yWhales Community Stories: Patrick Sweeney and Saving the Planet with DaVinci3.0

Welcome to the second edition of yWhales Community Stories, a series highlighting the key contributors and innovators at the center of Web3, shaping the next wave of revolutionary technology and transforming how businesses operate.

yWhales is a Web3 ecosystem that facilitates the migration from Web2 to Web3 for and by the world’s top executives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. We credit our success to the power of our global community as collaboration sits at the heart of the Web3 revolution.

A visionary leader, speaker, and serial entrepreneur, Patrick Sweeney is the CEO & Founder DaVinci3.0, an eco-friendly-focused company striving to achieve its mission to drive the next generation of greener and cleaner crypto mining. Its first and flagship product, the DragonFly Mining System, is powered by a proprietary immersion cooling technology. Patrick believes he can harness the power of clean energy systems to drive real change in the carbon footprint.

Patrick has been an active yWhales member since its inception and we have had the incredible opportunity to dive into his Web3 journey, the purpose for founding DaVinci3.0, and his hopes for the future.

Patrick’s entrepreneurial journey began with a six-year commitment to training as a rower for the Olympics. Rowing demands unparalleled grit and unwavering dedication, traits that continue to drive Patrick in his pursuits today. Olympians push their bodies to the absolute limit in a relentless pursuit of victory, and the mindset of “can’t” or “won’t” simply does not exist. With this ingrained mindset, Patrick pursued an MBA at the University of Virginia, one of the top business schools in the country. He was fortunate to land an internship at Trammel Crow, the largest real estate company in the world at the time. When Trammel Crow began a technology practice on the West Coast, Patrick and a partner were tasked with opening an office on the East Coast.

After parting ways with Trammel, Patrick decided to venture out on his own and founded ServerVault. As one of the pioneers in cloud hosting, ServerVault designed and managed data centers across Virginia, California, and Ireland. The company was subsequently sold to a large public company.

Sweeney’s next venture was ODIN RFID, which was entirely bootstrapped and grew for over ten years until he sold the business to a large conglomerate in a very appealing deal. ODIN led the largest RFID deployments in history and serviced clients like Mayo Clinic, J&J, and Morgan Stanley.

Following the acquisition of ODIN, Patrick launched a social media events company and automated social sharing platform called dwinQ. Vail Resorts utilized dwinQ’s technology solution to build their Epic Passes across 41 ski resorts globally.

Patrick spent some six years writing the Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Fear is Fuel: The Surprising Power to Find Purpose, Passion and Performance, and RFID for Dummies, and became a frequent public speaker, including the 2021 TEDx talk titled How to use fear as fuel at the Pearl Street Event in Washington, DC. And as if that’s not enough to keep him busy, he is co-producing and directing a film called Human Unity about volunteer efforts in Ukraine. He considered himself pretty much retired, enjoying life in Chamonix, spending his days’ rock climbing, skiing, paragliding, or biking. But there are many more exciting chapters to add to his already incredible journey.

We asked Patrick about the driving force behind building DaVinci3.0.

“I was doing a bunch of speaking gigs and that’s when I got hit with the bug to start a new company, but it all goes back to the glaciers in Chamonix. […] One day while climbing up the stairs to the top of one of these spectacular peaks, I saw a marker that said 2008, and then I climbed up a little more and saw one that said 2004, I climbed up a little more and there was a marker that said 2000, and these were the levels of the glacier for that particular year.”

When he reached the peak the markers were showing 1996 and 1991.

“I couldn’t believe just how much the glacier had deteriorated over such a short period. As a result, I became way more concerned about energy usage with data centers, pollution, cars, construction, and greenhouse gases and this was about the same time I started gambling with bitcoin in 2017–2018.”

Only when he started mining crypto did he realize how much of it was being done in such a brute way and how heavily the industry relied on fossil fuels.

“I thought, this is Web3, the most innovative technology that I’ve seen in my lifetime and it will have a bigger impact than the internet did — it’s going to need a supercomputer”

The issue that Patrick aimed to tackle is crucial: the energy consumption associated with cryptocurrency mining is extremely high. Estimates suggest that the annualized electricity usage from global crypto-assets has grown rapidly from 2018 to 2022, doubling to quadrupling in some cases. As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets ranged from 120 to 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, surpassing the total annual electricity usage of several individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia. This is equivalent to 0.4% to 0.9% of annual global electricity usage, and is similar to the annual electricity usage of all conventional data centers worldwide.

As Digiconomist reports “The Bitcoin network does not just have an energy problem, but also generates significant quantities of electronic waste (e-waste). The reason for this is that Bitcoin mining is done with specialized (singular purpose) hardware, which becomes obsolete roughly every 1.5 years.”

DaVinci3.0’s first product is DragonFly, which Sweeney is particularly proud of being designed and manufactured in the USA. DragonFly is a supercomputer built to produce optimal computational output for reduced energy usage in almost any environment.

“When I first got into Web3, I was sold on the proof of work and the consensus mechanism, but I wasn’t sold on how they were mining, and, in my experience, the real successes and weaknesses in any emerging industry only start to go up the hype curve which is where we are now. […] I saw a monopoly on mining machines, and people like Fred Thiel and Dave Perrill who are out there mining, they’re putting hundreds and thousands of them online, adding more fans, chasing this diminishing return of air cooling, and I thought this is exactly like computer storage was in the 90s right until EMC came along and optimized the small processors and increased storage power.”

DragonFly provides 200% higher performance with up to 9 terahash output and 65% less electronic waste — Sweeney calls it a “renaissance in crypto mining.”

Housed in a UL-certified, weather-proof exterior and powered by a breakthrough proprietary immersion cooling technology (patent-pending), the DragonFly can be installed indoors or outdoors in just a couple of hours and requires no permits or expert installation.

One thing that makes Web3 unique is the power of communities. We asked Patrick to describe how yWhales has impacted the way his business approaches the space.

• “I’ve always believed that wealth is the byproduct of knowledge and discovery. This is even more true in the fast-paced world of Web3. Building a team of curious and innovative people is essential to success. At DaVinci, we believe in hiring people who are not only experts in their field, but also have a willingness to be curious and explore new ideas. The best place to source those new ideas has been yWhales members. We continually turn to the yWhales community to help shape our approach to the space.”

As for what value he was able to extract from the yWhales Community thus far, Patrick says that “yWhales has been invaluable in providing us with access to all facets of Web3, from potential clients in the mining and energy industries to innovators in infrastructure and DeFi. By tapping into this community of industry leaders, we have been able to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate future trends in the industry. One of the key differentiators of DaVinci is our intellectual property portfolio — the reason we were able to put in our patent claims ahead of my competitors is asking the yWhales community their biggest problems in the earliest days and then focusing on unique ways to solve those problems. It was hard engineering, but we created many new innovations because of our research with yWhales members.”

We were also interested in hearing Patrick’s predictions for the next 5–10 years in Web3 advancement. He states: “Some people forget that crypto means cryptography — that’s where I started my career in 1999 with ServerVault where our motto was “Securing the Internet” via hosting data in the ether. At the time, I didn’t have Bezos’ marketing instinct to call it the Cloud, but was ahead of him on the business model! Crypto currencies and Web3 are all about taking back our own data, getting more privacy and security from a high distributed network that cannot be hacked. To meet tough requirements we will always need two consensus mechanisms — proof of work and proof of stake. Proof of work is unhackable, unless you have billions of dollars to spend. Proof of stake saves computing resources but keeps ordinary people from participating in the community. You have to be rich to stake 32 ETH. But anyone can have a BTC mining rig for $5k or a validator for even less. He added, “In my opinion, the technology industry will experience several significant trends in the next 5 years. One of the most notable shifts will be towards decentralized computing. Mining, transactions, and computing in general, will become not only green, but vastly decentralized. Currently, large data centers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for computing power, particularly with the growth of AI and Web 3. To address this issue, there will be a move towards using many microdata centers located at the edge of the network. This will involve thousands of small nodes in major cities, which will help to reduce network load and make computing more efficient and green.

Another trend that I anticipate is the increasing use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Although the term NFT may soon become outdated, I believe that many things will become NFTs in the future. Leading countries such as Ukraine are already using blockchain for innovative applications, and I believe that other countries will follow suit. This will enable people to store important documents, such as driver’s licenses, marriage certificates, diplomas, and other documents as NFTs, making them more secure and easily accessible.

Simplification of user interfaces is another trend that I foresee in the next few years. Currently, some people may find DeFi applications too complex to use. However, there will be a simplification of UI that will make it easier for people to participate in DeFi and other applications.

Finally, I predict that interoperability will be another significant trend in the next few years. Currently, the industry is still in its early stages, and switching between different platforms such as Test Net to Main Net to Bridges is a testament to how nascent this industry is. However, in the future, interoperability will become more seamless, and platforms will be vastly simplified, leading to greater user adoption and a more seamless experience overall.”

We are immensely grateful for Patrick’s valuable insights and unwavering commitment to our community. His contributions have undoubtedly made a significant impact, not only on our members but also on the wider Web3 space. We deeply appreciate his willingness to share his experiences and expertise with us, and we look forward to continuing to learn from his future endeavors. Thank you, Patrick, for being an integral part of our community and for your dedication to driving Web3 innovation forward.

Watch the full interview and a demo of DragonFly here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmRirHK8g8Q&&t=4s

https://youtu.be/hmRirHK8g8Q?t

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