer just stumbles on your solution and finds the below explanation:
“4EVERLAND is a Web 3.0 cloud computing platform that integrates storage, computing, and network core capabilities. It aims to help the user to make a smooth leap from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and become the infrastructure for millions of Web 3.0 developers and applications.”
Now, maybe he’s asking himself why Web3? Why should he renounce Web2 for Web3, and most importantly, why should he/she use 4EVERLAND as the tool that will facilitate this transition?
A: Thank you for your question, I would like to say 4EVERLAND is not designed for Web2 developers to renounce Web2 for Web3. 4EVERLAND is designed for developers to better use Web3 technology to empower their products.
We firmly believe that Web3 is a trend, and as Web3 continues to evolve, it is not friendly enough to Web2 developers in terms of a lot of development logic, habits, or environment so that a lot of Web2 developers would enter Web3 at excessive cost, either in terms of learning or spending.
4EVERLAND’s product positioning is to facilitate traditional developers using Web3 technology. 4EVERLAND is AWS-S3 compatible and provides a global acceleration gateway compatible with Web2, giving a better development environment. With 4EVERLAND, Web2 developers can quickly and easily deploy their products on top of Web3 technology, take advantage of Web3 and assure good product access and usage.
Q: We know that you started by offering IPFS storage services, but lately, we saw that you have focused on Arweave also in the past year. You began with the bucket, a way to effortlessly upload data on Arweave, then you teamed with everFinance and ensured that their Arseeding tool fully supports 4EVERLAND products, and now you just announced AR-hosting services. What are your thoughts about Arweave regarding its permanent storage proposition, and why do you find it necessary to be a part of your tool kit?
Arweave, as a usable decentralised storage infrastructure, illustrates the concept of permanent storage and proves its strong consensus as well as operability in the market development. Arweave is an unprecedented solution for any cloud platform, especially 4EVERLAND as a Web3 cloud computing platform where Arweave plays a particularly important role.
4EVERLAND integrates Arweave’s permanent storage capability through the Web2 or S3 compatible development architecture we just mentioned so that Arweave can more easily become the underlying storage facility for more applications, and by integrating Arseeding’s 4EVERLAND Global Gateway, it brings true global acceleration capability to Arweave files.
Q: Also, what are your thoughts about IPFS and Arweave? There are a lot of heated debates surrounding which one out of these two is the “best”. From my point of view, it’s like comparing apples to oranges, but, however, what’s on your mind about those two? Could they coexist peacefully, serving different use cases? If so, what use cases do you envision for both of them?
A: IPFS and Arweave are both great underlying protocols, and we think the problems they solve are not the same, so we don’t consider IPFS and Arweave as a competition. We often say that IPFS solves the problem of peer-to-peer file transfer and file immutability, but Arweave solves the problem of permanent storage status of files, which makes the two protocols serve completely different projects or objects. Let me give you an intuitive example, Realy is a well-known metaverse project, and part of their files are now hosted in IPFS via 4EVERLAND Bucket service. But the Realy team also uses 4EVERLAND Bucket to host some important files in Arweave for permanent storage.
In my opinion, the use of IPFS and Arweave are not conflicting, they both solve the trust problem of storage and reduce centralised storage. When developers want to host files immutable and at a cheaper fee, then choose IPFS, if you want to keep them forever, they use Arweave, it both makes sense.
Q: We strayed a lot; let’s talk more about the announcement at hand. What’s up with the AR-hosting services? Tell us everything we need to know. Does this somehow involve your quite impressive node infrastructure?
A: We are very excited about our integration with Arweave and the implementation of the Ar-hosting service, which will mean that developers can quickly deploy and host their front-ends on Arweave through 4EVERLAND. By providing such a CI/CD tool, we can make front-end deployment easier, more efficient, and less costly for devs. Also, this integration provides devs that previously hosted their front-ends on IPFS or Dfinity via our Hosting service a new option.
We all know that for most of the Dapps nowadays, their front-end is still hosted on centralised clouds like AWS, Google cloud, etc., which doesn’t achieve the true meaning of complete decentralisation. But when they use 4EVERLAND and host the front-end to Arweave, it means that all the accessing users don’t have to worry about whether the front-end disappears, whether it is hijacked or not, tampered or not, and realize the real meaning of decentralised application.
We are even more excited that we have implemented the true global acceleration of Arweave, which will bring the best access experience to all users who use 4EVERLAND to host their front-ends or store their files.
Unlike other platforms that use third-party gateway service providers to provide global acceleration services for the hosted pages, 4EVERLAND has chosen to build its own set of stable, large, and stable gateway nodes around the world from the very beginning of its establishment, which will allow our gateway nodes to be directly integrated with Arseeding to realize the content caching and acceleration capabilities of the edge nodes based on Arweave storage. It is a completely independent solution and fully Arweave-based implementation.
Beyond that, we also provide traditional DNS domain name bindings on the gateway side to meet developers’ needs for Web2 compatibility. So that users do not need to remember complex hashes or change their Web2 access habits. We are also developing decentralised domains such as ENS, and SNS binding to Arweave, I think it will empower a better Web3 access paradigm, pls stay tuned.
Q: Given the fact that you represent a project that’s not solely rooted in the Arweave ecosystem, you have the experience of dealing with other Web3 communities too, what do you think that we at Arweave could do better?
A: We’ve had a few meetings with Arweave team, and we’re amazed that Arweave team isn’t as big as we thought it would be. You know, in this industry, everything takes people, branding, marketing, devrel, op,etc. Arweave has not relied on a large team while having such a large impact but has grown to the size through the active participation of the community, developers, and eco-projects, this is rare and valuable.
The consensus of the community is the key factor to the long-term development of an ecosystem. Arweave verifies that this is an open and decentralised one. This is the advantage and perhaps also the disadvantage, fewer team members will, at the same time, bring some problems, such as it is difficult to efficiently host more events and advocate for more developers. Of course, we believe that with time, this must not be a big problem. Arweave already has a great foundation of community faith and market expectations.
Q: What about the future? How do you envision it for the entire Web3? But for 4EVERLAND? Does it involve more interactions with Arweave?
A: We believe that Web3 is a great process that will change the traditional way of collaboration, lifestyle, architecture, etc. It may not be so fast to bring everything to your eyes rapidly, but it must happen. With the development of Web3, more data will need to be hosted in Arweave, and we believe that the booming development of Arweave will also respond to the various market demands faced in the future.
Whether it is Bucket or Hosting, this is just the starting point of 4EVERLAND’s integration with Arweave, for instance, we are now planning the integration of Smartweave. We will keep up with the development of Arweave and leverage more Arweave’s features and integrate with featured ecological projects tech to facilitate more devs with our services. We hope that 4EVERLAND can reduce the cost of using Arweave for developers and connect Arweave with more ecosystems, thus advancing the ecological development of Arweave.
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