SQD – also known as Subsquid – has scored a major coup after enlisting the skills of one of YouTube’s most popular animators to explain its latest network upgrade. The looming protocol update is a biggie, marking SQD’s biggest transformation to date in how it delivers data. Thankfully, the YouTuber it’s got onboard to explain the transition in layman’s terms is every bit as huge. With almost 2.4M subscribers, Carbot Animations is YouTube royalty – and he’s now au fait with web3 jargon after taking a deep dive into SQD.
SQD Busts Out the Big Guns
Web3 data is big business. It’s also complex business whose finer points escape all but those who work at the coal face delivering blockchain applications with the infra they need to thrive. Which is why explaining the methodology underpinning this to non-technical users is extremely hard. Concepts such as RPC, SDKs, and APIs might make perfect sense to developers and hardcore crypto users but they’re destined to escape casual users.
Thankfully, you don’t need a PhD in Blockchain 101 because SQD’s latest video explains web3 data in comprehensible terms. “SQD Portal: The Movie” isn’t quite as long as its name suggests, running to just 2 minutes and 40 seconds, but it manages to pack in a ton of info, delivered in a cutesy animated video that gives off distinct Spongebob Squarepants vibes. It’s a formula that’s proven very effective for creator Carbot Animations to date, catapulting him to the forefront of YouTube stardom as an animator par excellence.
Carbot Enters the Portal
Carbot Animations is best known for its charmingly chaotic, silent parodies of video games, most notably those by Blizzard Entertainment. But Canadian animator Jonathan Burton doesn’t merely limit himself to turning serious games such as StarCraft and Diablo into cute cartoons – he’s equally accomplished at breaking down all kinds of serious business, from gaming to blockchain. And with SQD’s Portal upgrade, he might just have taken on his most challenging commission yet.
The video starts with a cartoon squid trying to make sense of the Portal that dominates SQD’s network upgrade. In the video, this is represented as a vortex that transports its protagonist to a series of alien worlds. Along the way, the video provides a quick lesson on the dangers of centralization and elaborates on why Portal’s deployment of data to thousands of nodes is a game changer.
Part hero quest, part educational primer, the video delivers the take-home message that data should serve as a public utility rather than a strategic asset under the control of corporations. As for why SQD turned to Carbot to animate its Portal video, that part is simple to grasp: the YouTuber is the best in the biz at taking opaque game worlds and turning them into humorous narratives that appeal to players and non-players alike.
Portal’s high-performance retrieval layer gives developers instant access to massive amounts of raw blockchain data without needing to run their own nodes or rely on slow and expensive centralized RPC providers. That’s a major breakthrough in web3 infra, but it’s a hard concept to sell in easily digestible terms – hence the video.
So far, X users have responded positively to the video – seemingly with no idea that its creator is Carbot – complete with the urge to “give that intern a raise.” Carbot ain’t no intern, but in making Portal understandable to just about anyone, he’s entitled to all the plaudits that come his way.
