Keynote - Gavin Wood, Parity | Sub0 Online 2021

hello everyone and welcome to subzero online 2021 my name is bill laboon i'm the director of education and community at web3 foundation and i am really excited to show you everything that's going to that is happening right now in the substrate ecosystem we have many great presenters from parity from web 3 and others developing with substrate before we start though i do have a few just housekeeping tips to go over first for those of you watching on hoppin please make sure to go to the reception area if you want to see the schedule for today and tomorrow as a reminder today's schedule there's a single track uh however tomorrow there will be three stages for beginner intermediate and advanced you can always click the stage tab to see the sessions that are currently live and you can use the q a section on the right hand side of the screen to either ask questions or upvote ones that you would like to see answered and after the discussions i will pick some of these questions and ask the presenter after the presentations you can go to the discord with in-depth discussions with speakers many of the speakers after their presentations or just to discuss other substrate related things also on discord we've set up a job board so there are some open positions that you can check out or if you're a substrate-based project then you can post your own finally uh as a reminder during our breaks there are a few throughout the throughout sub-zero please feel free to join the speed networking sessions or just sit back and enjoy the music after the end of the first day we'll have some swag giveaways during the final networking session at the end of uh the presentations today so without any further ado i would like to present dr gavin wood thank you bill good uh thank you everybody for tuning in um it's uh still a bit of a shame that we can't all gather in person like the first couple of sub-zeros but uh you know i i i have a lot of faith that next year things um will be a little bit uh back to how they were i'm going to use my little bit of time up front to talk to you um i'm going to cover three things first i want to just reiterate what it is that we're trying to do with substrate and with the parachain model that substrate was made for um second i want to um talk a little bit about uh what's uh what the status is of some of the substrate-related projects that parity is working on and third i want to talk more broadly about some of the um currents that we're seeing in the industry at present and how that relates to substrate and polka dot um so yeah let's let's start with a little bit about like what what substrate and and particularly um the parachain model is for i'm um this came up a bit in the last few months with a um you know with our industry heating up with a few new projects on the block and a clear idea of what it is that substrate gives i think is always worth um to have in mind so substrate built power chains um i really really have these four very important attributes and we've got to really uh i want to dig a little bit into each one so that everyone here is very clear about why why it is that we that we're doing what we're doing um unstoppable upgradable unlimited and fearless so let's let's dig in a little bit unstoppable so substrate-based paratrains and substrate chains in general are crucially they're very decentralized right now we can compare this to a lot of other projects that are not really designed to be that decentralized um they're designed to be a bit decentralized um uh i i suspect that the project leads often uh a sort of trying this hybrid bottle in order to see just how close they can get to the regulators before they're determined to be just too centralized but with substrate we really want to live the the true peer-to-peer dream and make something that is actually unstoppable which is why you know all of the nodes um our full nodes sort of have all of the data why validators why it's easy to become a validator on a substrate network and why we are dedicating a lot of effort to ensuring that light clients are not just viable but also uh um efficient and performant so we are trying to achieve scalability with decentralization we're not going to trade off any decentralization in order to get some um initial uh uh bit of scalability um the next thing i want to talk about is that's great ability now most of you will uh this will be old news too but i think it's nonetheless very important to emphasize that this is a key feature of substrate and polka dot is something that we want to review as being like a key part of its mantra and ethos it's a meta protocol substrate chains and meta protocols polka dots and meta protocol being as it's based on a substrate chain so it allows us to upgrade update assimilate new technology very efficiently very effectively um there's a couple pictures to try and uh get this and drive this home you know um we see a lot of uh a lot of chains of making those upgrades is a bit like trying to run in a very muddy field um whereas we get to be the illustrated kite surfer um a very important difference of the substrate parachain model is especially as it's it's compared to the smart contract model this is some this is a question you got asked about a lot so it may possibly be a question that that you get asked about was powertrain teams and substrate chain teams so i want to make it super clear the substrate power chain model is a free execution model this basically means you're leasing out a chunk of time on what amounts to a distributed cpu core um this is a lot different this is this fundamentally different to what the smart contract gives you which is a transaction execution model which is essentially where users can pay to have your code executed for them as a free execution model you're guaranteed that you get scheduled um in time slices and you're guaranteed that that that scheduling happens at regular intervals every six seconds for example for polka dot parroting and this is crucial in giving you the power and freedom in order to decide how your application should work and implement it as you need to crucially you are in control of what transactions get executed not the other way around on a smart contract train the transactions are in control and if you can't get that transaction through for whatever reason or rather not you but your users then your application simply won't grow and that can be um that can make a huge difference as to what applications are actually viable um i mean the sort of things that a free execution model can give you you know go through them on change scheduling transaction prioritization ordering and so forth in short facilities like on runtime upgrade on initialize on finalized simply cannot be supported in an ethereum style smart contract system and that's something that you really can get very easily in substrate finally feedless now this this isn't quite what it said because of course a lot of substrate chains have fees but it comes in two key points the first one is that as a substrate-based power chain once once your chain has secured um a power chain slot lease then you do not have to expose the dot token or the ksm token or indeed any token to your users now of course most teams will have their own tokens that they want to use in order to charge users transaction fees and that's fine but in principle it's entirely your your chain's decision and you do not need to expose users to any uh transaction fees at all in principle you can um you can restrict your user transactions to some number or some manageable amount for your chain without bringing tokens in at all you could have for example certification of users you could have an oracle that checks that you know the user has a sufficient you know has a sufficient degree of individuality that they won't be able to civil attack and therefore dos your chain there are ways of doing this and this opens the door to fearless applications running on power chains and that is a a very interesting path indeed because in my mind that would open the door to mass [Music] mass appeal at the moment we can only really appeal to people who don't mind owning tokens or already have some that's i think quite a limiting factor okay so that's um broadly speaking how i see um substrate and polka dot the power chain model b uh deliver some really crucial and fundamental differences um the next thing i want to talk a bit about is uh just talk uh the the status of some parts of substrate relevant technologies it says forgive me this is actually not that much to do with substrate per se this is more to do with polka dot but i figure most of the people here won't mind too much um first thing i want to talk about is the status of the bridges very relevant for substrate projects this will allow substrate teams to connect their solo chains between each other and also if for whatever reason they are not planning on getting a power chain slot just yet it could also provide connectivity admittedly less secure and a bit more latent but connectivity to the relay chains um bridges are also a very important piece of technology for some uh some stuff that we want to get done next year but now is not quite the point to talk about that so the bridge's status um the bridge audit um as uh uh about two weeks from uh being completed um without uh very many uh issues being found at all uh this is actually i believe the second audit the first one was done some months back so this is basically the audit of the corrections um there will be a uh bridge being deployed soon uh from uh rococo to the um bridge test net wakako just to make sure that works but we do expect a relay to relay chain bridge deploying before the end of the year for pocono that assumes of course that the last two weeks of the audit don't bring in any um more significant issues but that's the expectation and the parrot chain to power chain bridge hopefully deploying early next yeah um there will be an additional um information on this a bit later on uh in the conference i believe but um yeah there's the summary um next thing is the xcm status um so uh xcmb2 is delivered it's part of polkadot0911 this brings in most of what most of the core features of what we've been asked for um asynchronous error handling so basically this this means that you can get you can have some on-chain code run in case of some error that happens on a remote chain um and it's done in a relatively nice way so it's all done with dispatchables and status reporting so allowing the status of some xcm instruction to be reported back to some other chain which presumably will want to register it with some code handler asset trapping which is essentially just remembering the contents of the holding register uh at the end of at the end of an xcm message um a lot of the time in xcm whether it's through an error or just accidentally with perhaps a message that wasn't crafted properly at the end of the message execution some assets are left in the holding register this allows for those to be remembered and then later claimed exception handling there's now exception handling actually built into the language model of xcm um we're now using a virtual machine model it's a bit more i think comprehensible and extensible than before and one of the big ones is it's got uh version management so this allows different xcm versions to coexist within a multi-chain network i've also done the specification for version 2 as well next is the status of the power chains i know this is of importance to many of you here uh the pirate chain code is now considered feature complete in that all of the security mechanisms from the polka dot spec are implemented uh tested and audited so yes the audits complete the corrections from the audit about halfway done expected to be finished by november and we do expect a initial deployment of these feature complement security code uh onto kasama um very quickly and we want to leave it three weeks before we we would want to see it in production but we don't expect any significant problems so that should give some uh idea of the timeline that we would expect before the um before we expect any power chains to go live on polkadot in terms of our opinion on on the production status of this code we think it's reasonable to be confident that power chains be technologically viable from december and uh we think a a deployment to kasama by the end of october is something that we should expect and so from a technological perspective i think it's not unreasonable for polka dot to begin preparations for the uh lease period 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 um for that batch of auctions to begin uh uh being prepared for more or less now we think an ongoing auction schedule will be sensible um we think uh the number of power chains on polkadot should remain up to only three quarters of what's on kosama in order to keep kasama as polka dots canary network at least until the code is mature and we have a much better idea about the the the uh amount of power chains and transactional throughput and message throughput that it can handle on the current infrastructure um we think shorter auctions um for the initial um power chain scale-up period would not be unreasonable uh in general we would stick to um what we've already was published in the um in the past so roughly two-week per auction schedule good and uh looking forward i want to just talk a little bit about some of the currents and trends um not very many actually only a couple in the industry as a whole and how it relates to what we're doing with substrate what we're working on what you can expect from us over the course of the next 12 months or so um one thing that i've i've noticed is that in the search for high transactional throughput there are quite a few chains that have lost sight of the fact that decentralization and for that matter security are not optional features right you can get a lot more transaction throughput if you're willing to trade off um the effective decentralization of your network if you're willing to trade off the peer-to-peer aspect of the network um there's a reason that ethereum two is taking so long actually for several reasons uh one of them is that they're doing it um they're not willing to trade off as we are not um the the decentralization aspects of the network and if you're not willing to do that then the architecture the design particularly out of the security has to be a lot more thought through so when you see networks claiming large tps that are supposedly public networks i would take any comparisons with quite a lot of salt and often times it's really not an apples for apples comparison if we look at the currants of the global regulation we can see a few things now i've read a couple a couple of reports about this um i don't claim to be an expert i certainly don't claim to be a lawyer but there are some things that crop up in these reports in these policy statements that seem uh in in my mind to make some sense um if we look at the fatf which is an international body it's roughly the g20 i believe of nations that get their heads together or give some faceless bureaucrats and get their heads together um we see some some fairly if we look at what they're saying we see some fairly clear policy um the good news is that software development and generic uh keeping um so maintaining of a network is um is considered something that untouchable is considered something that that should be allowed to to to continue without any any regulation at all and this is a good thing right because this is this is our bread and butter as developers and people who want to deploy these kinds of peer-to-peer networks um it's crucial that these activities remain and free and unfettered however it's also pretty clear that global regulators are taking a very critical eye to some other things that um i think most peer-to-peer most decentralized projects have at least dabbled in a bit many of which rely very uh distinctly on some of these one is service provision and this is basically rpc's wallets um app sites another is multi-sigs so like are often sort of named um example of this uh where you've got like a bunch of named personnel who can decide how to spend the dallas treasury this is also the case with poco sama custodians hosted wallets and uh non p2p or stable coins being the obvious two and also it seems easy fire is what i've called here but basically um [Music] apps wallets that are trying to use it utilizing centralized um mechanisms trying to make um decentral and the decentralized apps easier to use and i think these probably one of the later things that these will still uh from what i'm reading come under some scrutiny um the service provision is is one of the more most interesting ones because of course decentralized networks that i would say fairly legitimately peer-to-peer such as ethereum still make a heavy reliance on centralized rpc services um and oftentimes centralized wallets and [Music] sites to host decentralized applications and i think this certainly looking at the language that is being used by global regulators it seems that these will come under substantial scrutiny in the not too distant future one thing i think is certain the more centralized you are the more chance you have of regulators uh knocking at your door insisting that you become licensed and uh the more peer-to-peer then the lower the chance so pushing towards peer-to-peer seems reasonable um another thing i think that it's quite likely again reading some of these documents um it seems that crypto projects that are not sufficiently peer-to-peer that have been sufficiently centralized will probably require licensing and those licensing requirements i would expect will be a similar kind of standard to banking requirements this if this is true this would imply that most crypto projects in their current form may not actually be able to exist in the uh in the next year or two i mean i think the timeline for this is probably um two to three years before it gets properly enforceable but still um it's good to plan for the future especially when the technology that you need to mitigate these risks is um is quite difficult to implement at parity we are committed to peer to purifying everything we want to make sure that our technology is in line with what is considered not needed for a regulation and this means that we have a lot of emphasis now but also going forward on um [Music] on these what i would call almost like weak points within um decentralization particularly bootstrapping boot nodes point of the point of centralization there rpc now it's also a point of centralization we're managing that with uh with live clients and particularly in browser-like clients which i hope um we're going to have a nice introduction to you all for in this very conference um with governance particularly trying to ensure that we can have on-chain decentralized governance that [Music] that doesn't fall foul of any kind of potential multi-sig regulations and also privacy so privacy mechanisms such as mixnets one thing that i want to make very clear is that solutions that are built on substrate should be true web3 solutions so actually peer-to-peer and similarly for poker dot we want that to be the first peer-to-peer secure and scalable free execution platform and with that i just wanted to leave you with the four uh tenets of um polka dot power chains and substrate chains unstoppable upgradable unlimited and fearless thank you very much that was my keynote okay uh thank you that was very interesting and we have quite a few questions uh from the audience if you have some time um so first on this lab yeah so first on this last topic about regulation uh do you see risks to developers uh and you know like centralized solutions for development such as github uh for these projects or do you see it that at a different level um i think centralized solutions that are very clearly geared towards general development probably not going to have much of an issue um i don't think they're going to start i don't think regulation is going to start coming in against like the rust language because the west language happens to be used for substrate um i do think that um i i i i'll continue on that right i also don't think that teams that engage purely in technological development so basically encoding software development and and software releases i also i don't think they're gonna be a big target any time soon i would hope indefinitely but i do think that uh any service provision that is to do with um uh transaction uh facilitation not just processing um could become a target could come under scrutiny and um therefore it's important to um [Music] to try to minimize the degree to which we as teams operating in the space have any significant control over the transactions um and the use of um of any value that exists within our networks okay uh thank you um a couple of other questions uh two actually that we had that would just like to clarify some of the the things that you mentioned uh so you had mentioned at least periods six through nine um but i think uh some people didn't understand how lease periods work could you just uh uh go over what that what that means exactly sure it actually it's uh that was the typo it should actually be six through 13. um but yeah um the the least periods um are uh essentially time slots um for power chains so um uh each lease period on polka dot is three months and um we are currently as it happens where i think we're just um approaching the uh midpoint release period five uh it should be at least period five should be ending at this period six should be beginning around the middle of december and um we think that basically the middle of december would be a not unreasonable point um to uh to have um from a technological point of view to have power chains be uh uh be live on polka dot i mean we would actually say probably early december but but as it happens with december would not be we think a bad plan okay um also one of your slides you had mentioned both excuse me relay to relay bridges as well as para chained to you know para para bridges uh so is this using xcm is this is this something different like how would this differ like a bridge between a para chain and a para chain differ from uh using xcm or is that actually you know part of the same thing um so xcm is a message format and this as a message format should be usable regardless of the transport mechanism um so xcm is usable both for communicating upwards to a relay train downwards from a relay chain to a power chain sideways by using xcmp from power chain to power chain and also over bridges which is another transport mechanism um the uh the relator relay bridge is a is essentially just saying that there would be um actually on the relay chain itself a pallet that allowed the relay chain to send messages to another relay chain um now these messages would be pretty secure um but uh in principle uh we may have uh you know that they're not they're never going to be as secure as um parrot chained to parachain within the same relay chain network just because they have actually the same sovereignty the same consensus mechanism the same uh securing capital when i mentioned the power chain to parachain bridging what this is what this means is that the bridge would sit from a power chain on polka dot to a power chain on kosama so it's still bridging polka dot kusama but it's doing so without interfering with the relay chain itself is doing it all within the um the confines of a single power chain um and eventually this this would obviously be a system power chain or a common good power chain um and it would uh uh in principle should be able to uh hold more than one bridge the general idea is that we would have a bridge pub that would sit in this common good power chain um bridging over to uh not just um polkadot to kusama but also poke it up to many other networks and uh similarly on the kasama side from kosama to networks beyond pokemon okay yeah bringing that uh that vision of uh multi-chain world uh to to permission um so uh another uh question we had is what is going to be the focus uh on substrate development uh over the next uh you know year or so i know we've seen uh i know we're going to see a lot of things that people are working on but would you say there are particular areas of focus uh that you're working on yeah so um the the main things i think uh we're going to see are uh in terms of like a renewed focus obviously there are bridges there's the um there's the content continuation of some of the frame stuff in particular upgrades and migrations but a renewed focus will be placed on substrate and its peer-to-peer decentralization technologies uh in particular um ensuring that we have the right governance apparatus to be able to have um uh agile um efficient inclusive accessible governance without relying on um on centralizing mechanisms like um like the council and potentially even like the technical committee so i think uh one of the one of the things i'm going to say over the next 12 months is a evolution alliteration in the governance building blocks that substrate provides a second thing would be the light client i mean i i don't know many of you may or may not be aware of the small dot project which aims to be a substrate light climate um that is uh very uh efficient and very nippy it can be compiled into webassembly and sit quite happily within a browser window we'll also be um focusing on one of the sort of newer projects yet to be commissioned but soon will be the initial bootstrapping and discovery so that we can find boot nodes for a substrate chain without having to have them hard coded into the code base um and one other initiative that i uh that i'm quite excited about next year um it's not strictly the substrate feature or code base but is a substrate and a polka dot centric education program and that's uh something that's in its early phases at the moment but i would hope that over the next 12 months we have really a very uh world standard gold standard education program for people who want to really get to grips with substrate and polka dot power chains blockchain technology in general crypto game theory um and rust and this is uh i think something that you know we've obviously got some things already in the ecosystem but this would really be the icing on top of the cake yeah i'm very curious just to follow up on that do you have any ideas about some of these new governance primitives that these decentralizing governance primitives or this is still this is the very early phases of thinking about that uh no indeed there is very much some ideas and this is something that um i i wouldn't want to say that we are um at the point immediately before implementation uh where we have a very coherent design but we're also i would say um a fair we have fairly fleshed out ideas uh one of the um [Music] i i think actually the main idea is to try to follow a more liquid democracy model um where we have um uh where we emphasize the delegation which is in effect what the council is doing anyway right um so uh in addition and it's also technology that we already have implemented you can already delegate votes but we would i think try to make it so the vote delegation is uh much more agile meaning that you wouldn't have to manually undelegate before you're able to move funds and you wouldn't necessarily have to pay anything to delegate um secondly uh and and in addition you know so building on this um this delegation to try to get people um involved in in the general uh referendum model would be to move beyond the adaptive core and biasing and move beyond the fixed um fixed time with potential fast tracking model that we have now into a um a variable time limit uh mechanism with a um essentially allowing referenda to end early if they have a sufficiently high turnout and are sufficiently uh in favor or against so essentially um you know for a referendum to end within an hour that would have to be an exceptionally high turnout and exceptionally biased towards approve or reject um within that turnout but as time goes on we would accept a lower turnout and a bit of a less of a bias one way according to the other um in order to allow for the early yeah early uh ending of the referendum and then the idea is that if it if it played through and had like the entire um whatever two weeks or a month or however long it's meant to go for by default and still haven't sort of early exited then it would exit without um without anything happening so it would essentially fail okay yeah that's uh that's interesting yeah like you know removing any you know individuals or like more uh uh yeah that there's some yeah really interesting plans uh for governance uh thank you uh so so this is an interesting question it's it's kind of vague though uh so i guess you can take it however you want uh but you know what are some ways that individuals can help you increase this decentralization and help uh you know promote substrate and the technological adoption of the polka dot ecosystem like what would you give as advice for people who want that yeah it's it's hard uh without knowing the specific skill set of any given individual um if they are uh you know a great coder then uh lending a hand either to the core technology within substrate uh or to uh building great products on the substrate um if they're not not maybe so much of a coder uh but but you know sort of a good networker and meet a lot of people do a lot of talking then um presenting on the key differences um evangelism going to other developers and and letting them know right well this is why substrate's a good idea this is why polkadot is different i think is crucial and generally if they're non-technical uh entirely not technical then uh just general evangeli evangelization of uh evangelism of uh peer-to-peer and decentralized uh decentralization uh as a whole so like why is decentralization a good thing why is doing things in a peer-to-peer fashion a good thing why do we not want to have the trust authorities why do we uh what's what's the problem with authorities you know talking about um nexuses of power talking about the potential for corruption the potential for mistakes to have magnifying effects that the greater the uh centralization is and this is stuff that isn't specifically to do with technology this is just stuff this is like you know classic um uh um sociology almost it's like why uh why it's not such a great thing to place so much power into the hands of so few um and uh that i i think if you if you google for uh decentralization and social democracy and so on you will probably find quite a lot of material all right well thank you very much that was a great speech and some great uh answers to questions uh so we are out of time for this uh so so thank you uh once again and uh thank you yep and we will be back in just a few minutes

Channel: Parachains

Views: 6,024

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Id: FA4iNucSYuc

Length: 40min 49sec (2449 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021

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[u/Holixxx]

Thanks for uploading the video onto youtube so I can watch in my free time!