Dive into the compelling world of decentralized technology with Navjit Dhaliwal, the dynamic CEO of Iagon. Iagon, a cutting-edge cloud computing platform, presents a fascinating case study of a team's drive to better understand user needs and provide a robust platform for shared storage economy. With the combined strength of a 19-person tech team and four dedicated co-founders, Navjit guides us through their exciting journey, the importance of compliance, and their decision to seek a patent to safeguard their groundbreaking project.
As we map out Iagon's unique path, we'll uncover why they switched their operations to Cardano in 2021. Navjit throws light on the key factors that influenced this decision, emphasizing Cardano's superior transaction speeds and enhanced security provisions over Ethereum. He also offers insights into Iagon's present initiatives involving their tech team, the liquidity program, and the decentralized system. From their enterprise strategy to creating problem-solving tools and plans for decentralized storage and compute, Navjit paints a vivid picture of Iagon's future and their preparation for success. So, plug in your earphones and get ready for a riveting conversation about Iagon's journey, mission, and vision.
Welcome to Card On Over Coffee. please remember to join us live Monday through Friday on Twitter Spaces at 1.30pm UTC, 9.30am EST. Today's show we have Igon, a cloud computing platform offering access to a decentralized powered shared storage economy. We hope to see everybody at RareEvo when August 24th through the 26th Where Denver, colorado Get your tickets at rareevoio. Here's the coupon code COC10 for 10% off. Grab your coffee. let's hear what Igon is building.
Speaker 2:
All right. Well, why don't we get things started? here, Is it? am I pronouncing this right, igon?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's correct. How are you guys doing? Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:
All right, let's settle down. audience Very lively today. We're doing great. Hope you have a coffee in hand, or some, or tea perhaps. What is your beverage of choice, if I may have?
Speaker 3:
It's four o'clock here, so coffee's a bit late here. I usually drink coffee, but I've already had a cup of coffee already, so the water is my choice right now.
Speaker 2:
That's the pragmatic choice. I think hero usually triples down at that point on the coffee, but we'll have different opinions on how much coffee one needs in a day. But why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you were doing before Igon, and basically, who are you? who's behind the PFP, so that we can get to know you a little bit better? You have Epoch here behind the cup and Hero is my co-host. Yeah, just tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3:
Sure. First of all, thanks for having me on the show and the podcast And just like to introduce myself. I'm Navji Daliwal. I'm a healthcare professional. I'm the CEO currently of Igon. I've been well looking at blockchain space since 2013. I come from a background of more so a healthcare sector, but I did programming in high school. I was kind of pushed into the realm of medicine and, by my parents being from an Indian background, i was raised up in Canada. I have two kids and wife here and I'm established here in Norway. Currently we have a team of about like 19 people and four co-founders. A little bit about our co-founders. Two of them are from the US. Dr Ladd Harrison is from Israel. We have Dr Rohit Gupta and Dr Claudia Lima, who are from the US. Rohit's actually thesis in 2005 in terms of decentralized compute relates directly to what we're kind of doing today with decentralized storage and decentralized compute. That's a little intro about myself.
Speaker 2:
Well, that was great, and you told me a little bit about the team. You said there's 19 folks at Igon, is that right? Correct, correct We do have also Sorry, how much of that is the tech team?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so that's all the tech team. So the marketing is included, and we don't really include the marketing numbers in that. But there's marketing team and community managers as well that are part-time on the project, and that also does include third-party developers as well.
Speaker 2:
What do you think about?
Speaker 1:
that, Harrell. I think that he would have enjoyed our conversation earlier about gluten. However, I think that it's great that they have such a big team. I know that makes you excited. I know that's never, but tech isn't my thing. Let's talk about what Igon is and what they're trying to build Sure.
Speaker 3:
Being from a healthcare background, the first kind of vision of the project was keeping data records private in terms of healthcare-sensitive data, protecting them as well, but it branched out to a much broader project, including decentralized storage and decentralized compute. With the help of Rohit, alad and Claudio as the co-founders, the vision kind of brought it out a little bit. So we focused a lot on the current at that time. The current in 2017, the storage players then were CACoin, filecoin, so we were focused on kind of making something, not trying to reinvent the old, trying to make something more unique, and we focused on learning behavior of resource providers. So what we do is we learn the behavior of resource providers in terms of different variables that include performance, availability, trustability, different other factors, location that are important to the end user. These factors, for example, location, are important, for example, for compliance. For example, if you want to be GDPR compliant, we can allocate the shards or data specifically to EU resource providers, and that's what sets us apart from the competitors And we like to highlight. We did go for a patent in 2018. I know it's against the open source grain, but just to point out that even open source projects are not fully open sourced most of them anyways, there are fully full-sized open source as well. But first we wanted to protect our investment, our time into that, because we also put our own funds into the project in the beginning And we wanted to make sure that it led somewhere. And what we do differently not just the compliance factor in terms of learning and the behavior, but we're focusing a lot on adoption. A lot of the things that we believe that the current storage protocols and the compute protocols are not doing well is onboarding users, and part of that has to do with the compliance factor, because a lot of the enterprises are looking for compliant and following the data regulations, so they won't store on anything that's not data compliant. So that was our first premises. And the second thing is we're building tools on top of the infrastructure that will help solve real-world problems. So in terms of not real-world problems, as is in hunger and things like that, but in terms of that, solve problems that projects and enterprises are facing today. So we're building tools like Stature Ledger, flow and also the decentralized GraphQL that we introduced. Briefly, that will help, we believe, use the infrastructure, which is the storage and compute, but also gain adoption in the future. So that's a little intro of the project where our permission is and we're headed.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. I saw and I was looking through your tweets and saw something about a sneak peek into Igon's upcoming innovation, soon to be launched multi-sig wallet. Could you tell us a little bit about where the need for that came from?
Speaker 3:
Sure. So for Ledger Flow. if people don't know what Ledger Flow is, ledger Flow is basically an accounting of keeping all your kind of financial as enterprise, keeping your records in terms of billables and kind of relating that to traditional work. So one of the biggest problems we faced as a company in the blockchain sphere is converting the invoices and information to the traditional accountant and traditional auditor They still have today. You'd be surprised how many auditors and accountants don't have the understanding and it's still very hard to explain to them. So what we're trying to do is bridge that gap, fixing that problem for us, but also, at the same time, using the Ledger Flow accounting system will be connected with a multi-sig which projects can use to manage their kind of invoices sending invoices, receiving invoices and accounts where they're kind of seamlessly using the infrastructure of the storage but at the same time, creating a service on top of that. So I hope that answered your question. So that's the multi-sig, where the multi-sig ties into the Ledger Flow.
Speaker 2:
Cool, cool. I didn't know about Ledger Flow, to be honest, so I appreciate you going into that. So before we kind of go into some more technical stuff, i guess is there anything on your end that you're trying to get out to the community, any milestones or dates or important things that the community should kind of know about?
Speaker 3:
Well, we currently launched our testnet recently actually So we'd love for the community to kind of give us feedback and try it on. That's one of the things that we have an open source So it's kind of if you join our Discord channel, you can go through and submit tickets and also run the testnet on Linux, windows or Mac just to run a node. There will be any feedback is helpful and we're kind of tying it in with our stature protocols. So stature we're going to be announcing in the catalyst proposal. Stature is a repetition model. How that fits into Igon is basically what we noticed that performance learning and performance availability, trustability. That's kind of like a repetition of that specific node. But we realized that that's actually bigger than just us. It could be branched out into even more, into the web, free space and to different other projects and also different blockchains. So basically, one of the biggest problems in the space is the repetition part, where you're not able to take your reputation from one place to another, even in the traditional space, like you can't take your karma to on Reddit to Quora. So we're trying to bridge that gap where we're like learning the behavior where you're able to take your repetition, build up your repetition in a specific protocol and then build upon it and then kind of create a marketplace around that where projects and other people that are seeking specifically resource providers or anyone that specifically fits their criteria into their projects, so they can search the marketplace kind of like an Airbnb, if you will, for CVs I guess. So that's the two things that we like to announce. We also have a liquidity liquidity reward program that's kind of running right now where you can earn IG So you can delegate to our IG L1 pool and also provide liquidity on the DEXs to earn IG. So you guys can check that out. I think we'll leave some links after the combo today.
Speaker 1:
I have a question You recently recently got a patent. Can you talk about that and what the patent is for and just go into that a little bit?
Speaker 3:
Sure. So we just well, we filed a provisional patent in 2018 and we filed it through various countries as well after that, including the EU and VPO and US and many different countries that matter in our sense. So China, india, all the big industries and what we specifically are patenting is the intelligent, autonomous, smart marketplace, which is related to compute and storage. So what that is is basically learning the behavior, performance, availability, trustfulness different variables that are important to the end user. So that specific part is the one we patent, and EU is the one first one to give us or grant us that patent, and we've been told by the legal team that EU is one of the most difficult places to get the patent, so that's a very big win for us in that sense.
Speaker 1:
Excellent, excellent, goodbye Apart.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I was curious if you could talk a little bit more about your clients, Like who is the right project? What are the attributes of a good fit for someone who's going to want to use iGone?
Speaker 3:
So we're mainly targeting enterprise users, but it's not to say we can't cater to regular retail users as well. So the main target focus for us is very broad, i guess, but initially we want to focus on blockchain projects to provide kind of storage solutions for them, like, for example, ledger Flow and, for example, the Stature protocol that we're doing and also the decentralized kind of Curie system that we're building. Well, we're going to build if we're approved on Catalyst proposal as well, that will help kind of with analytics as well. So we're just trying to help and create tools for blockchain projects first and enterprises That would be the main use case in the beginning target audience. We do already have two pilots in the traditional space, which include SEPTRA-RS, which is an Norwegian-based company with their legal firm that works here in Norway. They work directly with Toll Norge, which is a customs agency here in Norway, and they work with the biggest telecommunications company in Norway, which is ITSIVA, and what they're doing is basically tracking compliance of files in a live setting. So we'll be able to track the compliance of files, not prevent them, but tracking the compliance.
Speaker 1:
So a little funny story, right. You said that this all kind of started as a healthcare thing. Do you know, my first scamming crypto was healthcare related. They were going to put healthcare records on the blockchain.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah. Well, we're not putting it on the blockchains, we're just using the hash of the Pacific file. Funny story though.
Speaker 1:
Just kind of you know, but it's definitely something that I see a need for because of that exact reason. Right now, decentralized storage of data is, i think, the future. So I definitely have indulged the last few days in getting to know your project. Can you talk a little bit more about the leadership team and what, why you think you guys can succeed and what you're trying to build?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, sure, So I'm not a game. I kind of CV at. I don't like talking about too much about myself, but my success in terms of is more soul business related. So I've started three successful startups here in Norway. So in terms of, for example, I've bring in revenue from 2015 to 2018. For example, I grew a company from zero revenue to about 10 million Norwegian crowns per year. So in terms of the business side, I think that's where I bring what I bring to the table in terms of building up the business gardening adoption user base. Rohit he's the former director of technology for Expedia. He's currently one of the senior managers in Google. He's working part time. The other three founders are part time just so we're being transparent here. They're on biweekly kind of calls and we talk and we advise and directions, So they get free advice and everything. So. But since their salaries are on the very upper scale, it's very hard for us as a startup to afford them. Claudio he's a former CTO, Huawei in East Asia. He's currently advising projects, enterprises and governments in terms of blockchain architecture. And then we have a lot Harrison, who's a machine learning expert as well. So all three all three bring kind of various tools to the table. They have different experiences. Rohit's thesis ties directly to our vision, So he wrote his thesis and decentralized compute in 2005. So he brings a lot of knowledge to the table as well. So we think that we bring different assets, different skill sets, to the table. So I think that fits well in the vision of Biago Excellent.
Speaker 1:
Thank you very much. Appreciate the information. Why Cardano?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so we actually were Ethereum first. We actually migrated over to Cardano in 2021. So the reason why we moved over is we saw a lot of security issues on the Ethereum side and we were actually unlucky participant of one of the Ethereum exploits on Nomad. We had a bridge from. We had actually built out a solution, front end solution for a bridge from Nomad to Malcolmira, to Cardano, But we had to take that website down after Nomad had an exploit. So the kind of reason one of the biggest reasons is because of the decentralized network of Cardano, But even though the transaction speeds are not talked about, it is actually much faster. And also we like the ethos of Cardano and how their kind of the mission is to kind of help the you know, help the kind of the smaller population that doesn't have access to different tools and things like that.
Speaker 1:
I didn't just get the whiteboard answer that I normally get, so I like that.
Speaker 2:
That was good. I started listening so intently that I forgot my follow-up question. But one thing I wanted to dig into a little bit, if you don't mind me changing tracks Hero is just a little bit more about what the tech team is working on, because you said 19 people, That's a lot of people. Could you talk a little bit about what products they're working on, or how many are working on infrastructure? or just how do you deploy 20 developers?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it's not easy managing a large team, but we have a good team that manages the DevOps as well. So we've changed the team. Quite often actually, we've been unlucky in the past with developers, but we have a very strong team now, we believe, a very good core strong team, and they've been working on their own, working on the different projects like Ledgerflow, the multi-sig wallet, the test net and the storage depth. So those are the four directions that we're working currently. If we get approval for stature and if we get approval for one or both, even if we don't, we will build a little bit slower, but if we build those, we will head in those directions as well. Stretch, so the repetition program and the decentralized curi system. Sorry, yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you have four or five person teams effectively. Yeah, could you talk a little bit more about the two ways? I remember you saying there's two ways to earn IGON. Could you just go back to that real quick so that everybody's clear on how folks can get involved with IGON?
Speaker 3:
Sure, we have a liquidity program out right now, a reward program, so you can either and or decide to use one or the other, or you can do both. So the more you contribute, the more you can get rewarded in IG. So we have the Cardano pool, which is the IAGL1, which is 99 percent margin pool. Eighty-five percent of those rewards and ADA go back to the liquidity to provide liquidity on the DEXs. Then we have also the liquidity program on the different DEXs. So we are listed on Minswap, wi-fi, wi-finance, and also we are listed on Wingwriters, those three exchanges, if you provide liquidity IAGL or ADA you can also garner rewards in IG. The liquidity program goes on for 73 epochs from April 21st, so it ends next year and the rewards will be distributed after the 73 epochs.
Speaker 1:
It should have been 69 epochs.
Speaker 3:
I won't get too much for that.
Speaker 2:
Well, that's great that we can also be providing liquidity. I haven't seen the DEX, to be honest. Is that IGONcom?
Speaker 3:
You mean we don't have a DEX ourselves? We were listed on Minswap, wingwriters and Wi-Finance.
Speaker 2:
Okay. So how are folks going to provide liquidity?
Speaker 3:
I guess You just provide liquidity on the DEX themselves, either any of the three that I mentioned, so you can provide liquidity directly to them.
Speaker 2:
How did you approach how much liquidity to assign to those DEXs? Is it equal share amongst them or did one DEX get you.
Speaker 3:
So we decide from the IGL1 rewards that are accumulated, so the smallest amount gets the liquidity on each time we provide the liquidity.
Speaker 2:
So it's like rotating based off of. so you're raising the bottom line, yes, yeah.
Speaker 1:
So much like they thought about it, huh.
Speaker 2:
It's almost like they did. What more questions? I think I'm getting to the end of my list of easy questions.
Speaker 1:
I got some questions, yeah, So the future is bright, it seems. We're five years from now and you've succeeded in what you're trying to build. Tell me what that looks like.
Speaker 3:
That looks like basically massive user adoption. First of all consensus, a governance protocol, and ION is run by the community. That's, i would say, the success.
Speaker 1:
That's a big vision for sure. I like how you ended it run by the community. Tell me a little bit about the governance. How's that going to all work and where are you at in that stage?
Speaker 3:
We're very early in terms of governance, so we do want to actually have some say in the direction and in the beginning We want to implement the governance at a later time. What we are trying to do currently is just give it a direction and a certain set of tools that can get Garner adoption Eventually, when stature becomes a little bit more mature and hopefully it does succeed in the proposal, if it becomes a proposal that we can basically use the stature with the repetition program. Think of your repetition as also being involved in the governance. The higher repetition you have, the more your vote matters in the protocol. We're trying to tie it in with that. We're also going to be having, obviously in terms of the reward mechanisms, how the treasury spent things like that in the governance part of it.
Speaker 1:
Excellent, You had mentioned one other thing that caught my ear. Well, actually it said a lot, but that's a whole other story for a different time. Catalysts coming up, Funtime What do you have going on there?
Speaker 3:
It's the stature, the repetition protocol. What we're doing with stature is we believe that we're solving a big objective in Cardano. I think it could be also implemented in Catalysts in the future, if the community decides to, where you're not just focused on how many ADA you hold but also the repetition and how you voted in the past, for example, not to degrade voting but to encourage positivity. We're just going to focus on the positive parts. Let's say, if you voted on a project and were successful, you get some bonus points or badges. We want to also gamify that as well. For example, if you complete certain tasks in stature, let's say, if you are participating in the test net and you find bugs, severity of the bugs, things like that, you get badges rewarded for reporting those bugs and the severity of the bugs. Now think of your collection of badges that you can showcase to the community as a contributor to our protocol but not only to our protocol, for different protocols. We can even take TAP tools as an example, providing a certain amount of liquidity, doing arbitrage, things like that. that will help their parameters. We can build on that repetition and take that repetition somewhere else and also use it in governments. Then, when we take it into governance, that will really would make a bigger difference. we believe, instead of just counting on how much money you hold and how much aid are you Because that's the bottom premises right now in governments is focusing on how much money you hold.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, isn't that the truth? Is your proposal out there, yet that people are in order?
Speaker 3:
No, no, it's not, But we are going to be posting it soon. We will be on the final revision stage and we will be posting it hopefully by next week, early next week.
Speaker 2:
What categories then?
Speaker 3:
We have in shows. There's a couple of categories that can go in, so statuaries, the other one. The other one is the decentralized curate system that we're building. I think it, which is basically the objective of this, is Cardinals facing a lot of issues in the ecosystem with delayed visibility of data. So, like traders don't have real-time information making and you can't make informed decisions because of that. Another problem is when we're achieving the data. It requires multiple transactions, right, it's very cumbersome the whole process. So here we're trying to solve the situation and to making provide more efficient real-time data visibility And hopefully we can give an example, maybe to tap tools as well, maybe if it's something like a comprehensive DeFi analysis, simplified retrieval of data, which would benefit a lot of people, like Trados Analytics you know participants in the Cardinals ecosystem.
Speaker 1:
Wow, that's all I'm going to say.
Speaker 2:
Wow, just wow. What's your approach to building your client base? Because you said you're going after enterprises, right? So I assume there's a lot in TradFi or the traditional non-blockchain space. So do you have a strategy for how you're going to onboard folks?
Speaker 3:
I mean, the main thing is just to build something that people will use. That's the simplest way of putting it something that people that have a need for and something that people will use. I think that that's what we're focusing on with the tools different tools that we're creating. We think that these will solve problems. I mean, we're not going to know until the actual product is out there, right, but the vision is to just try to create these tools that will help solve certain problems in the ecosystem and beyond.
Speaker 2:
Okay, any other questions from our speakers? This is a good time to request. We're almost halfway through the show.
Speaker 1:
We're almost done with our time with IGON. We have another exciting guest, but if you have a question, please raise your hand.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for the clarification here.
Speaker 1:
Yes, it's like watching 12-year-olds, sometimes Data Hippo.
Speaker 2:
I'm not 12. I am of legal age, at least. Data Hippo, you got a question. Yeah, hey guys, how's it going? So I have a question. You mentioned you guys offer decentralized storage. Do you guys also offer compute of any sort?
Speaker 3:
Not at the moment, but we are going to be working on compute next year. Yes, so it is part of the plans, correct, but first we're focusing on storage. We do believe that it's much more difficult because of the compliance and the regulations, but we are planning on working on compute next year. Yeah, Excellent.
Speaker 1:
Wait a minute. Who's behind the exerberus account that has a question.
Speaker 4:
I'm Simon.
Speaker 1:
Oh hey.
Speaker 4:
I have another question to IGON. So we because you said you're primarily actually going for enterprise clients, which is something pretty cool We're doing something very, very similar And because also funded to start up before two and a half years with the German banks. I know that actually it's very easy to set right, but it's, you know, like there is no many. there aren't many enterprise clients in blockchain right now. I mean, everybody at E and there is a prototype and you know, like your large organization and you probably have a big burn. And I'm just like, from one entrepreneur to the other conversation was on a private call I'm just curious, like what is your enterprise strategy? Because it's very interesting, right, like and make also just came out with a lot of phone, so there's a lot of value in there, but it's also really hard. And I'm just curious like what if you have a, if you want to share something about that strategy and maybe if you can tell you know other projects how they can go about that, because it's a pretty cool thing to do.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, great question, simon. It was a great talk to you last time as well, but in terms of strategy, i think there's no, there's nothing. You have to try to do some. You have to try to do what you set out to do in terms of your vision right, but in terms of getting the adoption, i think that if you build use cases that solve a certain issue, that there will be adoption in the end. But there is in your right, in a sense, that the blockchain project, there's not a lot of enterprises to go after in terms of use cases. What we did for our two pilots that we onboarded, actually we were a little bit more fortunate and we got some government grants, so we had some connections and networking through those government grants, but where we were connected to these specific other industry players. But I think that if you develop something in the blockchain space and people take notice, and I think that once you get, as we are getting a bigger following in community, i think that you get more doors open along the way. So it's kind of hard, as in the beginning phase, because I've been where you've been and where we have had a smaller community and we even have that much traction going on. So it's really hard to build up that option of garne, of that intention. But I think that if you build and showcase that you are building, i think that you will garner attention and people will come to you guys and openly show their interest. And we have had a few projects that have reached out to us organically And that's just because we've been showcasing the community that what we're doing and what we're building, being community and participating in talks like this and podcasts is where they give your voice recognition. I think that just being participating in the community is a big step forward. I hope that helps. I'm not sure if that helped, but hopefully it helps.
Speaker 4:
Very cool answer And, as Datepo was already hinting with this question, we wish you all the success that you can have mad, and, when time is right, we could definitely think about hosting our own storage with you guys, so just for an amazing product, man Awesome.
Speaker 1:
Well, we have about three times to say goodbye to our friends Aigon. However, we have another exciting guest coming up, exuberance, who is just talking, and I'm sure that if you like Aigon, you're going to like these guys even too. So make sure you stay tuned for that. But before we get there, i want to shout out my friend, Sean at A3C for reaching out to Aigon and suggesting them to come onto the show. Sean is a friend of mine. He does a lot of good help for new people in the ecosystem. If you're looking, you have a project or something and you're looking for some branding help or anything like that, make sure you reach out to Sean at A3C, not A3C, just keep that in mind. Aigon, anything you guys want to make sure you finish up with, i think you want to just remind people of, or get out there or anything we didn't cover You want to touch base on.
Speaker 3:
I think we touched everything And thanks guys for having me And good luck to Exuberance and the next podcast. I mean the following podcast, and I'd just like to remind you guys in terms of the catalyst proposal, just watch out next week, early next week, and we'll also announce it through our socials. So thanks everyone for listening in, take care.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and you're welcome to hang out or if you've got meetings, go do that, but we are here five days a week, not seven. Five days a week for the past two years, on August 15th. So feel free to stop back and give us updates when you have time. If you want to come back and present your proposal in a shorter format at some time, feel free to sign up.
Speaker 3:
Sure.
Speaker 1:
You know all that fun stuff. So thanks for listening to the Card On Over Coffee and special thanks to Aigon for joining us today. We look forward to hearing about your catalyst proposal in the future. Make sure you join our breakout room Catalyst Over Coffee every Wednesday after the town hall meeting, come talk about your catalyst proposal on Card On Over Coffee And we all hope to see you at Rare Evo in Denver, colorado, august 24th through the 26th. Get your tickets at rareevoio. Use coupon code COC10 for 10% off.