# TOKEN2049 - Building Smart Contract Platforms

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-mCHyzvF4FIw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHyzvF4FIw

## Transcript

great panel here my name is piers Rudyard I'm the CEO of radix DLT we're a new protocol technology that's been in R&D for six years but this panel is not about me so I'm going to be introducing each of these guys in turn so they can talk about the importance of smart contracting platforms and different ways of building them so first we've got Yanni founder of eternity we've got humph a co-founder of near we have Shushan the CEO of silica and we have jeweling the co-founder of eighth house out apologies so I'm going to start off and just go through each of you and give you a chance to talk a little bit about your platform and how your approach differs from the etherium method of doing smart contracts so if we start with you yawning yeah thank you here's my name is Yanni I'm from Dante blockchain project I'm the founder we did a token sale in 2017 back then it was the largest open till after dark or 2/3 days we used the plans to develop new blockchain platform from scratch smart contract platform for yeah essentially improving everything of what a smart contract platform is made of starting with the consensus starting with a course also programming language in which the full notes are written in generally being a bit higher than others not contract platforms so we integrate for example also Oracle's and tokens and other primitives and our smart contract language which is also a functional language like a LAN like the language we are building full nodes in and at the same time we're building the community so it's not just software which we are doing it's it's more than that yeah any specific question yes no just just just your introduction and then hongfa if you would like to also introduce me I yeah personally I came across Bitcoin effect quite early in 2011 and then I started a project called anxious with Eric John two co-founders back to 2014 that's about four months there's five months later than a serum announcer their project so later on we rebranded to a new name the current name Neil the key difference of new and how the blockchains is we have different consensus mechanism we're the first in the word used a DFT style mechanism in a public blockchain and also we have dual token economic model we have two tokens the Neil and the gasps new is more like the governance token you can use new as voting power to do on chain governance and if you hold a neo token you will be distributed gradually distributed with gasps token gasps is a utility token and also the SMAW contract system is very different we call it we have our own VM called neo VM you can write a smart contract in in most of the major languages like C sharp Java go and we have compilers to compile compile it into bytecode that that will be run on new VM so that's also the smart contracts difference and also I think the the ideology is quite different we have a stronger governance we are not as decentralized as Bitcoin or ECM at this stage we believe a more progressive decentralization is more practical so that's a big difference is cool thank you very much chunchu yes that's right hi my name is Cheng Xu from zaleka we are a new production platform with team space largely speaking in Singapore and in London so people know us for having implemented sharing in a public blockchain space but you know today we are going to talk about something equally interesting the SMAW comes apart so for Zillah cosmic contract we design a new language called Silla so the idea is that we want to cry a language that is somehow by design to make something called formal verification much easier so just to let me explain a little bit about you know formal verification so this is about using mathematical tools to show that you know certain properties that you want in your program or I always fold and then once we show that they always hold the hold no matter you know whether you have barks in your programs or you you know somehow neglect some of the side effects of the programming language so this is a very very high level assurance that your your program is correct by your own definition we just launched our minute and knowing this is you know bootstrapping phase which which is going to end by at the end of the month so from April most people will actually be able to start sending transactions and erroneous mocking tracks on Cilla and you know a key theme for zelicah for 2019 is to bootstrap a platform that is going to bring value so clearly there's value in terms of technical you know sort of advancement but I think there's going to be more value in bringing interesting news cases to show that Byronic transactions by running small contracts on the blockchain platform things can be done in an easier manner can be done in a more transparent manner things can be done with low cost yeah that's sort of you know the the objective for for zelicah as a platform thank you very much and Julian hello everyone so my name is truly so the co-founder of alpha so alpha started in late 2017 where we only did a private token so just to raise the founding and just to solve a problem where we see that business ultimately will be wrong on top of blockchain so I'm here alone today for the conference because my our team is still busy with the code auditing and some of the tech are back fixing in Singapore and China my background started as a business consultant helping different corporates and governments to grow their business so what we've seen in different regions was that we see you know we see things are getting digitalized and also I'm very convinced that you will get tokenized as the next step so we want to build a platform that really helps the smart contracts to run in a fast and also efficient way so that's what we're working on so the first thing the problem statement we're trying to solve is that we found running thousands of smart contracts on one blockchain is a bit too rigid and also it may not be the most efficient way so what we have built from scratch is a multi-chain architecture that we have different smart contracts have irani on their own side chains so this has naturally separated the unrelated transactions from each other and in order to facilitate more interactions of different applications we have a main chain that very justifies what has happened on all the side chains so that reduces the counterparty risk so applications can easily work together with others and the other thing that we have worked on is to help smart transactions to be processed in parallel so in order to avoid double spending we have to first develop a task scheduler that determines what is the inter dependency of each transactions once the inter dependence II has been fully understood the independent transactions can be fed into the nodes for processing in parallel so doing this you know we can have a more flexible side chain structure that companies and developers can do most customization on the side chains and also they have more guaranteed performance because of the parallel processing thank you very much so you we've got two very different approaches at the high level in how you guys are building shinshu and yawning both of you guys have created your own language for you guys it's Silla and for you guys it's Sofia that's right and so a developer that wants to build on your platform would have to learn that language versus obviously and Alf you don't have to do that I'd be really interested to see yourself your two views and approaches on that so I'm going to start with you Shinshu why should someone learn a new language to build on top of silica so I think this is about you know the requirements so if you are building an application it doesn't require every you know strict level of let's say secretiy or you know security assurance you don't necessarily have to you know use Scylla but we want to provide a list an option and alternative to the status quo which is that if you're really let's say to enacting high volume volume in terms of let's say dollar value or you are doing something that's very important because you are dealing with you know people's lives for example you don't want anything to go wrong for such you know very critical applications when you have the requirements we have the budget you want a free more catalyst to provide this kind of opportunity to run something on the blockchain with very high assurance that things are going correct so that's sort of the way we position our Scylla but of course although I think you know personal I think Scylla is not a difficult language to learn all right I'm not a very good programmer but I look at Scylla I think I think it's straightforward it's very similar to JavaScript Authority but for any new language I think there's going to be a barrier for for developers to spend more time more to learn it so we have plans in place to find a ways to sort of compile different types of language that people are more familiar with today into Scylla so this is slides is just you know the first step this is the beginning of a new opportunity where people can more easily verify the correctness of their programs but I think going forward we'll try to make this you know process much easier but to me the first step is is very important you know it's more strategic and it's more challenging to accomplish okay Danny why should a developer learn [Music] exactly actually you can use JavaScript a functional way if you like to you can say that javascript is a functional language because you have functions as first of citizens there and you can pass functions of functions but there are the issues with JavaScript I think this has been very much documented online same thing with solidity it's a good way to start programming with JavaScript for example just right click inspect element and you can start writing code in the console that's cool similar with cerium but as soon as you wanna do serious things for example when you assume that in the future it will be trillions for digital assets handled by smart contracts on public lock chains as well as private blockchains then you want to do it a better way safer way in order to avoid things like have happened with the Dow or the parity buck 1 and 2 and yeah I mean there are important reasons why for example when you write code which has a lot of responsibility essentially that's you use methods of formal verification which we are also looking into by the way I mean this is the benefit of functional languages that you don't have side effects random side effects and yeah I mean we are here I think because we believe that in the future block chains will handle essentially all the digital assets and for certain things you want to have the hard security the highest professionalism which is the weldable in the software industry and this is what we are working on with also a team of highly renown developers and researchers in the space and yeah I mean start with cerium and then as soon as you want to do serious stuff he's use eternity home fake I do agree the security is a very important issue but we would take a different approach I think at this stage it is very important to attract talents especially developers from the more mainstream or conventional developer community so we decided to support mainstream mature languages but actually new VM is language independent so you can you can have different compilers today we support Java C sharp JavaScript go in the future we can support your language for your language that will be easier and formal verification can be integrated with can be ver can verify those compilers to make sure its correctness so I think it language is not the most important barrier for the for the future plushies so it's more like it's more important to have a bigger developer community yeah so I'm kind of you know with homepage on this stance I just want to share a story so I was in San Francisco I think like a few months ago got into a debate with a guy who is a developer there and he claimed that he thinks Blockheads should use a completely new language because that's the only way that you separate all the stupid guys and only get the smartest guys I'm true blockchain and I was like logically I agree with you it does achieve your objective but it does not achieve my blocking objective which is mass adoption you know getting more people to try out things that's why we also start with c-sharp same as Neal because it's quite commonly used and also tested building a blockchain you know has a lot of different aspects of tasks right we focus on the engineering side of having the right architecture and having the whole platform stable and secure we at our stage we don't think we can juggle with every single aspect and just saying okay we need to do innovation on every single every single thing you know we've think hundreds of projects running right now there are other projects working on different aspects we may just you know work together with them in the future so using c-sharp right now we do plan to support f-sharp in the future so that we also have some form of verification our capability and currently we do work with a few code auditing companies so that they can use their capability to help the developers on the security side we have come to a stage where right now we talk to companies and we want them don't have too much concerns of trying things out on us and this actually works quite well because even some IT solution companies say oh ok it's not too much frictions for us you know to incorporate guys in our brochure and help you know our clients to serve their needs I think that's what we're trying to achieve right now and it does I mean the Commons also comes back this is a really interesting point and Hong Fei also made the point about community and how important community is like if we want this to transition into the mainstream if we want people building things of value on it then we need to reach out and and enable those people to build on top of our various platforms so on fake cuts on sorry to builds bucks on the platforms I think I don't think this will lead to mass adoption if we work with languages which are not made for block chains because this will lead to lots of problems as well as you need some domain specific things and programming languages in order to you for example have little tokens almost every small contract wants to do this so why not just fill it in my contact language makes a lot of sense I think my counter-argument will be security is not free it's very expensive so if you design your language that's perfectly secured you butyl beauty software perfectly secured the software will be very expensive not every software I think Haitian needs that kind of labor of security actually so I see most important ones yes more than the most important ones so we in the future will live in a hybrid hybrid world so some of the software's they need to go is form of Education YouTube maybe use a new language some of them will just use conditional languages so um when you're when you're building a community around your platform do you speak a little bit about how neo is doing that and what you guys are doing in the future for that I just mentioned the main difference from you and a serum is we have a stronger governance so we kept about 50% of all the tokens to the to new foundation so new foundation can use that token to incentivize the community we sponsored about 12 developer communities around around the world the biggest one is called cities Iowa they have a few dozens of developers full-time developers mostly based in American and Europe and also we funded other communities like a new research there in South America and also one in Japan a few in Europe I believe so the communities are very geographically very distributed in different places and we also have a investment arm it's called NGC or new global capital they're using the token for a new foundation to invest in in the ecosystem projects and also other plot blockchain projects and they are doing very well in investment return I think that's it was a combination of these different methods that's the key how we build a bigger community duelling are you building a community around out yeah so we are really sure so what what we've seen the market right now is that not just for alpha for most of the projects one struggle we have is your there's a huge mismatch of your token holders and your target end users so that actually creates a lot of frictions and a lot of confusions in terms of what kind of path you're trying to take so we do want to focus on the fundamentals we try to focus on nurture people to understand more of what elf is trying to achieve and what what elf is doing and although we originated from Asia so we have office in Beijing Singapore and South Korea but we do our our goal is to have a global community and I would say so far our community is quite global yeah so the one thing that we want to do with the community is that we want to engage them to also do work with us know all our moderators our community is managed by volunteers that has been with us from day one and also we want to create job opportunities for those guys so our our community leaders our copywriters that those all came from our community and on the other hand when we are looking at how to nurture developers and help them to build real business on top of us we're kind of debating okay whether money is the only thing that is required to help for them to succeed and my assessment is that okay given this is a very early industry they need more than just money so what we figure out is they need money they need the business sense and also they need the technical support that's why we have built up a alliance which is called elf innovation Alliance trying to have very strong partners that can help on these three domains so we invited you know experienced funds we also invited business consultancy companies we invited some of the research arms of exchanges we also invited a code auditing firms like searching or a seller network those are the technical partners so we want to have this kind of a solution that helps developers whenever they need you know whether it be it capital or be it technical or business side Jinju how are you how you starting your community around Silla are you building and encouraging developers to build on top as ellika right I think first of all let me try not to pretend that I have the best answers to all these questions I think building a community is a hugely challenging task that requires a lot of creativity because you know some commonalities aside if you look at different projects or communities are quite different it's like you are looking at people with different you know personalities so yeah I don't know how all the best answers but we did learn some of the lessons the hard way sometimes so I have a few thoughts to share I think first of all in general you know whatever type of community you are trying to nurture I think Allison the in the beginning is very important to be very hands-on so we did that when we started the project almost all the co-founders were you know in the chest with every single person in the community at that time you know I remember for a very long time I I would you know read every single message from the community every single day so it was that kind of you know engagement that give the community people feeling that these people are serious people and then they are really you know on to something so that's number one I think that's the sort of a general general principle we we got from our own experience and secondly I think priority and timing are also very important so in terms of let's say Silla developers we feel that education is just very important education is probably of very high priority at this stage because you are talking about something that's you know very cool but people don't understand you know just explaining what is form of application explaining why that is important or take you some time and expecting people to learn a new language that's another you know huge challenge so that's why I put a lot of time and resources into education we try to build tutorials that people can see how it is actually not difficult to write something Salah with our help with the templates number two is that we engage student groups because these are the people who are having more creativity and you know we have sort of less boundaries here and there you know the end they can do many of the things out of out of the box that's why we work with the universities we work with student organizations sometimes face to face sometimes even for a program of a few weeks seriously engaging them trying to educate that you know this is something I think about doing there are many cool things you can do with Silla so I think I think that takes more time sometimes the growth of so-called the size of the community with that kind of you know engagement approach may be much slower but I think that's fine because we know what is the priority and we know what kind of people we need to really spend a lot of effort in attracting onto the platform thank you eonni yeah we set up two foundations to charitable foundations one focusing on the bark on SATA one for the planets these foundations they give out research grants and development grants to open-source developers at the same time advanced decentralized to global ambassador Network which organizes monthly meetups which have happens as far as an own every continent on this planet except Antarctica yeah I was thinking of going there to organize it yeah this will evolve over has already evolved into decentralized hackathons we have unfortunately a power outage I mean as well so we had lots of signups ramen as well as organized elders currently really into crypto partly because of the government as well who created their own cryptocurrency which not many people talk about I would like to know more about this so if somebody knows more about it please let me know later on and yeah besides this we are supporting startups with our incubator so giving them not just financial support but also marketing support and so generally how to develop as a start-up with you were experienced people in there so we want to essentially create this community of developers and reviewers who create value on top of the platform which you are building and we set up everything to do so thank you okay so the last question that I have before we hand you to audience questions so start thinking of some questions if you want some ask some to these guys is obviously on the flip side of this the application side so you can't do everything like you can build generalize platforms but you have to start thinking about what applications you really want to focus your time your development effort your focus on so maybe if we can just go around quick-fire and say would what smart contract applications are you most excited about this year and next year and where are you going to be focusing your efforts yep honestly I don't have a definite answer to that because you know this is also a debate of what exactly a public blockchain company is you know should we just focus on building the best product and somehow you know get people to be excited about it and stimulate their creativity you know let things happen on top of us basically we create a really attractive land and then people to build or should we go down a way that is you know okay we need to prove the point on our own so we go down a vertical and try to make a you know build something like that I think the good thing is that okay the market is huge enough that you know different projects are trying out different things for us right now we are looking at a few industries I think those are the general ones that all of us are looking at like financial services gaming companies in addition to that we are also looking at telecommunication operators because based on our architecture actually they could be running our notes and also for them there is a need for them to innovate in the next generation of internet so that's something that we are also exploring over there just as wealth of thoughts we have oh yeah I completely agree with you that although we are sometimes feeling very general-purpose platforms we are at this juncture that we have to showcase some of the compelling use cases as a you know as a whole space not just as one project so that's why we are focusing some of our energy almost quite specific use cases I would say or quite specific categories of use cases you know for us it's more about how do we best leverage the security and scalability capabilities provided by this circuit platform so we are very interesting things like you know payments settlements token addition so these are sort of the key areas we are looking at great thank you I'm fine I believe this day's gaming is the most interesting second factor yes in blockchain scope I'm very excited there will be a new game on you it's called crypto fast cool yeah it's a it's a car racing game go it's a 3d game so the the video is really good I've I've looked a preview a few days ago yeah we held a new first game come game conference in Tokyo it's last week of three days ago they showcased at the company showcase the game it looks very good so I'm looking forward to that and the gaming is the interesting thing about like car racing game is they can do like airdrop but not not tokens but cars like an airdrop a Lambo a Ferrari key to your account so that's that would be a very very interesting marketing scheme let's see how it worked the purchase for community or technology biotechnology was about contract application so that you most excited about also use cases yeah I think gaming is great generally also everything which is kind of like in the gray area so we're traditional financial systems Don's reach to as well as developing countries use case in developing countries where there is no existing financial system is super fascinating I think generally that blockchain will take off first and developing countries so somewhere where there is no widget or no yeah functioning banking system probably also no functioning government so financial stuff is one great application for blockchain but also governance how do we make decisions together community whether it's the local community a global community or whether it's a community for the future and Mars we need to kind of reach consensus not just technically but also socially all right any questions you can put your hand up if you have any questions no questions that means that we can finish on time thank you very much for your attention and have a great evening [Applause] you