Gavin Wood: Explaining the Polkadot Launch Process

hi I'm Gavin bird thanks for joining me taking the time and thank you to read Alea 1 for this great conference that they've put together I plan to detail the Pokot launch plan for you today but first maybe it will be nice for for us to give you a little video of how we got to where we are today [Music] we were just kind of thinking how we could maybe create the next version of aetherium if we sort of had a Greenfield to design a form so we already have technologies such as Bitcoin and etherium which are able to in some sense disintermediate many of the middlemen and many of the institutions and authorities and remove the need for much of the trust in society but what we currently have is a patchwork of if you like independent and isolated legal systems of the internet and this is problematic because it creates many different groups who although they share the same vision they have misalignment in how they wish to achieve it creating borders where borders don't need to be there we have this great new technology that is allowing us to automate one of the sort of very fundamental aspects of an economy which is trust which is this idea that I I can have reasonable expectations of what's going to happen without having to trust someone that was a general idea back in 2014 when we were starting ethereum that ethereum - should be being under development by you know late 2016 and here we were sitting around in autumn of 2016 and there was absolutely no indication that there was going to be any development significant at least on ethereum - for some time so really we wanted to push forward with that one way or another let's embark on something that we think will be complementary to aetherium to assist them in parallel that can fulfill things that probably if there m2 is going to be less than optimal and fulfilling and ideally whether it will interoperate with a theorem - as well so polka dot is a multi-chain the idea is that it's a blockchain but we bundle lots of different blocks of all at the same time that can be executed in parallel right so these things can all be executed at the same time in doing so we create this sort of idea of a multi chain because every block is actually lots of different blocks then we can in principle run a hundred times the amount of transaction through pod that just one chain like Bitcoin or aetherium could [Applause] polka dot is in many respects the biggest bet in this ecosystem against chain maximalism even if there were one perfect chain I don't think it would stay perfect for very long I would try to convince people that it's really not such a good plan to be so focused on backing one winner above all others I have here fresh from the Apple store a shrink-wrapped [Music] and I'm gonna give you a demo of developing a custom blockchain and upgrading it online using this very computer so let's see what I can do in 15 minutes so we've downloaded a package called the substrate node template what this is is a very small repository that acts as a sort of skeleton blockchain ultimately we didn't end up using our sort of aetherium technology set for implementing polka dot instead we created a sort of whole other one substrate now substrate is is basically this blockchain framework the idea is that you can make new block chains from it you can place this specialized logic and use the specialized logic in order to you know process transactions it's written in such a way that it works both as a as a block chain that just exists on its own like Bitcoin and etherium and all the others and it exists as a block chain that exists under the polkadot umbrella as one of these what we call power chains what some people call shards at the moment if you think you've got what it takes to develop a sort of low-level technology you go the whole hog and you write a whole new block chain and that takes a very very very long time and a lot of skill I really hope we can create a whole new class of development teams and development application where you don't have to know everything you'd have to do everything to develop your whole new blockchain but you can do just enough that you do have a you know a domain-specific chain that has its own parameterization and its own features that allow you to get a particular job done and done well that wouldn't have been possible before because smart contracts are two bloaty and writing your own chain is too much work and that is as simple as it is to create a whole new different chain that has this whole new piece of functionality in substrate [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I feel that my value add for the world is in creating technical solutions for things and delivering them if I don't build stuff for a while and I I am in some sense addicted to it this basically allows every coder to also be a businessman they just place a an algorithmic service online and it's a self sovereign autonomous economically strong business you heard the phrase like the pen is mightier than the sword well you know the keyboards gonna become even mightier than the pen pretty soon [Music] the world in some sense belongs to coders [Music] so now into the detail we are very near launch technically speaking things are coming together nicely and I'm really excited to share this experience with you and rest of the polka-dot community around the world so the polka dot networks going to have a phased rollout plan with important milestones towards the centralization and permissionless honest marking each phase in the process the launch begins with what we call a chain candidate this will be launched by the web 3 foundation and it's a proposal nothing more proposal for the polka dot relay chain now the chain candidate is launching a Genesis block it is the launch of a new chain but the chain that is being launched is a proof of Authority chain so it's one that has one that the web 3 foundation has complete control over as such this is an this isn't a real cryptocurrency this isn't any real kind of currency people can't transfer any of the the the tokens on it in effect it's just the bookkeeping exercise it's a staging area for us to move further and what it does is it allows us to to start the chain without having to have a sort of a set of validators already assembled and without us having to trust in our [Music] potentially unfilled governance structures to move the chain forward so the the initial phase as I say the the chain candidate gets launched proof of authority chain candidate kind of similar to most of the test nets the main difference is that this particular test net may eventually transition into the real polka dot block chain if for some reason one of the chain candidates fails this is likely to be a very unforeseen reason we won't launch it if we if we knew of reasons why it would fail but if it does fail then it's easy for us to launch a second chain candidate and even a third chain candidate koh-sama went through three chain candidates before it landed on the network that we now call koh-sama today this chain is although there's a Genesis block for it it's not necessarily the Genesis block for the final polkadot chain there may be a number of emphasis circumstances that world leaders - discarding this chain and starting in another chain that said in principle this could become the final polkadot chain you can think of it as a staging ground as much as a proposal allowing us to evolve a very basic restricted chain into something that is finally decentralized in permissionless so the initial chain has a restricted runtime it's it's limited to basic operations in order to gain confidence in the network's stability client stability the stability overall of both the the community and of the underlying code now this restricted runtime will have its limitations be lifted through a series of governance decisions the governance apparatus for this chain is a pseudo module now a pseudo module is very special module it basically allows a single element a single actor the web three foundation in this case to issue any kind of command that it wants rewriting the chains logic and reprogramming the chain as it desires so during the first phase polka-dot will operate as a purely proof of authority chains a proof of authority consensus simply means that we have a number of authorities on behalf of the web 3 foundation fix the validator nodes and these validator nodes they will never change there will always be operated by the web 3 foundation and they will be the ones producing new blocks and finalizing blocks now during this phase the chain will be limited to only a couple of pieces of functionality the first piece will be actually three pieces of functionality the first is the pseudo module so this will allow the web 3 foundation to upgrade the chain as it desires the second pieces are pieces of functionality that can be used by the polka-dot community the first is allowing claims so that dot tokens or at least dot tokens sort of indicators can be claimed the second piece of functionality allows those who hold dot token allocations to signal their intention to state and become validators or nominators for that matter this in this phase the only validators will be the web three foundations validator nodes but others can signal their intent and when we have enough people signaling their intent then we move to Phase two the web 3 foundation will issue a sort of special command using its pseudo functionality using its pseudo permissions and we will switch from proof of authority to proof of stake and all of those stakes with their dot allocations that had signaled their intention to become validators they will be well at least some of them will be selected to become validators and we will see the chain move from being operated merely by the web 3 foundation to being operated by an international selection of validators so while the chain is running under proof of authority it's really just trust in the web 3 foundation we have to expect this chain candidate to continue once it moves to proof of stake or nominated proof of stake our our variant of it then it will be quite different and we'll be trusting in the economics of our cryptographic logic the economics of our crypto economic logic now once the chain has been running well with a large validator set then the pseudo key will be used a second time and we will be able to move to phase three phase three is where the pseudo key has enabled various pieces of governance to to function the governance apparatus of poccadot is fairly sophisticated now it's evolved alongside koh-sama I'm broadly speaking there are sort of four modules one is the referendums module allowing a coin weighted voting system that means that token holders are able to basically alter the fate of the polka-dot network and the second is the council module allowing token holders to elect a number of members to the polka-dot council both council doesn't actually have very much hard power but it is able to steer the legislative agenda and potentially remove dangerous upgrades that might be voted on by the the token holders the third element is the Technical Committee this is a non voted body and it's it's selected simply by those teams that have properly implemented polka-dot it doesn't have any real substantial power but it is able to fast-track certain upgrades certain changes to the chain that they that it believes are important usually these will be bug fixes then the fourth piece of the governance apparatus is the Treasury the Treasury allows the the council as well as various as well as the assembled token holders to to place funds that have been there have been a masked through the staking system through the block reward system and put them to use on things typically external to polka-dot whatever they may be again these are all elements of the koh-sama governance system and if you would like sort of to learn more about them you only need to look as far as kasama now what is the council and the various governance other governance modules are in place the public the dot token holders have the avenues to affect changes in the system basically the fate of poccadot is now in the hands of the token holders a final runtime upgrade initiated by the web 3 foundation will remove the pseudo module and in doing so remove its omnipotent position as being able to cancel the chain as being able to create a new chain candidate at that point polka dot is a live decentralized and permissionless network the final stages of polka-dots rollout will be delivering the these extra pieces of functionality one of those extra pieces of functionality will be the balance transfers this will allow dot tokens to be transferable and not just an indicator and this will likely happen very soon after the pseudo module is released but of course we don't know what point because it will be in the hands of the dot token holders two more post pseudo upgrades will necessarily include the rollout of the first pair of chains and eventually para chain and para thread purchasing or leasing modules and finally the X CMP cross power chain message passing system these will be rolled out as they become available as they are their code is is finalized and as the audits are completed and will be done in concert between the various technical implementation teams the research teams and the dot holding community and that's basically it launch a polka dot in five or six phases I guess thanks for listening I'm Gavin wood and I hope this talk has been enlightening you

Channel: Polkadot

Views: 59,958

Rating: 4.9000001 out of 5

Keywords: Polkadot, Gavin Wood, Web3, blockchain

Id: TpcCeo-ZkDY

Length: 26min 25sec (1585 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Xexr]

Simple clean explanation. Enjoyed the back story intro too.