How this deployment aggregator startup is helping companies move to Web3, onboard protocols
Spheron acts as a deployment aggregator startup for decentralised cloud protocols. The platform helps developers easily onboard protocols and provides better tooling, and assists organisations to move from Web2 to Web3 seamlessly.
Mitrasish Mukherjee and Prashant Maurya have participated in several hackathons to build dApps (decentralised apps). While the duo was involved in the Web 3.0 and decrypting space, both have always been curious about what was amiss in the Web 3.0 ecosystem.
“We knew that the blockchain brings a lot of benefits – such as decentralisation, censorship resistance, etc. But does only building a smart contract that handles the backend logic make the dApp decentralised? We didn't think so, hence we envisioned the web to be fully decentralised – unaffected by any censorship from centralised corporations like Google and Amazon,” Mitrasish tells The Decrypting Story.
This vision helped the duo to come up with the idea of Spheron. Based out of Bengaluru and founded in 2020, the startup helps in decentralising the frontend – the presentation layer of the web app.
The duo started building on the idea during Arweave’s accelerator programme to showcase their MVP (minimum viable product).
Prashant - Co-founder, Spheron
What does the platform do?
“The eureka moment came when we were able to onboard 50 projects from the Arweave community to use our platform and deploy their web apps on Arweave,” explains Mitrasish.
The platform acts as a deployment aggregator platform for decentralised cloud protocols, which helps developers easily access and onboard them. It also provides better developer tooling to help organisations move easily from Web2 to the Web3 world.
The metaverse contains many protocols that provide cloud storage and servers in a decentralised manner, so aggregating them on a single platform will provide a better experience for new developers who are exploring new technologies in the blockchain.
“Also, to access these protocols, a developer needs extensive knowledge to use them for their web applications. We provide a simple way to use these protocols without learning new languages. We also give the option for developers to choose between protocols like Filecoin, Arweave, Skynet, etc instead of restricting them from accessing different protocols,” he says.
The developer doesn’t need to download anything from the Spheron platform; they are only required to connect with their GitHub account. The platform automatically fetches all the repositories from the user's GitHub account. Users can then select which repository they want to deploy and choose the protocol (Arweave, Skynet, Filecoin, etc).
“We have mentioned all the deployment configurations in our docs. The default configuration is already pre-filled but users have the option to edit them as well. With that, the user can now click on ‘Deploy’ and that's all,” explains Mitrasish.
It will be up and running on the chosen decentralised protocol. Users can also connect centralised and decentralised domains (like Handshake, ENS) from the Spheron platform in just a few clicks. Users can also automate their deployment as well, which will increase their productivity when building their application.
“Currently, we support JavaScript app frameworks like React, Vue, Next etc, but more Jamstacks will be added as we grow. Users can pay us a one-time fee or opt for subscriptions as well, which have some added features,” he adds.
The challenges
The startup faced a lot of challenges initially. The duo didn't know anything about the product-market fit for their product since the idea was unique to the crypto ecosystem. To find the market fit, they built an MVP and showcased it in the Arweave Web Incubator accelerator programme.
“The Arweave community started using our idea to deploy their web app to Arweave Protocol. It helped us to scale up our beta version with a lot of new features to improve the developer experience. We were able to onboard more than 50 projects from the Arweave community itself; they used our platform on daily basis. This gave us a boost and we started raising some funds to bootstrap our development and accelerate our growth,” says Mitrasish.
He explains the team has extensive experience in blockchain development and have contributed to several blockchain protocols like Ethereum, Gitcoin, Aave, Polygon, etc.
“I've won more than five blockchain hackathons myself, which helped me build up my extensive knowledge of the blockchain ecosystem. I started my journey in blockchain three years after graduating from Jadavpur University. I'm currently 24 years old. My co-founder Prashant Maurya has more than six years of experience in enterprise software development and solution designing. He has worked with many big tech companies and has also contributed to lots of open-source blockchain protocols. We used to participate in hackathons together and won all of them,” says Mitrasish.
The numbers
After the alpha release, the team was able to onboard more than 100 users and 20 projects on the platform, and were able to generate more than $1,000 in revenue.
After beta release, the team was able to onboard more than 500 new users and 30 new projects, which generated around $5,000 in revenue. They also changed the platform architecture to provide a better experience for users.
“So currently, we are running a testnet beta version, which is free for users. Currently, we have around 2,000 users and around 200 projects using our platform. Even though were are not generating revenue at the moment, we expect everyone to continue using our platform even after our mainnet release,” he adds.
He also notes that the platform is very compute-heavy. It has around five to six different servers running on AWS, so the costs mostly lie in the operation and development of the system.
The development stack is also complicated as they are building a cloud-native platform with the latest tech stack. Thus, hiring experienced developers was a challenge as they are very few in number and are often expensive.
“Also, it is important for us to educate users about the benefits of the decentralised cloud, so we created educational documentation as a marketing expense. We have been working on this project for more than one year now, a lot of things are still needed to be built,” says Mitrasish.
The market of turning the Web2 world into the Web3 world is fast exploding. Companies like Coinbase Cloud, US-based Alchemy, and Polygon are working on different aspects. According to several reports, the metaverse world is now pegged at $207.99 billion.
Speaking of the future, Mitrasish says, “We want to create a metaverse of NEW WEB, where developers can not only develop and host their service but can also choose a lot of developer tooling built around it to make dev life easier.
"This includes creating interactive NFTs on the fly, notification services, compute layer for running API, and complex business logic. Later, we want to open our governance, where everyone in the community can take part in the development and growth of the Spheron Protocol”
Edited by Kanishk Singh
