The Future of Smart Contracts - Tiago Tavares | Parity Technologies

Well then, welcome everyone. Polka dot is rewriting the history of smart contracts and we are bringing the most advanced ultimate state-of-the-art smart contracts technology to your hands. Some weeks ago, Vitalik floated the idea of replacing EVM with a risk 5 architecture as the only way forward for scaling. But let's imagine that future is not five years from now. It's not one year from now.

It's already here and it's on Polka Dot. So yes, Polka Dot already supports Risk 5 and yes, you can build on it today. And for those that are hearing for the first time, um, think of Polka Dot as a cloud that is doing to web 3 what AWS is doing to web 2. And its architecture comprises of three main components. The services that you can build on the systems applications and the interoperability layer.

At the moment you can build two types of services, smart contracts in our uh polka dot hub, an Ethereum compatible um smart contracts platform that you can leverage all the EVM tooling that you have at the moment. Hardat, Open Zeppelin, Foundry, and all the wallets. And you can also build roll-ups, the equivalent of L2s on Ethereum. The systems programs um allow for governance, the treasury, and you can directly access them through your applications, through your smart contracts, and through the roll-ups. And finally, the interoperability.

Um, XCM protocol allows, for example, to for you to communicate through your smart contract with uh another rollup. For the rest of this presentation, I want uh to show you how all of this works behind the hood, how you can go to market and scale up your business, why choosing Polka Dot, and what you can do for the rest of the week, and what you can start now. So, let's visualize you just developed your Solidity smart contract. What we're going to do is we're going to grab that code and we're going to compile it using SolC the standard Ethereum Solidity compiler front end that generates um a UL Solidity's low-level um intermediate representation. Next, we run that ule through our state-of-the-art compiler, which translates it into LLVM, the same intermediate language that is used in most modern software languages like Rust and C++.

From there, we optimize and compile the code to Risk 5 machine codes, a clean open hardware instruction set. And finally, we'll link the result into a polka dot compatible u metadata blob, a format that can be executed and deployed onchain. The entire compilation and optimization pip pipeline op happens um offchain. So in your local setup for example and the final artifact is fast, portable and ready to run within the polka dot runtime. So why not EVM contract?

Well, it's the industry standard and and yes, it's true that EVM is most is mostly widely used um and adopted within web3 today. Most layer ones and L2s support EVM. But there's a catch is painfully slow. Any smart contract that does real work like verifying uh cryptography or some mathematical complex logic is you know needs pre-ompiles for example so that the gas use is slow is low that's like saying here's the computer but for anything else you need to plug in some adapter and the EVM is also not a general purpose virtual machine and it has limited uh usefulness. It's not used outside of web 3 for example.

So EVM is constrained. It's domain specific language like solidity or viper since blockchains that adopt EVM are basically resource metered virtual machines and need these specific languages to to run. And another question is why not was contracts? They are they have widely language adoption but they take orders of magnitude longer to compile than EVM contracts to execute. So we already there's already benchmarking studies for example this one that compares PAC VM recompiler PA uh VM interpreter Solana RVPF and and WASMI all the the last three are state-of-the-art uh technologies and we can see that the compilation times is significant um in poker VM compiler But the execution time is much slower than the other technologies.

So and Pokevm recompiler is super optimized. And we can also use uh pokerv interpreter for other use cases. For example, the first to execute the same smart contract again and again and other and the interpreter for other kinds of use cases. So in the end what we want to achieve is 30 seconds finality which um in comparison to Ethereum is seven days subsecond block times Ethereum compatible tooling where you can port all your existing codes into our platform reliability and low latency. through integration and native interoperability through XCM and direct access to our system applications.

The current tools to build on polka dot hub that you have available for this echathon for example um is hard. Um so we have developed a plug-in uh plug-andplay and remix and many more are to come at the end of the year. So what you can do to go to market and to scale up your application. Polka dot offers a very clear path to scaling which is you can build your own rollup uh that supports high volume and low fees. We already have we already secure 40 million plus transactions per month and these are uh consistently with low fees.

Polka dot architecture was actually first built for L2s and rollups. So it's super optimized for this use case and it's built to help you scale. In AWS you have a pay as you go model. In polka dot you have a uh a pay as you go model and we have developed state-of-the-art meth methodologies or technologies like elastic scaling. So why polka dot and the answer is is many takes into account many factors.

One of them is bandwidth. So at the moment we we provide the most data availability uh by a large margin margin compared to other solutions. We are the most resilient. We in fact have the greatest Nakamoto coefficient. And why decentralization matters, you may ask?

Well, it's way different to build a million-doll business or a multi-billion dollar business. And we believe that trillion dollar and multi-billion dollar businesses can be built on Polka Dot safely and reliably. And we are here to support that path. We are the most energy efficient and the fastest by uh TPS achieving hundreds of thousands um TPS in live networks. We have a wildly uh wide ecosystem of entrepreneurs and um environments where you can go from a student to a professional.

you can go from an echathon idea to a business. And the last question I want you to think is what to do now, what to do for the rest of the week. Uh we have three tracks for this hackathon. The first one is porting existing smart contracts on open source projects, your own projects into polka dotub, our Ethereum compatible platform and try to understand how it performs in comparison with other um EVM platforms or other technologies of your choice. just make it very explicit what the differences are and is it worse, is it better and what's the real benchmarks on all of this.

Um, you can create your brand new Solidity smart contracts. Uh, build a business model around it, pitch it, make it, uh, clear um, and try to take advantage of of what uh, I've just uh, the advantages that Polka do offers at the moment. And the price pool for for this one is split into three different prices um approximately 800 for each. And the last is to enhance the developer experience creating libraries, tools, plugins of your choice um with special consideration with the documentation and everything else uh around it. We are in the booth and we have a team that uh is here to help you and has access to uh mentorship opportunities to grants um and to help you grow the idea into a business or if you already have a business in mind and you want to integrate Polka Dot we are here um to help you do that.

So you can find support uh with these three lovely individuals uh me and and some other folks that are very easily rec recognizable through the through the through their t-shirts and and what they're wearing. So the next step is a demo a quick demo that I want to show you. Okay, let's try Yes. Okay. So I'll first create a npm um repo and I will install um some dependencies.

Bear with us. Uh we are releasing um a new version today uh which is uh way more uh simple and you can use already the the latest version of our hats uh and it follows the the documentation that you can find in npmjs and all our available documentation. This is just one example of how you can build uh with risk 5 at the moment. You can also just go to contracts.rex.

io and and and build from there. Um, okay. This one. Okay. So now I will initialize um a project with npx hard polka dot in it.

And lastly I will compile. And as you can see it generates uh Pula VM compatible artifacts that you can see up there the artifacts PVM and the cach PVM and the rest you can find in our documentation and or with us outside. So um you can configure um for example a live network at the moment uh it's called PIO it's with the polka dot testn net um or or you can spin up a local node uh that uses uh just a a substrate node. Um at the moment with this uh version you have to compile uh the binaries on your local machine and then provide a path where it says uh ETH RPC but in the new version all of this will be hidden away in with Docker containers. So this is the end of my presentation.

Uh I wish you great luck and we're here to support during the rest of the week. Thank you. Right. Let me so the so ideally um you want to create a smart contract uh and deploy it for example on a uh on polygon on on Ethereum test net and execute it and try to track how much time it takes and how much uh what's the cost of executing that this particular logic. You can do the same in Pacio and and compare.

Now you may find that for example deploying to uh PO takes way longer than deploying to Sapoleia the exact same logic and but that could be for example um RPC not still not yet optimized. Um so we will take into consideration a lot of the the efforts and u um the idea path that you have uh but you know for for the for the goods or for for the bad just just try to make the sense of uh you know trying to compare both both platforms. Ideally, you want to uh build something that's heavily uh it's has some heavy computation. You know, you can create like a a for loop and and see where it goes. Also, it would be interesting to see um if if you can if the gas limitation for deploying uh a smart contract uh differs.

So if you can create a really big um you know very large insight in in size metadata blob and and deploy in both platforms. Yes. We uh through hard hats uh we did patch uh a function that was limiting um in uh hard hats the so it would throw this error. Um so if you deploy through there maybe this particular error is is not there anymore. Okay.

Yeah. Go ahead. Okay.

Well,

so from from what I understand, you want to compare the size of the the bite code that's generated with our compiler and the bite code that's generated with with sal for example. Okay. So you you you may Okay. So basically the same logic could have different uh bite code sizes. Uh well it's a very good it's exactly that kind of exercise that we want participants to to do uh for the first track um and and see see where it goes.

I think yeah that's a that's a nice idea to explore.

Yes. Yes, we do. And

yeah, so um support basically more than solidity on on and more than rust. Uh also it's worth mentioning that you can also build uh rust smart contracts uh in polka dot topub. Um in this presentation I only focus on solidity because that's really what what uh other other platforms uh offer at the moment but we do have uh intentions of of you know supporting multiple languages and I encourage every echathon participants to actually just just try to build their own interpreter. Any any more questions? Great.

Thank you very much for listening. Have a great week.