Gavin Wood: DeFi Regulation Is 'a Good Thing'

the crypto industry is uniting once again in new york for missouri's mainnet conference as we mentioned earlier regulation is weighing heavily on people's minds especially amid concern that someone was served a document at the conference investor slava rubin tweeting lol i just witnessed a guy get served by the sec at the top of the escalator at maynet 2021 right before going on stage for his panel and earlier i had his chance to speak to gavin wood creator a polka dot and kusaman co-founder of ethereum at the maynet conference we spoke about regulation web 3.0 as well as more have a listen um there's a lot of ways of explaining polkadot i'm you know i'm still spending a lot of time trying to figure out um the right way of explaining it to each uh each listener but um one one uh phrase that has come up recently is is the league of parachains which i think is not not a terrible way of of phrasing it if we start thinking of blockchains um uh and blockchain economies cryptocurrencies as as sort of proto states polkadot is like a union of states right and it gives its infrastructure that allows states to interact interoperate with each other um and in particular it gives states the security that they need to actually exist in this wild world in the same way that you know um texas and california both exist as nation states very different in their uh their their sort of state culture um very different laws very different tax laws all the rest of it but they're all they both have their security protected by the united states of america and um we might call uh you know the united parachains of polkadot that's interesting because a lot of protocols have their very unique and defined communities bitcoin very libertarian carnivore ethereum very hippy uh unicorns cats and and vegan and they're very uh patriotic shall we say to their queens and so do you hope to break through that or at least allow bridges between the two that concept yeah i think um how do you break down walls i guess i i would hope that um i mean i think walls i think small walls are needed in order to protect um uh protect cultures these walls can be useful but they mustn't result in bod the body the whole working against itself that's very important and i i feel that you know one of the first things i said about polkadot was it's like you know the biggest bet against maximalism um and that's this kind of crypto nationalism this maxi sentiment is uh is problematic in my view because it doesn't place the the good of the whole first place the good of the movement first and so with polkadot yeah polkadot is partly about building bridges out so building bridges to other networks we already have bridges for like bitcoin and ethereum but like you know the goal of polkadot is really to continue in that in that road but also bridges inward right it's about building bridges between its constituent projects and what i hear you describing to me sounds like your vision for web 3 and maybe you could perhaps explain that out for us walk us through that because if i were to explain someone what the internet could provide to someone 20 years ago you know one day you don't need a map you're going to be able to go on your phone and i mean it would have sound crazy back then but so explain to me right now 10 20 years from now what will the world look like with web3 it's a hard question because um there are many factors at play not just the technology that we're building but broadly speaking if if i'm allowed to hope for a world then it would be one where we we have much more sovereignty over our interactions with each other and over our decisions though in my mind the internet has facilitated a lot of institutions to consolidate their power and become ever more centralized now some of these are new institutions like twitter and facebook and all the rest of it but banks as well um governments as well there are many uh things that some governments do that i think are not necessarily in the interests of the individual but they are able to do this technology technology has been the enabling factor in them doing this for example we saw like you know snowden's revelations back in 2013 um showed the extent of um of the surveillance state um that was up until that point only suspected at best and in in general unknown um and i think there needs to be a push back on the side of of the technology so that we don't end up in like uh the the situation where there are a very small number of people that basically have all of the power in the world because that is uh is a massive um risk of uh a failure of systemic failure when you put so much power into the hands of a single individual that could reasonably do some make a mistake do something wrong go mad act out because they they've got the mentality of a toddler then this is a problem this is a problem not just for them not just for the people around them but for the entire world i mean the promise of the internet was the decentralization of information now you know publications didn't have the authority to publish we could self-publish now we're saying that the saying we're saying the same things with web3 with blockchain technology but is there a possibility a concern that the future that with the open access to finance that it could actually turn they could become more centralized and we could have a situation where the freedom of finance that was promised turns into a much more controlled financial system i have no doubt that there will be elements uh pushing themselves as decentralized solutions that will ultimately end up in in this role as a a very centralized exclusivist um largely arbitrary uh institution um but my faith in the underlying technology and its ability to deliver um trust free trustless um uh products and services that allow us um to regain that personal sovereignty that we have really lost in in the internet age is unwavering and you know at least my mission is is really to push through and deliver that technology talking about the technology what are the lessons you learned from coding ethereum that you've brought to you in polkadot team is super important and making making the right choices early on with who you bring on and uh and the culture is uh is can make a can make a huge difference to the like long-term viability of um of the team of the of the project we're also looking at cosmos do you regard cosmos as a competitor or complementary to polka dot um a little of both um primarily complementary um because what cosmos um uh attempts to deliver is uh essentially a um bridging technology it says that blockchains have their own consensus they have their own security they have their own validators they have their own um capital that is securing these validators um and really it's just trying to provide a technological bridge so that each of these it completely capital um independent chains can sort of talk to each other now this is problematic this you can't really have a communications gateway between uh certainly not a high security high value communications gateway if you have separate security mechanisms it would be like two independent states um trying to uh make a um you know a coherent militaristic long-term partnership without having coherent economies and coherent taxation like you can't really have coherent communication and coherent interoperability without coherent security now of course it's possible you can kind of um uh lesser forms of it are possible i should say um it's possible to like um muddle along and kind of hope for the best and say well you know um we'll we'll sort of have a much higher amount of time that we let pass before we before we accept that this event that we think has happened um has happened and should have a consequence on this other chain but basically it's it's really quite uh you it's it's insecure at a fundamental level and that reduces the application set um the use cases that can be done within um a system like cosmos and there's uh if you if you want to compare and contrast polka dot with its sort of general security umbrella so the fact that all of the individual shards all the power chains um operate under the same security guarantees is much more similar technologically speaking in terms of the guarantees given to application developers to the ethereum ii system which is a truly kind of decentralized sharded blockchain than the cosmos system which is really just a set of independent blockchains of differing levels of security um having a sort of um a way of communicating with each other if they'd happen to trust that the other one's security is good enough for them um yeah you know commenting on the regulatory environment right now the united states is investigating exploring especially as you see here against their decentralized finance they're investigating unit swap they're also going after yield products i wonder what you anticipate happening in the future for d5 as regulators get a handle of what this space is all about what will happen with d5 is in my opinion what will happen with everything else you must be either truly decentralized or you will be required to be licensed to do kyc aml and generally smothered with regulations um and i think i mean i think i'm already on record but if i'm not then let this be it of saying that i think this is broadly speaking as long as the regulations um protect um technologists i think this is broadly speaking a good thing because it will require um projects to actually decentralize and actual decentralization is the only way how these projects can survive in the long term because they will otherwise fall prey to all sorts of weaknesses of centralization and if if it takes some regulations to kick these projects to become decentralized or admit that they are actually centralized and get licenses fine that's that that in my mind is a good watershed moment and it's good to split these projects apart from the ones that have that have the tech to decentralize and have the ethos to decentralize from the ones that really just want to um offer regulated products um but without having to go through the rigmarole of regulation

Channel: CoinDesk

Views: 8,572

Rating: 4.9431281 out of 5

Keywords: CDTV, DOT, FM Clip, Gavin Wood, Polkadot, Web 3.0, crypto regulation, defi, coindesk, coin desk, coindesk tv, coin desk tv, bitcoin, blockchain, ethereum, bitcoin price, digital currency, markets, bitcoin news, price bitcoin, news bitcoin, buy bitcoin, bitcoin today, bitcoin price now, ethereum today, crypto market, crypto market today, ethereum price today, ethereum price, bitcoin price today, bitcoin price live, crypto news today, crypto news now, stock market today

Id: gwOyasrdbQs

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dwulf69]

Ok, the title is a bit misleading, from the interview Dr. Wood does say regulation is only a "good thing" only IF it incentivizes projects to pick a side. You are either Decentralized or Centralized. Pick a side and back the right horse. I know what side of history I want to be on, and it has been shown that if you kiss the arse and lick the boots of regulators and submit to their will, then you must know there can only be one lord of the crypto ring, only one that can bend it to their will and they do not share power.

[u/Gr33nHatt3R]

Excellent video! Thanks for sharing! :)

[u/Lickluckchan879]

I can't fuck regulations or kyc surveillance but I agree with what he said whole heartily. Regulations will separate the frauds from the real decentralized, trustless, permissionless projects. Privacy is coming to dot/ksm. Calamari/manta. Can't wait to see how well this tech works! If the level of privacy they bring to the table is on par with Monero at the minimum, then it's game on, humanity has fighting chance. Privacy& anonymity is the bedrock for freedom and Sovereignty.

[u/ThomasReturns]

Paddy pimblet, but in crypto