Why we invested in Space and Time, a decentralized data platform for blockchain applications
While web3 on-chain data is public domain and accessible, it is limited by the amount and cost. Naturally, the web3 infrastructure expands to off-chain data to fulfill application needs for comprehensive data access, real-time warehousing, and relational semantics.
But web3 paradigms introduce hurdles, such as lack of off-chain data permanence, high latency on-chain data access, and fragmentation of data across blockchains. Additionally, web3 use cases introduce unique trust requirements for query results. This means that smart contracts that use queries must be able to cryptographically prove the integrity of the results and underlying data. As web3 proliferates, enormous amounts of data will be generated that compound scalability and performance complexities.
Space and Time is a decentralized data warehouse unifying off-chain and on-chain data to enable big data applications for the trustless web. Its platform enables high-performance and tamper-proof cross-chain queries — and commitments on the data captured — that can be cryptographically proven for use in smart contracts.
We invested in Space and Time because the company is building some fundamental components to enable big data applications for web3 use cases, including Proof-of-SQL for tamper-proof data commits and queries, normalizing on-chain data for indexing across chains, and storage optimization between in-memory cache and disk storage on decentralized nodes. The company was incubated as part of a program by ChainLink Labs. Samsung Next participated in a $10 million Seed funding round led by Framework. Other investors include DCG, Stratos, and IOSG.
The company’s founding team has considerable experience developing database and analytics products. Co-founder and CEO Nate Holiday has been an advisor at Chainlink, and a senior vice president at Teradata. Co-founder and CTO Scott Dykstra was previously vice president of cloud engineering at Teradata. Finally, Co-founder Jay White, Head of Research leading the Proofs/Cryptography team, is a PhD mathematician, cryptography expert, and assistant professor of mathematics at Dordt University.
As web3 proliferates, data volume and fragmentation will continue to increase with the creation of new chains, dapps, and use cases — compounding the hurdles to deliver big data capabilities to the ecosystem. By entering the market early and aggregating the most comprehensive data set, Space and Time can provide the best AI models for predictive web3. Longer term, Space and Time aims to broaden its storage and compute interfaces to provide a Backend-as-a-Service solution for web3 developers.
Andy Duong is a Samsung Next Investor. Samsung Next's investment strategy is limited to its own views and does not reflect the vision or strategy of any other Samsung business unit, including, but not limited, to Samsung Electronics.