Nuvola Had to Change: Why It Built Vola Network Instead of Relying on Others

Here’s the formatted transcript:

Peter: All right, guys, we’ve got a pretty interesting interview here. DePIN is one of those big things that we need to keep an eye on in the space, especially with all the markets continuously changing. DePIN’s quite an interesting area to focus on. I’ve got Raul here from Nuvola joining me to talk through the project. They’ve been up to a lot of stuff — you guys have been really busy. I’ve seen you had this really cool presentation recently somewhere in Italy. Can you kick off with that? What on earth were you doing there?

Raul: Yeah, so first and foremost, Pete, thanks for having me. It’s been an honour. You were one of the first guys to cover us almost two years ago when we were launching, and here we are two years later about to launch our DePIN partner chain. So it’s exciting. As for how I got to Rome — I want to give flowers where they’re due. I was one of the key speakers at the Cardano Summit in Berlin. I was on a panel with MasterCard, Orange, and Volvo Group, and I spoke about Italy there as a case study regarding how DePIN can help essentially shape economies and make them more self-sufficient, versus money funnelling out to the hyperscalers we all know. Living in Italy, I had some connections, and it was picked up by some members. Next thing I know, I’m being asked to speak at the Palazzo Piacentini, which is tied to an organisation called Mimit — one of the biggest bodies covering all enterprises in Italy. They’re often looking for innovation, and Italy is a bit behind in the tech sector, quite a bit actually, if I’m being honest.

I went and gave a presentation, and from there the members in the room — some government officials, some Senate members — invited me back to speak at Palazzo Giustiniani, the Senate building in Rome. It was a private, extremely private event. High security. I was essentially in the presence of some of the ranking members of the Senate.

Peter: Wow.

Raul: Yeah. Talk about a surreal moment. I was brought up to the podium and asked to speak about Nuvola, what we’re doing, and essentially how DePIN in general — the DePIN model — can help solve this problem that’s emerging in Europe. There’s more and more discussion about the dependency on hyperscalers becoming counterproductive: they essentially control everything, there’s no privacy, no security, it’s more surveillance than service, and the dependency on Amazon alone has caused half the world to stop at the drop of a dime when they’ve had outages. These were all topics discussed, and the interest level in the room during my presentation was so much more than I had expected, because it’s become a national issue. Not only in Italy — Germany, France, they’re all actively moving towards better solutions.

Speaking at the Senate in Rome was not something I had in my deck of cards when we launched Nuvola, but two years later it happened, and it’s all been happening naturally. Nuvola was the hot topic. I don’t know how many blockchain projects have been able to be in prestigious rooms like that, but I can say we are definitely one of the few that has had that honour.

Peter: That’s amazing. And all because you managed to get in as a key speaker on that panel at the Cardano Summit — quite the snowball effect.

Raul: Yeah, this all stems from Cardano. I’ve been a Cardano community member since 2018, longer than most people I’ve encountered in the community. Cardano is what got us into that room ultimately — because of the tech, the innovation, us building on the Substrate Partner Chain model and using Cardano as our settlement layer. I represent the network as a whole in there, and it was very well received.

Peter: That’s awesome. I’ve heard whispers about the EU pushing towards digital sovereignty — decoupling their dependence on the big tech giants. This really falls into all of that.

Raul: Absolutely. If there was ever a right time, right place, right product kind of moment, we are in it right now. It’s one thing to say you have an idea of how to solve this problem of achieving data sovereignty and breaking away from the big three — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. It’s another thing to say the solution is essentially already built. What we’re doing with Nuvola Drive and Vola is what they’re looking for. It’s become the elephant in the room. At my speech at the Senate, I literally opened with, “Let’s address the elephant in the room” — that we’re practically sitting in the hands of three hyperscalers who decide what happens, when it happens, and if it happens.

In the last 24 hours I came across something where Google criticised open source solutions for Europe’s push toward independence. I’ll share the link with you. They literally said it’s a threat to competitiveness — and when you break that comment down, it’s a threat to them being competitive. It’s amazing to be at the epicentre of a solution everyone is currently looking for. The interest has been so strong here in Italy. I’m an Italian citizen, born here, and it adds to the narrative that one of their own is bringing a solution to the table that could change an entire economy.

There’s a heavy hunger in Italy and Europe for this solution. It’s one thing to recreate the centralised Google model under a European brand — that just recreates the same centralised problem of control and dependency. Having a decentralised solution with the DePIN and RWA model shows them that here’s a better solution, here’s how the economy benefits, here’s how the people benefit, and here’s how even I, as the owner of this company, don’t have control over the network — which removes the danger of censorship and all the things centralised entities stand for. It’s being extremely well received.

Peter: Right. So what have you guys actually been building? You’re almost at mainnet from what you told me earlier. Let’s talk about your evolution over the last two years — from Nuvola to Vola, and potentially launching mainnet very soon.

Raul: That’s a great question, Pete, because our evolution is something we haven’t really spoken about until now. We essentially started, when we first interviewed with you, as a DePIN aggregator and index hybrid — we invested into other DePIN protocols, set up node infrastructure, and helped them scale. But one thing that kept coming up as a weakness to our model was: “It sounds like you’re dependent on others to succeed.” If a protocol we were supporting didn’t succeed, we’d essentially suffer alongside them. That haunted me.

So we started building our own solutions, like Nuvola Drive — our web-to-client-facing cloud storage application. But even that initially ran into dependency issues. If another protocol hadn’t built a feature we needed for Nuvola Drive to function properly, we were stuck waiting on their development speed and progress. That’s when Vola Network started to be discussed, and then developed. Now we’re heading into a public testnet environment with our own backend solution for cloud storage and compute that plugs directly into Nuvola Drive.

We evolved from a DePIN aggregation and indexing model to our own independent standalone DePIN and RWA protocol. We still support other protocols and still run nodes for several, but now we have our own solution that we can spearhead — with control over development timelines. If an issue arises, I’m not sitting in someone’s Discord raising a support ticket. It was a complete shift to being in the driver’s seat.

Peter: Crazy. From DePIN aggregator to your own solution, driven by your own needs and your clients’ requests. I kind of like that approach — it’s a safer way to grow. You prove yourself as a network provider and then layer solutions on top. And you’ve got quite a big community around you now too.

Raul: Absolutely. We’re about 3,000 holders strong on the NVL side. We’re a smaller community in comparison to some other protocols, but we have a very intelligent, financially savvy core group of people who understand what we’re doing. And honestly, if I can be candid — it really came down to survival. How long can a protocol survive depending on another protocol’s success? We had to make that transition as a business. We still support where we see fit, but we needed to come to the table with our own food, not wait on someone else to put food on our table just by sitting with them. That’s an analogy I always like to make.

Our community has been so resilient through the changes. Even in this market downturn — and from my position, price is irrelevant, building is the relevance — they’ve held on and come with us on this evolutionary path.

Peter: It’s hard to say price isn’t important when you’ve still got to pay developers and keep the lights on. Hopefully the markets turn around soon. Now, in terms of competitive positioning — how do you compete on storage against the big players like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon? Google in particular can just bundle storage as an add-on to a suite subscription. Storage is almost an afterthought for them. How do you compete against that?

Raul: One-to-one, our service can come in at about 25 to 30% cheaper on most plans, simply because of the decentralisation on the backend. Take Google — their costs to run the business are massive. They own enormous data centers, and their profit margins are actually shrinking every year because of what it takes to keep those running. With our model, through decentralisation, the cost is shifted onto the node operators themselves. That means we as a company can be more flexible with pricing while still offering full end-to-end encryption, data sharding, and all the benefits of blockchain. So we can compete toe-to-toe on pricing in a very healthy manner.

But beyond pricing, there’s the economic argument — and that’s what got me into the Senate and other high-level rooms. The pitch becomes less about “use this because it’s cheaper and more private” and more about: “What if this cloud storage service could actually pay you, to the point that you’re not paying for it at all?” You can become a storage provider by running our node software, and the overall revenues of the protocol flow back to the people contributing to it. When you start educating people on that model, their ears perk up immediately.

At the Senate, on a case study I did on Italy, I showed that tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue could regenerate and recirculate into the Italian economy. People are spending that money on cloud storage anyway — why not redirect that cashflow back into their own economy? That’s the competitive angle. Google simply cannot compete with an open-source decentralised revenue-sharing network, because they can’t share their revenues without collapsing their own business model. So that’s the conversation I’m walking into these rooms with, and it’s resonating.

Italy is a compelling use case too. It’s a beautiful country — I’ll be biased and say the best beaches, culture, and history are here — but it’s financially struggling because it hasn’t kept up technologically. There’s a real depopulation risk, with people leaving because there isn’t enough opportunity. So having a conversation about a service that’s more private, breaks dependence on the big three, and actually monetises something you need anyway — it’s a no-brainer when you break it down. It’s like saying: you have to breathe anyway, what if breathing paid you?

Peter: Makes a lot of sense. Keep the money in the economy, keep it with the people providing the storage, and stop it disappearing overseas to tax havens. Now the other big thing I want to ask about is UX. In the Web2 world, Google Drive, Dropbox — they’re incredibly simple. Install an app, it syncs. That ease of use is one of the biggest blockers for Web3 adoption. How have you approached user onboarding for both the storage side and the node operator side?

Raul: Nuvola Drive is built with the same familiarity and ease of use as Google Drive. You’ve probably never seen it, Pete, but I can already say with confidence that you’d log in and know how to use it with little assistance at all. The whole philosophy from the start was to remove the crypto complexity — no wallet creation, no seed phrases, no buying tokens just to activate access. It’s an email login, a few security questions, and you’re in. Everything is end-to-end encrypted on the backend. You open Google Drive and Nuvola Drive side by side — we built it intentionally to feel familiar. There are no hurdles in the onboarding. Web3 is hidden in the background for you.

On the node side, that’s slightly more technical, but we’re creating a portal to make it as straightforward as possible to set up either a public or private node. In Italy specifically, I’ll be providing SOPs — standard operating procedures — that I can hand off to local businesses, citizens, even government bodies to guide them through the process. There’ll be a self-service option and a more hands-on enterprise option. We’ve been in this space long enough to know that setting up a node can be incredibly daunting, and we want to avoid that.

We’ve also got advanced features coming like auto sync, backup, and S3 compatibility — so enterprises can essentially reroute their existing data flows and have it back up automatically onto Vola. And there’s more in the pipeline that we’ll reveal when the time is right. But everything is underpinned by the same goal: un-crypto the crypto. People don’t care about blockchain — they care about whether a product makes their life easier and whether it benefits them financially. Nuvola Drive solves the ease of use, and Vola Network solves the financial incentive. A five-year-old could get into Nuvola Drive and upload photos of their toys. That’s the bar we set.

Peter: I love that. When does it all launch? What’s your timeline looking like?

Raul: We’ve been in heavy testnet since December. Nuvola Drive is already approved on both the App Store and the Play Store — we’re just finalising some internal testing before we push the button and make it publicly available. That will then trigger us moving into public testnet for Vola Network, which we’re targeting for March. After some public testing to iron out any final bugs, we’d trigger mainnet. Q2 is shaping up to be very explosive — a lot of things materialising, launching, becoming publicly available globally. We’re looking to scale from tens of thousands of users up to millions through the MOUs we already have in place.

I also want to personally invite you to test Nuvola Drive, Pete. And we have what’s called the ENOP program — the Early Node Operator Program — where we’re incentivising node operators to get set up early and earn rewards on top of staking and revenue rewards, to help jumpstart the network. So there’s a lot of incentive to get in early.

Peter: Very soon then. One more big question — Midnight and privacy. Do you have any plans to integrate with Midnight and bring privacy-enabled features onto what you’re building?

Raul: We’ve started conversations there. It’s a bit more technical than my area — Syed, our CTO and co-founder, has been looking into integrations and we’re actively exploring that direction. Cloud storage and privacy go hand in hand, so anywhere we can properly integrate with Midnight, we want to. I don’t want to say something inaccurate since I’m not the right person for the technical specifics, but I will say there’s a lot of interest to move in that direction.

Peter: Well, come Q2, with the launch of Vola Network and everything you’ve been building — fingers crossed we see it all very soon. It’s not only good for your company and clients, but good for the Cardano ecosystem as a whole. Thank you so much for this interview, Raul. We covered a lot of ground and I think the audience is going to get a lot out of it. Guys, leave a comment below, follow all the links and socials to keep up with what Raul and the team are doing, and we’ll keep you up to date with everything happening in the ecosystem. Raul, pleasure having you.

Raul: Pete, pleasure as always. Thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it.