India Embracing Web3: How Two Founders Discovered Success
The terms web3, crypto, and decentralization have all held the buzzword spotlight for the past few years, but technology moves fast. As the fair-weather crowd moves on to the next latest-and-greatest trend, founders who stay committed to improving the technology behind their product experience sustainable growth.
I recently interviewed Ayush Ranjan, the co-founder of Huddle01, who shared his story on building the future of online communication.
Ayush graduated as an electrical engineer in 2016 and started out working at consumer-based tech startups; most notably Taskbar and Xevo. While at Xevo, Ayush experienced the required balance needed to make unit economics work when scaling from a couple hundred users to a couple million.
In 2019, the realization of advertisers taking advantage of user’s privacy and data was a problem in his eyes. The scrutiny accompanying constant ad targeting and retargeting was a seemingly unavoidable cost of using the internet, until Ayush discovered Brave, a web browser that holds privacy as a first priority. Brave incentivizes users for the attention they provide advertisers via its Basic Attention Token (BAT). This discovery led him down the ever-metaphoric “crypto rabbit hole”.
Technically curious by nature, Ayush began to participate in hackathons as an outlet to understand how to build with blockchain technology. It was during this time that he reconnected with Susmit Lavania, his future co-founder and CTO. The two had known each other for the past eight years as they both attended The LNM Institute of Information Technology.
Susmit graduated in 2019 with a degree in computer science, then proceeded to help build India’s first big centralized cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX. The duo decided to attempt to build something leveraging their collective skill sets at the 2020 ETHGlobal Hacker Fest. Ayush’s experience with growth and Susmit’s understanding of the blockchain space gave them the ability to approach the challenge with a strategic point of view.
Hackathon origins 🏗️
When I asked Ayush where the idea for Huddle01 came from, he revealed that it stemmed from the cofounders’ realization that despite the hackathon’s focus on decentralization, all of the virtual meetings and governance calls were still being held on Zoom. The thought for a solution was, “Hey, can we build something which is not overtly centralized?” The first iteration of Huddle01 was complete by the time the hackathon concluded. Originally called Cadbury due to Susmit’s love of the chocolate brand, the project used WebRTC to build a peer-to-peer video calling platform. A layer of Filecoin was used for the recording storage, and a layer of Livepeer was used for the livestreaming.
Fast forward to today, Huddle01 is a team of 23 focused on building “an open and decentralized real time communication engine”.
What’s under the hood? 🚘
Today’s tech stack of Huddle01 has undergone a number of improvements since its inception. Although the video conferencing solution still utilizes WebRTC, a protocol Google Meet and Microsoft Teams are also structured around, the difference lies within the custom tweaks made on the backend. The media server is written in C++ alongside a Media Soup component that will be upgraded in the near future according to Ayush. Micro-services such as the call recordings are now completed on two layers: IPFS for the hot layer, then Filecoin for the cold layer. The real time messaging protocol (RTMP) streaming layer leverages Livepeer for its transcoding services. This allows the platform to broadcast videos out to multiple people at once. Huddle01’s front end is built on React, and mobile is built on React Native. The SDKs are in React Native, Flutter, and Web SDK as well.
The advantages of a blockchain approach ⛓️
The team at Huddle01 understands two distinct issues with centralized solutions:
- Current video communication applications are built in a top-down fashion
- Current video communication applications control the data their users give them
Video meetings held on centralized platforms route user data to central servers, which creates a micro economy controlled by service providers. This incentivizes customers to comply with the rules stated by the largest players. Huddle01 uses blockchain technology to improve this unbalanced model.
As Ayush breaks down the three phases of the Huddle01 roadmap, it becomes clear prioritizing a steady progression towards decentralization is a key component for the team. The first phase was to solve for demand. As of the beginning of Q4 2022, the app has seen 500k minutes from approximately 14,000 users. Future focus will be on continued growth through feature releases and an upcoming enterprise package, while also “solving for retention.” Client-server architecture has been the backbone of success thus far; however, moving the application to node-to-node architecture will be the key to achieving decentralization. The advantages of this architecture migration will be the platform’s ability to provide low-latency performance while scaling data packet transfer sizes. Ayush believes this bet will be especially important when AR and VR digital communications become more commonplace. He feels it is “needed to have a web3 based video conferencing infrastructure” — both philosophically and technologically.
To double tap on the team’s sentiment towards web3, the platform is making sure to support emerging crypto primitives such as non-fungible tokens, decentralized identifiers, and verifiable credentials. Right now on Huddle01, users can set their video conferencing avatar as an NFT. A feature allowing users to use their NFTs as an AR filter, which will track live head movements during a call, is currently in beta.
“You can use your name, or you can use any of your names which you want. [Even] an anime character with Naruto.eth. You can be completely anonymous in nature,” says Ayush.
Ayush sees these emerging behaviors as new ways for people to express themselves. By being able to assume different identities online, users are rapidly producing new genres of content. He is excited to support this trend as he feels “people are always curious what’s behind the mask.”
Additional features in the works for Huddle01 include a pitch shifter to allow an individual to change the sound of their voice, the ability to drop live POAPs to an audience, and increased ways to make livestreams more interactive.
Ayush highlighted the fact blockchain technology enables Huddle01 to give users complete custody over their data. The platform will never know who a user is, where they are calling from, what their name is, or their IP address. All recordings are cryptographically encrypted and stored onto IPFS and Filecoin.
Precautionary measures ⚠️
Given the current status of the industry, it was reaffirming to learn about the approach Huddle01 is taking to build a strong foundation. The first order of business on the project’s roadmap was building a solid product while doing progressive decentralization. Although authentication, recording, and livestreaming aspects are decentralized with the help of existing web3 protocols, decentralizing the platform’s media server is the team’s current focus.
Ayush stressed the research the team is taking to make the eventual migration to a node-to-node architecture technologically achievable without disturbing the project’s current success. “We don’t want performance to take a hit because consumers should believe that it’s an invisible product,.” he said. The future state will use prover and verifier systems to ensure nodes supporting Huddle01 will have zero knowledge proof in terms of what data packets are being transferred. A final note was made regarding the team’s constant monitoring of Huddle01’s monetary and fiscal policies.
Building with Livepeer 📽️
My role at Livepeer has given me the opportunity to hear the stories of founders building projects on top of the protocol’s technology. My introduction to the folks at Huddle01 started at Blockchain Week in Paris this past summer, where I bumped into Susmit at the Metaverse Summit while I was wearing my Livepeer shirt. Our introductory conversation quickly led into setting up this interview with Ayush, but the founders’ relationship with Livepeer started at the hackathon back in 2020.
When I asked what it has been like working with the Livepeer team, Ayush gave me a smile as he reflected on the early days. From initial collaborations with the engineering team, to the mentorship and guidance provided by a few of the leaders at Livepeer, Ayush said the Huddle01 team feels fortunate to have found a partner they can rely on. Video is at the core of their project, and having a decentralized solution makes their goals possible.
Although both Huddle01 and Livepeer have evolved significantly over the years, the message to those building in the space holds the same tone. Don’t stop building! After winning prize money at hackathons or grant programs, Ayush recommends to keep moving forward. “If you stop, you will go on to try other products, then other products. And then over time, your affinity and love towards any kind of product decreases over time, your emotional quote also decreases over time. The best way to go about it is to have a mental model of having a staggered reward function — for example, if you do 50 more pushes, your product could be used by 5000 more users.”
If you are interested in building with Livepeer, start by creating your own account.
The right mindset 🧠
After concluding my conversation with Ayush, it became very clear that understanding solutions to the world’s problems has been a driving force behind the founders at Huddle01. Not only is the team adapting to meet emerging requests from a blockchain-oriented community, but also staying focused on building a product to meet demands of the future. This is how Huddle01 is not chasing the latest trends, but using the technology as their advantage.
My name is Drake Bauer, Product Marketing Manager @livepeerstudio powered by @Livepeer, a protocol founded in 2017 focused on building the world’s open video infrastructure. An awesome part of my role is getting to interview founders on their journey building the future of the internet.
Have comments, questions, or concerns? Tag me in a reply below or Tweet at me @drakebauer_
