Customer Interview with Eliott Teissonniere, Chief Technology Officer at Nodle

Find out from Eliott Teissonniere, CTO at Nodle, how OnFinality’s robust and scalable node infrastructure helped Nodle save costs and scale faster to be the parachain with the most user accounts active today!

Eliott talks about how Nodle aims to connect as many things as they can, as fast as they can, and as cheap as they can, to be the bridge between the real and digital world.

Learn about some of the ways Nodle is already bridging connectivity with Cash App, geolocation NFTs and other ‘Move to earn’, ‘Play to earn’, and ‘Connect to earn’ strategies.

🎙️ Watch the full video here ⬇️ or scroll down to read the full transcript!

(Disclaimer: The below transcript has been automatically transcribed hence there may be minor discrepancies with what was mentioned in the actual interview.)

Rob 00:00

Welcome to OnFinality’s Customer Interview Series where we learn more from leaders in the blockchain space about how OnFinality’s infrastructure helps them build the decentralised future faster. I’m Rob, Head of Growth at OnFinality. And today it’s my pleasure to have Eliott, the CTO from Nodle and IoT company to join us for a chat on how they’re using OnFinality’s expertise and powering their mission critical infrastructure. Everybody, great to see you. Can you tell us more about Nodle?

Eliott 00:29

Yeah so Nodle is you said IoT company, but we are more an IoT company. We are a decent by security company which obviously authority working on blockchain nodes cannot make sense for us to use OnFinality here. Anyways, we are building a polka park chain to connect IoT devices. To do that, we actually use smartphones. We turn the smartphone Bluetooth antennas on, collects nearby Bluetooth data, anonymize it and then share it with the network. And at the center of all that very complex system, we actually have our power chain that’s just controlling everything, handling settlements and soon running missions

Rob

awesome so maybe just stepping back, so for the average person who’s maybe not familiar with IoT that at the Internet of Things and you know this network that you’re building, what sort of a an application they could think of because you guys have a whole stack of different applications for this network. How can you make that kind of tangible for someone who’s interested in it?

Eliott 01:40

Yeah, good question. I would say car expertise in our 2000 was developed use case we have is actually asset tracking and so we work for instance with the car insurance company in France named rule. To find stolen cars, so consumers can actually find their car if it’s lost, that’s a solution that’s offered by the insurance provider that’s actually backed by the networks. In that case, it’s more for enterprise use case, right. And then they resell the solution built on top of noodle. And that’s the kind of use case we’ve been seeing mainly overseas pass, I would say 45 years also. Over the last year or so we also started exploring and seeing more consumer oriented use cases. So think of various applications that will be cannot at the border and digital world. So think of you go to Starbuck and suddenly you mean Starbuck NFT just by being in Starbuck. And so we think that’s going to be quite a few more use cases of the type. So we’re pretty excited about this ones.

Rob 02:45

So it’s yeah really leveraging the power I guess that everyone has like in their pocket with these devices, right. And you’re embedding all sorts of integrations or partnerships that would be keen to take advantage of that network and as I saw there’s this, there’s always things like move-to-earn and play-to-earn and you guys have got the connect-to-earn and can you tell me more about you have got this Cash App and how that works for people?

Eliott 03:15

Yeah so connect-to-earn comes from our higher focus on e- connectivity our core focus of Nodle previously was we wanted to connect things, right. We wanted to connect as many things as we could, as fast as we could and as cheap as we could. And overall, again, over the past year or so, we said also we realised that what we built can be a beautiful bridge between the real and digital worldwide. I remember I did a few presentations on bringing web3 to the real world and what I think Nodle has a potential to do nowadays. And ultimately the Cash App is the 1st and primal way to experience that. So Cash App started as just an application that you’d run to turn your smartphone into a Nodle smartphone that connect all devices. And nowadays we are rolling out more digital and web3 and real world however we can come up with the world for that feature so in the Cash App so I don’t know when this is going to air out Rob but for instance for Chinese New Year we’re going to experiment with huge Chinese New Year integrations especially a few of red envelopes. We recently launched a new feature on a real world located NFTS which are pinned on the map and there’s a lot more to come it’s. For us it is the best way to interact with the networks, your vision into the potential model and we want to treat it as such

Rob

interesting i actually downloaded the app just to have a play with it and yeah I noticed that I was you know it says I’m connecting the different Bluetooth devices nearby and so on. What given that I mean i’m based in Singapore. Who do you have the specific clients in different countries that are leveraging that data or that you’re building out some use cases like globally or how does that work sort of region by region or does the rewards. Try given one country. Would that be quite different if I was somewhere else based on that?

Eliott 05:25

So there’s a few questions here. I think I want to say yes to you both of your first questions. So we do work with key customers in certain countries. So all the key insurance company is actually based in France, right? And we’ve been creating various pilots and integrations with other customers in France, the US, Europe. We’ve had people in America as well and Brazil. When it comes to house the rewards are created while we are looking at just some kind of typical crypto wealth formula where ultimately your tokens what you give out to people is gonna minted out of nowhere as a way to kick start network right. And over time as the network grows and develops and the issues flowers and we all demand for the for the token takes over

Rob 06:22

Understand. Given the state of the market at the moment, this crypto bear market, how’s that going for you guys and is there a current focus that’s allowing you to build the map, you know some certain features that you’re excited about?

Eliott 06:36

Yeah, it’s going, it’s going to go, right. I mean like everybody, right, we we’re not the happiest. You know, it’s not the bull market where everybody is excited about everything, but the way I see it, we are being offered the opportunity to focus on the fundamentals of the network and we take time to build. I’d like to say bears are time are good time to build and bulls are a good time to market and that’s true, right, but that’s tough to debate. So that’s basically exactly what we are doing. And we have again experiencing with new experimenting with new use cases surrounding the Cash App sounding real world integrations and bringing more customers to the app bringing us some more features to the customer instead of the enterprise.

Rob 07:25

Yeah, we’re finding that ourselves. Of course, it’s not as exciting as say bull market, but great time to focus on some things and also, you know, do some research on various topics. So yeah, we’ve found it really helpful so far, but yeah, can’t wait for things to heat up again, whenever that is. And I guess on that vein that you know, obviously people always talk about, you know, look at the success and you guys are a pair of chain and have done well.

Are you able to share some of the challenges that you’ve faced and how you’ve overcome them?

Eliott 07:57

Yeah, of course so. We were one of the most early adopters of Substrate. Remember when we joined the Builders Program, it was like barely 10 parachains even participating. And we’ve had a number of challenges. Obviously it’s working out with OnFinality. A lot of them are actually infrastructure related right. I think the key challenge that we started our partnership if we can call it that way was our issues in scaling node infrastructure for mobile customers. If you look at the number of accounts we haven’t changed, we actually a parachain with the most accounts, we have over 600,000 thousand accounts active on the patch as on Subscan data. And this is, this is higher than Acala, this is higher than Moonbeam, higher than all those guys. And because of all those users that actually use another app and actually try to query the change to check your balance of 200% transactions, we had extremely important pain points in having solids nodes that would solve queries at scale to those hundreds of thousands of customers we tried to do it internally for quite some time. It was very messy and ultimately very expensive. If you factor in engineering time, you factor in infrastructure costs as well you know, because obviously it’s not what we do as a living. So we may not optimize everything very well and ultimately we work with OnFinality to create robust. node query solving infrastructure however we can call it and since then I think we’ve cut off our cost on load hosting by probably 5X to 10X each at the very least. Because again, you know we were not exactly optimizing and if you factor in the devops time to maintain these nodes to maintain a good service the number is probably much higher and also, our users are happier

Rob 10:03

Well that’s the main thing, right? A better user experience? I like the term that you have around unstoppable infrastructure and that’s where we’re delighted to be able to help support you in that vision you have you know, globally with this application is really neat. One of the things we didn’t touch on there before is that there is the work that you’re doing directly with clients and this cash app that you have, but you also have an SDK that can be used by other partners, correct collect

Eliott

yeah, so. Is it cash shop actually embeds SDK and is the SDK is a piece of code that can be used on a smartphone into a noodle enabled smartphone, but actually is an active part of the network and we do work with application developer across the world. So we have some again in France, US, Mexico, Brazil, pretty much all over the world to actually integrate it. So we’ve seen find sense faster adblocker, but it’s been experimenting with using models and other SDK to replace ads. As an advocate who we cannot terrible devote to show ads to their users to meet as well, so they’re experiencing. We’ve got active ways to do so and I believe they all felt our users the possibility to turn onto another SDK instead of paying a subscription, and then their pockets.

Rob 11:28

Interesting and out of all the areas that you guys are looking at, personally for you what’s the most exciting use case or future vision for Nodle?

Eliott 11:41

It’s a good one. I don’t think I’m into a specific use case, but what I really like is what I was teasing at the beginning, bringing web3 to the real world. My position on Web 3 customers is right we’ve built amazing things, but they don’t really transcend to our daily lives. You know, monkey picture only goes so far. And I do think obviously I’m bias, but I do think that with Nodle, we are kind of sitting in between both worlds and we can serve as an infrastructure for use case applications that can impact our daily lives a bit more than buying monkey pictures online or stacking coins on you know cooking, whatever name pool you want to come up with.

Rob 12:30

Yeah, exactly. I think there’s so many really interesting ideas out there, but very few that have some of the tangible kind of concepts that you’ve got at least so the average person could understand and use today. So yeah, I think obviously then the next say five years or maybe even less, you’re going to see like a real explosion of these types of things. So you guys are obviously in a great place to monetize that. So switching gears a little bit, for those people who are interested in perhaps getting into crypto or web 3 or whatever term you want to use, do you have any advice for how to break into the industry?

Eliott 13:08

That’s a good one. I would say it’s depends on the profile of those people. Let’s say we’re looking at somebody kind of technical minds and maybe they are, you know, working a standard software engineering job then. As someone of. Technical minded person they may want to look into you know what does , where can I deploy it, what can I do with it, right and pick up your preferred smart platform if we’re looking at somebody less technical like or moms or dads that you know maybe yours are more crypto oriented than mine are. Like I would suggest, yeah, just, you know, inside a few apps, see what you can do. Just, you know, maybe a good start. Totally unbiased recommendation. Yeah, just inside while it gets started, you know, it only takes a few clicks to set up nowadays. Set up Rainbow Wallet. Whether it’s Talisman. Talisman is great. Nodle is very good too. Yeah, just fiddle around with a few apps and wallets.

Rob 14:15

Great advice. Well, thanks for joining us today Elliott. It’s been a pleasure to learn more about Nodal and the Internet of Things or IoT. If you’d like to learn more about model, you can check out their website and put in the link. And if you’re a web three builder and want to get stuck in with nodal, you’re at the right place. On finality is blockchain infrastructure made smarter. You can log on to our website and get up to 500,000 thousand daily API requests for free to help build your applications or validator node with model and you can take your DE. To the next level with all sorts of APIs and analysis tools that we have to better understand your users thanks thanks again Elliot. Great to have you here. Appreciate your time.

Eliott 14:59

Thank you

Rob 15:01

Ok, see you.

About OnFinality

OnFinality is a blockchain infrastructure platform that saves web3 builders time and makes their lives easier. OnFinality delivers scalable API endpoints for the biggest blockchain networks and empowers developers to automatically test, deploy, scale and monitor their own blockchain nodes in minutes. To date, OnFinality has served over 300 billion RPC requests across 70 networks including Polkadot, Ethereum, Moonbeam, Astar, Avalanche and Cosmos, and is continuously expanding these mission-critical services so developers can build the decentralised future, faster!

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