Exploring the Ethereum Blockchain

[Music] hello hello yeah very good afternoon one my name is matthew tan and I'm the CEO and lead developer at ETS Ken so welcome to one of the less technical presentations of the day so the topic of our presentation today is exploring the theorem blockchain so I will do is will first begin with a quick overview of the blockchain stats and then share your some of the challenges issues that we face wobbling and infrastructure level service for the term blockchain and they will attempt to derive the theorem used Upasana using Google Analytics data so OB before for the accounting I'd like to do just a very brief introduction of who we are so either scan is a block power and search engine for the ETM blockchain and it just came we have up to 1 billion monthly active users we receive 18 million pages per month and we serve over nine billion API calls every month so either scan was first launched in August 2nd 2015 and today were one of the oldest and longest externally run project built around and for the Chilean blockchain for the most part ETS can weave bootstrap the entire project is my own personal funds but in 2016 we did raise a seed round from leading players and blocked investors in space so as for the team at one money we are a team of five a paste out of Malaysia and all the next two weeks we will be adding in a more two more two new team members the SIS with support and software engineering for manpower resource allocation as far exploit am half our resources is actually dedicated towards providing community support and yet half on software engineering alright so for a quick blockchain or used s so the etherion blockchain as all as some of you might know was first born or kick-started on with the Genesis block 0 on July 30th 2015 fast forward today the interim block team has processed more than 4.4 million blocks which consists of more than 71 million transactions and I wish there are more than thirty seven point five million internal transactions now just to further clarify an internal transaction really isn't an official term is merely a term that blog explorers came to dot to represent a message call or action that resulted in a value transfer and just to give you an overview of how far the interim blockchain has come since the early days so we're going to use the previous DEF CON conferences as data points or DTM transaction chart so at Def Con one which took place around two years ago in London November 2015 at the point at time the term blockchain was only processing around 8,500 transactions per day at the f-con to last change Shanghai the term blocks was processing around forty six thousand transactions per day representing a 5x or a 500% increase from the previous year today a DEFCON 3 the term networks processing outputs up to half a million or 500,000 passengers per day representing a 10x or a 1000% increase in number of their transactions as for the interim block times pre byzantium folk the block x used around 30 seconds a post by the NMR fork after october 16 20 71 now looking the block times have significant reduce they were now everything around 14 seconds today today the term blocks is processing more transactions at shorter block in first I with a lower transaction pending queue all right so yeah for the next section I'd like to pass a mic - Thank You Matthew hi I'm we product manager at the scan I would like to share some of the challenges we face in building and infrastructure level service around the atrium blockchain first off is the issue of scale already we've revolves resolve revolves around managing and supporting and ever-growing user base just looking at a transactions volume alone we have seen an average of up to 10 times growth year-on-year and from an operational viewpoint hiring and expanding and team is also tricky as there's a shortage of blockchain their place in the space security is sorry security is always a top concept top concern for us being on a protocol of application level or external event such as DDoS attacks being the space as we all know and is if there exists and any security vulnerabilities you'll be fairly quickly exploited or taken advantage of on the support front we have seen changing user dynamics over the last two years back then when we first started most of the questions or issues that we receive are more technical in nature or coming from CalPERS already work in the space however going forward since the beginning of year we have seen more and more normal regular users coming on board on a daily basis we are receiving an average of 80 200 tickets per day and most of the users are first-time blockchain users with basic questions such as how do they transfer tokens missing or invalid transactions or even request for refunds which we all know it's not possible you cannot reverse transactions on it really given the ecosystem is still fairly young and evolving so fast at times is also a challenge for us just to keep it up there's never a boring week with aetherium new features i SEOs secretary issues multiple software revision patches within a short space of time while it's extremely exciting interesting it can be difficult to manage over a longer period of time and lastly the final issue revolves around interim notes management which is something at least one that we often been asked about and we exploded in the infrared details that either scan in the earlier days we ran three different client implementations namely get parity and TMJ over time we managed to reduce this to just two clients which is get and parity so some of you may ask why do we need to run two clients why not just one we are not saying this is the correct way but this is what we found works best for us so while both clients supports all the official api's there are certain areas that each of these clients excels in for instance if you plan to use remix debugger for now this works only we get on the other hand if you need to trace internal transactions parity provides an easy-to-use RPC endpoint the dusties but more than just feature set running multiple clients also provide what we call network robustness a case in hand some of you may recall that during DEFCON 2 in Shanghai last year the network was under a massive DDoS attack just before the event started one of the reasons that the network was able to continue chugging along was when a specified attack was successfully executed against one client the other client was not affected I'm vice versa so while both get and parity works extremely well for private notes in default settings there are some challenges when running these as public fun facing notes for instance to handle burst of traffic's of upwards to thousands of concurring API calls per seconds here are some recommendations tip number one use SSD drives do not use normal hardest rice as these AI ops will be about a net tip number two if you are Sparrow X program you can allocate like larger cache settings than the default ones when running over a longer period of time with a high concurrent request you'll want to run some sort of monitoring service that checks if the note is seen Corelli or the latest blocked time is leaders block times them it's not too old if they are the service you restart the nodes to scale upwards of multiple concurrent connections you may want to deploy multiple smaller nodes behind a load balancer application gateways while taking care of the session position settings are now passed to metric on your representation thanks P so for the next section I would like to talk about deriving the theorem user persona with Google Analytics so as a blockchain developer or as the developer in general one of the things that I found extremely useful is when building applications is to first understand who your target audience is who your users are who your customers are so ETS can add as a base layer infrastructure service for the interim blockchain we serve a diverse range of etrem users from all across the globe so what I would like to do right now is to share via our own a very own Google Analytics data that we derived over the last and half years which we feel will provide you with a rough indication of what the typical user of the interim blockchain looks like so looking at our analytics data one of the interesting things that we found was a shift in user geography locations what last two years so in borders the united states represented our largest user base in 2016 the united states represented half of our user base around 44% followed by Russia Germany United Kingdom and Ukraine but in 2017 we saw a large increase in number of users originating from coming from China and the emergence of new interests from South Korea in the crypto scene so the take-home points while the United States still is the represents the largest user base China is definitely a growing market in at least South Korea's a new player on the scene so by sort of understanding where your users are located know perhaps as the developer this can help you by deciding about optimizing location of your physical servers or like or even like when assigning which languages you should support for your application so as for the age engendered user demographics our data was actually fairly consistent of what one might expect in crypto scene so it's still largely dominated by males which make up 92% of the user base and on which 50% of the users belong to the age groups of 25 to 34 years of age and females only making up 8% and looking at the affinity in marker um demographics we generally see this coming from users with interests in areas of Technology and also those interested in financial and investment services so for the user interface and ethics we look at two data points which is the user browser and screen resolutions so as for the web browser type the Chrome browser represents the largest share at 60% followed by the Safari and Firefox browser and as for screen resolutions we normally see users interacting with a larger screen resolutions normally indicating a desktop or a laptop interface so for the collaborating the screen wrestle and ethics we do indeed see that around 2/3 of the users are indeed using a desktop interface and around 20% of remaining users using a mobile interface for the opening systems break down we see that around half the users or 50% using the Windows operating system followed by Android iOS and Macintosh in similar proportions Linux users only represent 3% of the user base so further diving to a mobile device background we see that as a single device type the Apple iPhone commands the largest market share followed at 40 percent followed by the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy phones all right so looking at the previous analytics data our derive a theorem user would most likely be a meal from the ages of 25 to 34 located in the US China or Russia generally tech oriented interests and with financial services and uses a windows-based PC and Chrome as the primary browser and you all likelihood either owns an Apple iPhone or a Samsung mobile device okay so uh summing up so where are we today we generally feel that we are definitely very early stages of the technology and its potential however with like like past that first wave of like any pure early adopters or software developers or like hardcore techie users and what we're seeing now more regular users so in large part we believe this is perhaps due to the recent popularity of icos well really getting a lot of users who don't really understand what blocked in technologies but I need for speculative investment reasons which is why during this stage onboarding and user education is extremely important if you want to continue growing the ecosystem so onboarding regular users onto the platform through better user interfaces education and while providing a secure user experience is critical at the same time we are actually extremely excited because we sort of can see the pieces of the puzzle coming together the etherion protocol continues to be further developed at a rapid pace things like ens ETA Observatory in place today and in use and then both response wom will fill the remaining pieces of storage and communication to form the next distributed web built on interim so an ether scan will do what we've always done which is actually which is to continue to push forward at the background while continuing to expand our search for content for distributed protocols ladies and gentlemen thank you for exploring the interlocutors [Music]