ETHDay - Tools & Infra panel - Austin Griffith, Francesco Andreoli & Simon Emanuel Schmid

[Music] cool well the audience should know the drill at this stage please go to slido and ask any questions we'll try and cover them towards the end we're going to have half an hour from around now and to kick things off if we go one by one then please give a short introduction as well as an introduction about the the project that you work for hello it works nice hello my name is simon i work for a company called edgenode it's a core dev behind working on the graph protocol the graph protocol is a indexing and querying protocol on ethereum and other networks cool it's working hey guys i'm francesco i'm working at a company called consensus and those days i'm basically like working with community and developer relations team and you know building top of the funnel trying to engage with web3 developers every day to events and anything anything that has to do with building hey i'm austin griffith i'm supported by the ef i work on developer tooling and developer onboarding uh i built scaffold eth and then around that i wrote a curriculum called speedrun ethereum and you can go to speedruneetherium.com if you're a developer and learn how to build on ethereum cool cool bow tie over there well you've got a real fan there i like that bow tie thank you thank you austin um yeah well to kick things off i think you know with tools and infrastructure right you really exist kind of behind the scenes um can you talk a little bit about you know what problems you actually go about solving within the ecosystem and why you think they're really important because i think you have some different viewpoints on this yeah sure i mean the graph source the the data reading problem actually that we have on blockchains so a blockchain protocol basically is optimized for writing and also incentivized you pay the miners to uh mine your block so you can write to the blockchain but if you want to read stuff from it it actually gets a little bit more complex because you need to dig through all those transactions on the blockchain let's say for uni swap if you if you want to see the the charts about the the trading volumes and the prices and it's powered by the graph because otherwise this page would would take i know maybe a half an hour to load sure i can just um you know extend a little bit what are the challenges i see in the industry right cross chain liquidity i think that's a big one i think you know we should support um we should support basically like what we're trying to build with those metamask snaps is uh is uh nothing else and extensions for non-evm compatible blockchain i think you know anyone has the the right to build on on different chains and uh i'm i think this is a big challenge that we have to solve in those days i think so i think my tools are kind of like just for developers they're not really behind the scenes it's more just like uh like burner wallets are good for like a developer to quickly be able to interface with a smart contract without having to sign a bunch of transactions uh i will kind of like lean back a little bit here and give props to these guys when it comes to uh there's kind of like building the infrastructure and then decentralizing the infrastructure and building the wallet and making the wallet super safe so people don't lose money right so behind the scenes uh these folks are working really really hard not just making the thing work but making it decentralized and making it safe so you know props props to these guys thanks i just i just want to say across to these guys because this guy and nader are basically the top of the final educator and ever yeah and patrick yeah great great i'd like to i'd like to double click on that decentralized aspect aspect that you just mentioned because obviously i think as there are these providers these infrastructure providers ultimately they start centralized and then there is this argument of of progressive decentralization but it's kind of like the necessary devil in a way like what are your thoughts about that um about these types of providers and can it cause unnecessary centralization and reliance i think there was an incident with infuria where it went down for a while and you know that broke a lot of stuff unfortunately but then it was fixed so it's okay i mean i think the graph by itself is actually an interesting uh example of this progressive decentralization as the hosted service as we see today and actually also currently powers uni swap for example that i talked before um is the centralized server that was that is actually now ran by etch a node but seen but it was a necessary to build it in a centralized way in the beginning to actually have this proof of concept and then to play around with the concept of subgraphs how to interact with such a thing and then and but now since one year uh it is possible to use the decentralized graph network and actually doing the same thing that you do with the host service in a decentralized way so i think uh for the complexity of protocols like the graph it's inevitable somehow if we come at it from the perspective of a builder if i if i'm trying to quickly spin up uh an nft display i'm not going to build my own indexer i'm not going to parse the chain in the browser i'm going to find the easiest npm package to install so it shows those nfts and a lot of times that's going to be some central server that that could fall over right so on our end we need to do a good job of having those packages available that are decentralized that have you know the full breadth of decentralization behind it so it doesn't fall over the same but if we come at it from the developer's point of view you have to understand that they're going to grab the first thing off the shelf that works they're going to try three things and the one that works is the one that's going to get shipped right so we need to do a good job behind the scenes of having that mpm package be as resilient as possible yeah i just want to add on that that for example like as you're saying developers want to get stuff built quickly right and uh you know decentralization is a progress a progression it's not like binary zero to one so basically you just progress you know in fewer is not centralized maybe it will be you know like is is a progression that is actually making uh people and developers building quicker stuff easier and uh you know we are just getting there we are so early in the space and i think it's just a matter of time that you see all these solutions spin out maybe centralized and then decentralized i love you know the way that you know austin is building scaffolding like it's it's part of a journey you know and maybe you know in the future or maybe they're already there you know like front-end libraries that you can pre-build and and having basically like 24 hours hackathon mvp done in in in a fraction of the time you know i remember four years ago it was like such a nightmare and and now it's totally different well how how do you think like the speed of development versus five years ago versus it is now do you think there is a considerable difference or do you think there are still some major hurdles that people have to jump through both yeah it's still it's like way faster now right like when we see it i feel like about eath new york 2019 i started to see it really speed up we started to see instead of i did this one hackathon project that took all weekend to get this you know gross html page up where i could click this and the metamask came up to now i'm building a block or i'm using a set of building blocks and i'm building a product with those building blocks and that was like 2019 and i i would give a lot of props to the hard hat guys i feel like that was one of the big pieces of infrastructure that came in that just was just like 20 earmuffs over here consensus guy it was like 20 or 30 better than truffle and i think it sped up development and developers enjoyed it so like that's that's one big one so i think development has sped up it is a lot easier there's a lot more things on the shelf it's a lot easier to grab a few building blocks and make a product but i think we have a long ways to go especially in the realm of decentralizing these things and making these things more resilient yeah yeah and i mean five years ago when i started uh working in the space then i mean the graph didn't exist and so we had this we had to do this indexing by ourselves vbr kind of beaver i worked for the project called melonport that's now enzyme we were fully dedicated to uh to being fully decentralized and then we in the end we ended up kind of shipping an electron app that people needed to download and then you started up that app and the first thing it does is it starts to index the blockchain for you so you so we can actually display some charts and that was so cumbersome and so in that regard there is a step forward but still some some stuff when i look at it kind of compared to web 2 tech like if you look at react for example kind of how battle tested it is as a library and then you look at some libraries that are heavily used in the blockchain space where it's kind you still have kind of these rough edges then you think okay maybe there needs to be more more thought on it and more people working on this [Music] well if if you see like from your perspective ideally this is outside of your project but it may also be something inside it's like what do you think has really been the biggest breakthrough in terms of tools and infrastructure like is there one thing that you can point out and said that made a huge impact on the industry the graph counts the graph uh hard hat i think is another big one i mean i think every you know roll ups roll ups and the you know faster transaction cheaper transaction and uh and deployment infrastructure you know like in fewer alchemy those those guys you know even like alchemy like creating competition for the same thing right yeah yeah scaffolding delirium but i think not only like about tooling infrastructure like a big um you know a big change that we had compared five years ago is educational resources like you know like you get those guys like that there's they're making educational content and people from web 2 can spin up their dabs in what less than 40 hours even like in what it was eat to buy that you spin up like on may net you know half an hour workshop that was amazing right nice um obviously the big talk of the town at the moment is the merge um what kind of impact do you think that this will have on on infrastructure providers if any and also all the tools the indexing things like this i mean for for the graph what i know is like the indexers um they kind of need to index the beacon chain completely and at some point they need to upgrade the aragon thing and and for them it will be quite challenging um but but it will i mean everybody's looking forward to it and other than that the graph doesn't really take that much care of it because it just sees the blockchain as one history so i don't expect big hiccups there and from the standpoint again from the standpoint of the lazy developer who just wants to build something everything is technically going to work the same except we're going to get some new tools to play with like bls signatures and stuff like i i'm still like oh what's going to happen yeah it's uh from from what i've heard from the standpoint of the caveman developer that just wants to build a product on top everything will work pretty much similar you'll just get some new tools to add to your your toolbox yeah yeah mostly this uh this engine api and we will perform the the the load of work but i i just want to say basically the things that will not change because we're in the developer conference today will probably be the developer experience and uh and by the way tomorrow we will interview also like team and and drake on on on the merge changes and we want to say like he is always drake is always using this metaphor about changing the diesel uh the diesel car with the electric car while you are in a freeway at 90 and you know the driver even doesn't notice that so it's it's and that's the developer and i think this metaphor is exactly what what people are referring to the developer experience will not change but people get much more secure secure and scalable transaction out of it um i want to remind you guys at this point please ask questions because we're going to transition to that in a moment based off of the experience that you guys have had like are there any kind of um yeah unsolved problems or opportunities that you see in the tools and infrastructure space or you're wondering why aren't more people doing that have you ever tried to get the transactions for an account from the chain you basically have to start from block zero yeah and look through all the transactions for that address and then move on to block one and look through all the transactions in the block looking for that address so just indexing is like a huge issue that like maybe we should build that into the client a little bit better like wouldn't it be cool if i could query geth for all my transactions that was really subtle yeah at tooling in general actually i think um uh yes some of so some of the underlying tools that are that are still used i mean as good as they are let's say ethers js i mean it's a very good tool but it's just i think it's just one maintainer right it's not maybe some community maintainers but like rigmarole counts as multiple people i think that's true that's true it's a base it's a 10x but so 10 10 developers but still the boss factor is quite quite big um so so actually but maybe it's also a little bit the strategy of the commons right so because you can just use ethers there is no token you do not pay for it and uh so i would love to see more people get involved with this tooling stuff and really make it solid proof so that we don't have kind of hard bleed problems on ethereum at some point because just one weak link had a problem yeah basically like differentiates clients you know and not having this monopoly of gas for example i think you know people are starting using bayes when they cool more moreover but but i think yeah that's definitely a monopoly um but what was the question again the the the unsolved problems that you see in the ecosystem i think i don't know i would like to see more uh you know front make make life easier for developer focusing on front-end and focusing more on solidity and and less on the front end it's always like a pain in those workshops where people you know have you know just give them like a pre-built uh um front-end libraries i mean basically what's what you're doing with customers and you spend 10 minutes on the smart contract and 40 minutes on the react getting elements where they need to be yeah yeah yeah and i don't know and the other things maybe is a little bit different but i think dao you more more down aggregator toolings because right now we have a bunch of aggregator defy lama and and everybody spinning those aggregator out about the layer two we saw before with with uh with uh rollups but i think you know the aggregator more information about governance they're educating much more like also the the end users um and you know a part of that i think also maybe you know smart contract security platform you know you have fuzzing you have diligence you have different things but it's still very difficult to the end user to understand quickly if a project is some sort of like you know not well done as from the technical level right um i think tooling around this might be you know like even no code security platform i don't know even like the seed phrase and a private key and when you lose it you're host forever right it's awful ux that's like i would i would call that an unsolved problem just because we haven't built a great smart contract well i mean there's great smart contract wallets out there gnosis safes argents uh but like maybe there's some things that need to change at the plat the the protocol level to make those smart contracts more powerful like delegated execution and stuff like that but that's another unsolved problem it's just like that bad ux of losing that's a whole bag of eggs basically yeah and we're talking about how difficult it is to build on this stack and how a lazy developer will pull something off the shelf maybe maybe if it was less complicated there'd be less developer apathy toward decentralizing and the developer would be thinking about decentralization out of the box and maybe that we we'd see better products getting built yeah that's fair um is there anything from like the pro the stuff that you're working on currently about maybe your road map that you would maybe like to share or something cool that's on the on the horizon alpha win token is that a win token [Laughter] i mean the the graph roadmap was recently published and there is a lot going on with cross cross chain indexing uh indexing other chains indexing other data sources like rv um is planned cosmos is on on the way and a lot of improvements in in terms of indexing speed there's also much to see in the next uh in the next month um it's definitely checking checking i mean like it's probably a i know five to ten paper pages a blog post with a lot of information but if you are curious what's going on in the graph then that's a good place to start yeah i want to say decentralization is all about community rights we're building tools to give power back to the developers so like for example as i mentioned before like this cross chain liquidity you know like people should being able to build on top of an infrastructure for example i don't know metamask building snaps you know the community the developer are building those naps you know they have the pain point they don't they don't have like this solana i don't know integration bull beam build your snap you know it should not be like you know that the team at this core having all the due diligence on the ground it should be that the community is starting to build something like what's happening with the roll-ups and layer twos right people are feeling a pale pain point and they just start building on top of this layer and i think that's why like this i'm super pumped about these extensions on top of metamasks that are not owned by mitamas is some sort of like layered layer one for all all the problems that people solve not just about um you know that's why i'm i'm i'm quite excited about that yeah cool i'm bringing in i'm bringing in the last question and i thought of another problem in the space and that's how expensive audits are we need more auditors in the space to make audits cheaper and i think that with build guild and with scaffolding we're focusing on kind of the one like you you've gone zero to one you understand how to deploy a nft and a token but really understanding the space takes this whole tour of duty where you need to build a whole bunch of things a decks and a multi-sig and you need to get closer to being auditor level and we as an ecosystem need to put challenges up and resources up to get people from i can build a simple dex to i can actually audit this like amm platform and just have a better auditing ecosystem what are your what are your top tools that you suggest to developers to use it today like for for auditing easier and faster i i'm a terrible auditor so i don't think i would be the best person to ask i hear like foundry is a really great new tool for running tests quickly shout out to georgios on that one cool well we can now go to some of the audience questions so the first one is and one of you can answer this and we can go from there uh but how are l2 sequences kept censorship resistance i don't know enough about it at like the protocol level to know how it works i think that's the question for twitter yeah yeah you got to ask l2 guys but what's cool about those sequencers on optimism is they're earning a bunch of fees and those fees are getting fed back into public goods and it's like at the protocol level so there's something else happening there that's very magical that i'm really interested in and it's the public goods the retroactive public goods funding cool cool all right got a retro pgf fan in the house all right this one is how will the graph scale well well for layer 2 chains quick swap had some issues with their analytics page on polygon when blocks moved faster than the indexing yeah yeah i like the questions it's actually this one keeps me very busy or like the whole team uh the answer is uh there was so the graph did kind of decentralized development into core dev teams and actually by doing so the first core dev team after at your node was streaming fast and streaming force created a technology called the fire hose which can increase indexing speed 10x and more and this thing is currently being rolled out and that will more or less solve that problem and i saw it already in the demos and it really looks uh impressive and um so this will be rolled out but more kind of more performance things are are actually in the making indexing performance is actually one of the highest priority if you go to the roadmap you see there are a lot of initiatives just targeting it exactly that problem cool thanks for sharing sounds like a tough one one question is around the new tools for after the merge could you maybe mention some of them my my one two was the bls signature where you can use groups of people to sign things cool so like yeah that was all i know okay um and then there was another one about the tools aimed towards security i think you mentioned one um are there any other tools around security for the audience well you should take on the ethernet challenge that's one of the first things you should do uh hard hat and foundry are both great like write good tests uh go see previous audits uh a lot of i was talking to an auditor the other day and the way they train their new audits or their new hires is basically have them audit stuff before they audit stuff and see if they can find it go find an audit and before you read it try to audit the contract and see if you can find things first right there's tons of audits out there where you can learn a lot from it just start by going to solidity by example and looking through all the attacks and go and reproduce those attacks either in remix or scaffolding or hard hat or foundry and just like reproduce them and learn how how those attacks work that's going to get you a lot closer to being able to become a real auditor yeah you tried out fuzzing that that's also quite interesting with the new release there's one more question about how do you see wallets in games and the easy interactions of the blockchain and like i guess for you with metamask is that something you're actively working on for what for gaming it's wallets and gaming yeah i mean i'm i'm quite interested to see like gaming on layer twos you know like those uh avagoji even like side chains on you know not not mentioning you know skeleton axis but it's super interesting how they scale up but uh but i think a dedicated wallet for for use cases makes sense but i think it's better to to focus on the the main use case and then build on top having for example snaps extension for like gamers that are actually allowing you know specific um specific methods to do stuff i think uh and i mean your demo was great about the gaming that you spin up in those in one hour less than one hour we we kind of showed how the burner wallet was powerful there right where i i basically had a character on a map and i was moving that character north or south or east or west and with metamask it's a lot more secure but when i hit north it pops a thing up i say yes we wait a little bit the block gets mined the piece moves i hit north again repeat that whole process but then what i did was i send a little money to a burner wallet and you'll see a lot of blockchain games using session wallets burner wallets where you fund a wallet that's less secure because you've got a private key in local storage but then behind the scenes that wallet is signing transactions very quickly and i was able to like go left left left left left up up up up and they're all transactions and they're getting signed and they're going to the mim pool and they're getting mined but there's no there's not that like pop-up right and i can almost imagine a version of metamask and i bet dan will never do this but a little autopilot check checkbox that just sounds like like keep keep like if i keep sending you transactions of this type less than a dollar just go ahead and send them for this session right he's like dan will never do that going going back to we want to make things usable but security is like the most important part there right super thank you um and the last question is do you have any tips for like the educational providers to encourage devs more towards infrastructure as opposed to building the apps or actually do you feel like there's actually a fair balance at the moment i think it's i think it's just like awareness right i feel like when i built my first app and it was totally insecure i got like griefed a lot like bro this is not secure right like there's a lot of griefing and it's like oh okay i need to do a better job of making this more decentralized or something just like awareness within the space yes you pulled those things off the shelf yes you made an nft app pretty quickly but here's all the like six places where that's gonna fall over when it actually like gets it gets pushed on by anything yeah yeah i was the one i had awareness i was when i had like you know going to hackathon and trying to build spin up stuff easy and then when you actually have this type of like um you know education even going you know trying to you know get some you know third party um third-party company advisory trying to help out you know contribute to the house i think it's you know it's just a progression of things and uh and then you will just keep up uh you know keep up uh doing what you love basically cool well do you have any closing comments or things that you want to share with the audience or speedrun ethereum.com if you are a developer or you know a developer that's a web to developer that wants to get into web3 tell them to speed run ethereum oh my god or developer dao come to developer dao and go even if you want to learn there are a lot of helpful people around a lot of del operado people are also here so this is a very good place to start yeah i don't know just keep learning and and build uh build cool stuff right and just have mentors around you like and uh like like this guy here it's like someone was asking me out here if they're not a technical person or they're not a developer how do they get into space and my answer was become a power user get meta mask learn how that seed phrase works uh go swap some tokens go get an ens name go deploy a gnosis safe understand how a multi-sig works like become a power user and everything else will fall into place there's always a job to be done somewhere that's fair well please give a big round of applause to these panelists thank you so much for coming absolute pleasure [Music]