Scaling Blockchains Towards Mass Adoption - TOKEN2049 London 2021

hello ladies and gentlemen um we have an absolutely wonderful panel for us today uh some of the smartest people in the crypto industry right now um and talking about one of the greatest topics in the crypto industry which is scaling blockchains towards mass adoption so my name is piers ridiard i am the ceo of radix dlt a public ledger focused on giving d5 builders everything they need to obsolete traditional finance by decentralizing the 360 trillion dollar global financial industry today i'm joined by four titans of the public ledger industry each of whom have an incredible background and i will give you a fast introduction now before we get on to the first topics firstly we have evan shapiro ceo of the mina foundation and co-creator of mena the world's lightest blockchain that manages to keep the entire state of a ledger in a mere 22 kilobytes which is the same size as a single tweet a self-professed computer science and crypto geek and the secret of mina blockchain comes from their fascinating use of zero knowledge proofs to roll up huge amounts of information into tiny amounts of verifiable data mina is optimizing blockchain size to achieve scalability next we have dr stan kledko a former physicist at stanford university and co-founder of cto and cto of scale labs a layer 2 for ethereum that adds scalability and functionality for decentralized applications stan's startup background comes from the traditional web 2.0 infrastructure space and he and the scale lab teams is working hard to bring that flexibility and power to decentralized ledgers to make it easy to build richly featured highly scalable decentralized applications on ethereum scale is achieving application specific layer 2 side chains to achieve scale next we have professor el ben sassoon a giant of mathematics and cryptography who founded zcash he also helped build practical implementations of zk snarks advised ethereum on the inclusion of those primitives into the ethereum public ledger and is behind much of the layer two scaling technology that is being built by so many teams on ethereum today he's also the founder one of the co-creators or the creator of zk starks which is another profound breakthrough in scalable transparent proof systems eli is president and co-founder of starkware and is building incredible breakthroughs in zero knowledge-proof systems to add incredible scalability to decentralized applications like dydx i summarize that as creating application specific sorry as as creating application scalability through transparent zero-knowledge proofs lastly we have professor emin surya ceo of ava labs professor of computer science at cornell university author of a paper on selfish mining which is the third most cited paper in the crypto space after the bitcoin white paper in the ethereum white paper he created a number of different consensus algorithms that are behind other platforms that you guys will have heard of like waves and eternity he's the co-author of the avalanche consensus algorithm and architect behind the public decentralized ledger avalanche a rapidly growing innovative decentralized ledger that has recently crossed the 14 billion dollar market cap and has over 4.5 billion dollars in total value locked in its d5 ecosystem a fantastic panel so we have three topics for discussion today the first topic is going to be a painter a picture painting exercise what does mainstream scale mean for the crypto space and let's have some spine tingling ideas about what the opportunity is here so i'm going to start with gun sure um whoa this is very loud but okay so the thing that gets me out of bed every morning the thing that gets me really really excited and uh the vision behind avalanche is not to compete with the dollars of the world it is not to compete with heroes of the world that's a great fight that's a fight for others it is not to build an internet computer that's interesting it's a good play box it's a good sandbox so other people are doing it that is not what we're after we are here to digitize all of the world's assets we built a system from the ground up that has at its core the notion of an asset if you look at other systems they don't assets are add-ons the miners or the validators involved in those systems don't even know what they're dealing with in avalanche an asset is a first-class abstraction and our goal the thing that gets me super excited is to open up for everybody's consumption trade and transfer those assets that are currently lying inert on people's balance sheets there is about 72 trillion of assets in the world money is just one of them and our goal is to take those assets and to open them up and to take them out of silos guarded by middlemen and to turn them into things that anybody can trade flat in a flat universe without having to seek permission from anybody else that's our vision it's very very simple and quite different it turns out even though it's so simple to express it's quite different from everybody else's or many other coins coins operation and and gold that's that's awesome awesome evan yes um i i think the way that i we usually often think about this is crypto's reached a point now where it kind of feels like it's um getting usability within the crypto native ecosystem but it has a long way to go before it's something that kind of the regular person is actually using and one thing we think about a lot is what tools kind of remain to get built in order to make that possible so particularly from the zero knowledge proof angle there are things like identity that you don't want to put your social security number on chain but you do want to be able to identify yourself for some applications or putting things like your financial history or your social media data or other things that are like you're going to need to interact with the crypto world but you don't want to just like put on chain um things like zero knowledge proofs gives you a way to start doing that in a way that keeps privacy so i i think that where we are now we're missing a lot of those primitives still so that's something that we think a lot about and i think will be a key to getting it to like this really mainstream level as you i mentioned it's awesome stan yeah so when we actually went to vcs like in 2017 and created scale the vision that we saw sold to vcs was that we're going to take web 2 and move it to ethereum compatible web 3 essentially replacing every website with a blockchain and you know we talked about things like decentralized uber decentralized google you know drivers pay to uber 30 every time they hate it you could create a uber where drivers pay zero you could decentralize google twitter actually asked on twitter which company people want to decentralize most and they say google you know google is such a crappy company i i remember you know when i first saw google in 1999 they were just a fantastic search engine and now you search google and they just shovel into you this information which you just don't need it's just total crap i think so and my personal personal reason why i got so excited definitely such an interesting field but another thing is that it allows us to solve problems that seem to be unsolvable like in our world basically what we have is that we have wall street and we have washington dc and we have people in washington dc printing money and this money goes into the wall street and people in the third world pay for it so there's pretty much no way for these people in this real world to to actually get out of this crappy life they have and i think blockchain provides this way and that's actually one of the reasons we we think at scale that we really like what we do it's awesome so uh looking around the world one could be a bit dystopian a lot of our information is now harvested packaged and monetized by these big trusted parties and we're not happy with that we sort of woke up and realized that that's not the way it should be and it happened very quickly right and of course the more we move things of importance over to the virtual and digitized world the more this is hurting us so but of course the answer to that is you know democratizing and decentralizing again and that's exactly what blockchains at their core offer they offer this more democratic notion where the root of trust is not based on you know big trusted parties be they banks or or you know googles or whatnot but it should be sort of made in a way that everyone is invited to inspect the integrity of the full system and that's what blockchains deliver however however they have this issue of scale they have several issues but one of them is one of scale and what really gets me up in the morning and very excited is is the fact that um you know there's this technology based on very deep math and cryptography that goes back a few decades that is just perfectly fit for empowering blockchains to reach even greater scale and what starker is doing and there are others as well doing that you know of one and mena and many others zcash and others it's it's a big effort across many teams is using this amazing technology coming from cryptography science math and using it to reach massive scale and offer privacy and a lot of good things so that's number one thing that gets me up in the morning number two is of course just having this amazing team of collaborators that are just innovating in ways that i could never imagine and more concretely seeing that the things that we're now doing with our technology is you know allowing dydx to reach a tps that is higher than bitcoin and and at times higher than ethereums for a fraction of the gas cost um and and even more concretely seeing you know being able to tell my kids that something like tick tock is deploying using our technology that's something that now you know they start having respect for you know that that is doing something that is uh of interest to the world so so everything everything that matters in our life our money our identity either the services that we interact with and the way that we are able to actually provide those a cost effective way these are all the things that are going to be touched by blockchain and blockchain scalability yes we have a really interesting panel from the point of view of this there's a there's a kind of split here uh which i'm going to make which i'm going to make which i'm going to make into a little debate right so on one side we have um the the the incredible guys who are building on the existing infrastructure like ethereum and making ethereum more scalable and making existing layer ones more scalable on the other side we have guys who are coming in and saying no we need new infrastructure we need to create new layer ones because these layer ones we can't already have are not really um providing everything everything that we need to to get to that next level of adoption and scalability so what i'm going to do is a little little debate now just to be clear not everything that everyone says here is necessarily their 100 like died in the wall opinion but i'm going to create a segmentation between these two sides just for the sake of this and we're going to have a debate on this house believes we don't need new layer one protocols we can just upgrade what we have so i'm going to start stan if you would like to start yeah let's artificially insult the other fight here so i think you know if you think about blockchain i think my perspective is that it's very much the same as like homebrew club if you guys knew know about homebrew club that existed before apple like lots of people are doing interesting things there's not yet i think like a steve jobs figure in in this space that can like take everything and like you know drive it so but if you look at homebrew club at that time already a c programming language existed and many things that were done we're done using c programming language so from this perspective when we at scale sold our startup to dc's and investors we said you know solidity is such a important language and evm and all of the things and meta masks we're gonna do this decentralized web but we're gonna support ethereum metamask because there's so much momentum you know developers use it and that's why we at scale are building decentralized web but we are making it fully compatible with ethereum and we think that ethereum will definitely can continue as money you know in the past people thought maybe bitcoin still becomes like continues to be like number one now many people are thinking that bitcoin may be in danger so i think in the future ethereum states to be the most important money and then it may be that nfts may even surpass the value of ethereum because there's so much momentum and if this is literally like the beginning of decentralized web but the main point is that why we stay with kind of with the current the current way is just because there's so much momentum behind existing existing solidity and all other things okay so so much momentum already established ecosystem let's go and support that we can scale it to what we need gun so my opinion is that we just don't we must build from scratch we must start from new layer ones and actually create protocols that scale scale is not something you can add on or tack on to something that exists so what you're doing whenever you do a layer two protocol in fact i'm going to take all of those layer two protocols layer two uh you know whatever roll ups layer two protocols lightning network uh whatever else you might have i'm going to take them all and i'm gonna brand them as what you already know as side chains to a first approximation they're just side chains they're a way to take load off of the underlying chain to elsewhere that's great and and the side chain idea is really compelling and yet not done properly by anybody yet and the side chain idea is essentially a way to tack something on and complicate the existing underlying protocol to try to get at what you truly want which is scale it's much better much more elegant from the to build scale into your protocol from the ground up as opposed to trying to tack it on after the fact the there are a couple of things that you do want to retain and there are things that are really valuable in this space the tooling is valuable so stan's point stands is correct that people are used to the evm interface and you don't want to break that or change it the users are used to using say metamask for example even though metamask is actually terrible to use that's what people that's what the installed user base actually likes so you need to preserve that so so that's true so you want to preserve tooling that's correct you want to preserve communities that's correct but we are in no way wedded to the old technology that was developed only 10 years ago the oldest of these is bitcoin is only 11 years old do we really want to add on layers upon layers upon layers onto this existing thing that wasn't all that amazing in the first place it only achieved three tps so we could add a couple more layers onto it but that's not what's going to take us to where we want to go if you want to really digitize all of the world's assets you need to reach another level of of scale and that's not something you can tack on so uh end result you do want to to uh to preserve communities you want to preserve tools but you are in no way wedded to the the protocols that are that we consider legacy even though they're so so young if you want to know how you end up where wall street is today they end up like this you take what you have you add another layer you add another layer and then you've got the software stack at goldman which is layers upon layers and they want to shed that they want to come over to our technology because it is so flat so fast so it's much better much more elegant much more technically reasonable to come up and build scale into layer one than to try to add it via these disparate mechanisms that at the end of the day simply fracture your liquidity and that is one of the most precious things you have in a financial game they fracture your user base they fracture your developer base i don't know how any of these layer twos are going to interact with each other there is no coherent protocol for taking you know optimism and making a talk to this and that etc so there is if you go that route of tacking things on it's kind of like browsers with their extensions that will never be able to to come back together and talk to each other again so don't make the mistakes that has already been made like banks still on mainframes take this young industry and re and create a foundation that we can actually build on properly ellie okay so i don't know if only ethereums will survive or two other chains or five or twenty i don't know and i don't know if l2s are going to be sufficient or not um i very strongly believe that any solution that's going to scale to to reach really you know the kind of things that the conventional world needs is going to need things like starks both for the you know sort of allowing a single party that need not be trusted to run very massive computations and still prove its integrity to the large set of nodes that is needed for decentralization and it's also needed for privacy so i'm very sure that this technology will be needed now four years ago when we founded starkware we this was you know towards the end of 2017 everyone was icoing left and right and everyone said to us you need to ico and we said no we're not this doesn't make sense this is a technology it does you know it's not sort of a some monetary policy or something and it doesn't make sense that new technology means necessarily new coins so that's the decision we made back then and since then we've basically said wherever we find a place that right now is reaching the you know burning need for scale and we can deploy this technology on we will so that's why we did it first on ethereum we would have loved to do it on bitcoin bitcoin is a bit more conservative but we would love to deploy it there as well and help their scale and make tps grow there and we will be very happy to deploy it someday on avalanche and any other l1 that needs it so um i don't know if i i i can understand that a panel is more interesting if there's like a lot of blood out there but uh our view currently is more of a mercenary kind of thing um you know we have a very cool weapon at hand and anyone who needs it we would like to um help them use it it's a very potent well a weapon of course is not the right term it's a very beneficial technology that everyone needs very cool awesome let's have a a quick show of hands so who thinks that we need to uh we can upgrade existing infrastructure we don't need new layer ones hands up who thinks that that who thinks that we need new layer ones and we need to start again i think the layer ones have it new layer ones very good well done all right okay moving on to topic three which is as an industry we often talk about scaling towards mainstream adoption as purely a technical problem but it's also a very human one what else do we still need to nail to get to the next 100 million users and ellie we'll start with you okay obviously there's a scale but we'll get there there are all kinds of things of like you know clearing up the regulatory um you know rules of the game and i'm sure that things will be more clear over time okay i think that beyond that um something that i became recently quite passionate about and i'm reading a whole lot about it is um decentralized macro economic theory which means i mean if you go back to bitcoin and sort of set the tone for everything the monetary policy there is amazingly innovative beautiful there's a very but it's also extremely simplistic there's a very simple rule of issuance that uh you know at a fixed uh fixed predictable rate that is independent of the um you know needs or evolution of the ecosystem that supports it and um it of course is it's very good on one side because it's completely predictable and the amount of coins out there is always known and you can know it in the future but a lot of the volatility and unpredictableness of the you know the monetary power is due to this so a huge challenge is to take um decentralized systems and somehow converge them with a monetary theory that is one that sort of can can relate the ecosystem and what it needs with the rules of issuance and burning so that's i think a third aspect that that i recently became very interested in and i think it also in addition to having you know having scale regulatory clarity which both of these things are going to be resolved i think sort of going back to the basics and asking what is money about you know who decides on what and how should it function which are very deep questions um you know part of this process i started reading um about the existing theories around monetary systems and so on and this is even prior to things like quantitative easing and it's it's it's very uh you feel like the ground is dropping under your feet and you don't understand what's going on and then you talk to people who are devising these monetary policies in central banks and you hear from them the same thing so i think we need also to go back to the basics and figure out what it is that that that money is and then try to understand what money should be in the context of decentralized cryptocurrencies that's the third aspect so why why do you think that money like the definition of money is important for uh mass adoption of crypto like why why do we need to change what we already have as a definition of money for one we already have a very all the cryptocurrencies okay yes except for various stable coins which are then sort of pegging off of some other mechanism that is sort of managing some other goals like price stability and you know maybe employment with the national um you know boundaries um all the other crypto currencies are extremely volatile and very hard to work with so that's the reason for all these stable coins sort of being so essential in various parts of the crypto economic world now this is a side effect of the fact that the crypto currencies out there have monetary policies that are very algorithmic simplistic but they don't react very well to the economic uh you know conditions of the ecosystem they serve so i think just for like mass mass adoption and sole reliance on cryptocurrencies as opposed to having stable coins all the time i think it's also essential to have some monetary theory that will eventually lead to a little bit more price stability even without pegging so if this is you're thinking for like native cryptocurrencies like ethereum and bitcoin or something like that or you're thinking of things that are aping national currency so like a synthetic version of the dollar or making a cryptocurrency like ethereum more stable like which which is the i think the latter either ethereum i mean bitcoin again i think it's just too conservative so bitcoin is going to do what bitcoin does which is reach you know 21 million coins around 21.40 whatever the size of the economy around it is but but there's room for innovation and understanding and like i mean that's a missing link right now what is this uh uh decentralized but reactive monetary policy and then once it's out there um you know either existing cryptocurrencies could sort of adapt to it those who are willing to i'm assuming bitcoin is not going to change uh uh just because it's very conservative and it's fine and uh yeah once we have sort of that kind of theory or set of theories then then it could be national cbdc's that might try to do it or other you know uh decentralized cryptos might try okay so better stores of value evan like you you've done a lot of thinking on governance as well haven't you guys yeah i i think in particular for this i think a lot of the existing crypto infrastructure is built to suit the technology so you have to be aware of that layer under the hood or private keys and whatever um the the human version of crypto that'll really go out there is a version that doesn't require people to kind of bring on all those um those details from crypto world into their interaction with their applications maybe sort of the same way that like you know you click a save icon on a computer you don't have to like i don't know what you would do instead but but basically yeah like i think that in particular if you think about things like governance it's like how are we going to get to a world where people can collectively think about their interactions about owning a cryptocurrency in the direction of that cryptocurrency when they're like a normal person i don't have the answer to that but that's like the sort of thing that i think that we as industry have to figure out and start solving if we're going to start bringing this to a wider audience so how how people think about the the human experience of crypto and whether or not they and how they become stakeholders in those systems in a way that isn't like massively technical yeah like i i think it's a i don't have an answer right now but it's a huge question do you how do you do like one of the interviews i heard from you you were talking about this idea of like having a venue like the there's some prerequisites right and one of which is just having a good venue for discussion like have you do you think do you think that's something that we have to do better to get to uh more scalable adoption for crypto totally i think that with any of these cryptos there is a core community that is the ones that are really kind of driving the tech forward and i think it's still the space is figuring out this kind of like implicit hidden layer of like okay you like see all these things that happen and tweets and and marketing and stuff but what's really going behind the scenes is these people that are collaborating together and building these structures and the structures right now are very implicit and no one's i think like kind of cracked it for like how do we build like an arbitrarily scalable collective organization that is distributed and decentralized i think that when you see that to start to happen that'll be a place where both like a this stuff can start out competing traditional companies and hierarchies and b can build something that is hopefully i would like to think um kind of has our more collective interest at heart which i think is kind of the real destiny of crypto um and if we can achieve that in a mainstream scale would be very exciting to me at least that's really cool stan yeah i think you know uh i mean i think there are two things which i'm missing now one thing is you know when we like went to the vcs in 2017 again we told to the vcs that we said you know we understand that every disruptive technology will have this hype curve of bubble and then bust and then people will start building more like long-term things and i'm not saying that i'm like looking for for a bust but we are really missing like people and projects that go long-term and design these decentralized airbnbs or decentralized ubers or essential social networks many people just do like another clone of like unislope right so one thing which we're missing is just just startups that actually go for longer term and more ambitious goals and the second thing which is missing is you know we should be able to the entire like web 3x web 2 experience on web 3 and there has been lots of progress but still there are some pieces missing like you can with gmail you can easily change identify is it a human or a bot you know have this google capture how do they like do capture on on blockchain how do we make all of the experience the same on web 3 as it is on the web 2. and at scale we've been doing lots of research and actually coding to working different parts of the thing so you can now actually from ethereum virtual machine on scale you can stream music you can watch videos so and we're actually working on that so there are two things first people have to start looking for long-term projects i'm not saying we need bust for this but maybe it would help and the second thing we need to have the full experience of web 2 on web 3 right get to this right so we we like in in our rush to move to a web 3 style of of user interaction user experience we're losing some of the things that web 2 actually created in the first place we need a total we need a total cafe not a copy but you need to total features and abilities you know and and how hard do you think that process is going to be in recreating great web-like experience i think we solved quite a number of problems already and it's become much much better for instance things like unislope it's a huge huge progress now because you can exchange any token for any as a token it has never happened in the history of the human kind that any time any person on the surface of this planet can change any currency cryptocurrency you can can't do it with dollars and euro your bank will be closed so we have these things with that the new things in the infrastructure but we still need to fix some things one of the important things is identity you know how do we differentiate humans from bots and uh how do we do it in decentralized way um yeah it's just that's a huge topic on itself absolutely so uh very quickly i think there are a couple of challenges up ahead of us for us to achieve of true full mass adoption first one is scale and uh i think ellie ellie said we will get there we will there are big big uh steps that we've already taken uh we couldn't have gotten there with three tps with 15 tps we need the kinds of protocols that can give us actual throughput and very very quick time to finality so avalanche achieves less than one second right now and can do three times what visa can do so i think that's that's a huge step up uh so that's step one that's uh that's the kind of uh throughput that we can that we need if we're going to be able to act as a medium of exchange for a point of payment system second thing that we need are uh are our applications specific sub networks or uh or jurisdiction specific sub networks so as as they stand most blockchains are one size fits all solutions bitcoin is bitcoin for the entire globe there is one bitcoin network and it's supposed to serve everybody's needs and so you know that's it bitcoin does what it does incredibly well i'm very proud of that but it can't be specialized or customized for any specific use as part of its value proposition actually but if you actually go talk to enterprises if you talk to people with valuable assets in their hands they have actual entanglements there are laws that that actually bear on them those laws can change at any time they need control over the full life cycle of their assets and the only way to do this are domain-specific blockchains so one of the things that we did in avalanche is we have this notion of subnets so you can create a u.

s centric subnet separate from the avalanche's default networks that is specific to your needs or if you have an iot set of iot devices you can create an iot subnet as shielded from what's happening in d5 that day so you know you don't get this behavior that happens on ethereum where there's a defy thing happening and every other application that day is unusable because the fees have gone through the through the roof so those are the kinds of those two things third thing in the short term i think there is going to be a bridging game there is going to be a bunch of uh essentially there is going to be some some change that everybody wants to use and we're going to need bridges to take the valuable assets from wherever they may have been created legacy to those chains where they are actually best put to use so we're going to see this bridge game play out i would suspect for the next year or so and we spent a lot of time on our bridge technology our trustless bridge uh that allows us to to bridge to ethereum at the moment uh to to be able to bring valuable things over the fourth thing that is also very crucial is governance i think evan mentioned this um in in avalanche the ethos is always open things up allow the people to speak they know what's best and that's much better than a cabell telling you well this is what's going to be the interest rate etc for your for your your coin so um those governance structures are yet to be worked out the dows that we have so far are i think in their early days and um and i think there's a lot more work to be done in that space but the first steps i think we've begun to take as a community and i'm really really excited about where this is going to take us that's really interesting a couple of questions um with the subnets i like idea what why does why is a subnet not more like going back towards a permission state oh it could that's what it gives you so you could create a subnet where you say for you to be uh active in this in the subnet you need permission from me and then now you have the good old permissioned private blockchains from before from a couple years ago so if you want that you can go there every one of those projects that did that have not been has has been a failure right we don't see these private permission blockchains in actual use by companies so what we give you is a slider you can go there if you want you can start there if you like but you can then move towards public chains you can say look i will open my chain up to uh to for example anybody from the u.s now it doesn't have to be vetted by me but these identity providers are acceptable to me or you can say i can open my subnet up to anybody who has the following hardware characteristics i'm going to run it at a higher speed and so on and so forth you determine what what uh the gating factor is for somebody to be a member of that subnet so now you have this uh this uh slider and you can just say look it's open and now you have a public subnet so it's it's up to you and my sort of hidden agenda is that most people are very comfortable starting with the very first point and they almost always find themselves wanting to go towards the other side and so give them that slider they will for sure find themselves within a year or two of deployment wanting to move to the left to uh to where the public blockchains are and that's our actual funnel into our big ecosystem the very first you know byte is free and then once you get the taste of these networks then you will want to move to the to the public chains it's interesting because like obviously the the internet or had similar issues in terms of jurisdiction and the concept of and like actually a lot of people don't know this but france tried to create their own internet uh which was separate from the rest of the industry itself yeah so um like are we are we are we talking about uh the idea that we're kind of giving people entry drugs towards a open permission of systems and we think long term the rules are going to change or you are you saying that finance is different and so actually we have to build in a different way to be able to get the global financial system into into these networks i think this little the latter i think we need to give people the tools that they need for their legal departments to be happy so without that you don't get mass deployment you don't get enterprises coming into this system so you have to allow them to say look this is my private network i understand what happens on it and then give them the tools by which they can connect remember how the internet started it started on campuses with local ethernet deployments and then each campus was like hey it would be so cool if i kind of had a long distance connection to another campus that's the kind of thing you can do with avalanche subnets you can have assets on one talk to and communicate with or be swappable with assets on another so that's kind of like that bridging and once you get the taste for this remember how hard it was when the internet was starting out i remember trying to explain email to my parents it was such a hard concept to get across right people were using private messaging systems that were sort of all individual islands and once you bridge it's like it's like you know it's like a different universe so that's what we enable and uh and then of course the bet here is by doing that we're going to be able to funnel everybody in to a much larger ecosystem that's interoperable interesting really interesting can i just get a quick time check because the the the con it was a slightly lighter time anyway how long have we got anyone how long seven thank you very much all right cool we'll do one more one more set of questions then so um we could take from the audience we could say for the viewers do people do people have some questions come and see some hands of people who've got some questions they want to ask excellent yeah go for that person first hello yeah um the the silly version of my question is like how many tps is enough but the the more the more serious version is something like you know which of the two views of the world l1 versus l2 to ln is a better design for something like jeevan's paradox you know you have an increase in efficiency that's eaten up by more consumption so like does that speak to which of your views of the world to all panelists i guess so let me take that to take a first step at the question so um first of all tps is an incredibly misleading metric and it's a as as you well point out and um and i think it's it's the easiest metric to game and there are there is at least certainly one chain i have in mind that games the crap out of it but let me tell you guys how to game it i you know i've been a researcher at cornell for many years i've seen my my colleagues and who work in databases you know game that metric all day long for publication here's how you game it suppose we all build a supremely slow system it makes one decision per day and so that's one transaction per day we could be honest and say look this is very slow we kind of suck at this game we're not we're not even a player we didn't even try with one one transaction per day or we could do the following thing instead of making one decision per day on one transaction we collate all the transactions into a giant thing that's kind of like a phone book and then we take the merkle root hash of it and then we make a decision on the root hash and so now you know but suppose i put a million transactions my speed went up to million transactions per day i posit to you that you don't want to use a system that makes one decision per day okay it's just a it's a damn slow system so almost everybody out there who's reporting tps numbers is playing some some version of this game so disregard tps the metric that is hard to to to mess with the metric that's hard to lie about is time to finality so that's the thing to focus on so ours is very easy to measure it's on our website it's about 717 milliseconds it's less than a second so like a slow blink and it's final it's immutable it's done and if i look at our competitors they're like at least a factor of four to a factor of a million slower than that so that's that's the uh the answer to the first question is how many tps are enough forget tps let's look at time to finality that's i think our best measure of um of of speed and then on the layer two question maybe let me succinctly say something else there is no such thing as layer two you've got you've got a system here and you've got another system there okay and some systems are built from the ground up for scale and they're elegantly designed to give you that and other systems are not and then they try to patch stuff on and but that's still an evolved new system it's got the l1 core it's got the l2 accoutrements those things don't talk to each other they're not designed by the same unifying architect and therefore you've got a essentially a patchwork of liquidity which divides that system up so i posit to you again that you don't want that second world i think you want to be in the first one where there's a single coherent elegant way to get that liquidity so um so that's sort of my my two stabs at that question if i may um the more bandwidth you'll have you'll see new types of applications coming on so um for instance more scale you'll see tps you know expand not eps sorry nfts which are very static expanding into like full game play and beyond you'll see you know more collaborative editing of files and and art on the blockchain and beyond that i can't envision but just like with bandwidth on cellular um you bring more and you'll see new functionality you know like video calls today right more we'll get more stuff so i think that's the way to think of it i just want to add just a couple of years to what ellie said is that you know in 60s people thought that the future would be a huge huge like a super main computer everyone would do calculations on these things and this future died it crashed and what we have actually internet is a collection of reasonably working weekly coupled computers so so the weekly coupled system actually won over the strongly coupled system that's why i think what's going to happen the future of internet is going to be many many many many weekly coupled systems and this many many many weekly couple systems will have you know reasonable performance tps doesn't really matter you know you don't know how how much computing power your facebook server is because facebook has so so many servers you don't care so people i mean it's not so important how fast a particular blockchain is the important is the the actual system how it works together those weakly coupled systems we call subnets thank you thank you very much one more one more question uh this guy down here if that's all right how you got mike do you think proof of work will be obsolete in the future i hope it is because of uh you know the carbon footprint i hope i don't know i also hope just one i mean i hope too but i must say that a proof-of-stake blockchain has probably ten times more code and time time times harder to secure it's just more complex so i hope we'll get to this point but it will take us some turbulence to fix all of the bugs i want to say the ultimate solution we want to reach but but it's hard it's going back to proof of identity which isn't solved right now because of sybil but really really if you think i mean democracy is a beautiful idea right so so you would really want to solve proof of identity and then you know and then bring it back to people which is what it's all about so i don't want to make a normative statement here um we are open to chains that actually generate coins via proof of work and so those are wonderful they're fine until recently proof of work was the best way of getting decentralization in the blockchain so um that's that's how it was uh moving forward you know my personal opinion is not overlaps or anything else my personal opinion is we should not be melting the poles it's just a bad idea there is a lot of better uses for any any source of energy other than you know just essentially getting a bunch of miners who are well connected have mining rigs uh to get richer by adding blocks to a chain and how many do you have at the end of the day they coalesce into uh into cartels uh into mining pools and then uh well then within for any given chain there are only a few dozen of them you don't even get meaningful decentralization out of proof of work so proof of stake has some really appealing properties like better security the amount of economics that are going to secure the chain is typically far higher uh it's only one to two percent for a proof-of-work chain and it can be as high as 70-80 percent for a proof-of-stake chain and you can get much better carbon footprint and we leave a better universe for our children so i think it's a much much better thing to look forward to but as everyone said it's not an easy easy process the technology is being being essentially playing out even as we speak all right well that's been an amazing panel thank you everyone for your attention and give them you