# Interoperability as a premise - Vikas Pandey | NEAR Protocol - Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community) - Date: 2023-10-07 - Duration: 24:44 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-h9XJdzsMpc0 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9XJdzsMpc0 ## Description Interoperability as a premise to better sharing assets, seamless onboarding, lower costs and higher value generation for all stakeholders - Vikas Pandey | NEAR Protocol ## Transcript [Applause] thank you gmgm my name is vikas like my colleague said I work with the near foundation so near Foundation started almost three years ago as a layer one general purpose blockchain and the vision of creating near was to solve the problems that we saw with the first generation of blockchains like uh congestion issues security and gas fees over the years a lot of the first generation blockchains ethereums and others that a lot of l2s are built on top of them like as we know the polygons the arbitrarms and others on the evm world near being a non-evm blockchain protocol never had these problems you know the scalability security because built on rushed it always has sharding by design called nightshade so last almost a year near has been building something that that is called as blockchain operating system uh and that's something that I work with at the near Foundation currently trying to uh propagate the concept of interoperability in the blockchain world while also talk about the near blockchain operating system so today's talk will generally be covered around blockchain interoperability and that will uh lay the foundation to take us to the end or at the conclusion uh about uh how is near Foundation solving the problem of blockchain interoperability I think we have a 28 odd minutes we'll try to finish the talk before that and maybe keep a couple of minutes for any questions so let's kick it off so blockchain interoperability the the most important concept of any interoperate or interoperable solution is how do you exchange information data or assets across different systems right whether it is web 2 or website it doesn't matter so it's the same in the blockchain world a lot of these blockchains were built or designed in a very fragmented way so you could transact or share assets only within the same ecosystem like if you're in Cosmos you can only share it within the cosmos ecosystem but the moment you wanted to move out of one blockchain to the other there were issues like Bridges and others which created a lot of security issues user experience and gas fees among others so we are going to cover those topics how how are some of the blockchains of today the second or the third generation as well like people call it are solving some of these problems so these are some of the topics uh the introduction and background about blockchain interoperability what is it uh the problem statement the challenges that exist today and what are the different approaches to solving this interoperability challenge in blockchain and what are the different uh cross chain protocols like the top four top five that exist currently in the world and how are they trying to solve this problem and what are the benefits that we get out of this some future outlook and where do we start where I'm also going to talk a little bit about the near blockchain operating system yeah some introduction background blockchain interoperability the whole idea is how do you seamlessly transfer information between two blockchains or two blockchain networks so when I say transfer information information can be in the form of data it can be in the form of assets and the assets could be images video or even tokens as we see in the blockchain world and another a very important aspect is uh what are the different consensus protocols that exist between these blockchains so some blockchains use uh the the modern ones proof of stake some others use proof of stake of authority uh bfts pbfts and others so that's also something that we'll talk a little later what are the challenges that those things bring and then uh the background right so uh a lot of these blockchains were designed back in the day to only operate in their own ecosystem a good example is like I said when Bitcoin started 2008 and 9. the whole idea was only to transform assets or money in that case right the digital money and then came ethereum which added the smart contract layer so which smart contract layer we got computation power to the blockchain networks but the uh but within ethereum we had problems like you know huge gas fees where we paid 200 dollars up to 250 dollars for one transaction but also these transaction times and finality was a very big problem it took hours sometimes and after ethereum we saw a lot of the change that tried to you know build on top of it like uh building uh polygons of the world or uh solanas and others so these chains they started uh they started to solve the congestion issues but also some performance issues some of them were very cheap in gas fees and then we had Roll-Ups and l2s and l3s also as some of them call it a lot of these Solutions were always built with the premise that you are always going to work within your blockchain ecosystem like within your own network and not interact with the other networks couple of them tried the tried an approach to interoperability and that's something we'll also see later on yeah in terms of importance again like I said apart from moving information across systems the other a very important aspect like we can see on the slide is how do you improve scalability right like some blockchains are designed for Securities others are designed for low gas fees while the the third could be designed for scalability so we'll also see how those things are being addressed in the current situation so a lot of these blockchains like I said somebody has a very different transaction scheme very different data structure how do you consume data how do you process them and how do you spit out data that can be consumed by other systems a lot of them have challenges with on chain and often data sharing and management and then a lot of these things are so fragmented that you cannot uh you know move out a lot of data from one chain to the other and start using it uh seamlessly that's the challenge that we see with a lot of systems so sub graph is one technology that try to solve this problem by indexing it the whole blocks the transactions together so that it can be you know transferred and move to the other chain and be consumed very seamlessly but again in that we had that we still see challenges such as the data structures the data formats and the support that we get out of it and a lot of these blockchains also have this challenge like some blockches are designed for iot some blockchains are designed only for scalability the others are designed only for low gas fees but there's no wholesome or a YouTube In Black blockchain that exists today and it's also a bit difficult that solves you know the the blockchain trial as we all know right in terms of cost speed performance among others and all of these things have also created duplication of efforts what does that mean that means that uh one blockchain is trying to solve the gas fees problem while the other blockchain is trying to solve the same problem the third or the fourth is trying to solve the same problem in a different way so all the effort that the industry could put in into building you know a very efficient gas efficient solution was put into building parallel Solutions and duplication of efforts a lot of blockchains were built for design uh to scale a lot of blockchains are built for lower gas fees among others so and we see like at least three or four of these blockches are trying to do the same thing instead of trying to take this problem as an industry problem and solid together so what are the different approach to interoperability so there are a couple of them so there is a standard based approach and then there's these side chains para chains uh Roll-Ups kind of an approach so in the standards the based interoperability approach uh we have seen uh some of these uh blockchains like polka dots our lunch Cosmos the Wormhole but also near has blockchain operating system they are trying to bring standardization in the way you you feed data to the system the way the data is stored the data the way data can be uploaded to the other blockchain while and also the way it can be consumed and then presented to the user or to other systems in the form of events so there's one approach trying to standardize the whole input output process of the system and then exchange of data so we have seen with a lot of these Bridges right when you transfer assets or when you transfer information we have had security issues so that's also something that has to be uh addressed in terms of how do you you know exchange data between these systems seamlessly either you do it in a standardized format that the whole world follows a certain format or you set up what is called as extract transform load engines between these two systems so that they can consume transform it and load it and upload it into the system that understands the language and then there are also challenges that are not mentioned on the slide like naming conventions right nomenclature or ontology of these systems so that's a very big topic for some other day but what it means is how do you name this different solutions the Json objects and the files and the input and output of these different chains foreign so some of the example like I said so we have this Wormhole uh near blockchain operating system we see polka dots of the world we have one chain among others hyperledger is also trying to do quite a lot of things in interoperability especially with the evm stack so we'll also see some of those examples and also try to dive deep a little bit on how near is trying to solve this problem later on side chains so we'll also see in the next slide uh the different approach so in terms of side chain there are different approaches like there are plasma shards and side chains where you do not send all your transactions to the main chain you process the transaction in in a in a silo which is still connected to the main chain or the main chain is divided into a into a mirror image of the entire stack and then you process a transaction at the end of the day or after four hours or at a certain point of time so let the performance and other uh uh challenges like sharing the data between systems can still be you know transformed and uploaded into a different system seamlessly uh so tokens so there's also this concept of uh packing your tokens right so you can use your tokens from one chain and pack them against as an asset to the other chain and still use it like a wrapped usdcs or stake usdcs and used it can be used into different uh chains but again it also impacts the user experience uh a lot while also exposing security issues right because when you wrap you wrap them through a bridge transfer it to other chain the there's a risk in bridges as we have seen there are a lot of Acts because the token literally sits there until it is moved to the chain it doesn't happen in real time while for the user you always have to wrap and wrap between these two chains move your you know move from one wallet to the other and keep on waiting until the whole transaction is complete so in order to do one full transaction between two chairs you have to do six different transactions uh across two or three Networks uh so this this is a an interesting slide so like I said there are three different approach maybe there are more this is a slide an old slide from 2019 by White Lake so people have been talking about this topic for almost four years and also doing quite a lot of effort and research in this area so there is this shards plasmas and side chains so shards is the premise on which the near uh blockchain the near protocol was designed and ethereum as we all saw last year right ethereum launched their own sharding scheme where you can you know create multiple uh replicas or a separate a set of chain that runs by itself and it has a tight coupling with the main chain so whenever you want you can also you know still share the data with the main chain while the chart keeps running independently by itself providing a lot of scalability to the to the main chain so that really solves the problem of scalability but also the problem of security because your charge Works still with the main chain and it doesn't have to go through the risks of data sharing between chains ah plasmas is like it's a it's a side chain and uh it basically is a change that runs very similar to Shard but if there's something that happens to the plasma you can always uh cut off the connection from uh from the main chain and spin up a new uh plasma it is you can still roll it up to the main chain when you want but also is not completely connected uh like like what we saw with The Shard because it's not a mirror image of the main chain so it still has a lot of dependency in terms of performance uh and uh source of throat as well as the finality to the main chain in the side chains are very similar to what we saw with the with the polygons of the world and the polka dots of the world where you you know you have a very Loosely coupled side chain with the layer one which runs parallely to the main chain a lot of these transactions are happening uh by by itself so you can distribute your transactions to these side chains and then you decide when do you want to you know bring those transactions to the main chain for finality but so it improves the performance also reduces gas fees storage issues among others that we see with the scalability in the blockchain world um so yeah some of the benefits and future outlook so like like we saw right it's a pattern with not only with the blockchain systems but also with the web 2 of or web one uh of our technical world so a lot of these things uh have two or at least three dimensions one is scalability you cannot scale if the interoperability is not put into place the second is efficiency it's not efficient enough because uh you have to you know keep processing this uh the same transaction for for minutes sometimes hours so it's not efficient it's also very expensive in terms of gas fees uh or it's also very uh uh it also adversely affects the user experience so the user like I said has to keep moving across the stack uh something that I was explained at the end of the talk if with an example where a user has to keep moving you know from the wallets to the uh to the smart contract to the finality layer across change if they want to interact between two blockchains so yeah there are a lot of innovation in Industry collaborations happening on this area uh polka dot is doing a quite a quite a lot of collaboration in terms of you know their side chains but also working with other chains to uh uh to create you know to solve the problem of interoperative operability but plasma sorry polka dot by itself with one or two other chain will not solve the problem there are at least 150 plus blockchain protocols in the world today so there has to be a bigger and larger effort to try to you know standardize and create a common layer between these systems across the stack from the front end to the middleware to the finality layer and even at the validator level level where there are a lot of these uh servers or nodes running to solve the problem of proof of stake and then a one one chain is another one that's working with 12 different blockchains that's a very nice initiative and uh Wormhole like I mentioned earlier is also working with 14 different genes and near protocol is taking a different approach all of all of these changes started their interoperability approach and they kept on adding one chain after the other whereas in at near we created what is called as a blockchain operating system a wrapper on top of the uh of the near L1 chain from where you can communicate to the chain using the block blockchain operating protocol decentralized front ends which is built which can be built by anybody very open source in nature and then communicate with the smart contract of any chain that that can be deployed using the Gateway and after you have communicated with the Gateway you can also choose which chain you want to write your finality depending upon the security the gas fees and the performance of the chain for example I could choose the evm chain of evm Shard of near for uh for high performance uh in terms of low gas fees if I want to do a high scalability high performance I can choose the core L1 layer but if I also want to use unisop of the world on the near blockchain operating system I can still do it using a decent less front end choose the Gateway or the smart contact layer of any of these chains and also at the end say that you know I want to write it down on a polygon or on evm any of the evm GS or on Solana or even on the near chain so that's a different approach is from the near blockchain operating system instead of adding a lot of these blockchains next to each other like in in vertical there's a horizontal layer that has been created on top of all of these chains so so also in terms of liquidity and asset Mobility like I said if you have interoperable system you can easily move your tokens your your identities and your information that are stored in iot devices as well right when the when the 5G really kicks in when you can easily transfer them across different change the whole transferability and and the mobility or asset could be very easy so there are also a different research and advancement happening in the blockchain of interoperability world like there are a lot of iot based Solutions there are a lot of AI based solutions that are built with the with the with the code blockchain or with multiple block yes near itself is trying something called as near GPT which is a part of the blockchain operating system that you can use to automate your tasks and you know perform a lot of the transactions with a you know with a simple uh if this then that scenarios and a lot of the these uh interoperability Solutions are being built with uh with different domains in mind like there are solutions that are built specifically for uh for employees productivity like like I mentioned with the with the AI Automation and blockchain because that provides extra security but also in terms of iot systems with a barcode RFS RFID chips among others so that's also a very interesting area that is impacting in terms of single source of throat immutability and finality of the solution that we use across the chain uh yeah so in the next slide we are going to also see what I mentioned about the notable project so one indeed like I said uh polka dot it has the multiple para chains that is very different in characteristics all of them but at the end of the day they roll up and come back to the same uh polka dot nomenclature or naming convention to be able to write all the transactions and the transaction schemes on their finality layer and it's also very focused at uh private but as well as you know the the public or the permission or non-permission blockchain as We Know one chain it took a very nice initiative back in the day with a lot of multi-party computing which is a very common feature on all blockchains today but it also has a lot of digital transfer Solutions across at least uh one doesn't change that I know of so Cosmos with their Cosmos zones and hub is also very interesting use case a wormhole started as a initiative of Cosmos which solves a lot of these problems and takes a very unified approach to how do we solve the problems such as how the web3 was designed what were the flaws in the design of the web 3 and how do we solve the flaws that exist today in the website design so the cosmos takes takes a very different Hub and zones approach where you know there are different uh ways you can communicate with a with one chain while also use the same logic or different Logic for multiple keys while at the finality layer they have something called as the guardian Network which is managed not only by Cosmos but it can be managed by any chain or any big independent body or a group of people like a decentralized autonomous organization as well being one of the Guardian validator Network so near uh protocol what we are trying to do at near like I mentioned so we built this blockchain operating system and it has it has taken a very different approach like I mentioned it doesn't have it has the the classic horizontal approach you know try to keep adding one chain after the other it has a wrapper a very horizontal approach so the wrapper is built on top of the L1 chain of near with which like like you can see on the slide you can build the decentralized front-end a good example there is you are building a a front-end component which can communicate with metamask but it can also communicate with near wallet it can communicate with trust wallet or you can also communicate with any wallet that supports multiple chains so using this decentralized front end which is completely open source by the way and can be built by anybody it is not built by near so people are contributing to it there are more than 10 000 components already built on blockchain blockchain operating system more than 20 000 users on it so what this does is it provides you the flexibility to choose after you've built the decentralized front end whether you want to build a smart contact layer on or an API Gateway so that's the second part the Gateway apis so what this Gateway API does is it creates the an extra middleware layer which is connected to the decentralized front end that you've built and it allows you to communicate with any of the chains under a layer under it whether it is polygon whether it is near Solana or Cosmos and at the at the bottom layer again you can choose whether you you know want to write on any of these chains using the Gateway which is uh what we call as multi-chain finality so you choose whether you want to write on one chain or you can also choose to write the same transaction or multi-chain if you want if you wish and the two very uh outstanding features of the near blockchain operating system is one it is designed to scale because it works across the stack and second it is it is it is optional for you to whether start with the front end decentralized front end or you start with the Gateway apis you don't have to do it all you can start from one over the other uh we have a workshop tomorrow with some of our colleagues if you want to see how that works in real action with code I think we have a very interesting uh uni stop working on near you're going through a Gateway and writing the finality on the near L1 chain so if you get time tomorrow please attended Workshop it will be very very interesting to see how this industry is moving forward in terms of interoperability in a true sense from a design perspective because interoper interoperability until now has always been addressed as a problem and saw is being we have been solving the smaller part of the problem instead of looking at it holistically from a design perspective so near blockchain operating system really takes the design approach it has been designed separate in a very different way so that it can be you know scaled programmed and very be open source given to the developers who can build different solutions that can be built by them instead of being built only by the L1 chain themselves foreign yeah those are my LinkedIn GitHub and telegram accounts that would be it from from my end today thank you so much if you have any questions we still have five minutes