Bluzelle CEO: ‘Being able to have high performance is going to be critical’

Coin Rivet recently spoke with Bluzelle CEO Pavel Bains to hear more about how the company is planning to change the status quo when it comes to enhancing online game performance and latency issues.

Bluzelle is a decentralised data cache network that boasts impressive speeds of up to 30x faster than its mainstream, centralised counterparts.

In Pavel’s own words: “Bluzelle makes data-intensive applications run faster. It does so by using blockchain technologies, decentralisation, and edge computing.”

Rather than storing all the data in one centralised location, Bluzelle has adopted a model reminiscent of the BitTorrent model, “scattering it over servers all around the world, replicating it everywhere”.

“No matter where an end user is, they’re getting the fastest delivery of the content to them,” adds Pavel.

At present, Bluzelle has its own servers with some of its partner companies, but in future the aim is to enable anybody in the world to become a node themselves.

For example, if you have a spare computer that is not in use all of the time, you will be able to join the network and help support it by running that computer as a node.

The demo

Before we began the interview, Pavel loaded up a demo of the product. To begin with, he sent a data packet between two nodes using a different product, with the data arriving at the destination in 211 milliseconds. He then ran the same test using Bluzelle, with the data arriving at the destination in only seven milliseconds – clocking in at 30x faster.

Next came the international demonstration. For this demo, the data had to travel from Singapore to Virginia. On the non-Bluzelle test, the results came in at 723 milliseconds, while the Bluzelle results came in at 90 milliseconds.

From these tests, it seems Bluzelle’s product is operating on a far superior level compared to its competitors.

The problem that Bluzelle is remedying lies in the fact that audiences in the modern world have gone global. As a result, it becomes tricky to pinpoint how people will connect to a data centre. This becomes particularly prominent when, for example, a UK resident is attempting to connect to a date centre in the US.

With Bluzelle though, there are a multitude of nodes and servers located across the world, meaning when a game developer connects to Bluzelle, they are connected to a node much closer to them and their data is replicated everywhere.

“So, it doesn’t really matter where that player comes from – it’s always going to go through the data centre close to them. The developer doesn’t have to do anything anymore. It’s all automatic,” reveals Bains.

‘Being able to have high performance is going to be critical’ 

For Pavel, as the world continues this trend of globalisation and audiences keep growing, the ability to have high performance and less latency is going to be pivotal.

“Let’s say Fortnite,” he suggests. “It’s available on so many devices all around the world. You know game matches that have hundreds of people at a time on it. Thousands of games running at a time – people are going to be copying that model.

“So I can definitely see that performance issues are going to be a competitive advantage because if your game was running slow, then people get frustrated and they could leave and go somewhere else. So, being able to have high performance is going to be critical.”

This doesn’t just benefit the player either, as it also frees up more time for the game developer. As Pavel notes:

“They didn’t want to be IT companies, you know, spinning up new servers and deployment on an as-needed basis. So the more you can take up their hand and the more they can focus on game development, the better.”

The ‘penny drop’ moment

Speaking on the origin of Bluzelle, Pavel commented: “Our thesis on the project was for it to be a fully decentralised database to go up against Redis and MongoDB and everybody else.

“What we realised was building a super secure database and getting enterprises and businesses to switch over takes a while, and so does getting that trust.

“So we said we don’t want to wait forever. We’ve got something here. You know what we’re good at right now? Data cache.

“That’s when we started really testing that out, and then the big thing was that it doesn’t matter what kind of database it is, you know, because the customer is winning.

“It is a cache, we can work with everybody. So, it really came down to what can we do to put it out there faster.”

Gaming isn’t the only industry Bluzelle can improve

Fundamentally, Bluzelle is aiming to improve any industry that relies on the delivery of data on a global scale. We discussed the impact Bluzelle will have on gaming extensively, though by no means is Bluzelle’s product limited to gaming.

“As 5G networks come out, you’re going to have more proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and traditionally IoT devices haven’t been very secure. So we definitely see that as a key vertical,” reveals Pavel.

“Looking down the road, another one would be mobile ad networks, because there are all these mobile apps out there and they’re running ads.

“If there’s any latency, it could actually end up costing somebody a lot more money than they wanted to pay them. Anything that is global and kind of like a marketplace and you need real-time data, that’s where we see the applications.

“It works for everybody because the goal should be the same for any of us in this industry, and you want the mainstream to kind of switch over to new decentralised technologies.”

For Bluzelle, presenting a product that offers tangible results and use cases without aligning itself with blockchain will help promote mainstream adoption because:

“This is going to make one or more things run faster around the world, and it just happens to be decentralised.”

The future 

At the moment, Bluzelle is opening up its product to select customers because it does not want to go live prematurely. Instead, Bluzelle wants to work through any potential pain points that could arise with customers as they happen.

“Then a few months down the road we’ll do a wide release and begin to on-board more customers,” adds Pavel.

This phase will be critical because Bluzelle will be transitioning to having hundreds of nodes spread across the globe.

“It’s really a network capacity issue, and so that’s something we really need to build towards,” he concludes.