Yaniv Tal first understood how decentralization could help solve the world's economic problems, especially resource allocation, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis when many of his talented graduate peers felt like giving up on even searching for a job and being forced to let their potential go to waste.

"The Internet changed everything but society is still oriented around these industrial-age institutions and clearly at some point that this is going to have to change and there are better Internet-native ways for people to cooperate and for resources to get allocated" Yaniv, Project Lead at Graph Protocol, said on the latest FTWR episode.

Flip forward almost a decade and in 2017 Yaniv saw how Ethereum could harness the potential of decentralization. "Ethereum -- wow. What an incredible idea that we could build on this global computer code that runs on thousands of machines that is guaranteed to run as specified with expressive programming language," he said.

Yaniv recalls how a combination of community dynamism and technological ideas persuaded him that decentralization was set to make a difference. "I thought this really is the infrastructure of the future being built right here, building these global decentralized, distributed systems on top of  immutable data systems and we have all the energy required, there is enough momentum that we can take this mainstream."

In response, Yaniv now dedicates his time at The Graph to helping people build APIs for a vibrant decentralized future where anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, making data easily accessible.

Yaniv's experience at a previous startup where he had to pivot and respond to customer feedback showed him the limitations on using developer tools and left him with the key questions: "How do we make building apps easier for people and how do we make it more accessible?"

His answer emerged at the company he went on to found. "The problem that we solve is that, if you try to build an app directly on a blockchain like Ethereum, you quickly realize you can't get the data you need directly to power a beautiful product experience directly from a Ethereum node," Yaniv said. "The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing data from blockchains and storage networks and making it easily accessible."

You can hear more of Yaniv's perspective on making APIs easy to build and accessible by following us down the rabbit hole: listen to the conversation here or on your favorite streaming service.