NEAR Without The Noise #2

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:11

   all right so i think we're live um this is episode two of near without the noise hosted by ants guild uh i'm ozzie mandias and below me is kevin part of uh ants guild as well and today we've brought on dr alex shibshenko who's going to be talking about the near ethereum bridge as well as the ethereum virtual machine on near and the big picture significance of these two products uh in this in the scope of the development of the near ecosystem

2. 0:44

   so welcome alex um thanks aussie hello everyone thanks for joining us today uh hopefully the next hour will be interesting for you and so i think maybe just before we even get into any of the the ecosystem or the the technical questions do you just want to give a little bit of a background on your role within year and kind of what you what you do on a daily basis uh sure so i joined near not a long time ago about a month and a half or something

3. 1:17

   like that and i am the product manager for two projects uh bridge and evm so my day-to-day job is try to interpret uh from the technical and language to the business language and backwards uh making sure that like uh the projects these two projects are consistent uh with what our partners would like to be delivered and we actually want is inconsistent with the like the main direction of the company

4. 1:47

   so this is what i'm doing here okay so with that um i think we have a we have a more or less informal discussion we want to kind of go through but to kind of start with the the whole point of the the near ethereum rainbow bridge why don't we first take a step back and talk about interoperability so when you approach interoperability in the blockchain space today in 2020 why does it matter

5. 2:21

   and how have you seen it evolved and maybe where do you see it kind of going in the future as different layer one protocols become more developed okay so that's the nice question so i believe my point of view on this is pretty similar to many other people so um i think that uh there will be no single blockchain standards anytime soon just because like everyone is trying to be there as a as a first creator of the blockchain so everyone will continue to

6. 2:57

   try to do that um said saying that it means that we need to have something uh that will enable the uh some kind of communication in between blockchains why is this important well because blockchain is itself a a closed universe um and uh it's just because of the like the rules of the blockchain you need to uh the validators or the miners need to calculate the outcomes of the transactions or the changes of the state

7. 3:31

   and in order to be able to do it you need to have the consistent data so you need to so all of the inputs and the functions need to be the same and if this consistent and if this data is taken somewhere outside of the blockchain then the execution result may may be different that's why blockchains are only dealing with their own state i mean you can calculate things uh with the

8. 4:02

   with information that is stored in the state and that's it and because of that like there is no api that blockchain is able to query from another blockchain and and that's that's the problem so this is something that needs to be solved we need to have something that would be able to put the information into the states of the different blockchain and this something is oracles actually so you can put there or something um

9. 4:32

   or it is like bridges so we need to breach things in between blockchains and that's why uh i believe it is a crucial thing um it is similar um if we if we take an analogy from transitioning from intranet to the internet uh that's that is absolutely the same a single blockchain is an intranet with multiple people even if it is decentralized or multiple applications working there but when you need to scale to the world wide web then you need to have interconnections in between these so so i believe it is

10. 5:10

    like very very important and we need to build this bridges we need to be uh friendly to different blockchains we need to to establish this thing and on on near the decision was i think taken a good year ago to start building specifically a bridge with ethereum were you a part of that from the very very beginning and kind of what was that like at the at the beginning stages of the project what was the rationale and the kind of strategy

11. 5:40

    uh from the near team to get that going so early on so so i was not there so i joined only a month and a half but the rational i believe is the following so um the reason a very good existing ecosystem in ethereum and people are used to uh work there people are used to use ethereum tools and there are lots of applications lots of liquidity uh there so it is pretty natural to if we if we think that we need to build bridges with other uh different networks then it is pretty natural to choose ethereum as the first

12. 6:20

    one so so i believe that was the thing there well the most interesting thing in the approach that nir has taken was in the way how you're building this bridge so now we have in the market uh lots of different proof of authority bridges where there is an entity that is holding a key from two accounts the escrow account or the locker account on one blockchain where people are sending their tokens and they are locked and the same entity means the certificates for these tokens on the

13. 7:01

    another blockchain and uh lots of different blockchains and everyone is building the bridges the same way whether this entity is a single entity or it is a multi-signature contract it doesn't matter it's just it's just a single something that is doing this minting and locking and that's the problem because um it goes against the philosophy of the blockchain the philosophy of decentralization of the operations because if these people are not signing the transaction the user just

14. 7:35

    losing his tokens so approach that mir has taken was about making the bridge decentralized truly decentralized and truly permissionless so and because of that the overall architecture was to build a light client of near on ethereum and to build a light client of ethereum on near and these two light clients they are actually they are the oracles of the other blockchain um inside our like specific state so uh this this light clients are

15. 8:10

    able to verify anything that is happening on on the other blockchain and this approach actually said that we are now not going to rely on any intermediary we are just relying on the way how the blockchains are validated how the consensus algorithms are working there and that's it so i can say that there is no uh perm truly permissionless breach uh in the market and i can say that for six to nine months we are ahead of any other developments that are there

16. 8:51

    and that's why uh that's why this is one of the like unfair competitive advantages for uh uh ethereum near rainbow bridge um yeah and and that's good that's good and so beyond the the permissionless value of the bridge if i'm a near community member if i'm a developer in the context of maybe defy in the context of a lot of the most recent crypto developments happening on ethereum what does the bridge very simply bring to the near ecosystem

17. 9:23

    now and then what's the promise of it over the next couple months you could say so so the thing that bridge brings right now to the developers is the access to liquidity that is available on ethereum so that is the most uh the most important thing because many of our partners they are saying okay we would like to launch automatic market making or we would like to launch flash loans or we would like to launch

18. 9:56

    another d5 projects just because it is very popular it is uh something that people are paying their attention to so they would like to do it but in order to do this they need to have the uh backbone of the d5 multiple erc20 tokens that are interchangeable that people can trade and and do this stuff but they do not have well we opt we can obviously launch these tokens directly on near but they will cost zero

19. 10:26

    so it would be in very good and like uh a very good addition to near to have this liquidity uh from ethereum or near or at least give an ability to people to transfer in between the blockchains so that is the most important thing that bridge is enabling and uh and that's that's the most important thing so you just you just use the conventional bridge with the erc20 connector we actually

20. 10:57

    have developed the generic token connector which is different from the hackathon for example so people can breach any tokens on or through through our rainbow bridge and you can instantly get the access to this liquid that's the most important so so to summarize um basically the approach for you is to be rather uh friends with ethereum than be competitors absolutely so we are not friends but we are friends so we would like to be friends to

21. 11:30

    everybody actually so we do not think again um this is my personal point of view but this is also the point like the corporate uh uh um that we we are actually not trying to compete with people we are trying to uh you know find uh some kind of things where we're complementing each other uh and that's why we are we have lots of partners that's why we are talking to many different other different blockchains

22. 11:59

    so uh for example um a couple of days ago it was um an interesting conversation um attack lead of evm project eugene he went directly into uh into the communication channel probably it was discord of elrond a pretty known project and he was asking there some questions about the cross charts and execution how the state is how they're finalizing the states how they're doing the rollback and stuff like that and some of the community members were just laughing at this saying that hey near folks they do not

23. 12:38

    understand how to do this and that's why they are asking the questions from these guys but the reasoning for this was like absolutely the opposite we would like to share our knowledge we would like to get uh get some additional knowledge from other projects and we would like to like to understand how what is the best solution to do this this is the open source is actually working like this it is not like a competition because anyone can just copy paste your code and that's it just because if you're

24. 13:11

    using non-permissive license okay uh uh yeah and and we are trying to like to find the thin uh the interesting things there and we try to complement with people so um it is not like we are not knowing things but it's rather that we would like to enrich our knowledge and help people to enrich their knowledge and it seemed it seems like um the hackathon i don't we haven't talked

25. 13:41

    about the actual hackathon itself yet but a little so a little bit of context i think it was about a month and a half ago near hosted the near ethereum rainbow bridge hackathon as kind of the i guess you could say the seminal event announcing the launch of this permissionless bridge and they were trying to attract developers and possibly also project leads from both ethereum and near to build on

26. 14:07

    or across the bridge uh maybe explain if if you could uh what kind of applications are people looking to have built on the bridge and then if i currently already build on ethereum what would be my incentive to interact at all with near if i'm already kind of established and have my project on ethereum and then i guess we can go more into the hackathon itself from there yeah okay so multiple questions let's let's start from from the last one uh what's the incentive for ethereum people to to use the bridge

27. 14:40

    well the incentive is very simple uh to scale i would say that is to scale and in order to scale you need to cut your costs for the gas fees and in order to count your gas phase you either need to go to the layer two solution or you need to go to some kind of other layer one solution that will provide a lower cost and and here bridge helps you to transition the state of your contracts or the liquidity that you are capturing into other blockchain

28. 15:11

    that is like a good thing another thing that helps you to do this transition is the support of ethereum virtual machine on the near side this is something that we are going to roll out pretty soon in the in the better nets so we are we're like in the testing phase i believe we are going to attach the road maps a little bit uh down the road um but uh in general this is another thing that helps people to transition um yeah and with regards to the hackathon well hackathon

29. 15:44

    was well from my point of view it was extremely good because lots of people were participating lots of submissions and we actually were not we didn't expect that there will be so many people that were coming to this hackathon and we were not prepared actually and i believe for for all of the people who are who are participating in the hackathon and watching this they they would probably say uh that yeah some things were not that simple and not that like

30. 16:22

    smooth so we did uh we put down our our notes and we are like doing our homework to make the next hackathons better and we actually already started to work with some of the community members with some of the projects there um and we are trying to like find uh how to apply these projects to to the bridge and to to other to other initiatives inside of near uh just because they were actually doing things that we

31. 16:54

    wanted to do so why not let's let's work with these people let's incentivize them uh so they can continue their work and uh with regards to well if if if i if i am to say something to the hackathon participants i can say that uh uh you did a good job uh and you need to continue this stuff so maybe not you need to continue but i encourage you to continue your work i encourage you

32. 17:24

    not to stop not to think about this as like a weekend project but rather as a startup and this is something that can be a very beneficial piece of activity in your life and near itself a new york foundation is there to help you so reach out to our community guys nima and peter and myself obviously um reach out to us if you if you're stuck with some problems if you need some help either it is a validating of the idea or funding or anything uh reach out to us we are here

33. 18:03

    to help you um and uh yeah and i would like to remind everybody a very very key feature inside of near is that just because of the way how neo works uh 30 percent of the fees that smart contracts does and collects it goes directly to the developers so the developers that are going to develop like the basic infrastructure contracts for near which are can be a connectors to a rainbow bridge for example so the guys that are going to develop this and support they will actually earn some real money and

34. 18:40

    it is inside of the prep inside of the protocol so this is a very good incentive for all of the open source guys uh to build on here so yeah encourage everyone to build uh continue your great job um that's great um i do want to go back to one point where uh one of the guys reached out to elrond because what's actually the value in having different blockchains if they all share the same knowledge pool wouldn't just be

35. 19:14

    spreading the liquidity around or you see that differently well i see that different people are actually focusing on different things uh so for example for near it is very important to have uh sharding and this like scaling solution for other blockchain it is all about enabling the d5 ecosystem to be there some other blockchains they they for example pretend that they are permissionless blockchain but that they are actually permissioned blockchain blockchains and this gives some additional credibility to

36. 19:52

    the users so they feel more safe it is like from my point of view it's like different countries that are out there in in in the world in the us you have one tax system and the government and the way how you vote for people for prep for president uh in other countries there are some kind of other laws and we are well i am personally grateful that i'm not like born in some kind of country and i need to stick with one but rather i can choose where i can work where i can live

37. 20:30

    and where i can make money so that's that is the difference the devil is in the details though the overall everything all of these projects are blockchains but the devil is indeed in the details thank you um so maybe if we could look a little bit big picture for what's coming for near you said that there were some recent upgrades since the hackathon for the bridge uh that are going into beta mode

38. 21:04

    maybe could you walk through the two-month six-month 12-month kind of projections of where things will be and the value that can come from that yeah that would be really great if i would knew what will come to us in 12 months obviously uh so yeah i can probably answer liv a couple of questions the first uh blockchain world is is so dynamic and we are at so high pace that uh it is

39. 21:35

    very hard to to do the like the pro the appropriate uh planning for a long period of time um so yeah the bridge road map uh it is pretty uh straightforward so uh since uh yeah let me give you a short overview of the history of the bridge so somewhere in august uh the bridge the first version of the bridge was developed and we actually did a security audit of the code and the company uh

40. 22:05

    said that everything is okay you can we can launch it to production and uh so in order to to test it we and then try it we launched the hackathon and we launched the bridge into the test network the test net and since then we actually have found like five critical bugs in the code so the security audit was not that good and and we are fake we have already fixed that bugs but we understood that you know the guys that are working in in near they are much more

41. 22:41

    deep in tech and much more profound and can find things that can be wrong uh much better than some other companies that are even professionally provide services for security audits and i believe there are lots of people in the community that are also very very deep into into tech details and they can actually help us so we thought that uh rather than launch this uh product with flaws we would we would like to you know do some kind of a revision of everything

42. 23:13

    so we wanted to focus on two things first one is the restructuring of the bridge trying to clean up all of the messes there and make it a little bit more uh like user friendly uh so we started this uh refactoring and that that is the the biggest part of what we are doing and what we are focusing right now and the second part that we need to thoroughly test the bridge we need to like do lots of end-to-end tests we need to do fuzzy tests and some penetration testing

43. 23:44

    and even and even then it would not be enough so we understand that we need to put some bug bounties we need to launch better mode of the bridge and stuff like that and and now it seems like we are close to the moment when uh we are able to deliver the first better version of the bridge to the network so uh within november and i believe it is going to be sooner than later um we are going to launch what is called the private beta release of the bridge

44. 24:18

    the bridge will be deployed on the main net network and the people that would like to participate in the private beta they would be able to access it and transfer erc 20 tokens in between ethereum and uh and near on near side it will be nap21 tokens which is like literally the copy of the ear c20 standard so these people would be able to test it will be able to integrate it in the in their apps in their contracts and work with the

45. 24:51

    bridge uh we are going after a while we are going to put some bug bounties in place for the people that would like to hack the bridge um and uh this and obviously we are going to to to do the payouts and all of this stuff once we are fully comfortable with the with the state of the bridge then we are going to name it a 1.0 version and we are going to re deploy the bridge to the network with the upgrade ability and all of this

46. 25:22

    stuff now for everyone who will want who would like to join the private beta testing of the bridge uh they need to uh remember two major things first one is that uh please be careful with the bridge do not put too much money into it we have tried our best to fix all of the issues but unfortunately we cannot guarantee you that like uh you are not going to lose your money there so please make a decision on what is the threshold that

47. 25:57

    is okay for you to put the the threshold for the money inside of the bridge uh and just uh be below that threshold if it is 1k uh of us dollars then okay if it is 10k no problem but just uh just be be very responsible for this and the second thing which is a little bit more on the technical side uh once we are going to deploy 1.0 bridge it uh in order to use it you would need to move the tokens from the beta version of the bridge

48. 26:37

    back to ethereum and then move it back through the new version of the bridge so you need to do the upgrade manually unfortunately but this is done for the sake of the speed of the delivery because some of our partners they are really they really would like the bridge to be delivered and we would like to help them to do that so these only two like restrictions um the information about the private better

49. 27:02

    i believe some of some of you might might want to know how to take part in this uh so the information about private better is going to be posted on the governance forum of near golf.near.org this week so uh so pretty soon you can you can check it um and you will be able to leave your uh uh you would be able there to fill the form and and take a part in in the private beta testing any anyone from the near community would

50. 27:34

    be able to do this but uh keep in mind you need to have uh at least two accounts then your account and the theorem account to be able to try to do the transfers so yeah that's it um uh and yeah and pretty soon we are going to to put some explanation explanatory blog uh about the near bridge uh to give uh information about about it uh to white community um so yeah again uh coming back to the road map during november we are going to uh launch the private beta

51. 28:09

    uh then probably december and and the rest of the november we are going to uh to do the testing uh of different stuff there the bridge will be already operational but we will continue to do the testing and probably like the white rollout of the bridge with the 1.0 version attached to it this is something that is going to be early next year so just just to summarize kind of what you've been uh speaking about for the last couple of minutes the beta version of the bridge that's going to be available in the next couple

52. 28:43

    months would be a great opportunity for developers interested in getting in on the ground floor kind of as you said earlier with the rewards involved in that and then it also sounds like there's going to be a number of partners as well that are interested in in leveraging that is also is that fair to say yes and anyone is free to join if you would like to explore this you are free to join and you know actually i missed one additional milestone somewhere in the in the end of november

53. 29:13

    and in the beginning of december we are going to deploy the front end for the bridge so first the deployment it will be like the back end code or like the contracts uh but uh in the end of the november we will have the front end and people will would be able you know go to the website log in with the near wallet and with metamask and just in couple of clicks and couple of sign-in transactions they would be able to send their tokens from ethereum to near and back so this is additional something

54. 29:45

    additional that we are going to to show to people okay um there's a question from one of our viewers and um this person asked will there be a bridge with other blockchains like polkadot yeah so actually during this week there were several um blockchains that were reaching out to us they were fascinated with our blockchain solution and they were saying that okay we are also like evm compatible uh let's let's bridge with us and we say okay no problem i mean

55. 30:24

    that that is simple if we since on the ethereum side we have the uh ethereum contracts working there uh why not polkadot is also he's also supporting evm obviously so i do not think that there will be lots of different work that we need to do um in order to support this bridge uh the main thing uh for the bridge to be operational is that we need to cover the costs of the light clients that we that i was mentioning uh

56. 30:57

    yeah we need to cover these costs so what does it mean um so for example from ethereum we are sending every block to near uh uh to near uh to ethereum on your client and this client is storing this information he needs this information in order to check the decrypter proofs and different stuff and this costs almost zero because for this we are paying the transaction fees in near but

57. 31:27

    when we are sending information about near blocks to ethereum we need to pay ether fees and they are pretty high so the operations of the bridge would cost us and we are going to will fully take this costs on on our side it is going to cost about 400 us dollars per day for sending the blocks to the near light client on the ethereum side so if somebody from the polkadot either from the or from the community or from from some officials would like to

58. 32:03

    do this breach would like to adopt this uh and would like to cover uh at least partially these costs then uh we are we are more than uh well we we are welcome everyone to to join this and the major thing that like the the architecture of the bridge is not going to be changed only the connectors only like the things that we are going to uh to send it is going to be changed but from that point of view uh once the rainbow bridge is developed it would be pretty easy to apply it

59. 32:36

    and to reuse it on other type of the blockchains and i think before we move on you touched on something pretty important where you were talking about different integrations of the ethereum virtual machine of the evm can you maybe explain why that's important to allowing different uh to connect to different bridges uh to taking out different bridges to different blockchains i guess if i'm if i don't really

60. 33:02

    understand the context of this is that if i don't come from a background where i am familiar with what an evm is why does that matter in the context of connecting sure so so the evm is is like ethereum virtual machine this is this is a place this is a thing that is an essential part of the ethereum where the ethereum code is executed um and this is something that people are get used to

61. 33:33

    well i believe like nowadays the blockchain developer it almost it in 90 percent cases means that this is like an ethereum developer and in 90 percent of that it is a solidity developer so most of the people are used to work with the ethereum virtual machine with solidity with with the development tools like truffle for example uh and and that's why it is a convenient place for them to

62. 34:04

    do a convenient ecosystem to work and we would like to help these people to to go to the next stage as i said we would like to enable innovation through scaling of the solutions and that's why we're helping people to to do the first step we are hand we are holding their hand uh during this cross from the uh old slow non-scalable ethereum to near um and that's why we are given them an ability

63. 34:35

    to take their smart contracts as is and to put them into near so you have written lots of smart contracts different well lots of them and this is your decentralized application that is working and it is hard for you to like write the code from the scratch and deploy it into new environment and that's why that's the major problem for many projects to migrate from the blockchain to another blockchain

64. 35:05

    once you are on one infrastructure it is very hard for you to go to another infrastructure this is how amazon web services actually is working once you start using it it is very hard for you to go to some kind of other cloud provider so uh what we are doing instead of saying that you need to throw your code in the bin and and then create the new one from scratch we are saying hey

65. 35:32

    to start you can take your contracts deploy it on near as is or with the minor changes and that's it you have the same decentralized application but working on near side that's why what from the from the protocol level what what do we need we need to support this uh these contracts that are written in solidity and that are working on the evm that's why we are doing that and for the

66. 35:58

    evm again within november uh i believe we are going to publish the uh evm support on the battle net the evm is much more drastic protocol change so we are we are going to be extremely cautious with it um i know that lots of people are waiting for it uh but let us test everything and if you would like to try it if you would like again to submit some reports to us uh we're you are more than welcome i'm going also share the details

67. 36:32

    uh once we're going to deploy deploy the evm on the battlenet but what we are aiming to to have here is absolutely smooth experience for ethereum developers uh to be able to transition to near okay another uh one another right so will the bridge support ethereum 2.0 and will there be differences so um i believe it is a pretty long uh pretty long road until ethereum 2.0 unfortunately uh i i started in crypt space since 2015 so

68. 37:22

    i have have some time spent here and at that year i i met the vitalik and we were talking about um about proof of stake in moscow and uh and then he said well we are not quite sure when but i can guarantee you that it is going to be soon and now it is 2021 almost and prof stake is not yet there so uh i believe ethereum is too big to move fast so it would be very hard for ethereum 2.0 to be on our desktop desktops and laptops and

69. 38:03

    and wallets very soon though uh we have no problems into migration okay we need to change uh the way how how our contracts on the ethereum side work but that's it uh it is not going to be a major or drastic change um so once ethereum 2.0 is there we are going to adapt but i'm not i do not think that this is going to be fast right right also have another question which is basically near presents itself as a developer friendly and developer oriented solution

70. 38:36

    and sometimes you have to build things from scratch but what's the short term goal is it to roll out as many products as you you can to give a wide variety of tools or is it to rather polish them and fight fine tune these this small selection of products um so a great question so the near approach or near the near inc approach yeah so as you know we have two two companies the new foundation who is governing everything and the near incorporated

71. 39:08

    which is developing some things for the near foundation so uh our approach is not to like create everything because we cannot do that um and we are not that creative as millions people in in the community so we would rather uh say to our community come here we would like to support you we would like to to help you with all of our knowledge and and the funds that we have uh and please build things that that that you would like to build so

72. 39:38

    near itself is not launching any commercial products so we do not have the bridge is going to be for free we actually are like covering the cost for the bridge uh for the users the wallet the web wallet is for free the evm support is going to be for free um and and and so on so all of this development uh is only the costs for near foundation obviously near foundation has has funds and this this is coming out from early investors and from from talking sale and from there

73. 40:12

    the percentage of the fees that foundation is taking uh and and that's why foundation is just like spending this money so that's pretty natural uh we're just encouraging people to build that with regards to the protocol changes and the protocol features that we are introducing well um many have mentioned and many have seen that the wallet uh rollout was not as smooth as as people want it to be it but just it is just because

74. 40:41

    like we are at in the beginning of the road uh we were not knowing when the people are going to vote for the for the unlocking of the transfers on the near blockchain and so we also needed to adapt so we have rolled out the wallet um and there were some issues we were trying to fix it we were trying to introduce new features that people requested for example the staking of unlocked tokens and there was implemented and for now for example the wallet team

75. 41:12

    they're taking a break in in the development of the new features so they would like to stabilize this and i can say that with all of the other products everything will be in waves so it will be a wave when we are developing new features and there will be another wave after it when we are stabilizing the code closing some technical depth uh and like doing some additional tests and

76. 41:36

    and make sure that end-to-end things are working correctly and so on with the breach um the thing that we are focusing right now is a very robust and secure transfers as i said and we would like to develop the basic connectors that will allow people to transfer some subset of the tokens so erc20 nfts or erc 721 and of course uh the native tokens and ability to bridge ethereum to near and near token to ethereum so this is something that we would like to cover there are

77. 42:16

    many other token standards uh including the ones that are pretty fresh and new and they would probably substitute your c20 but this is something that we are not going to develop this this support for this for the bridging of these tokens this is something we are not going to develop uh soon uh this is uh instead we are encouraging community to build this uh if they will not build this well okay we

78. 42:42

    are going to build this but a little bit later when we fix all of the errors great great um thank you what do you think more people need to understand about the bridge and its significance for near since we're talking about the bridge and uh to add to add to that just what what doesn't receive enough attention from the community or that you feel like the community might not understand

79. 43:15

    fully about the whole how the bridge is developing or the value of the bridge overall yeah so um so like the communication of the community with the community something is like it is in my domain of responsibility this is something that i would like to fix and to make it more obvious for everybody and to help everybody to understand things uh and that's why well for people that are very interested in the bridge

80. 43:46

    uh i i have a bad news for you guys that my face you are going to see quite a lot and and some posts in the blog from from myself so beware beware um with regards to the most important things that people from my point of view do not understand right now is the nature of the breach we already have touched this point uh but this is like the unique approach for bridging assets which is the permissionless approach and uh lots of lots of

81. 44:18

    different projects uh put in their blog post and say hey we finally launched our bridge it is completely permissionless and in order to transfer you need to transfer the tokens to this multi-signature account um and then when i'm reading this post i like hey guys you are just posting a ton of marketing you are saying to people that it is permission less while you're just transferring to multisig accounts i mean what what are you communicating uh that that that's really

82. 44:50

    rude to your community so do not cheat people because they they are not going to uh to say thank you for for this uh and uh from that point of view uh rainbow bridge is truly decentralized it is truly permissionless there is absolutely no way for anybody uh including near and near foundation to steal your tokens on the architecture level some hackers can hack smart contracts this is this is true and they can steal because of the the way how the smart contract is

83. 45:28

    implemented but if it is bug free then nobody is able to steal it and nobody ever able to collude and uh and you know like uh just put your money in some other people's hands so this is a very very important thing and from my point of view this is very encouraging because like blockchain is all about the decentralization and permissionless nobody can whether it is a decentralized finance uh

84. 46:00

    which is a very different from the traditional banking or it is decentralized autonomous organizations that are like providing you the ways to govern things uh and why why if you if you're doing like cross transactions in between countries why do you need to have swift for this why do you need to have a centralized authority even if it is managed by the board of directors and there are multiple people there why do you need a centralized authority for this so i encourage everyone to to take a

85. 46:34

    look once again to this piece of the architecture of the bridge and uh and this is something that guarantees you and your users uh presuming your dab developer like a solid background into what they are using this is blockchain is about it is all about this why would you sacrifice decentralization and permission less in one piece of your application i love hearing you talk about the whole

86. 47:07

    concept of decentralization and i'm interested in hearing for you personally what you're looking forward to most within the near ecosystem in the coming years and how do you find working with other members of the near team yeah so uh look uh as you as you heard i'm clearly biased uh so i um well actually i i used to work in bit fury company before for four years and i was building their framework for private blockchains which is called the

87. 47:38

    theorem it is not it is not um you know an advertisement of the of that but even in the permissioned blockchain framework i was i was really staking on the light client uh as a concept yeah so light client itself is a piece of software that is working on the client side and it is it is able to verify um answers of the blockchain so uh to give you you know some kind of obviously lots of people know about this but let me give you a very

88. 48:16

    quick example so imagine you have you have a smartphone and you are opening your bank bank online banking application there is a secure connection that is established between your smartphone and the servers of the bank and uh and no one is able to go in the middle and there is no possibility for uh the men in the middle attack so the hacker is changing some numbers but even though everything is secure and presumed that

89. 48:47

    your smartphone is correct the data that is displayed on your screen is just the data that the server has sent to you if the server want to send you the information that you have a hundred dollars on your bank account then he is able to send it if the server would like to send that you owe 100 to the bank it will send it and there is no way for an end users to check whether this information correct or not and

90. 49:25

    in the blockchain world obviously you can install the full node of ethereum or full node of bitcoin a full node of anything and and and just see all of the transactions and check the consensus algorithm and like be 100 sure that uh the information that you are using is correct but that is damn hard just because uh bitcoin node it it it takes i don't know 250 gigabytes of the data ethereum node even more than that and you you need to have an ssd to store it just

91. 50:03

    because with the hard drive the ordinary hard drive you will not be able to keep with the with the with the heads of the blockchain so it just damn hard and and because of that for example the full amount of bitcoin notes is like a little bit more than 10 000 and what is the amount of people that are using the bitcoin it's like hundreds of thousands or even millions of them and all of these people they are not well with the bitcoin so all of these people need to be

92. 50:34

    100 sure that the information that they have is the correct one because this is all about the blockchain this is all about the decentralization you do not need to trust any server you do not need to trust to anything except your own device actually yeah so still you need to because you are looking at the screen of your device and that's why a piece of software that is able to verify

93. 50:58

    things that are inside that align inside of the blockchain is very crucial so you cannot work with the blockchain the way how the the secure connection things are working it is just like killing every every benefit of the blockchain what you need to do instead is the following you need to establish again the secure connection just for the sake of anonymity of yourself and stuff like that but when you are

94. 51:30

    clearing the server when you're acquiring your bank you need to ask them hey please send me my balance of the card but together with it please send me the cryptographic proof that this balance is correct and then using some hashes some different specific uh data structures like merkel trees and stuff like that the light client is able to verify that this information is correct and the way how cryptographic proofs are assembled is that they are unforgeable

95. 52:04

    i mean it's it's just based on the same cryptography as the ordinary digital signatures are based and hashing and stuff like that so just use it and that's why like i'm a big believer of the fact that people need to have light clients and that's why i am a big believer of the concept uh and the architecture of the of the bridge so for now i can say that light clients uh are really great i'm looking forward to to all of this stuff

96. 52:34

    with uh with uh near there is an ability to build a light client we were not focusing at this moment on this but i would vote with my two hands up for the community members who are going to create a near light client uh as a javascript library and and make it available to all of the front-end applications so this is first uh i i very i'm very looking forward for the the releasing of 1.0 breach and obviously the better release too just because the architecture is right

97. 53:12

    the architecture is the best that we can that we can create um yeah and with regards to working with uh with people in in in near i mean uh the team is is just great it is a very very strong team assembled in one place so if we take a look into the developers they are just nuts i mean i have never ever seen that deep and that detailed and profound people uh that are doing their job if we take

98. 53:50

    on the support functions and the leadership lots of people from the very big companies like google facebook memsiq well uh they have their experience there and also lots of companies from the blockchain ecosystem consensus and bid fury and they know things they know stuff how to do and what is from my point of view really really important is that they are all like young and hungry they would like to do stuff uh and uh like

99. 54:21

    from my point of view blockchain is like your renaissance of of this of the of the world it's just second renaissance i can say and uh uh near is like yet another nikolai kapernick copernicus who is just opening the eyes for the people that hey guys you know the earth is not in the center or the government is not in the center or the financial institutions it's not in the center we're just like this is just some way how you can

100. 54:52

     uh how you can think about things but there is like another much more bigger things much more bigger vision into different things and you know i'm really happy and i i really i i i'm really happy to be like a part of this team uh be like a small finger of nicholas copernicus and to be able to leave a footprint in in the history of the new world of the things that are going to be next

101. 55:21

     after the blockchain technology will be realized in this world and be appreciated here so yeah excellent well we're we're pretty much at the end of our session but uh that was absolutely fantastic alex uh thank you for all of the information you gave i think just as a general summary we can say that the bridge is in its early days but there's a lot of development to come for it with a lot of opportunities uh for developers community members and

102. 55:54

     official near partners and i think as you just said as well this is this is some part of something much larger that's taking place in in the blockchain uh domain as a whole so um we want to thank you for your time we're definitely going to hope to have you back again to talk about other topics because that was fantastic hour that we just had and um do you have anything you'd like to add

103. 56:18

     kevin to that now i'm just overall grateful with the information provided and if any watchers here haven't gotten any more bullets now i don't know thanks again thanks kevin for you having me yeah would be would be happy to join once again on different topics maybe on evm maybe on evm so thank you very much you have a great day and everyone will be having a full upload of this to youtube with uh time stamps as well uh in the coming days

104. 56:56

     so yeah thanks everyone we'll uh we'll see you next time