Project Spotlight: Garrett Minks Founder and CTO of RAIRprotocol

Garrett Minks, the founder and CTO of RAIRprotocol, is on a mission to redefine Web3 infrastructure. RAIRprotocol is an open-source platform designed to empower developers and businesses to build and scale robust, enterprise-grade Web3 applications. By providing a fully open deployment layer, RAIRprotocol enables seamless collaboration between developers, integration partners, and the open-source community — fueling the creation of thousands more dApps. Today, we’re diving into Garrett’s vision for the future of Web3 and exploring how RAIRprotocol is shaping the landscape for decentralized applications.

What inspired the creation of your project, and what problem are you solving?

After building in Web3 for 4 years, we realized our proprietary SaaS based business model (along with most companies in the dApp layer) was holding back the whole space. We were inspired to go fully open source and create an open deployment layer based on feedback from both large enterprises (like Sony) as well as the wider dev community who told us a fully open source deployment layer was missing from the space.

The ultimate problem we solve for is how to fill blockspace and generate usage on Web3 systems. L1/L2 blockchains, as well as the surrounding Web3 infra projects (RPC, AA, explorers, etc) build amazing rails, but building dApps that can leverage their technology is still super difficult.

Enter our open deployment layer. A network of developers constantly creating new features and integrations, then adding them to an open source master repository of container configurations. To use our system, devs only need a cursory knowledge of how Docker works to replace a via environment variables with their own API keys and parameters then are off to the races.

As the vast majority of web3 projects in a dApp layer are still closed source, we feel an open alternative can achieve a critical network effect.

What inspired you to participate in a tokenomics accelerator, and how has the experience been so far? → What key challenges have you faced in designing a sustainable token economy?

We knew going into an OSS model getting the tokenomics right was crucial for the successful of our open deployment layer. There are many ways to incentivize developers, protocols, and other constituents in our ecosystem incorrectly. One design challenge in particular, how to distribute rewards to developers with short term cash needs, balanced with longer term incentives to hold and stake our token. Denarii has recommended a sponsored model based approach that will really help solve this issue.

Through the program we will perform rigorous testing of our tokenomics before go live, and get critical feedback from experts in the space that have already designed successful tokenomic systems.

How does your project stand out from other Web3 solutions in the market?

The biggest differentiator we have from other projects in the space is of course track record. We committed 4 years and 5000+ commit history to our Github repo when we officially went open source. This full source history gives a proof-of-work component to our project many newer solutions don’t have.

Our connectivity with large enterprises, and well as established Web3 players (Akash, Alchemy, Web3Auth, Filebase) to name a few, give us a network effect advantage when bootstrapping our open deployment layer.

Finally the game theory around receiving VC backed financing to pursue a closed source SaaS model holds our competitors back. Many other projects with less flexible investor bases can’t pivot to our model as they are so invested in their current KPIs and other metrics focused around SaaS growth.

Can you explain the core principles behind your project’s tokenomics?

Our principals are 2 fold:

1. Borrow as much pre existing logic that works in Web2 and apply it in a Web3 context. Using the Epic Games Unreal Engine licensing model, Apache 2.0 notice files, etc. This grounds our tokenomics in existing norms that will make enterprise adoption easier for us over the longterm.

2. A sink and faucet system designed developer first. We reward developers for expanding the open deployment layer, then capture enterprise value through our licensing model taking tokens out of supply. If we can balance the inflationary developer rewards, with sinks established from enterprise usage, grants, and token swaps, this creates the network effect flywheel to attract new developers to our open source.

What partnerships or collaborations are you working on?

We are proud to be the first paid affiliate for Alchemy Platform. Our partnership with Alchemy cements them as a preferred RPC and AA provider for RAIRprotocol. By default our system will work by developers using our affiliate link to get their API keys. We hope to expand this model further to a network of additional web3 infra partners using Alchemy as the template. https://www.alchemy.com/astar

As well, we are proud to be a Soneium blockchain launch partner. We graduated from the inaugural Sony/Astar incubator in 2023, and have a direct pipeline into Soneium as it gets closer to mainnet. To date we have fully integrated our solidity codebase with Soneium OP stack testnet (minato) https://soneium.org/en/ecosystem/

Finally we have partnered with Akash network as a preferred Web3 cloud compute partner. For the hackathons we sponsor, new developers can use our pipeline to get a free faucet of Akash tokens to deploy our open source. Recently we were accepted into their Akash dApp store, and are in the process of going through their grant funding and token swap approval process. Template detail RAIR-Dapp | Akash Console