CEO And Co-founder Of Gateway.fm Cuautemoc Weber On Preserving Web3’s Spirit Of Decentralization

Hi Temoc, thanks for joining us! What problem is Gateway.fm solving in 2024?

We are on a mission to solve blockchain’s complexity problem – which has been one of the most pronounced barriers undermining mainstream adoption. Getting to grips with cryptographic algorithms, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts is extremely complex for non-blockchain native professionals.

We want to make blockchain easy to build on top of, much like how anyone can build a fully functioning website now, without extensive expertise in the underlying infrastructure or protocols running these services.

We recently launched “Presto by Gateway” – our Zero-knowledge based Web3 platform as-a-service. Presto is designed from the ground up to greatly simplify deploying and operating Zero-knowledge rollups or sovereign chains, allowing any non-crypto user to deploy a state-of-the-art full E2E zk-validium or zk-rollup within a couple of clicks and minutes at a fraction of the costs from previous solutions.

Can you tell us about Gateway.fm’s work with Stellar?

Recently, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced the rollout of Soroban, the Stellar network’s highly anticipated smart contracts platform.

Soroban enables developers to create, deploy, and engage with decentralized applications (dApps) on its blockchain – ushering in a new era of Web3 innovation and adoption.

Gateway.fm provided a public Soroban RPC infrastructure on private data centers to facilitate network decentralization.

With our free public RPC infrastructure, developers can effortlessly execute smart contracts and build dApps on the Stellar/Soroban network.

Can you talk to us about the Gateway.fm origin story and vision?

My co-founder Igor Mandrigin and I initially launched Gateway.fm to build decentralized RPC solutions that didn’t rely on centralized services like Amazon Web Services.

Thanks to our deep experience in Client Node architecture and developing the most efficient Ethereum client in the market, Erigon, we wanted to disrupt the status quo node infrastructure landscape and to provide diversity and decentralized access in line with the spirit of Web3.

It was clear to us that there was massive pent-up market demand for infrastructure services supporting multiple blockchains.

At Gateway, our focus since day one has been to simplify the complexities of blockchain, while accelerating deployment capabilities, enhancing security, and making blockchain more accessible to a wider audience to foster more adoption and better quality of service to a wider client diversity.

Our strategy has been to stick to this overarching vision, and deliver category-leading solutions that address the needs of our expanding client base.

At Gateway.fm, we are firmly aligned on a vision to abstract the complexity of blockchain technology, and we also have a clear roadmap to execute this vision which is well underway as part of our new Group strategy which has 3 strong pillars, Infrastructure R&D , Presto (PaaS) and Stakeway (Staking).

What were the biggest hurdles in gaining traction, and how did you overcome them?

Web3 is an extremely competitive market that is fast-moving and continuously evolving. Our entry into the market was relatively late and we knew we had to catch up fast and stay laser-focused on some key principles of federating the infrastructure via non-public cloud providers.

One of the major hurdles was to gain traction in the market which was already saturated with some larger providers and compete in a ruthless market filled with discounts and freebies.

We also had to avoid being distracted by the constant new wave of narratives in the space while sticking to our guns about our overarching vision.

This allowed us to find similar services that could benefit from our principles of federating the infrastructure with non-public Cloud Providers and double down on working with bare metal providers and thus stakeway was born, our staking service which received an overwhelming acceptance towards our “ DePin”  infrastructure approach.”

There were a couple of key decisions we made from day one to focus on some key principles. One of the key decisions we took from the early days was to work on our deep automation of all the infrastructure we supported.

This allowed us to manage more types of infrastructure providers, from private data centers to bare-metal providers while allowing us to focus on better quality of service development of microservice, aggregation, load balancing, alarm monitoring and clustering of our entire stack.

This in-house automation system called “Stuart” evolved over three years and today represents some of our strongest IP at Gateway Group.
 

Another key thing we did was to provide best-in-class SLA and technical support on our services, this allowed us to get a lot of recommendations from existing projects and scale our services across the ecosystem rather quickly.

From your perspective, what's missing in the current startup environment?

This is an interesting question, there are several things that I’ve seen in the space related to supporting a deep infrastructure startup like Gateway.fm.

One of the first challenges we encountered was raising capital in the Nordic market, which was no easy feat since blockchain was not so much embedded in the tech investment landscape and the appetite for startups in the space was very limited.

This forced us to expand our search for global native crypto VCs mainly in the US and Asia. Web3/Crypto is a super fast-evolving space and investors get very excited about token launches as it provides a narrow time to get a partial exit from token projects, which means that Equity-only projects are prioritized less and absorb lower levels of investments when compared to token-based projects.

 
Finally, working on blockchain infrastructure is not something that not many investors are attuned to, and few fully understand the complexity of operating these systems and the long-term roadmap associated with growing this line of business.

However, we have done a rather good job of finding and working with our investors to demonstrate the potential of our mission and are long-term focus areas.

Can you share your experience with fundraising? What was your approach?

Last year we raised $4.6 million USD in a combined seed funding round led by Lemniscap, with participation from CMT Digital Ventures, the LAO DAO, Folius Ventures, TRGC, Metaweb Ventures, Very Early Ventures, Factor Ventures, Fantom Foundation and Unstoppable Domains Ventures, among others.

We had a well defined value proposition and target audience, and we could demonstrate clear customer segment appetite for our solution, in addition to a comprehensive product roadmap, Go to Market strategy and general direction of how the services would be monetizable for our investors to review.

What hurdles did you encounter while fundraising, and how did you tackle them?

Sometimes it can be difficult to stand out in this congested field, particularly during times when popular narratives are receiving the lion's share of VC attention.

Having a technical and business background really helped in that regard, especially in terms of articulating the core value proposition of our project, and illustrating how it addresses a pronounced market gap.

To stand out to VCs in the hyper-competitive environment, we demonstrated scalability, a clear roadmap as well as traction metrics.

What's next for Gateway.fm? Any exciting developments on the horizon?

With “Presto by Gateway”, our recently launched Zero-knowledge based Web3 platform as-a-service, we want to simplify the establishment and upkeep of blockchain networks, enabling more businesses to tap into the potential of blockchain, enabling quicker adoption and implementation in a much more cost-effective and timely manner.

This instant private zk-rollup lets users choose between the Gnosis chain and Ethereum as their Layer-1 for zkEVM, we foresee adding more networks in the very near future during Q2 we will be making some exciting new announcements around this, as well as enabling gasless transactions and instant transaction confirmations.

Over the course of 2024, we’ll be expanding our team, our solution suite and the technical reach of Presto. We are already getting some massive traction with more than 25 projects onboarded to our platform and the deployment of testnets have been ongoing since the end of last year.

We also have a great pipeline of activity lined up for 2024, and we have expanded into new use cases, from sophisticated on-chain payments, AI, gaming and supply chain.

We are seeing an explosion of new use cases emanating day by day and are thrilled to play a leading role in bringing these use cases by architecting and developing the entire solution end to end.

This is something that we are now expanding into and we’ll be making some important announcements soon on this topic. As part of these efforts, we’ll be pursuing partnerships with industry leaders who share our vision for driving mainstream adoption and decentralization.

If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your journey, what would it be?

I should have acted sooner. I always felt that being an entrepreneur was something I really wanted to do in my life, but I was hesitant, and wanted to wait for  the perfect timing, idea and people to build a company with.

But there is never really a perfect time, it’s just about diving in and moving forward with heart. However, you need to be prepared to chew glass and drink sand, metaphorically speaking.

Startups in the tech realm always seem very exciting, and while we always hear about the success stories, the reality is that being a Web3 startup founder will test all your previous limits and mental resilience.

It requires a lot of conviction and determination to find a way forward no matter the obstacles and a deep trust in your co-founders and team to execute your vision. But I truly believe fortune favors the brave, and the bold.