BBW23 – Day 1 – An Update from the Protocols

[Music] okay so as you might have recognized from the previous kind of interaction I love Liv Lively opinion so certainly like if you do have questions interaction or whatever um I guess the way they're going to kind of do it is hold it to the end um but definitely hold on to that level of inquiry if we don't have time for it I'll be around afterwards and I'm sure like a lot of the panelists will as well so so I I totally love that um the way I'm kind of going to do it is just start with just introductions and I'll introduce myself I'm John Woodard um I'm from wol from blockchain Labs we actually do not have a blockchain which is sometimes a little bit of a misnomer so I guess I'm doing the the moderating here um I've been at Wolfram for over 12 years um from that time I've gone from helping to monetize uh wol Alpha to now like working pretty closely with Steven wolffram who's the founder and CEO in running a subsidiary with blockchain and now I'm doing stuff um with kind of the the current wave of AI so it's kind of I'm going back again in a way to AI so it's kind of funny how that works um but I want to just pass things along to our panelists and they can introduce themselves um and then from there we'll just kind of get into more questions sure hi everybody my name is John hilard uh I'm I work for polygon I'm a director of blockchain infrastructure and Dev tools which basically means my team works on testing the variety of uh blockchain clients and protocols that polygon develops I really love my job I get to play around with a lot of different blockchain clients so proof of stake ZK miden supernets all those things my team is generally responsible for figuring out ways to break those clients make them more reliable and figure out like you know how to scale them uh and make them more robust over time so excited to talk to you all today good morning my name is John luad dinovi I am a local so Harvard faculty work for M General and then since a few years I started uh working in the blockchain space I'm an expert in high performance Computing and after designing a lot of interoperability stack for the Department of Defense I found that there was a room for improvement in some of the blockchain protocols so I developed a couple of different protocols and right now I'm representing edger that is a a layer one blockchain awesome hey guys my name is Jesse I've been part of the Boston ecosystem for a really long time started a company back in 18 uh for mining which is kind of rare for this general area uh been all over the centralized exchanges uh you know as well as starting uh the current company which is trustar we do simple self- custody and single sign on across many different blockchains um the goal is basically to increase ownership for people uh that are getting into web 3 especially from web web 2 rails so nice to be here thank you awesome thanks everyone um so I want to survey the room quickly and just raise your hand if you feel like you're really technical you know every like protocol you know like wallets and all that stuff just to give an idea of like for both myself and the folks on the panel kind of a better idea of who's in the audience raise them high don't be okay okay great so it seems like we have a nice mix one of the things that I wanted to do was kind of mix a little bit so to educate a little bit but then also to go in techical areas if people are more interested so if you see like some technical like someone's going like more technical like just raise your hand and be like go more technical go deeper um but what I wanted to do as a next question just to give everyone a bit more background on folks because everybody has a different kind of story to how they got into crypto so I want to go back through the panel again and learn more about their story of like how they even got here yeah yeah that's awesome I uh so my background I'm uh studied computer science uh I really focused my first job would have been in like 2008 right at the beginning of the first uh the recession in that time uh I was a web developer so my background is really JavaScript HTML CSS PHP that's like my first stack and you know my first love is really JavaScript in some way um I first got introduced to crypto at lunch with other developers you know someone was like oh have you heard about Bitcoin I was like tell me more it was like oh you have to you can earn money from running your computer and I was like what is the computer doing they're like nothing really uh and I was like no it's got to be like folding at home or SE right it's doing something like no no no literally nothing um so I was fascinated at that point I started uh Bitcoin mining uh almost right away uh just because it sounded really fascinating to me and so I kept that as a hobby for a couple years and then when I first heard about ethereum around in in 2015 or so I switched to ethereum mining because it sounded more practical uh in some way I'm like okay you can actually do something it's not just value uh I kept that as a hobby and and then eventually as like The nft Craze like maybe two or three I was super into crypto Kitty all that uh I developed some smart contracts and got into it and then when I was looking to move out of you know web development I started looking for jobs and uh and I really really wanted to get into blockchain I I just find the technology and the problems there really fascinating so it worked out that you know as I was deploying smart contracts I had started using polygon because it gave you know me a cheaper way to deploy smart contracts uh and so when I was looking for jobs that's basically it it was a perfect fit for what I was looking for at at that time and so that's kind of my journey from you know web development into um running the infra an infr team at at polygon so John I'm going to drill down just a little bit sorry I change changing on the Fly keep on your toes um can you tell people more about polygon and kind of what makes it unique because that seems like such a part of like your story yeah so it's interesting so just to remind a little bit when I was looking for jobs I really wanted to find a place not only that was in crypto but also something that I had used so I wanted to be in a product that wasn't just sort of uh theoretically interesting something that was practically interesting and from the polygon perspective you know we talk about it as an ethereum scaling solution as a the proof of stake chain if you are familiar with deploying on ethereum it's going to you're going to feel right at home deploying on on on polygon it's the same tools the same technology it's evm compatible uh to the maximum degree and uh yeah that that was basically the pitch that's what drew me in and and like even in the web development space I always loved thinking about scalability and performance issues and I wanted to be working for a protocol that was you know trying to solve that at scale and um I'll get more into like how we're doing that in other ways besides proof of stake but that was the original original draw and what polygon has really thinking about scaling ethereum awesome well uh like I was saying high performance Computing so since I was very young I've been trying to make software go fast go fast I've been developing 3D engines for VR AR video games the computer vision AI always these exponential technologies that have one thing in common hard Computing gpus and need for optimize the access and use of resources uh here I lead the a lab at Mass general which is a medical device and simulation lab and I got close to blockchain because I was looking for a technology to certify medical records because a patient get hurt uh maybe there is a mistake of a of a doctor and they can change the data they own the log so potentially there's no way to find out if someone has been tempering the data so having a technology that can certify and track if something changes was very important so I started studying uh the different protocols and um while I was studying the different protocols I just realized oh wow there are things that can be done better I mean I come from a different field like for example in surgical robotics you have the problems of going very fast in exchanging data and I said oh but if they change this if they change that like especially if you look at smart contract today are highly centralized and and the processing is super slow there's still not very good technology for that so I started uh playing around and I said perhaps I'll do a a blockchain just for medical purposes for healthcare and then I said I started studying more and more and I almost became the city of cardano I've been doing almost all the interviews and then I started creating my own blockchain and then I simply met edger on the way and de it's a small company uh but what I liked about you Ledger is that um it is mostly an Enterprise blockchain so it's not a token Centric blockchain and it's actually tackling all the other opportunities that there are behind the blockchain because the blockchain and the cryptos are two different things people it's misleading when they talk about blockchain they think it's about they're talking about crypto so talking about Bad actors when you're talking about blockchain makes no sense it's like to talk about Bad actors when you talk about I don't know uh my SQL that's a technology and the other instead is a is a currency and they use each other so I like the idea of of you know tackling other kind of uh problems uh that blockchain can uh can address and so I I started adopting some of my architectural design for the blockchain and there are several interesting features for example all the blockchains out there on a single Network you have one single blockchain if you want to have para chain co- chains all these other you know secondary chains they need to have several other networks I said why don't they decouple the process from the data so you can have a network that can process and blockchains so yeah let me drill down there a little bit too I hate to say drill down repeatedly but I'm going to keep doing it um can you explain for the audience for like the the newer folks in in the audience what the difference between like a layer zero or level zero one and two um when it comes to blockchains so essentially the layer zero it's about moving data without knowledge of the data it is pretty much the protocol of synchronization of multiple agents which are the nodes of the blockchain the different nodes in the blockchain about how move the data but with no knowledge of what that data represent it can be a to transaction an nft or whatever a layer one is when instead there is an actual processing of the data so I know what data it is so I can verify this transaction and validate the transaction based on the meaning of the transaction it's a token so I want to make sure that there are enough token in the wallet to be able to transfer this token and then there is a validation that that transaction is H is uh is happening everywhere consistently and then there is a layer to which is yeah the price of one single transaction on a layer one is to I why don't I instead pack 20 different transaction in a single payload of a layer one transaction and I split the cost for by 20 for free at that point I can also gain throughput because the average layer one throughput is A500 transaction per second forget about all the big numbers you hear they are obtained through other tricks but the right now the basic trut is 1500 transaction per second so packing multiple transactions inside the payload of a single layer one transaction you can multiply by I don't know 20 50 whatever it is the number so you can obtain a a much more efficient uh interaction which makes now the blockchain more suitable for example for payments where you have you want to have a transaction finalized immediately now waiting the next block in 10 minutes these are pretty much the main differences awesome Jess can you tell like more about your story with with crypto yeah I mean I think first off it's really interesting that we have a panel full of people that are talking about protocols and yet all of us came in in some way shape or form through Hardware through gpus right Etc um I'm I'm guilty of the same thing I'm kind of a a proof of work maximalist I call myself in a def5 body um but basically I started in in crypto because of a girl um and that's kind of like the non- nerdy uh version of the story but basically was in school um was dating someone in Buffalo and realized they had really cheap power there got very into uh like looking at Mining and I'm like well I won't have to sling drinks um or you know if if I basically do this so our original idea was let's put a bunch of miners in the back of a warehouse and then uh I can continue on what I actually want to do which is entrepreneurship I was in 2013 I was the youngest kid through Draper University submitted right out of High School to uh a pitch uh to them and and got in so I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life um I thought mining was a great way to do it and the relationship didn't last but then that's probably because I was spending like 80 hours a week diving into the the crypto side of things so uh basically went down the rabbit hole uh built some of the first methodology for um turning mining from an art into more of a science so it's like asset price valuation X Network difficulty X the like literally to chip efficiency put it all together and try to predict where you can put different things that turned into kind of a white glove consultancy it was actually based out of Newton Massachusetts um so shout out the IEC as well for letting us kind of camp in their uh in their office um but then kind of got did a couple of Mines as well got basically swallowed up by binance who made me an offer I couldn't refuse ran the pool over there for about a year and a half um so if you're English speaking between 2020 and mid 2021 you're talking to me was about 5% of the Bitcoin hash rate a little bit under a perent for the ethereum I think just about um while we were there got really interested in CI defi this is right after defi summer um I was right next to binance earn which was all the oneclick solutions so from the inside of a centralized exchange you can really see kind of how their asset routing what they're doing um and uh but the other side of this was that I also got to see all the problems that people were running into especially my clients I had a Client List of about 80 80 down from like 10 minors here all the way up to I don't know uh you know some names that you might see on the NASDAQ right um and realized that a lot of these people were getting hurt in the centralized exchange it really never left my mind uh went over to a place called rain um in the Middle East uh they call themselves like kind of the coinbase of the Middle East was head of innovation there uh got very interested in kind of or invested in the protocol side of things uh listed a bunch of tokens work with the regulator um and then teral Luna hit and well we all know what that kind of what preceded that um and a couple months later I met my co-founder and that idea of all of these clients that basically uh getting hurt had never really left my mind and so we started trust wear um about a month later uh after meeting each other you know circling all the way back 10 years later to Draper University alumni reunion um and basically our goal at that point was we've seen a bunch of people where they have a single private key they get hacked uh look at mark cubin it was like literally 3 days ago $870,000 4.7 billion have been stolen attacked hacked basically in the last year alone that was just 2022 um and so we just started and said can we bring native web 2 things to blockchain for security um and we started by basically saying all right let's bring native TFA to blockchain um we got into Tech Stars and from there basically we realized that a lot of people were buying security like uh uh an arculus leure treasure never using it um and that was shocking to us so we started going down the usability side which basically brings us to now we see a couple main things and this is really like day in day out same energy as when we got into mining uh what we're focused on is usability security and accessibility um so in a few short weeks you guys will be able to try if you'd like uh basically username based payments across many different blockchains it's kind of the Gateway in um be able to send things just like venmo um um with that you know on top of many protocols that's built on Axel who may actually be here as well kind of some Boston ties there um and that's kind of my bridge story so yeah aesome awesome um so John why don't you tell me more about where polygon is now and actually about your ZK evm launch that happened in March that seems phenomenal we've kind of hit on that in different ways and talking about layer twos can can you go into that more and first by like explaining like zero knowledge proofs and and stuff just just just at a very high level so that we don't like go in too far okay yeah yeah so um I I think if people have used polygon and they're familiar with polygon as a brand they probably use the proof of stake chain which um from a technology perspective uh is is technically a commit chain so it's like a side chain there there's debate of like is it L2 side chain rollup whatever but um the way that works you know there's two clients that are working together one is a fork of gu and the other is a fork of tender tender is kind of the consensus layer bore which is the fork of gu which is doing evm execution and so that's why it feels so familiar to use from a from a either smart contract deployment or RPC perspective because it's very similar to go ethereum and that's where kind of the we have a ton of transactions a lot of activity on that particular chain um over the last year there's been a lot of really exciting development in the ZK front um in March we I think probably a year ago now we deployed ZK evm test net um but then in March of this year we deployed ZK evm mainnet and I'm trying to think how to how even my just my mental model of how this works um instead of being uh on ethereum there's a smart contract that can verify zero knowledge proofs um and I don't have a handy you know explanation of what a zero knowledge proof is I'll handwave it away to say that it's a very cryptographically secure way to understand the result of execution so what we're doing is we're executing transactions um in a rollup which I could explain what that means more and proving that the execution was done in a certain way so the ZK proof is submitted to L1 which L1 in this case is is ethereum and it's verified on L1 that proof guarantees that execution was done offchain in accordance with the you know Moon maath ZK circuits um that are implemented on L2 so that has been released in production for several months now we're doing all kinds of uh improvements for performance we did another hard Fork I think probably two days ago the dragon fruit update which you know adds even more improvements I think it adds push zero if you're a smart contract developer a lot of cool stuff on that front um but yeah that that ZK mainnet uh has been in production for a few months now uh and I think from our perspective you know from my perspective I should say that you know ZK evm is a building block that we can use to do all kinds of exciting things that were announced as you know polygon 2.0 multi- chains interop which we could talk more about uh later as well but kind of the history of what's happened you know we've gone from proof of stake which is the you know go ethereum Fork which is a ethereum scaling we've done a lot of development even on that so if you're a polygon user there's a lot of great um improvements that have happened even even in the last few months at uh eth Boston I gave a talk on reorgs and what reorgs are and why they're a challenge um even in the next few we've already done a hard Fork that greatly decreases the amount of reorgs and how deep they can be uh in the coming weeks we're doing another Fork which will add uh deterministic finality to polygon as well so there's a lot of protocol Improvement even in the proof of stake layer but I think there's a lot of really you know hyperscale uh big developments coming on the ZK front in the coming months with polygon 2.0 as well gotcha so I'm going to have like a follow-up question there one two all the people in the audience that didn't have their hands raised don't worry like I'm blown away by this answer and like would have to like watch it again on YouTube or whatever to catch all of it but one thing I did catch in like real time was reorg that I didn't recognize what is that can you explain that to people sure so I think one of the other panelists talked about finality and you know when you work with a blockchain there's always this possibility that you know when you have a distributed system how does the how does the chain on the whole come to consensus on what is the authoritative block if I send a transaction and it's mined in one block what is my guarantee that um that transaction isn't reverted later um and reorgs are the process by which a blockchain moves from one canonical chain to another um so my client at one point in time thought that you know chain a was the canonical chain but over time I realized there's actually a longer uh more final or more you know difficult chain somewhere else and a reorg is when I move from one chain to the other and uh historically polygon proof of stake and also um ethereum itself were probabilistic in terms of their finality which meant the only way you can get a guarantee that a a transaction is not going to be reverted is just to wait a really long time and the longer you wait the more blocks you wait the more likely it is that the transaction will not be reverted um but in the coming weeks we're going to add deterministic finality which would allow you to say like this block will not be reorg there's no probability anymore it's it's deterministic based on uh checkpoint and Milestone implementation that we've added gotcha gotcha awesome um Gan Luca first of all I hope that I'm getting your name right if not it's just my I okay great excellent so one of the things in like looking at new Ledger um that I think John kind of hit on and like i' said a little bit is like blockchain is really complex and like every month there's something more complex and if you're even if you're sitting there every day at your computer 145 hours a day you will will literally you will fall behind um so from what I've heard about you Ledger you guys are trying to make things easier especially in business H how are you guys doing that from like a service perspective and from an architecture perspective for people are developing Solutions yeah uh for example the scenario that you was describing about waiting for a transaction to be finalized and not being reverted those things are things that the new generation blockchain should not happen when I send a transaction has has to go through I can't get the surprise it's like I make a payment for a car and then five minutes later they refunded me the money after I took the car so the the possibility to create uh you know anti forking uh blockchain which means that there is one string of blocks there is no possibility to split in two different branches and one of them gets wiped out at some point the zero knowledge proof it's one other system with zero knowledge proof proof means that I have some data I want someone to validate that data but without reading the data so how can you do this well I take the data I extract a signature and I ask that person to sign to verify the signature not the data so he can see the the the data can just see the signature and can tell me yeah that signature is exactly the way it's supposed to be because taking two different moments the two signature matches they didn't change so the data has been not tempered and uh and so so possibility to integrate AI in the blockchain they say how can you integrate block AI in blockchain think about smart contract you want to execute a smart contract because of data that is on chain what if you want a transaction to happen for example if your clients uh are adopting a certain type of trend rather than another how can you do that well what you want to do is to be able to process offchain data through a private Cloud for example and have a smart cont contract that is a little bit smarter and for example can leverage some AI That's why gpus now the story of the high performance Computing the possibility to do things that are not done in other environments adopt AI to try to find uh malicious Trends or behaviors on the on the network uh so have assistance in writing smart contracts or even inv validating smart contracts you can't say that the blockchain it's easy if you expect uh you know huny Gina that is an old lady to see if the code of smart contract is correct you can't do that so at least you need to provide a lady a a piece of AI that can do that analysis and say okay this smart contract is okay it's only doing ab andc nothing else so this is a new generation blockchain whatever it's there is struggling with throughput is struggling with usability struggling with security it's not good Paradigm needs to shift needs to evolve gotcha and and Jesse like from what I understand of working with trust wear that you're trying to solve a lot of these problems more from like the client side of things can you explain cuz I know like one I suppose well you tell me about like whether it fits into the category of like a protocol yeah it's it's interesting it's kind of like a parallel or right before the protocol and a in the value chain so when we look at kind of where uh value of crws in crypto in general I see two distinct areas one and you can kind of see the Gold Rush there is you've got kind of the the user the wallets this is where like the exchanges lie essentially it's user facing here on the other very farther end of that is the actual protocols themselves right and in between there is this giant layer which I think we're seeing more of right now which is the middleware layer this is kind of where you can add value between where the user and wallet or exchange Etc is and where the protocol is and so we sit directly there I'd say we sit as close as possible to where the user and wallet will wallet are are um I think the real idea is that we're not necessarily A protocol but we do have kind of the infrastructure Primitives to build other uh other apps on top so if you look at kind of where we're focused it's usability security and access to Value uh these are the same things that happened in web 2 usability we went from IP addresses to Dooms and suddenly you can actually look things up right um next is SSL in 94 right this is uh this is the security layer this is what allowed PayPal for example to be possible and then there's the single sign on Revolution where you know we can all get on a a Google call because we all have a Gmail account we don't have to do that so looking at the way that web 2 reached 86% of uh of everyone on the planet we follow those same lines we build sdks on each of those different things um in order to essentially allow for the b2bs the the businesses the protocols the um the the the daps for example um to use these things to create value based relationships and for users to have a better time even just getting into web web 3 um and that's really where we're focused so yeah I I think that's kind of the the short answer um I will say I do have one thing uh which is a ZK uh ZK analogy that I could do in 12 seconds which I'd like to I like to bring in I'm going to time it okay cool yeah so um we've all been to uh a concert venue right the bouncer outside checks your ID right and then they give you a wristband and you walk in and you can buy a drink for those of you that are 21 right um the person giving you the drink doesn't have to know anything about your ID no name no nothing anything they just know that someone else that they trust checked you that's a ZK it's pretty close pretty close so all right cool we have about like less than 2 minutes left um I think Ian actually has a microphone if you have any questions for myself or any of the audience I mean any of the uh the panelists sorry hello this is Sati great panel so as you mentioned that you are building something uh V more for crypto so my question is uh currently the market is people are buying cryptocurrencies for investment so people are not buying cryptocurrencies to make payment the the sellers or Merchants will accept cryptocurrencies because uh they don't have to pay any gas cost because they already receive some cryptocurrencies so they they can put this cryptocurrencies into different protocol they can stake assets but why someone will buy cryptocurrencies just to make an payment it's a good question um right now if you like there's kind of a giant segregation between different fintechs um there are places in the world where there aren't quite as much like we're we're all privileged here we sit here in America we can use our card we can do whatever there's a lot of people out there that doesn't work and so crypto in in general and I think blockchain in general is when you put them together is kind of a way to bridge that Gap app it's a more Equitable way and so it's not like you need to have any other credentials for a self- custody wallet in order to uh to start something and if we can simplify and there are many people working on this simplify the inroad from Fiat in then it's easier to transfer crypto all over the world uh without any other kind of Gatekeepers than for example using venmo or whatever um that's yeah that's the short answer so I'm going to jump in to as like a point of privilege or whatever as moderator like the question that I was kind of talking about previously when it comes to crypto is that's like when it comes to Nakamoto that's the original crypto application is to basically knock over Elite institutions and kind of from Cipher punks be more anarchic um and I mean that like from a Grassroots level regardless of your ideological maybe predispositions or positioning and that's to say that like as Grassroots people that you can now have some say in monetary policy where before that's like like literally it's elitist in like power institutions right like if you're like you have people who are and it like it sounds really weird but it's very true you have you know people who run central banks that often are not accountable to anybody they're not elected um and it's kind of one of those things whether you agree or not with their positioning and what they're doing um you can see that there are various other systems that could exist that people can do um so to me that's one of the most important applications is that original application that people have tried over and over again to kind of achieve some success with only to be knocked back or knocked down and I think like previously that's why I would like you know uh critique that point of like the previous panel that like it's not as though things are happening kind of independently there's always responses for these kind of movements or these kind of um these kind of positions so so that's what I would kind of say um and I think we're over time or do we have more oh we have more time oh no okay we're overtime I'm getting that like literally right literally um well well my mic didn't cut off which would have been something else to be okay so I guess that's it and we okay yeah thank you [Music]