Mainnet 2021: The future of Polkadot (September 21, 2021) | Parity, Acala, Moonbeam speakers

b minus c plus but you get credit for still being here because i know it's a long day a lot of content we've got a great one that we're gonna end with uh we've got dan we've got derek we've got angela going to talk about the future of polka dot um just a reminder we do have uh not quite a full day but a pretty solid chunk of time allocated tomorrow for our final sessions and looking forward to seeing everyone at the cocktail hour after this final glorious session and then uh tomorrow for day three which is going to be entirely here just on the sixth floor with that angie take it away great have fun thank you so much so i'm slotting in as moderator uh and it's changed on the slide peter moritz our head of public affairs has been triple booked and heroically managing all of our schedules so i'm very excited i mentioned this to dan when we were uh backstage that if i had to pick two people in the polkadot ecosystem to do this panel with it would be the two of you um so i think what we should do first is just start with some backgrounds do you want to start sure thing so uh um my name is derek you i'm the ceo of pure stake you know we're working on the project uh called moonbeam and um just to give you know the quick uh kind of uh blurb on moonbeam we are building um an ethereum-like environment uh smart contract environment that's a para chain on polkadot so one of the member kind of blockchains uh that's in the polkadot network hey everybody uh dan reiser here i'm vp of growth at akala um been in decala since about february prior to that spent a year and a half at web3 foundation working on the polka dot and kusama launches um just for a quick background on akala we're building a kind of defy specialized blockchain or para chain in the polka dot ecosystem um and we can get in into more details on that and then on the kusama side um we've built a network called carrera which is already live and kind of actively actively building great and i'm angie dalton i serve as lead advisor to the web3 foundation since 2019 pre-polka pre-polkadot launch and um i my background is really in in mass markets uh tech so gaming esports and i came to the project because i was doing a deep dive for a big media company nla who wanted me to figure out blockchain and nfts in gaming this was in 20 i guess 18 and i stumbled on polka dot and was pretty convinced this team can pull it off so here we are so i think it would be good to start with um you know what polka dot is and what it is not uh we started that ryan started started off with this uh with gav yesterday but um you know we talk about polka dot as a layer zero uh meta protocol so can you guys both comment on that yeah yeah i'll go first um so i guess one way of looking at it that i have is this that you know it's kind of like when you hear people talk about different blockchains sometimes they're asking things like well what's what's the best blockchain and you know my one is better because it made this set of trade-offs or this you know this is the correct way to do things or this this is a you know this is kind of like the way it should be and it'll you know i think that that questioning you know for a poker person they're going to say like that's the wrong question to be asking right i mean the the right question is it's not like it kind of presumes that there's like one like you know one blockchain that's somehow this like platonic ideal or gets everything right and is going to be right for everything and that's i think not correct right i mean like the polkadot point of view is that there's there's many blockchains there's many best blockchains right it depends on what you're trying to do it depends on you know what you want to try to optimize for and so i think once you kind of think about things in that way and then the kind of the polka dot idea is well let's create the tools in the environment where you can create these specialized blockchains and then let's create like an environment where they can get common security and networking so they can talk to each other and so i think that's for me that's kind of like the one of the core kind of ideas of pokemon because there's like not one but many many best chains yeah i do really like this idea that um layer ones uh you know ethereum bitcoin and and both of your uh chains are focusing on what you uh are trying to solve and and really uh you know a use case versus security and a lot of the tools that you don't have to do in terms of organizing validators etc so yeah and just to kind of follow on to both of you for people in the room i think many of you might be here if you're if you're just looking to learn more about polka dot and i think a lot of people are understand obviously ethereum bitcoin and then we're seeing a lot of these layer ones starting to grow pretty rapidly like the terras and solanas and cellos and everyone of the world um but what i think i want you to walk away with today is that like like derek was saying and angie were saying polka dot is a layer zero that does ultimately two things when you really boil it down it secures block chains so any para chain like us building in polka dot we came here because we want to plug into the existing security validator set of polkadot instead of having to do all that on our own and then number two polka dot connects blockchains together so there will be up to a hundred potentially more someday once we scale but 100 connected pair chains together in one ecosystem and all of these chains will have native cross chain ability with each other so moonbeam and akala will have the ability to do cross-chain applications um obviously cross-chain token transfers and things like that but this is really the i think the fundamental thing to understand with poco is it's it's just this connected network of blockchains that are ultimately there for the security and the cross chain and of course we could go on um about several other topics as well yeah i it might be good now just to dive into securing a slot in a pair chain auction um can you talk about the very basics of how that works you know we've seen it on kusama so far the canary network but it'd be good to hear both of your perspectives in terms of your experience so yeah so as you all probably know polka dot was built by gavin wood and he most likely took some learnings away from the ico phase of ethereum where a lot of people were were kind of burned and teams were able to raise money pretty easily and launch trustlessly on ethereum just just launching a token one thing that i think him and the team at web3 foundation took away from that is that when we're launching para chains on polka dot we need to make it we need to make the bar a little bit higher make it a little bit more of a of an effort to launch these blockchains so that we can help protect people in our communities so because of that moonbeam and akala and any chain that wants to launch on polka dot in a slot on the network to get that security has to go through this thing called a parachain slot auction so there's an auction where teams pair chain teams are actually bidding to win one of these slots on polkadot in order to kind of earn the right to launch and this is a this is an auction just like you'd see for a house or a car we all know what an auction is but when you bid in a traditional auction you're bidding out of your own pocket you might have a thousand bucks that you come to the auction and hope you win the auction and in the polka dot case you can actually bid in two ways you have a lot of dot you can bid on your own with your own kind of stockpile of dot as a team if you think you can win with that but the second and more common option is to do something called a crowd loan it is what it sounds like it's a loan from a huge crowd of people most likely 20 000 plus people where those people are actually contributing dot loaning that dot to us or to moonbeam as a team in support of their auction and then when we get that dot we can then go on and use that as our bid in the auction so we get the power of the crowd instead of just a single account and why would you do that as an individual because as a as a contributor you know going into it that there's a there's going to be a ratio of a token from that team so say aca given for every dot so maybe it's 1 to 10. when i contribute my dot i'm just agreeing that that will be locked trustlessly not touched by the team and then in return i would be issued the native token of that project and then after two years which is the duration of that slot that the paratrain wins then all of the dot that i contributed in the loan which is why it's called a loan because i get all of that dot back so the only thing you're really sacrificing as a contributor is the staking returns that you would have earned on that dot because you actually you do have to unstake the dot in order to contribute so this is a process that we've already done once on kusama polka dots experimental network and this is probably the biggest event to watch for in polka dot in the in the coming months because this is how moonbeam and need to do in order to launch yeah no well well put uh and you know the thing i'll just add a little bit that you know the thing i think that's interesting back to these points of what the motivations were for coming up with this model it is the case that you have to continue to demonstrate your value basically right so you know these um slots that you're bidding on it may last uh you know a year uh possibly in the maximum case maybe two years but then you have to renew so it's not the case that you kind of you know you clear this bar once and then it's like free sailing from there you have to keep showing your value and you know it might be the case over time that um you know project becomes less valuable right or it's you know stopped executing or stops you know shipping in which case you know then they'll be probably unlikely to continue to occupy a slot and you know their slot will be given up to another team that you know can make better use of it i really like that concept that um you know you have to continue to prove your worth to the community and get community buy-in by you know bringing people back to the table at the end of that lease so um so we all get the is this an ethereum killer question and it came up yesterday with gav and he said no it's not and he pointed to moonbeam and said actually there are uh you know moonbeam is out there you know bringing apps into the ecosystem and and so it'd be great to hear kind of what is this multi-chain application uh you know how does it work yeah so i mean i kind of mentioned that you know obviously the the idea that we had was to basically implement something as close as we could make it to ethereum but on polka dot and so i guess the first question is why even bother doing that like why do that and you know i think it's it's really born of kind of practicality you know from you know my background we had a background building uh just regular web 2 companies where you know if you look you know the ethereum dev tool set you know infrastructure you know a lot of these things are just uh the most mature tools that are in this space right now and it's the technologies that most developers know already so there's just like a lot of practicality in kind of providing a way for developers to use those tools to to express themselves you know on on polka dot um so that's definitely part of it but you know back to this killer point i think it it does tie back into the idea we talked about uh when we started um which is that you know i think that each killer narrative is born of the same mindset of there's gonna be like one right there's like one that's correct there's one that's going to win like you know it's a kind of zero-sum game all spoils go to the winner and that's i mean i just think it's i just look at what's happening in the market i think it's pretty hard to kind of maintain that it's increasingly hard to maintain that position now right we see you know many chains that are quite successful have like communities have ecosystems have you know development activity on them um you know i i only see that like you know continuing and you know there's a huge demand for block space in general right so um you know for for you know high quality you know kind of team and product um i just continue to see you know things evolving further into this kind of multi-chain you know environment yep yep i think that we should maybe before we move on to kind of broader topics just on the kusama uh parachain uh you know the kazama is the you know canary network with uh you know it's not a test net it's actually real value at stake um so you have learned we've both learned a lot i think in this process what how do you think that the polka dot pair chain auctions will be different or what how will this evolve um yeah so kusama the whole point of kusama really is to allow teams to first of all build products on testnet move them to kusama and experiment in a real value network kusama right now is i think between two and two and three billion depending on the market so it's a very much so a real mainnet but the whole purpose of it is to provide an environment for us to build before we move that product or feature to polka dot but what i've actually on the marketing side what i've experienced is that it doesn't only help developers it's actually helping me a ton with preparing for polka dot because we had to do this crowd loan on kusama and it's an unbelievable amount of work on on all of us but what we're able to do is understand how to get the community kind of um you know educated around the whole process building out the in the actual ui and the experience that users go through to contribute the ksm or the dot and then going through the whole process of distribution and launching this phased launch rollout that both akala and moonbeam did so for me we've we had some take key takeaways of course and some small things that we might change but for the most part it just kind of helped me refine the strategy in the in the way we execute um on on polka dot i guess one of the the big things we learned is that there's just a lot of um you need to focus a lot on the users and support and education um so we we ended up hiring someone for that we got a lot of good processes built around that and we'll definitely be using that for the polka dot auctions as well yeah i mean i guess i'd maybe add just some some comments on kusama itself um you know so obviously uh on the same page with dan like you know it's a you know it's a real value environment where we could you know cut our teeth or we learned a bunch but i kind of feel like you know this original idea while it's still the case is evolving right these things once you launch them kind of take on a life of their own and you know the future is determined by the stakeholders of the token holders of the network and you know what's seeming increasingly clear to you know uh to me at least is that you know this is its own network right it doesn't want to be kind of always second fiddle to you know to poke it on and you know we're seeing teams that like are targeting like kusama as like their final deployment destination they're like no no i got that's like that's where i want to be i don't even wanna like go to polkadot so um yeah i think it's one of those things where you can start with one idea but you know i think that um you know these things you know have their own like will in a way right their own collective will and so i'm starting to kind of think of it as there's just two networks here basically there's two networks and you know we're finding that um kind of the same comment i made before that you know the demand for block spaces is quite high so there's gonna you know it's going it's going to be filled with like interesting use cases like uh no matter what yeah yeah what do you see as the biggest hurdles for getting para chains to the masses um you know that i was pretty excited yesterday when gav said you know we won't have wallets we'll we'll be able to easily kind of integrate or you know onboard the masses and like i said i came came at this from a mass market perspective spending a lot of time with gaming companies and most of them are kind of confused about how they could actually onboard 100 you know tens of millions of players or users how do you think this will happen yeah i think a good example that i can talk to is a company actually based in new york called current current.com is a traditional fintech company who actually started out as a as a crypto native company after the two the two founders of the ceo and the cto left morgan stanley tried to build on ripple and then eventually asked themselves how do we get crypto in the hands of millions of people actually this exact question and their answer to themselves was let's not build in crypto let's build in fintech get the millions of customers there and then bring crypto to them some years later so now fast forward six seven years um current and an ecologist i think it was two or three months ago announced that we're going to be building an integration with them to essentially provide a d5 back-end to generate yield for their current savings account customers so they've got about 3 million customers in the u.s and just to make it very concrete imagine one day the the customer is opening up their account they've got 200 bucks in their savings account but then there's a pop-up that says hey would you like to sign up for this um yield account for from current say for example it's three percent or four percent um the user accepts and says yes let's sign up for this account what actually happens in the background is those customer funds are going to flow through an on off ramp into the akala dollar our stable coin and then into this yield yield engine that we're building so this yield is generated from dot staking which fluctuates from 12 to 15 percent we got a grant from compound so we're building a bridge to the compound gateway which is another substrate based chain and other various kind of forms of yield but then when that yield is being generated on a periodic basis say it's daily weekly monthly that will be liquid liquidated back to the kala dollar sent back through the on off ramp into us dollars and then distributed to the customer's accounts the customer does not even need to interact with defy and not doesn't even really necessarily need to know that there's d5 involved these these common people are the the general masses don't really care about anything besides what percent am i earning i'm earning three four percent instead of zero point five percent um and then of course in the background akala's network is operating that kind of process so this is one use case that's coming for us that i'm really excited about because this is i think how we get crypto into the hands of millions it's it's basically just by not forcing them to interact with these tools that aren't quite there yet in terms of ui and ux i think i largely agree there that um you know the the ux just in general is still you know probably the biggest barrier for like mass adoption um you know this is definitely clear when you're coming from just a regular web 2 world that like you know i'm always explaining to people that you know my last company we had like maybe a third of the product team was like devoted to like you know ux design you know um design research like you know these kinds of things you know are not usually like priorities you know in a lot of crypto projects so i think that i would agree that you know ux is important but i do think that a lot of that is just additional investment needed right so i mean you can still make like you know they're still better and worse you know when it comes to ux even even for like a web 3 native like product so um that's kind of my hope is that those people just invest more in that right they just kind of take it take it as seriously as the computer scientists and you know the uh the cryptographers that they're hiring you know that you know you should value like a great ux person is just as valuable i was going to ask what is the largest problem we will have solved five years from now uh do you think it's you at uiux or i i mean i think it's you know it's a big barrier to like to broader uh adoption now on the other hand i think that you know you have highly motivated users in the web three space so like uh you know they'll put up with a lot basically right like i think so that's um you know that that's a you know a benefit maybe not out five years but what challenges will we overcome in the next couple of years yeah i mean well i think if i just think about you know how i think more broadly about things and this kind of ties a little bit into you know kind of i think some of the motivation for like why um you know we've chosen to build like in the polka dot ecosystem that you know it kind of ties into this multi-chain idea where i mean for me like probably the most interesting use case uh use cases on polka dot are kind of infrastructural i mean i think these chains tend to be feel i have a lot of infrastructure look and feel you're still dealing with you know fairly low level things but you know what i see happening is i already see it starting to happen is that there's different teams that are providing different like infrastructure services like on polka dots so it could be us providing a generic you know smart contract we'll say a compute capability um you know it could be someone providing storage capability it could be someone providing an identity service um so those services you know i'm quite interested in those because you know kind of the the vision that i have is that it's kind of like you know when you're a developer you go to aws right you go to aws you have this like menu of different options different kind of building blocks you can use right you you have like you know a message queueing service an identity service a database service and you know what i think is going to happen in web 3 is that you know as it evolves you're going to get these specialized services that are going to involve specialized infrastructure services and then you know the the idea would be that you know you can kind of as a developer you're going to build an application which will span multiple specialized blockchains right and so you you know you'll kind of have this aws experience but it'll be all web 3 services and um you know so my best bet is that you know polkadot's a place where like that's going to happen because of this you know toolkit that allows you to build specialized services combined with like the networking element to like let them work together so um you know that's you know kind of this this tendency towards increasing specialization but then being able to combine those specialized services you get a whole is greater than some of its parts you know kind of a kind of idea and so that's probably the thing that i'm yeah that's the thing i'm most interested in and that's you know what i think is you know what we're going to see kind of happen as things play out before you go i want to ask derek one more question because i spent a lot of time thinking about nfts and i and i would love to hear and i know you have some experience here too how do you see interoperability kind of eventually happening with nfts because right now it feels like rights management you know there are a lot of challenges there yeah i mean well i mean to start with i mean this kind of multi-chain idea you even see that now i'd say right so it might so like you know a very typical application these days for nfts is that you might have you know the actual nft itself might be on you know something like ethmainet or polygon but the metadata might be on something like are we right like you know storage optimize change that's the same kind of idea where you're combining these two different chains that each have their own specialization but kind of combining them into one application um now i think in the case when you have two separate chains like that you know it actually kind of works against the ux in a way because you kind of like the integration's happening client side so you're kind of almost making the user understand like these different like systems so i think that's you know that's where you know a system that has this built-in networking like polkadot i think is it has some opportunities to hide some of that like complexity like behind um and you know that's gonna be important for kind of making that like that clean ux but you know to your question of like you know nfts i mean yeah i think they're more difficult to move if you're just talking about movement versus fungible tokens um you know you always have these questions questions of you know what to do with metadata like the provenance like has to be tracked usually so then there's like all this kind of extra data that has to be tracked and then you know you kind of start facing questions too about like what the creator like either wants or doesn't want like whether you're going to like honor those wishes or not kind of thing um so there definitely is more complexity but you know i see you know teams are tackling these problems so um you know i'm quite confident that you know these uh you know that these are they're gonna there's gonna be movement you know like there is with fungible tokens now uh for nfts yeah that will be a good place when we get there because it's uh yeah it's a challenge so i'd love to hear your perspective next five years what's the biggest challenge i was gonna just expand on derek's comments around customization and in terms of a problem i think we're we'll see solved or at least improved is um kind of the developer building experience so just to kind of talk about the the polka dot sdk or substrate which is the kind of blockchain development framework that we use to build these blockchains one i think under-appreciated aspect of this is that we can continue building these modules you can think of substrate as kind of like a menu of of pieces or components within a blockchain that you might drag and drop in a very simple simplistic way into your blockchain but these components these these pallets can actually continue to be built and essentially injected into your chain without a fork with a simple upgrade so just to put that into perspective obviously to to upgrade ethereum creates an entire fork and it's a huge headache with polka dot polka dot itself and any para chain can be upgraded for without a fork so polka dot since launch it's been launched for i think uh a little over a year it's upgraded last time i checked about 25 times these are 25 upgrades that would have caused other networks to hard fork so if you can just imagine what that means in terms of almost future proofing the chain and allowing us to continue to build new pallets new components that can be just seamlessly upgraded into our chain so for us it's exciting and also for moonbeam because when we have these developers building in our evm the developers if you're in the ethereum space you you kind of get what you signed up for with ethereum and you can't really change it we're going to be able to take in requirements from the developers building on the akala platform and actually build new new requirements or build these features into the chain itself and upgrade the chain and give the developers a essentially a new blockchain that they can build on without even having to move so we'll continue to be able to upgrade our chain as well as polka dot over time which is i think it's pretty uh pretty fascinating and exciting yeah that's great totally totally agree with that upgradability i mean uh you know you know we just launched like a you know our kusama like parachain called moon river um not even a month ago and i think there's you know there's been like five runtime upgrades like already and like you know four client upgrades so yeah i think that it's this this adaptability to the market is something and you know as new information is being made available that is like a you know a big competitive image i'd love to ask you both about the blockchain trilemma you know the the trade-offs between security um scalability decentralization and um one thing that i was really excited about with polka dot is this idea that the layer zero kind of abstracts security away from that and i'd love to hear your uh there was actually a great image i mentioned earlier in uh an arrington research report that i just saw was was really good but i wanted to ask you guys in practice is that what's happening why don't i just chime in first quickly i know that you uh like uh will have comments too but uh i would say that uh this this kind of idea that as a para chain you kind of get security as a service from the relay chain is unique basically so if you were you know kind of launching your own standalone chain you know the the the trick with that is that you usually have to kind of bootstrap the security around it and that's like easier said than done right so in the early days of the network you might have some smaller set of validators there's not a lot of economic value like in the system yet so you're quite like vulnerable um you know i think that's something that polka dot solves via this idea of you know being able to kind of rent the security if you will right so as a para chain you know you're kind of getting a slice of the security from like the relay chain where validators and relay chain are kind of swooping in and kind of you know validating blocks that are being created by each power chain um so that's like a very elegant way to solve this bootstrapping problem where you kind of come in from day zero like with the full like weight of you know the the polka dot relay chain like you know finding security yeah and i'll just add i guess going back to one of the first questions of um like why why even build on polka dot and why did akala choose to build in this ecosystem that's one of the the main reasons is that of course we get the cross-chain ability substrate but not having to bootstrap our own set of validators is one of the biggest reasons why we have decided to build um in this in this ecosystem and go for this paratrain slot auction go through all that that effort in order to get that security um so i think that's that's about yeah yeah yeah well i was um excited to hear maybe a little easter egg of what might be coming in terms of the thousand validators going to even more validators and the scalability potentially of the relay chain that's coming so um that's really good to hear um so last words we have about a minute it looks like a minute and 20 left each of you want to give kind of last words on your project i mean i can just you know comment on kind of uh you know the the thing i mean for me of all the different you know good reasons why you know people are building on poker for me it's this like networking is like the the key thing this ability for different blockchains to interact with each other you know i think what you find in the polkadot ecosystem is it's a you know it feels like you're all part of the same system and i do think it's going to be a non-zero sum game where as different teams like a you know colin moon beam like you know uh interact and integrate with each other you know we're going to create like you know more like rich scenarios more value like together than like a part so um you know that i think is probably the most interesting like you know part for me of this and um yeah that's where we're focusing on our energy basically you know moving forward would be focused on integrations like with you know other teams and obviously there's simple things like token movement scenarios but you know there's also much more advanced things like remote control of uh you know smart contract or other kinds of functions like on other chains uh to create these like multi-chain um is natively multi-chain applications we talked about so yeah i think last thing from me we explained how parachain auctions work in the polka dot ecosystem i think this is the event to watch for this should be coming hopefully soon we don't know exactly when but i know akala and moonbeam are both going to be having crowd loans open and and this is really the next kind of phase is is working our way into launch and then bootstrapping getting users getting applications going um so really appreciate everyone um taking the time to come kind of at the end of the day and learn learn more about polka dots so as you do uh learn more about these paratrain auctions one thing that i would ask is be an advocate and be an ambassador for for polka dot and help us educate on on all this stuff because it's really complex i know when i started understanding it it kind of blew my mind and i think a lot of you in the room might be able to to relate to that feeling with with polka dots so i would appreciate any help kind of advocating for all of our um all of our work thank you both to drinks [Applause] to drinks thank you guys thank you so much

Channel: Parachains

Views: 5,996

Rating: 4.9555554 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: g0PVPuwmxAk

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021