May 20, 2022 8 minutes read

Cross AMA with DeepSquare Community, the Recap

We had an exciting chat with DeepSquare team and learned much about their project and vision. DeepSquare delivers cutting-edge High-Performance Computing services. Data scientists, AI engineers, metaverse builders, researchers, artists, and physicists have everything they need to build the future in one place.

If you missed the live AMA session held on the @OpenFabricAI telegram channel, find the below version with the most important questions from this great AMA.

Let’s begin by introducing yourself as well as your project

With pleasure, I am a passionate engineer working in the field of AI and intelligent systems since more than 10 years. I gained experience on blockchain since 2016 by working on different projects with the Dash and cosmos ecosystem.

We also started a GPU mining company in 2017 and gained lot of experience into what it means to run infrastructure. Since the beginning I knew that we can so much more than crypto mining with GPU. The ecological aspects was also a very important aspect to me.

After the crypto mining journey, we decided to concentrate on the real use of computing with a clear sustainability angle and started developing what is now known as DeepSquare.

DeepSquare is building a decentralized high-performance computing cloud.

This cloud has to be seen as an inclusive ecosystem consisting of grid partners a compute protocol to allow people to provide compute ressources in a trustless manner and a market place were users can make use of the capability of the grid while abstracting the complexity of managing a distributed cluster.

We have a strong focus on sustainability as well. Our infrastructure uses immersion cooling and can therefore reach very interesting efficiency (because most of the heat can be re used to heat up district heating system for instance).

Our first POC cluster is now running in SION Switzerland and providing the generated heat to heat up the city water.

Can you give us a bit of your background and introduce us to DeepSquare? In a broad outline what the project consists of?

My background is clearly on information technology, artificial intelligence and blockchain. I am passionate about open systems, open source philosohpy and community based project.

Concerning the broad outline of the project I can summarized it like that : DeepSquare is distributed compute cloud, you can think of it as the community response to big tech giant cloud provider. We want to leverage all the existing smaller scale cloud providers (tiers2), research center (that have huge super computers) and utility company and join forces to create a strong and powerful distributed compute grid. We want to offer a professional unstoppable compute cloud.

Can you tell us more about the HPC and Cloud Computing sector? What are the use cases for HPC and Cloud Computing?

Use cases include many fast growing sector that leverage the access to big amount of data to extract value from it. This includes AI, life sciences, environmental models, simulation and so on. The future will require more and more compute. Think about the training of autonomous vehicules or the generalization of metaverse (accelerated by the covid time were people were doing most of their activity online).

An important point I want to add here, and that we understood by talking with blockchain project. We are focusing on HPC but this does not mean that we restrict ourself to HPC only application. Whoever needs decentralization of compute resources shall have a solution with DeepSquare.

I am talking specifically here about hosting blockchain validators. Since the raise of Proof of Stake blockchain there has been a shift from securing the network with mining farm to securing the network on the big tech giants cloud by hosting validators there. A lot of blockchain project suffer from this reduction of resilience of the decentralized world. With DeepSquare since we will have to host our validators on our grid, we want to also open this feature to other project. This is why we applied to the Harmony DAO fund, and to the multiverse Avalanche fund to get help to further develop this aspects of decentralized node hosting. In that case you could see the vision of the DeepSquare project has beeing a layer 0 (an infrastructure layer) which fullfill the requirements of decentralized world from node hosting to highly depending compute project such as OpenFabric AI !

How does the solution offered by DeepSquare differ from what already exists on the market? How are you going to survive in an environment dominated by Tech Giants?

Comparison table

Here is the difference table of DeepSquare.

What we can see here is that something that put us apart from big tech giants are related to sustainability, inclusiveness, data sovereignty. The decentralization allows this. Be close to were people need the compute, allow customers to choose the jurisdiction they want their workload to run on.

And there is a big need for that. A lot of company don’t feel comfortable of running on big tech giants for data privacy reason. Joining forces with local providers answers a clear customer pain.

Concerning the other crypto projects working on the same vision. What put us apart there on top of the sustainability angle is the strong HPC focus of the project and the entreprise grade aspects (we want to guarantee strong SLA to customers so that businesses feel comfortable running on DeepSquare). This also means that we can see our blockchain competitors as partners, because we can also host them on our infrastructure which could be beneficial to some of their customers.

Tell us About your first Cluster – Where is it located and How is it performing?

Our first cluster is located in the Energypolis campus in SION in switzerland. The campus is focusing on helping emerging smart city technologies. Its in this context that we put our first POC cluster. It is currently being used by researchers of the university to do interesting simulation related to environment (simulating wind turbine for instance). The cluster is an immersion cooling cluster. This means that all the fans are removed, and all the computers and gpu are put in a non conductive oil. A heat exchanger is then using cold water coming from the district water system to cool down the oil, which warms up the water. This warm water is the injected in the circuits. This reduces the electricity cost on our side and makes use of something that is normally to used (remember 95% of what we do with computer is generating heat). The transfer of heat is a liquid-liquid transfer done with a heat pump and is therefore very efficient (more than 90% of the heat can be recovered that way).

DeepSquare migrated to Avalanche, why?

For several reason, first the person that build that was a professor and he is running avalanche like a big lab, which with my past background as PhD resonates. Second, they built a very powerful consensus algorithm which has been proven to be very efficient in terms of carbon footprint (5 orders of magnitude less footprint than current ethereum), validated by external sources, which shows that they take sustainability seriously. And third, they have a very interesting way of scaling through their subnet which is very exciting, and fourth but not least transactions are cheap.

What will the DPS and SQUARE tokens be used for? What is the difference and how will they interact with each other? What are the long-term sustainable value drivers for the DPS and Square token?

The DPS is used for governance. Its a security token. Holding it requires KYC and a minimum amount of 25k DPS is needed (except for people participating on the private sale which get DPS for any amount). People holding DPS cannot exchange them with other people because it is linked to somebody. This is what allows us to already distribute token without allowing a secondary market to take place before we go live. This DPS token can be always exchanged to SQUARE token in a 1-1 ratio. Going from DPS to SQUARE makes you loose the aspects linked to security. What you get is then the utility token of the ecosystem, the fuel for compute. This is a standard ERC20 type of token that can be freely exchangable and is not link to any KYC.

But going from SQUARE to DPS has a wall : 25K SQUARE and a valid KYC.

Since the DPS cannot be exchanged, his value is 1-1 linked to the SQUARE value. What drives the value of the SQUARE is designed in our tokenomics. All the margin made by the grid is used to replenish a vault which provides token for staking rewards and offers a way to specific investment (projects in our launchpad or investment in infrastructure). The staking mechanism are ruled by algorithm and the rest is community decided.

Then since not every one wants/can pay with token (e.g. hard for a research center to justify holding or paying in token). They can pay in fiat which gets converted to stable coin. In that case all the margin made by the grid is used to buy back the SQUARE token effectively creating an upward buying pressure.

How can we participate in the Private Sale?

There is a dedicated link that has been done for the OpenFabric community. Referral gains will be then offered to the OpenFabric project.

Who are DeepSquare’s partners and/ VCs supporting the project?

White Loop Capital
Square Factory
Bird Incubator
Submer
Pledged Capital
OpenFabric
EcoCloud
Crypto Valley Association
Hyperlense

And more to come !

Is DeepSquare participating in any other events this year?

Many events are planned, we will be keeping an up to page link on our website. The one coming this week are

12th May — EU-Startups Summit, Barcelona — At this exclusive in-person event, Europe’s hottest startups will be showcased and coming together to learn from some of the most successful European entrepreneurs of our time. Diarmuid Daltún, our Head of Business Development, will be there to meet like minded business leaders

13th May — Tomorrow Conference, Belgrade — Bringing together the technology of tomorrow NFT / Crypto / Metaverse. Here, Me and Maja Kehic, our Head of Marketing, will showcase how DeepSquare is the backbone of future technology

13th May — Avalanche House, Berlin — always happy to join any event organized by Avalanche. Charly Mancel and Aakash Shetty will be there for the great networking and fun guaranteed.