«Time will show that federated systems will be taking over,» Sandi, Calimero CEO

Hey everybody! It’s Kate, MNW community manager, here again, and it’s the second interview from the MNW community series. This time we talked to Sandi, Calimero CEO, and discussed the private sharding future and the ways the Calimero project has started. Sandi also shared a few interesting thoughts on decentralization and privacy matters.

Enjoy reading!

K: When did you first hear about NEAR? How did you get into it?

S: Both Mario (Calimero’s CTO) and I have previously worked at NEAR. We were the first two people on the Infrastructure team, responsible for ensuring site reliability and security across the NEAR stack. Before NEAR I worked at Facebook and another layer 1 protocol. NEAR recruiters found me on Linkedin before the Mainnet launch to work on the best practices when releasing.

K: So, what did you like the most about NEAR Protocol?

S: I fell in love with the strong technical team. If somebody can build a scalable blockchain, those would be Illia, Alex, and their initial team. They had experience working on top projects like Tensorflow and MemSQL and won the biggest amount of medals in algorithms competitions I have ever seen. If you want to build a scalable blockchain you should be good at algorithms. :)

K: While working at NEAR, how did you come up with the idea for Calimero?

S: At NEAR, I was working on several projects investing about 20% in each of them to see which one had the most potential and could get the most traction. I was also talking to Illia about other ideas I had, so he suggested Private Shards and it perfectly fitted into the project I wanted to build. He proposed I find a replacement for myself, and start working on the private sharding project full-time. It eventually became a NEAR spin-off.

K: Was it challenging to implement?

S: It was easier than expected, as we acquired a lot of knowledge while working at NEAR. Also, when designing parts of the system and onboarding new people we got a lot of support from Marcelo, who did a lot of work on NEAR, and Aurora, another ecosystem spin-off.

K: Got you! Let’s talk more about sharding technology itself. What is its future in general, in your point of view?

S: I believe that sharding is the best and only way to build a scalable blockchain solution that is truly decentralized. We have seen sharding being implemented across the web2 world for scaling databases in companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They run on clusters of smaller sharded machines for both computing and storage instead of one big device. When you have a lot of throughput and data you need, that is the only way to go.

Obviously, we have other scaling solutions like rollups, sidechains, private shards, and others. They sacrifice decentralization, finality, or some other properties to achieve scalability. Not every single application has to be truly decentralized on Mainnet. We need other layers of the infrastructure. This is, again, very similar to the real world with CDNs, caching, different architectures for storing database records, etc.

K: Do sharding solutions have any limitations? Calimero specifically.

S: Some of the main disadvantages for Calimero is that it is not as decentralized as other public Mainnet networks like Ethereum, NEAR, Aurora and others. However, “sometimes good enough is good enough” and we should be practical about the problem we are trying to solve. Not everything should stay on the main chain open to the public. Not every use case needs huge decentralization. Time will show that federated systems will be taking over. If you look at the market, there are already a lot of L2 (and even L1) solutions that actually operate permissioned networks while not telling that explicitly. Yes, you sacrifice a portion of decentralization, but at the same time you open 10x more use cases than the ones available on high-cost L1 networks. We sacrifice a bit of decentralization to have better privacy, scaling, and customization.

K: Oh, can it be solved in any way?

S: Sure, if Calimero’s infrastructure is implemented through a consortium model, more than one big stakeholder would own the validators. That would diversify centralization risks.

K: Got you! That really sounds like a solution. For whom private sharding might be of most use?

S: Anywhere you need to hide private data from the public or run some operations for free, off-chain. This is especially important for fintech and infrastructure companies. However, it can be of use even in some Web3 companies. Let’s take gaming, for example. Imagine you start a chess game on the Mainnet. You bridge the whole game to a private shard. On it, the game plays out for free and the moves are hidden (unless you want to reveal them). You bridge the outcome back to the Mainnet. And voila!

K: What are your plans for Calimero?

S: We want to become a pillar of the NEAR, Aurora, and Ethereum ecosystems for privacy-preserving technologies. We are about to launch Mainnet, as well as our console for developers where everyone can spin up their private shards in seconds and start building. Besides that, we are building an internal Labs team for Enterprises coming into the space, a set of zero-knowledge solutions, and a confidential computing platform called Calimero Enclaves.

Over time, Console will integrate many different technologies and DApps offering an out-of-the-box solution for any business.

Also, we’re actually aiming to have more than 50 new hires over the next year. The team is composed of 15 people and 3 major teams right now: core, apps, and infrastructure. With 2 more teams that will go through the expansion soon (Ops & Marketing). Btw, feel free to reach out to us, if you have needed skills and background. Our team has many talented people from companies like Facebook, Uber, Deliveroo, Rimac cars, and others. We knew each other from previous jobs or college and they shared my vision and were stoked when offered the opportunity to build the future together. I feel humbled that they see that at Calimero.

K: Final question, what do you like the most about Calimero?

S: The everyday energy. Everybody is super hyped about changing the playing field. We execute incredibly fast thanks to our agile team members who take ownership of individual initiatives. And we deliver all the time. I love the internal language that we developed — when something is ready, we all say SHIP IT (obviously accompanied by the appropriate ship emojis).