Blockchain Infrastructure
A conversation about building blockchain apps, covering smart contracts, dApps, and the broader Web3 developer ecosystem
Episode Description
Anthony Campolo explains Web3, DApps, and blockchain basics while discussing his new role at QuickNode and bridging the gap between Jamstack and blockchain development.
Episode Summary
In this episode of Jamstack Radio, Brian Douglas welcomes back Anthony Campolo, now working at QuickNode, a blockchain infrastructure company that simplifies deploying and interacting with blockchain nodes. Anthony breaks down core Web3 concepts—blockchains as synchronized distributed databases, DApps as applications with data living on chain, and smart contracts as embeddable programs—making them accessible to a Jamstack-oriented audience. He draws a natural connection between Jamstack's decoupled architecture and blockchain's inherent separation of front end and data layer, walking through the toolchain (Hardhat, Ethers.js, Solidity) that JavaScript developers would use to deploy a smart contract. The conversation moves into NFTs and DAOs, using the Developer DAO as a concrete example of how token ownership can grant community access and governance rights, while also acknowledging the risks, including the Terra stablecoin collapse that wiped out billions. Both hosts emphasize that Web2 and Web3 developers should collaborate rather than remain hostile, and that earning trust requires less hype and more practical, code-focused content. The episode wraps with picks highlighting developer Discord communities, terminal tools like Fig and Warp, and the Keychron K6 keyboard.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introduction and Anthony's Return
Brian Douglas opens the episode and reintroduces Anthony Campolo, who last appeared on Jamstack Radio nearly two years prior during the early pandemic. Anthony reflects on how much has changed since then—he's now on his second developer relations role after working at StepZen and joining the RedwoodJS core team. Brian shares a fun backstory about originally inviting Anthony to discuss Redwood before realizing he wasn't yet on the core team.
The conversation quickly sets the stage for the main topic by pivoting away from Anthony's previous projects toward his current work at QuickNode. Brian notes Anthony's trajectory from newcomer to established community voice, and the two establish an easygoing rapport that carries through the rest of the episode.
00:02:11 - What Is QuickNode and What Are DApps?
Anthony introduces QuickNode as blockchain infrastructure comparable to services like DigitalOcean or Netlify but tailored for blockchain applications. He then explains DApps by contrasting them with traditional web apps: instead of storing data in a conventional database, DApps keep all their data on the blockchain. He simplifies the blockchain concept as a distributed database that many participants keep in sync, making it tamper-resistant because no single party can introduce fraudulent transactions.
The discussion moves from simple ledger use cases to the broader evolution of blockchain technology. Anthony explains how Ethereum introduced the ability to embed full programming logic into the blockchain via smart contracts, enabling general-purpose applications beyond just currency. He mentions other chains like Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, and notes that QuickNode supports 13 chains, giving developers flexibility across ecosystems.
00:05:24 - Getting Started with QuickNode and the Dev Toolchain
Anthony describes his onboarding experience, including giving a talk at ETH Amsterdam—his first in-person conference as a DevRel professional. He outlines his regular activities: engaging with the community on Discord, producing a weekly livestream, and planning guest episodes featuring developers like Ben Holmes from Astro. He candidly compares the creative freedom at QuickNode to his previous streaming experience at StepZen.
The conversation shifts to the practical toolchain for blockchain development. Anthony walks through how a JavaScript developer would use Hardhat as a development environment, obtain an RPC URL from QuickNode, deploy a Solidity smart contract, and query it from a React front end using Ethers.js. Brian and Anthony both emphasize the natural connection between Jamstack's decoupled architecture and blockchain's separation of the front end from the on-chain data layer.
00:09:39 - The Blockchain Ecosystem and Why It Matters
Brian asks about the broader ecosystem landscape, and Anthony describes how different blockchain communities—Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon—each have their own culture and competitive dynamics, with many chains positioning themselves as potential Ethereum alternatives. He draws parallels to the Jamstack hosting space, comparing QuickNode, Alchemy, and Infura to Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages, while noting the open-source libraries and tools that form the foundation of blockchain development.
Anthony then articulates his personal case for why blockchain matters: permissionless applications, transparency, and the absence of proprietary gatekeeping. He explains that once a blockchain is deployed, it behaves exactly as coded and anyone can inspect and interact with it. Brian follows up by asking why developers should choose QuickNode over raw AWS, and Anthony contrasts the managed, endpoint-ready QuickNode experience with the manual server setup and configuration required on traditional cloud platforms.
00:14:43 - NFTs, DAOs, and Community Ownership
The conversation turns to practical blockchain use cases, starting with NFTs. Anthony explains how NFTs tie images to on-chain data and use cryptographic wallets to establish verifiable ownership, drawing an analogy to PGP encryption. He describes generative art projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Coven, then pivots to the Developer DAO as a more substantive example where purchasing an NFT grants access to a thriving community of blockchain developers with working groups and scholarship programs.
Brian compares DAO membership to military challenge coins or fraternity membership, and the two discuss governance mechanisms where token holders can vote on community decisions. Anthony raises an important cautionary example: a case where a DAO's governance mechanism was used to strip someone's funds, illustrating the tension between immutable code and the need for built-in safeguards. They briefly explore whether traditional open-source projects might adopt DAO governance models in the future.
00:21:35 - Risks, Skepticism, and the Terra Collapse
Anthony shifts to a more sober tone, warning that greater financial autonomy also means greater risk of loss, and urges listeners to approach Web3 carefully. He explains the Terra blockchain collapse in detail—an algorithmic stablecoin that attempted to maintain a dollar peg through a burn mechanism between two linked coins rather than holding actual collateral, ultimately losing roughly $40 billion in value and devastating investors.
Brian builds on this by arguing that the Web2-versus-Web3 hostility is counterproductive, noting that real progress comes from writing code and solving problems like Ethereum's environmental impact and IPFS caching challenges rather than fueling hype cycles. Anthony agrees and stresses the importance of earning trust through practical, educational content, recommending that skeptics buy even a small amount of cryptocurrency to better understand the technology before forming strong opinions.
00:27:13 - Picks: Developer Discords, Terminal Tools, and Keyboards
Brian transitions to the picks segment, and Anthony recommends three developer Discord communities: Lunch Dev (formerly the React Podcast Discord run by Michael Chan), Front End Horse (focused on creative coding and CSS), and the Jamstack Discord that recently replaced the older Jamstack Slack. He highlights Discords as valuable spaces for networking, getting help with bugs, sharing content, and building professional relationships.
Brian shares two picks of his own. First is Fig, an open-source terminal autocomplete tool that helped him set up his new M1 MacBook Pro after the switch from bash to zsh. The two briefly compare Fig with Warp, another modern terminal tool Anthony prefers. Brian's second pick is the Keychron K6 keyboard, which connects to multiple devices and simplified his streaming setup. The episode closes with a lighthearted exchange about typing speed, Mavis Beacon nostalgia, and Vim usage, before Brian directs listeners to follow Anthony and check out QuickNode.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Anthony Campolo
It's a really great way to have an application that is permissionless. Basically anyone can put it up and interact with it, and you don't really need a company behind it. The blockchain is kind of like a single, self-sustaining entity that just does its thing. I think there's a level of transparency that comes along with it. And I think that's really, really important for where we're going on the web.
00:00:28 - Brian Douglas
Hey, this is Brian, and you're listening to Jamstack Radio, a bi-weekly series where we discuss modern web development with maintainers, founders, and developers. Jamstack Radio is brought to you by the leading investor and developer for startups. For more information, visit Heavybit.com. If you're interested in being a guest on the show or if you'd like to suggest a topic, find us on Twitter at Jamstack Radio.
Welcome to another episode of Jamstack Radio. On the line, we have Anthony Campolo back again. Welcome. How are you doing?
00:00:57 - Anthony Campolo
Hello. I'm doing great. It's been almost two years now since I was on last time. I think it was September 2020, in the thick of the pandemic still, and I was just getting started. I hadn't even gotten a job by that point. I wasn't even on the Redwood team by that point.
So it was really great to get a chance to have a platform like that as pretty much a total noob. But now I'm on my second job. You missed me on my first job, but we're going straight to the second one. Yeah.
00:01:25 - Brian Douglas
We never had you on for StepZen, which is a great product, folks. Definitely check it out. But today we're actually talking about QuickNode. Quick note, I also wanted to make one quick point for anybody who listened to the RedwoodJS episode years ago with Anthony. When Anthony reached out to me in a DM, he was like, hey, let's talk about Redwood.
So I invited him, and I think I got halfway through the conversation and realized he wasn't on the core team at that point. So I was like, oh, what's your involvement in the project? And then since then, you've joined the core team. I've chatted with Tom and David separately and mentioned how amazing that conversation was and how great of a job you were doing just sort of advocating RedwoodJS.
00:02:01 - Anthony Campolo
That's awesome. Happy to hear that.
00:02:03 - Brian Douglas
Wanted to say that out loud, but we're not here to talk about Redwood or StepZen. We're here to talk about QuickNode. Do you want to give us what QuickNode is?
00:02:11 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. This can be a pretty big pivot for some people getting into what's known as the Web3 world. This is related to blockchains. It's related to cryptocurrencies. It's related to all those different topics. We'll define a lot of these things as we go.
But the main thing is that QuickNode is infrastructure to build applications with all that stuff. It's kind of like spinning up a DigitalOcean server or hosting something on Netlify. It's a dev tool that allows you to quickly, reliably, and easily interact with production applications, these ones specifically being blockchain related.
00:02:52 - Brian Douglas
Excellent. Yeah. And so we're going to have to talk about blockchain. I'm curious, perhaps we can even start with DApps. What are DApps?
00:03:00 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So a DApp is like an application you would have on the internet, a phone app, or just a web app that is interacting with some sort of data. You can think about a to-do app. A to-do app would usually be attached to a back end somewhere out there in the world, which could be Firebase, or it could be a Postgres database, or it could just be a static file on a CDN somewhere.
A DApp is an application that has all of its data living on the blockchain. So what does it mean to be on the blockchain? The blockchain is not as complicated as people make it out to be. It's really just a database that a bunch of people have on their computer that needs to constantly stay in sync. So if I have a database, you have a database, and we have one other buddy who has that same database. We each have it on our computers and they would constantly stay in sync.
00:03:56 - Anthony Campolo
So if you're thinking about it, you could use it to record a ledger of transactions. So if you, me, and your friend each have $10, I want to give you $5. Then we would change my balance to five and your balance to 15. But we would need to do that on all three of the computers. The idea being that if we all sync up on the state, then no one can tamper with it. Because if there's 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 of us who all have this, if someone tries to introduce a fraudulent transaction, giving themselves, say, like $1 million, they couldn't do that because the rest of the nodes would connect together and say, hey, this is wrong. This is what people's actual balances are.
So that's why it started as a mechanism for cryptocurrencies, but is now being used for more general purpose applications. Now you can embed programs in the blockchain. It's not just like an account balance with an arbitrary number in it. It's actually a fully embeddable programming language that allows you to do any logic you can think of that you can write in a computer program.
00:04:58 - Anthony Campolo
So that's what Ethereum is. Ethereum is kind of what introduced the concept of DApps, which is actual applications and not just a currency. But now there's Solana, there's Avalanche, there's Polygon, there's this whole set of other blockchains. And QuickNode is multi-chain. So we have 13 chains that we support right now, and that allows you to build DApps in a wide variety of different ecosystems.
00:05:24 - Brian Douglas
Okay. How have you hit the ground running? What sort of things can people expect, or how can people get started and jump in?
00:05:31 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So the first thing I did, actually, is the week before I started working there, they were like, hey, do you want to go do a talk in Amsterdam for ETH Amsterdam? And I was like, yeah. I'd actually never been to Europe. This was my first chance traveling as a devrel kind of person because I've been doing this job only during the pandemic time.
So it was a chance to go to an actual in-person conference, meet a ton of people, give an in-person talk where I was actually in front of a projector screen with my slides and whatnot, and that is now recorded online. You can drop the link for that in the show notes.
But the main stuff that I'm doing on a regular basis now is hanging out in the Discord. Just answering questions, making sure that people have a lifeline if they need it. And then I'm producing a weekly stream now. I just finished the first episode a couple hours ago, and that's going to be a range of solo streams where I build stuff out with QuickNode.
00:06:32 - Anthony Campolo
The first one I did was deploying a smart contract to the Avalanche blockchain, and it's just Hello World. Literally, it says hello and you can change it to say a different message if you want to. And then we'll also have guests on. So we're going to have Ben Holmes from Astro as one of our first guests. I'm going to show how to connect Astro to a blockchain.
So it's kind of a Learn With Jason or Alex Front End Horse-style stream. Those are kind of two influences that I have, but I really love streaming. I actually led some streams for StepZen, which didn't really go super well. I think because there was kind of a need to always shoehorn StepZen in, in a way that I felt was kind of inorganic. Whereas with these, it's a little easier to not have to make them all about QuickNode all the time. So that's kind of a fine line to walk.
00:07:21 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. I don't come across a ton of streams or a lot of content around blockchain. I know Nader did a great job last year of doing tons of great content for introducing folks to the blockchain and folks who were familiar with Jamstack and other places. So I see a great way for QuickNode or any other blockchain-adjacent company to just expand the space, because I think at the moment a bit of my gripes against blockchain is very similar to everybody else's. It's very dense, and sometimes it can be very opaque on how to get started.
But what I love is your approach to it. Connect it to Jamstack applications, because by default, I don't know if you said this since we hit record, but you said it before we started: by default, blockchain is Jamstack because it is separating your concerns.
00:08:10 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. Because it has to be decoupled. You have the whole blockchain, then you have the front end which is querying it. This is another thing that I definitely got from Nader. When Nader first made his full stack Ethereum tutorial, he did a very similar exercise to what I did today with Avalanche.
He had a simple little contract written in Solidity. Then you have Hardhat, and Hardhat is your development environment. It's like a CLI and it has a configuration file. So you can do configuration as code to take your RPC URL, which is what actually connects you to the blockchain. And that's what you get from QuickNode, the RPC URL. You also have your private key for your wallet because you have a wallet, and then Hardhat basically takes all of that and deploys the contract for you with a short little JavaScript script. Once you've done that, you have a contract address for the contract that you include in your React application that then can query it with another library called Ethers.js.
00:09:11 - Anthony Campolo
So there's a handful of libraries you have to learn, but they're aimed at JavaScript devs, like Hardhat and Ethers.js especially. They work very, very similarly to any kind of JavaScript library and CLI that you may have used. And then the only challenge is kind of learning Solidity, which is its own programming language, and how you actually interact with the smart contract. But that's actually not the only one. There's also Rust-based languages too for Solana. So Solidity is kind of the first one most people learn.
00:09:39 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, the full stack JavaScript course, that course series that you put out, I did skim through your series of blog posts as well. And I think what it just comes down to is developers themselves want to be cutting edge. They want to learn the next things. I think that's very prevalent in the reactive ecosystem and in front end JavaScript frameworks.
But I'm curious, what is the ecosystem like? What are we looking at when it comes to people getting started? Is there a React and Vue, but for blockchain frameworks and services?
00:10:13 - Anthony Campolo
There are lots of different chains, and that's kind of what tends to be the organizing factor between people. So like people who are into Ethereum, and then there's people who are into Solana, and there's some crossover there. But there's also kind of a competitive nature there because everyone's trying to be what's called the Ethereum killer, because Ethereum was the first one to really establish itself as a way to write DApps with smart contracts and kind of pioneered this whole paradigm.
So they had a huge head start, and they're now the second most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. There's also market caps associated with the coins that are associated with these blockchains. That tends to be what people get really riled up about because people have money in these things. It can be very challenging if you're putting your money into something that you don't really understand. You have no idea what it's going to do or how it's going to behave. So you want to look at things that are established and have communities around them.
00:11:10 - Anthony Campolo
And so I would say the Ethereum community is a good one to look at. The Solana community is up and coming. The Avalanche community is really good. And then there's the Polygon community. There's a whole bunch of others. I'm still learning about some of the other chains that we have on QuickNode.
But then there's also the dev tooling companies, those other companies that do kind of what QuickNode does. So most people will know about Alchemy or Infura if they are going to look for this kind of thing. That's where you have your Netlify versus your Vercel versus your Cloudflare Pages kind of thing. And then you have open source libraries, which are like Hardhat or Ethers.js, and those are kind of more like the JavaScript frameworks because those are GitHub things that you can just pull down or npm packages you install. So there's basically a lot of open source stuff associated with it. And then the blockchain itself has to be open source.
00:12:02 - Anthony Campolo
That's one of the things I actually find really interesting about this whole paradigm and why a lot of people will say, what's the point of all this? What's the use case? Why are we doing all of this? We didn't really say any of that throughout this conversation yet.
For me, it's a really great way to have an application that is permissionless. Basically anyone can put it up and interact with it, and you don't really need a company behind it necessarily. There are companies that are formed kind of after the blockchains are created. But the blockchain is kind of like a single, self-sustaining entity that just does its thing. Once it's out there in the world, it's going to behave in exactly the way it's coded. Everyone can see the code, and there's no weird proprietary stuff that you don't really understand or that's behind it. So I think there's a level of transparency that comes along with it.
00:12:58 - Anthony Campolo
If you actually wrap your mind around what this thing is, I think that's really, really important for where we're going in the web and the need for transparency in the applications we're using.
00:13:11 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, for sure. I'm curious, going back to the product that you work for. Folks can deploy blockchains in a lot of different places. I think even Azure and AWS, and I don't know if Google has an offering, but they all have an offering of how to get things deployed on chain. So why use QuickNode over AWS?
00:13:34 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So within AWS you're going to be managing that server. You need to pick your flavor of Linux, and you're going to have to actually install the software for whichever chain you want to use. Then you have to figure out how to expose it through an endpoint, which then involves Route 53 or one of those things.
With QuickNode, it's more like Netlify, where you just get an endpoint right away that you can start interacting with. It lets you basically pick whichever chain you want to connect to, and then it'll spin up a node for that chain specifically. They give you an HTTP endpoint and a WebSockets endpoint. You also have the ability to add authentication to it. You can do any of that kind of management if you need to roll your key because it's been compromised or something like that. So that's really good.
So basically, you have tooling to quickly do any of the tasks that are specific to a blockchain, but also installing the software and getting it set up and attached to an endpoint right away. That's all the stuff you would have to do yourself if you're using something like Amazon, or if you were hosting these nodes yourself.
00:14:43 - Brian Douglas
Cool. I'm curious now, what are examples of projects that you would want to put on? Is there any benefit for putting stuff on chain as opposed to reaching for some back end server, like Railway, which I know you're a fan of, or other things?
00:14:58 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So NFTs have become a really big use case right now. And for me, I think they're interesting. I don't think they're necessarily the be-all, end-all of what you can do with this stuff. But I think it's a good mental exercise for people because it allows you to basically have an image be associated with a chunk of data on the blockchain.
This is a way to signify ownership, because what it basically does is, because you have a wallet with keys and a password and you can sign transactions, it gives you the ability to do all this really advanced cryptography stuff that encryption experts have been able to do for a while. So if you think of PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, where you have a public key that you can expose, and then someone can basically send a message to that, but then they can keep themselves encrypted and you can be encrypted. It's that whole thing.
00:15:53 - Anthony Campolo
So you are able to pinpoint and say, like, I own this thing because you can point to it on the blockchain. You can prove that it's yours by verifying and signing transactions, and that allows you to use it as a way to either value and sell art between people. If you think about it, it's ownership of a single individual object, like owning a painting.
So people associate them with images. Then there are communities that get formed because they do a generative art project. The most famous was the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But Crypto Coven is another good one, where they'll generate like 10,000 images that are slight variations on a theme, like a bunch of bored-looking apes or a bunch of witches, something like that. And then they sell their 10,000 of them and they have a starting price, and then people buy it and then they're in this club. Then there are benefits that can come along with that, like you can get into events or things like that.
00:16:51 - Anthony Campolo
And so then it makes the NFT itself valuable. If the group is something that people actually want to be in, like the Developer DAO is one that Nader formed. So I'm in the Developer DAO. I had to buy an NFT. That NFT was a couple hundred dollars, which can seem like a lot. It's actually extremely cheap for what some people are paying for NFTs.
But the thing you get is you get access to a community of thousands of other blockchain developers who are all creating content and working on initiatives and putting together working groups. It's a huge, huge thing. If you want to be a part of that, then you have to get this NFT. But there are usually scholarships that go along with it. So people want to get sponsored to get a Developer DAO NFT. That's also possible. This is all stuff that we can do ourselves with these tools, and it doesn't require a company sponsoring these things or putting it together or doing any of that. It's a self-organizing kind of force.
So yeah, it's a whole thing. When people talk about NFTs, they kind of talk about certain individual aspects of this whole thing. But you have to take it all together to get what's going on.
00:18:03 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. I keep learning through Nader too, because we both obviously chatted with him. He seems like the person that's kind of brought a lot of folks in. And I'm familiar with the Developer DAO, because I had chatted with Nader last summer about using NFTs not as selling artwork, but more of, what do you call them, community coins? Like the Marines have a challenge coin where if you're part of a certain cohort or battalion, you know, I didn't serve, so I'm not sure what I'm saying right now. But you get basically a challenge coin, and the challenge coin is to show that you're part of a community.
I think the DAOs are a very similar experience where, yes, you buy in, but it's also kind of like a fraternity or sorority where now you're part of a cohort of developers, which could be very, very valuable, but also kind of sounds like a union, doesn't it?
00:18:56 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it's pretty interesting. It sounds like a lot of things. It's really unique in the blockchain world, but it's not unique in the regular world. It's just like people who are in clubs and in professional societies and things like that.
But the interesting blockchain stuff can come in where then once you have an NFT, you can also have the ability to vote on changes or initiatives or things like that. So there's also this whole kind of governance aspect that goes along with this. There's going to be a specific coin for the Developer DAO. So based on how many coins you have, you can vote on different initiatives.
This stuff can get dicey if it becomes kind of like a mob-rule thing. There was a case recently where basically someone was accused of something, and then a bunch of people voted to just take their funds away, essentially. Because the governance mechanism was set up into the blockchain, it actually allowed the manipulation of someone's balance, which is what the blockchain was supposed to guard against in the first place.
00:20:02 - Anthony Campolo
But if you don't have something like that, then you can't even stop it. It just goes and runs. You can't change it. You can't update it. So the built-in governance mechanisms and the ability to change the blockchain is really important. But you have to really think about what you want to give the ability to do after the fact once it's deployed. So yeah, it's like so much stuff.
00:20:25 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like even in your role, where you sit, would it make sense for developer communities, not just the Developer DAO obviously, but imagine a random React library or JavaScript library. Create a DAO around that library in general. Do you think that's a possibility that people move forward with in more developer communities picking up DAO as a governance model?
00:20:49 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, it's a possibility. It would be a question of whether this would be a separate DAO that would be set up separate from the core team, or whether the core team would try and create a DAO. Because it wouldn't really make any sense unless the people who are actually working on it are the DAO. And I don't see that happening anytime soon with most of these projects, especially because a lot of people in Web2 are actively hostile towards Web3.
And there's plenty of bad things about Web3. We haven't really given the disclaimer and all that kind of stuff, but I am working in the space, I believe in the space. I think there's a lot of good things that can come from it. But like anything in life, it can lead to bad things as well. Giving people more control and more power and more autonomy over their funds can actually be a bad thing, because then it means it's easier to lose it, it's easier to spend it on something dumb.
00:21:35 - Anthony Campolo
So you really have to take this stuff seriously and go at it carefully and do your research and understand what you're actually getting involved in, because you can lose a lot of money and a lot of people lose a lot of money really fast. It's been this huge, ridiculous scandal with the Terra blockchain.
00:21:51 - Brian Douglas
I'm not familiar.
00:21:52 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So this is intense. This is an idea of an algorithmic stablecoin. This is the idea that you want to have a coin that doesn't go up and down in price, because cryptocurrencies are very volatile. They're always going up and down, and you want to have one that's just like if I have a dollar, I want it to be $1 tomorrow. So you peg it to the US dollar.
And the way this has been done previously with things like Tether, you have collateral. So there's a company that said we have $1 billion. So you can use a billion tethers. If anyone wants to cash out, we can give you the actual dollars. But Terra has an algorithmic stablecoin that basically means there's one coin associated with the blockchain and then another coin that's the stablecoin. So as the stablecoin needs to be balanced up or down, the other coin gets burned. So it's like the opposite of printing money.
So the way the Fed usually changes the money supply is that it prints more money, or they raise interest rates. It's kind of like quantitative easing. It's a way to try and create a financial mechanism built into the coins. But basically this didn't work. It had about $40 billion in it and it's almost gone to zero. It's been a complete travesty. It's wiped out huge, huge, huge amounts of people's money. Now there's a huge scandal around it and it's really bad.
00:23:41 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, and I even like what you mentioned, a little pushback on the Web2 hostility. I agree there's risk involved. But also I think we need to solve problems together. When the hype is higher than the actual contribution to the code, then you don't really get a lot of progress. You get a lot of hype.
And I think we saw that now at the recording of this podcast. Bitcoin's less than 30K, at least it was this morning, and it was like 69K at the end of last year or something like that. So I guess what I'm getting at is people probably were writing less code on blockchain last year, and they might be writing more code now, but it might just be the people who are really invested in solving the problems.
And things like, I know there's an environmental impact for things like Ethereum. That's a problem that can't be solved like the answer could be not use Ethereum. Use something else. Or the answer could be like, hey, let's contribute code to solve this problem. But at the end of the day, when there's so much noise and hype and no one's really actually talking about solutions, but more about issues on top of issues, then there's not a lot of progress.
And that's what I did a whole series on. I built a Next.js app on top of the Zora protocol, which is an NFT protocol. And in my experience in doing this, I found that caching is really challenging. So if you have an NFT that's like four gigabytes because it's a moving video that I can't deploy, where am I going to deploy that? And as soon as someone uses it, I run through all their bandwidth or something like that. So there wasn't a really good solution.
And I think Cloudflare offered a solution for IPFS to be able to cache that and cache IPFS URLs, which is a good step forward.
00:25:26 - Brian Douglas
And if you want to draw a distinction between Web2 and Web3, a Web2 company is now supporting Web3. But at the end of the day, I think we all win when there's no Web3 or Web2. It's just the web.
00:25:38 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, and that's why I try to be conscious of people who are hostile to Web3 and understand it, and not take it as an insult or a slight because they're completely entitled to think that. It's like they're saying you need to prove to us that this actually does what you're all saying it does. And I'm just like, yeah, that's totally valid.
People should be skeptical of this stuff. People should ask the hard questions. That's why I really try to focus on creating content that actually shows you how to do this stuff. Actually, what is a smart contract? How do you deploy that smart contract? Because people can talk about these things, but until they actually start working with them, it's all very abstract.
I'm trying to explain this stuff to my girlfriend and I'm like, you need to create a Coinbase account and buy like $5 in some cryptocurrency. That's all you gotta do. You're going to understand it so much more and so much better. So I recommend people do that. Then you can start to form a kind of more nuanced opinion of it and then start to try and see, okay, what is the hype? What is not the hype? Why are people actually into this? Why are they excited by it? Always keeping that dialogue open.
Now I have tons of Web2 friends and people who aren't really into blockchain at all. It's really interesting having conversations with people about it because some people think it could be interesting, could be good. Some people are like, nah, I don't really want to have anything to do with that. And so yeah, it's like, I think we're still working on earning trust and that trust can be easily lost. So we need to really think carefully about how we promote this stuff and how we talk about it.
00:27:13 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, indeed. And I think I appreciate you being in the space and talking about it and sharing, because I enjoy your content and follow you on Dev and Twitter as well. So I would love for you to keep it up and would love for folks to check out QuickNode because it's definitely a tool and it's making it easier for you to build stuff on top of the blockchain.
And with that, I kind of want to transition us to picks. This is music, food, could be tech related, like everything's on the table, basically.
00:27:38 - Anthony Campolo
All the things.
00:27:40 - Brian Douglas
Yeah. And speaking of all the things, you've got a couple picks. So do you want to go ahead and go first?
00:27:43 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, my picks are some developer Discords. You were one of the first people who got me into developer Discords with Open Sauced. I had joined that and then started joining some others right around the same time.
So the ones that I'm going to recommend: first is Lunch Dev. This was originally the React Podcast Discord from Michael Chan, and he now has this Discord that we've kind of rebranded to Lunch Dev because it's not React specific really. There's all sorts of channels and topics related to JavaScript or TypeScript or GraphQL or CSS, different frameworks, or just career advice or life advice or just hanging out and movies, music, all that kind of stuff. So that's great.
And then there's also the Front End Horse Discord, which is Alex Trost, and they're more heavy on creative coding and more of the front of the front end, CSS and stuff like that. But there's also lots of JavaScript conversations going on there.
And then since this is Jamstack Radio, we should mention the Jamstack Discord, which now has been running for a couple months and has kind of replaced the Jamstack Slack, which not a lot of people were really using. So I'm really happy to see that.
00:28:55 - Brian Douglas
Didn't even know they had a Slack.
00:28:56 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. So there's a Discord now. And yeah, Demetrius is kind of heading that up. There are lots of other ones too. I'm in so many developer Discords now, I don't have the time for all of them. But they're a great way to connect with people, to have a lifeline to others who are doing similar stuff and may be able to help you fix bugs or get out of a jam. But then also just a way to get your content out there and a way to get people to see your content and give you feedback on it. And then you start building partnerships and just all sorts of good stuff.
00:29:32 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, for sure. The Slack thing drew me because when I was at Netlify, we didn't have a Slack. The one thing that I noticed in DevRel is a lot of companies have Slack with 10,000 plus people. That's cool, but hard to manage, and it becomes a customer support nightmare.
What I love about Discord is there's an evolution of access, which makes it really nice for having folks who only talk in this corner or have this corner that they own. But then you can have the rest of the Discord for mods and admins and stuff like that. So it's a great DevRel tool. If anybody's not in these Discords, definitely check them out.
I did have some picks as well. My first pick is Fig. Fig is a terminal. They started with autocomplete, so it provides autocompletion to your terminal in a way that just works. I love it. It's open source, and you can provide extensions and plugins to it. So definitely check it out. If you work on any sort of CLI tools, create an extension for Fig.
Their goal is to be in every terminal. They just added JetBrains recently. But what I love about it is when I set up my new machine. So I got the new M1 MacBook Pro. I went with the 16, but I kind of wish I went with the 14, but that's a whole other conversation. I got the 16 M1 and set up my machine pretty quickly, and the one thing that threw me off was that the M1s now come with zsh by default, no longer bash. They haven't changed that since like 2000 and something.
So I had to think of a whole other setup for setting up zsh. And I'm like, if I'm going to start new, I should just install Fig and let that install everything for me. Well, it doesn't install stuff for you, but it gives you autocomplete to know what is available to you. So I'm not giving it the best justice, but you should definitely check out Fig. I don't know, Anthony, have you checked out Fig?
00:31:19 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I did try Fig. I thought it was good. There are a lot of terminal tools out there these days, and I don't think they all work together, so you have to go with one. And you know this one. I'm using Warp right now, and I really like it. I'm already kind of used to it, so it's going to be hard to get me to switch off of it. But it was really cool to, like, don't use your regular terminal. Let me just put it that way. There's much better options out there.
00:31:42 - Brian Douglas
Oh, yeah? Yeah, for sure. I don't think I'll ever go back to just normal terminal. I do always have Warp installed on the machine. I haven't used it. I'll need to use it for a couple projects because I know it's bringing a lot more to the table, and that's what I wasn't ready for yet, so I'll need to give it another try.
And I did also have one more pick, which, funny enough, I was talking to Michael Chan at the recent Reactathon, and we were talking about keyboards and how he used Dvorak and also uses blank keycaps and how much better of a typer he is because of the blank keycaps.
So I'm just going to shout out my keyboard, which is the Keychron K6. I love it because it connects to my Mac and my PC. I don't know if you've ever noticed while I'm streaming, but I can just click this one little side button, and it goes back and forth between the PC and the Mac.
So you can connect multiple devices to one. It makes, I used to have this whole streaming setup where I had two keyboards on the desk at the same time and then tons of water cups. It was a mess. So I've been able to, well, the water cups are still here, but at least I only have one keyboard.
00:32:46 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, it reminds me of Mavis Beacon. Learn the home row.
00:32:49 - Brian Douglas
Yeah, I mean, it goes a long way. I don't think I really took it seriously until I started writing code because I still would. I could probably type papers pretty good. Like, you know, 50 words per minute. 60. I don't know what's good, but for writing code, it's perfect. Especially if you use Vim, which I do use Vim.
00:33:06 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, never got into Vim, but I can type pretty fast. I did a lot of Mavis Beacon in middle school.
00:33:11 - Brian Douglas
We should have a competition for developers typing words per minute and see, because I bet you there's some devs out there that probably have some, including yourself. Sounds like you have some serious, what do you call it, WPM.
00:33:24 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I would get up to like 90, I think when I was back in my prime. It might not still be there. But yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's useful if you spend as much time typing as I do.
00:33:36 - Brian Douglas
Excellent. Well, I really enjoyed having this conversation about blockchain, but also exposing us to QuickNode. Folks, again, check it out. Reach out to Anthony. He's ajcwebdev on Twitter and pretty much everywhere else, I believe.
00:33:49 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, yeah. And check out QuickNode.com. You can get started and just host a node and see what it's like. Right now we have a seven-day free trial, and then after that it's $10 for a node. But we may be adjusting our pricing structure soon, so keep an eye out for that.
00:34:04 - Brian Douglas
Okay. Excellent. And listeners, keep spreading the jam. That's all we have time for today. If you're interested in being a guest on the show, or if you'd like to suggest a topic, find us on Twitter at Jamstack Radio. This show is brought to you by the leading investor and developer for startups. To learn more about Heavybit, visit Heavybit.com.