EP. 245 - Building Verifiable Onchain Data for Institutions with Edge & Node CEO Rodrigo Coelho

Rodrigo Coelho (0:00)

The ability to create kind of bespoke or purpose-built data infrastructure, that can cut your cost dramatically.

We did that ourselves at Edge & Node. We cut our cloud bills by 84% over time. And AMP is the first example of a purpose-built piece of data infrastructure. We believe that's gonna be a mega trend going forward, without now AI lowers the cost of developing kind of custom infrastructure.

Narb (0:33)

Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers, and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech.

Welcome to the show, Rodrigo. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man. GM, GM. Happy to be here. Excellent, excellent. Yeah, I'm really excited for our audience to get a chance to see you go over kind of the origin story of Edge & Node. I know you guys got really popular for The Graph. My actual first crypto conference was Graph Day, I think, back in 2022

Rodrigo Coelho (1:07)

Oh, yeah, you were there. Wow.

Narb (1:09)

I was there, yeah. It was actually so good that I haven't been to another crypto conference.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:18)

You set the bar so high. You set the bar.

Narb (1:20)

Yeah, I didn't want to experience anything.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:22)

We cannot be top.

Narb (1:23)

That's right.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:25)

Oh, that's so cool.

Narb (1:26)

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:28)

That was a small venue. It was like a theater.

Narb (1:32)

That's right.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:33)

Yeah, there's a lot of people. So that's cool.

Narb (1:35)

You're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:38)

28, was it 18 or 19?

Narb (1:41)

I think it was 22, 22 or 23 I was there.

But yeah, just participate in the hackathon and won some prize money there.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:53)

You went to the one at the Palace of Fine Arts, you mean?

Narb (1:56)

That's the one. Yeah.

Rodrigo Coelho (1:57)

Okay. Yeah, there was a prior one that was even smaller than that, like the original one. But yeah, the Palace of Fine Arts, that was amazing. Yeah, that was like, it was really big venue and yeah, the hackathon.

Narb (2:07)

It was a great time.

Rodrigo Coelho (2:09)

Amazing.

Narb (2:10)

Yeah. Cool.

But yeah, that kind of aside, yeah, it would be awesome if you just wanted to give introduction about yourself before we get into all the great stuff you have prepared. Yeah.

Rodrigo Coelho (2:23)

Well, a little bit about me, I've been a tech serial entrepreneur for a couple of decades or more and started, you know, early days of the Internet, kind of the.com boom. Founded, you know, a few tech companies. And around 2016 era, started to get interested in crypto. And out of kind of right place, right time, I was working at a co-working space in San Francisco and happened to become friends with Yaniv Tal, who is like the original founder of The Graph. And we, he was actually working on the pitch deck for The Graph at that time. And I was kind of fellow entrepreneur, kind of like, hey, what are you working on? He had like an Ethereum sweatshirt on. And so we started talking. So he showed me the pitch deck and I saw it was a really big idea and just wanted to be helpful as a fellow entrepreneur and friend. And so made introductions to investors.

And then, yeah, a few months later, I was kind of looking for the next thing to do. And the timing was such that they had just gotten their first check-in and so he'd asked me to come join the team. So I ended up being the first hire back in 2018 So I was there from the very beginning.

I was three co-founders. I was kind of like an adjacent ops person at the beginning. I was like, you know, helped out with like community, like we graphed, I'll plan that. I was doing kind of all the things as we scaled. And yeah, so we built the Graph protocol and launched it in 2021 So it took about three years of building and launched a decentralized network that does indexing of blockchain data and allows developers to query it.

I'm not sure how much the audience knows, but yeah, it's the graph.com. There was a token called GRT. It's still in use today. We've served the infrastructures, served trillions of queries over the years and still serving billions of queries per month. And it acts as a major part of the backend infrastructure, many protocols that are out there today, like DeFi protocols. And yeah, it was really a key piece of infrastructure that is still utilized today. And so it's been a really fun journey. I can't believe it's been eight years, but yeah, so Edge & Node is the original team. The company originally started as Graph Protocol, Inc. And then we rebranded our name to Edge & Node in 2021 when we launched the Graph and the network. And then, yeah, so we've been, you know, working all these years in improving the protocol. And then more recently, we have shifted our attention to more of the enterprise use case with our product AMP that's working directly with financial institutions and getting blockchain data into their organizations.