Sebastian Pfeiffer Podcast Transcript
Sebastian Pfeiffer joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Sebastian Pfeiffer. Sebastian Pfeiffer is the managing director of Impossible Cloud Network, where he’s responsible for developing and implementing the company’s growth strategy. His focus includes designing decentralized business architecture, omics legal frameworks, and stakeholder alignment.
Before joining Impossible Cloud, Sebastian was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, specializing in strategy, development and execution for globally recognized companies across various industries. With a focus on social impact and industrial goods, he holds dual Master of Science degrees in strategy and corporate development from Aalto University and Universität zu Köln.
Well, good afternoon, Sebastian. Welcome to the show.
Sebastian Pfeiffer: Thanks, Brian. Enjoyed and a great pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I appreciate you being on and making the time. I know you’re hailing out of Switzerland. Currently I’m in Kansas City, so love doing these international podcasts. Again, making the time. I’m just so grateful.
Sebastian, jumping into your first question, you’ve helped shape the decentralized business architecture at Impossible Cloud. How do you define what a truly decentralized cloud ecosystem looks like and why is it so important?
Sebastian Pfeiffer: I think it’s a great question you touch upon. Maybe we can start with some basics for the viewers listening in, and they’re not so familiar with the term cloud, right?
So what does cloud, essentially it’s renting someone else’s computer, right? So like when you store your photos on iCloud, it means you’re using Apple’s or other partner’s infrastructure to store the data, right? So now imagine that that infrastructure is controlled by just a few. Companies like the big tech companies, AWS, Microsoft, Azure, or Google, and that’s centralized cloud, right?
So what’s decentralized cloud? What does it make a different, if we look at the service level, it starts there, right? So instead of AWS owning their 200 services. It’s modular and composable, right? So you can envision all these services that are built like Lego bricks on top of this infrastructure. Um, second thing that makes a difference on a service level, it’s, uh, permissionless and open.
And so there’s no gatekeepers anyone can build, get this rewards from building and deploy on the hardware level. Same here. So instead of us or anybody in any other decentralized cloud project, owning the infrastructure, it’s community, contributing this infrastructure. Now for us, it’s a bit different in that we only do enterprise grade hardware, but similar mechanism, right?
So we have community contributing the hardware rather than AWS owning it. And then on the protocol side. Also here, it’s community owned. So it’s powered and governed by the community and not by centralized entities. Uh, now Brian, I mean also for the audience, why is it important? Uh, so cloud in and of itself is one of the fastest growing markets.
We always hear this, have this conception. Nobody realizes how big it is. It’s 230 billion for infrastructure alone, by the way, with a 30% growth year over year. So in short, it’s a very large market and, uh, with all these centralized providers controlling a market share, it’s, it’s ripe for disruption. And it poses a lot of problems actually, which we’ll get into.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. We absolutely are seeing that proliferation, explosion of cloud usage just in the last five to 10 years of explosive growth. But I appreciate you breaking that down for our audience. And I agree, I think there’s a lot of room for disruption and I know with decentralized cloud or community cloud is kind of the route that you’re going and, uh, we certainly support that.
Sebastian, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced when designing the token ons and legal framework for Impossible Cloud, and how did you overcome them?
Sebastian Pfeiffer: Yeah, first of all, thanks for the support, Brian. So when designing this, there’s essentially different routes you can take, right? So the, I think the big problem is because it’s still a, I would say, relatively young industry in Web3 things can get confusing.
Very fast and actually change quite quickly. Right On top of that, because it’s so young, you have all these high projects. Some of them, frankly, as we know, are scams, right? So you have to be careful and laws highly depend on the local regulation. So we set, when we set this project up, we said, okay from the beginning, right?
We are in it for the long run. From the beginning, let’s have legal certainty. Anybody that’s involved with the project should have legal certainty even for Switzerland. Why? Yes has, I would say globally speaking strict rules, but they’re very clear, right? There have been rulings and many, many past examples of projects to learn from.
So that’s why we said, okay, let’s pick Switzerland because it’s strict, right? Because there are clear rules that make it easy to navigate and anybody involved in a project. And the second reason why we went for this is because it’s, I would almost say a golden standard, right? So if for you are compliant Switzerland, there’s a high likelihood you will be compliant in other regulations when you offer your product.
Or traded on exchanges that are based on those, you’re gonna be likely compliant with those local regulations as well. Right? At the end of the day, what you wanna make sure, and we want to make sure, is that our token, ICT, is not an investment, right? So essentially there’s three major token types, right? So there’s a security payment in utility, and we wanted not to fall under that security.
Why? Because this is the most of the project actually out there. This is the hype projects. Yeah, so actually you have to be very careful here because again, in Switzerland it’s very strict. Once it’s a security token, it essentially says that it promises future gains. And what we want to do is we want to create an ecosystem that’s gonna be able to, as I mentioned before, right, disrupt a traditional cloud.
That’s what we’re trying to build with our token, essentially an access token to this network, right? So instead of saying, okay. We are here to build a product that then fuels a token. We kind of flip it and we say, okay, let’s use the token that fuels this ecosystem, which hopefully provides a, a meaningful alternative to these cloud projects.
Again, because we’re here for the long run because we wanna build trust in our system.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. The industry, while blockchain essentially has been around for, gosh, almost 15 years, the industry is still in its infancy because we still have a lot of people that are slow to adopt.
But what I really, I guess, resonated with me is everything that’s changing daily in this industry. You did do the smart move and pick something that has some legal foundation. Of course you took that to the next level and picked Switzerland, which we know they have the most highest regulatory environment probably in the world.
So really appreciate that and I appreciate that you’re moving into this space with some vigor, but also obviously being cautious around the legal side of things. Sebastian, in a landscape dominated by hyperscalers like AWS and Azure, what makes impossible Cloud a compelling alternative for enterprises?
Sebastian Pfeiffer: So I would say that there’s a a few reasons that could be considered here, right? So let’s start with the risk management reasons, right? So with a lot of market share within these big players, like a side of politics, I just don’t think it’s a good idea. To hand all these businesses essentially in the hands of these few providers, because one day who knows what happens.
Let’s say that provider doesn’t like you anymore. Then basically all your business operations are gone, right? So that I think, from a risk management perspective, that’s one. Then second, I think it’s a systemic risk, right? So. If that one provider has, let’s say, a technical outage, a lot of businesses are affected, and this actually happens more often than you think.
For instance, the My Slack is, is down every once in a while. Right. But that’s just a service I use. I imagine there’s many, many more services that build in AWS that are out that I don’t even see right? Then from a technological perspective. There’s also reasons. So if you think of it as a bigger picture, centralization in a way slows innovation.
Why? Because it limits participation as a decentralized project. And by making it composable and open, we invite anyone to contribute, right? So we live kind of this DNA of, there’s always smarter people outside a company than within. And by inviting all these smart people to contribute to this ecosystem and to be fair benefit from it.
We envision that we can actually be more innovative than centralized providers. Then you have architectural reasons, right? So you have edge performance, for instance. Again, take AWS, they have maybe 30 data centers around the world. What we envision to do here and what we set out to do from an architecture perspective is set the system up in a way that it allows not 30 but hundreds of nodes around the world.
What this enables is significantly reduces latency and depending on your other, that can actually play a crucial role for your business because you have that edge performance. Additionally, it’s all of this is community owned. So I wouldn’t underestimate this as well. Again, there’s no single entity or individual in the middle playing a role here.
It’s all community owners, which makes it, I would say, resilient to any structural or challenges. And I do want to emphasize that, that all of this, right, all of these advantages. Should come without any performance sacrifices. I keep iterating on this fact because I think that there’s a lot of Web3 projects out there with really great, smart people, great visions.
However, they lack the typical performance that the average user is used to, and then they have to kind of see, okay, do I want to sacrifice here for all these other advantages or should I have whatever I have now plus something better? I. And that’s what we set out to say, okay, we offer all these advantages and do not sacrifice whatsoever in performance.
So depending on where you are, as mentioned with Edge performance, you’re actually more performant than AWS when, for instance, using our services, I. Thank you. That’s very helpful. And you know, you highlighted the pros and cons, right, with some of the big providers out there. From a risk management perspective, really all your eggs are in one basket, and you talked about systemic risk.
You know, having downtime for tens of thousands of customers at a time when there’s an outage. Obviously that technological risk and limiting that participation with these providers. But with you, alternatively, you invite some great minds into this space for some really good innovation. Then of course, because it’s decentralized and it’s located around the world, that edge performance with the added resiliency and speed is just a plus.
Brian Thomas: So really appreciate that. Helps me. It helps our audience today. And Sebastian, last question of the day. Can you walk us through how Token base incentive systems are used in Impossible Cloud to align interests across contributors, users and partners?
Sebastian Pfeiffer: Again, here we come from the lens of the product slash demand first.
Now at a possible cloud network, we set out to design this ecosystem in a way that it’s demand centric. So demand in a sense, there’s real customers using it today. So what are these kinds of customers that are already using our ecosystem? What do they want? They want reliable services. So that’s what we started when designing our to omics, right?
So anybody that onboards hardware to our protocol, to this ecosystem, yes, there’s kind of a, you can envision it as a base fee, right? They do get their bills paid, but they get a dynamic incentivization depending on utilization. So why do we do this in the long run? This will incentivize good, reliable hardware that it’s actually being used to thrive.
Kind of quote unquote weed out the hardware. That’s not as good, not as much in demand. Uh, so that’s basically what we as a mantra, set out to have only the best performing hardware in the ecosystem, again, based on utilization. Second thing, I believe is. We have this, what we call paper node system, right?
It’s essentially validating and putting a transparency layer on top of this. So anybody can run these nodes. And what they do is they show, okay, this hardware and this service is coming at, at these quality criteria. Are they actually fulfilled? And this is basically transparency layer on top. Both of those combined will over time provide a resilient ecosystem that’s demand driven.
Again, really, really important because we as a project stated, okay, we have to solve a problem first, and if the demand is there, we scale according to that demand.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate that, and I just love this model really. Do we support blockchain? Obviously we’re built on blockchain, this publication and love to have folks that are in this space, but you’re taking it to a whole new level, and I really love that you’ve designed this ecosystem, so it’s demand centric.
Customers obviously want reliability, but what I really like is you’re incentivizing your community with these dynamic incentives based on usage, right? But that transparency layer that you’re putting there through these hyper nodes, I think is also awesome because you’re letting the customers kind of like get in and test drive and, and see what’s under the hood.
Again, love this stuff. I can’t believe how we’re taking Web3 blockchain defi to the next level with people like you in the world. So I really appreciate that, Sebastian.
Sebastian Pfeiffer: Appreciate it, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. It was certainly a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sebastian Pfeiffer: Amazing. Brian, thanks again for having me. And yeah, I’d love for the audience if you’re into our project for free to get in touch. We’re always looking for people to contribute to this growing ecosystem and, and make cloud finally decentral.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sebastian Pfeiffer Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
