illia Polosuhkin & Scott Melker: How Near Protocol Is Different

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   let's go this podcast is brought to you by athletic greens and bullish please stay tuned for more information on both of these amazing companies later in the episode in a world of nearly endless layer ones it's difficult to differentiate yourself but Ilya polisukin of near has a very very compelling answers as to why they are so so different so there are seemingly an endless string

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   now of layer ones being developed how do you differentiate yourself from the other ones so we started kind of at the bottom and right as developers wanting to build uh on blockchain and from our perspective even right now the people don't focus on things that you know as a developer you want right as developer you want a simple to build platform something that you can come in with whatever programming language you can build on and start building you want something that users

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   can really easy to use right like they should not need to figure out how to buy crypto on an exchange install extra Chrome extension all the stuff before they into it right they should be really easy to onboard it should be secure and it should be scalable right like somebody else becoming successful app should not make your app super expensive and unimpossible to use and so reality is there's still kind of you know not much

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   focus on these properties and that's what you know in near we focus on right we you know use webassembly which is kind of a framework that is used by all the browsers there's you know a huge community of developers beyond web3 that are building tooling and compilers for we just launched JavaScript support so you actually any JavaScript right there's 20 million developers with no

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   JavaScript can actually write smart contracts one year oh wow our onboarding is designed web 2 style you know login was near similar to login with Google or Facebook kind of that flow underneath there's crypto all those you don't see any of this you don't see private Keys like if you don't want to you don't see seed phrases you have email recovery um and then you know focusing on security making sure it's bulletproof

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   it's you know stable um like we did a lot of research across a lot of protocols we have our own whiteboard series on YouTube where we actually talk with a lot of them and so really focusing on worst case they're focusing on kind of protecting against that and then scalability right at the end you know one machine cannot process everything that people will throw at it right and so you need to start kind of parallel processing but you want it to

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   still be simple and you know there's a lot of scalability solutions which just say well there's this chain is that chain app chain roll up whatever whatever you call it at the end it's separate environments as a user now I need to know about and what we focus on how do we create a singular environment that you as a user don't need to know what's underneath there's shards there's you know cross Shard messaging all the stuff you don't need to know about it you just use it up more shards are added

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   as more capacity needed kind of similar how web2 works you know you don't think about you know how many data centers Google have you don't think about you know that some data centers work or not right you don't need to think about any of this so this is kind of you know philosophical focus is different from our perspective and then it results in very different decisions on on the protocol how close do you think we are to actually living in a world where a random person who's not crypto native

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   has no technological understanding can actually engage so we have people who have no technological understanding like I mean some of the stories I've I've seen somebody interviewed some of the users like people from factories people in Services industry in Philippines you know using apps on near onboarding you know earning money from like there's a job Marketplace pretty much that they

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    can engage with um already right now we have sweatcoin which has 100 million users uh non-crypto they're already onboarded 10 million users on near so we are there like we like they don't need to understand private keys they don't need to understand like even crypto uh we have also other plastic launch that you know you don't need to have even ether or near to send transactions no transaction fees just sign up with an email and get going right so we pushing it pretty much to a

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    limit on what is a real experience should look like for the user that you don't need to think about blockchain you just use the apps you just get you know get the experience and then over time you learn about the properties you learn about the uh kind of all the things you can do right I mean ux and UI have continued to be the biggest problem in my opinion for mainstream adoption exactly that's the problem that needs to be solved obviously you're working on it

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    I just think it's too scary for most people or confusing so I mean we're addressing a lot of confusion part scary part is still there and this is actually kind of looking forward for this year a lot of my focus is how do we build better security model that is so right now there's kind of Two Worlds right there's a new trusting bank or whatever exchange to hold all your assets or you're trusting yourself but now if you lose the seed phrase if

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    you lose The Ledger if you you know whatever happens you lost everything or somebody you know somebody attacks a computer and manages to recover it and so this is Two Worlds this you know like this is black and white we should be somewhere in the middle we should be uh giving users options to self-custody not allow somebody else to you know withdraw their funds and do whatever they want

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    with them but still be able to recover and so part of the benefits for example veneer we our account model is not single key single account we actually have like your calendars you know named account like minus ilia.nir and underneath there's a lot of keys there's different permissions and so I can have a Banks key you know my friends Keys whatever I want to set up as a recovery

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    method that only can recover a new key with a delay with the you know with some cooldown period right and so pretty much if I lose it I can go and figure out how to recover it I can also have a model where there's active threat prevention model that detects if there's like outliers in my transactions like all the things can be added and kind of uh to protect the user similarly one of the other things we're

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    working on and surface information about contracts like contracts can be malicious like we can actually detect that for and so we can surface that in the wallet directly like hey this contract seems suspicious you sure you want to transact with it and so pretty much building the system that protects the user that's really it's very reminiscent of there's a lot of problems with web too but but I'm sure you don't want to click exactly what you want to click on this

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    website you know like if you if you still click at a certain point at which the onus and the responsibilities on the user but in crypto sometimes it seems we lack those warnings exactly yeah right you click the link and it's over it seems like right now we're in a place where I don't know if it's because of the scale of adoption or how much more usage there is but where a lot of things are breaking exactly so we went from like this this is like uh you know nerds

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    and hipsters who were using this I mean for a better word fair to like holy you know there's there is like everybody starting to try to use it at least and obviously yeah they don't understand what they're clicking right and and so it's easier to scan them it's easier to uh you know people running like phishing ads on Google such that and people click on that and the first three ads if you're used to serve units uh uniswap

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    would be efficient exactly and so and so this that's why what I'm saying is like to get to a mass adoption the next thing is security is is protecting the user actively making sure they're not able to do these things and then creating a more kind of secure environment like still permissionless but you're also protecting them from themselves exactly so it's sort of a different uh you're not necessarily protected from the

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    attacker you're protecting them from making the mistakes that are so common it's both it's both yeah I mean like pretty much it's the same you know the browsers have security model that does not allow malicious JavaScript to for example take over your computer right it's like by doing that you know that stops the whole surface of attacks yeah and so this is the same thing we need like in the way wallets and you know some of the other tooling is the browser

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    of web3 and we need to build in protection into it yeah I love what you said about it being sort of bipolar or black and white and I think a lot of things in crypto are viewed that way by the communities and everything really is in the gray on the scale and that I think also is true for centralization to decent execution right you have this sort of I guess the Maxi ethos or whatever they have to be everything has

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    to be fully decentralized your own Keys all these then you have the finances and fully centralized exchanges of the world and maybe the best things will fall in between nobody wants to hear that seemingly but well there's a thing also like decentralization is not very defined right what is decentralization right this is like running more machines this is development decentralized is like which like there's a lot of aspects

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    of it and there's also a lot of repercussions of each aspect like what does that actually mean and and indeed for each one of them it's not a like that's why it's like if we actually build a framework for decentralization we'll see that it's all black and white right it's like well most of the stuff right now is centralized development maybe decentralized nodes um but you know centralized like this and that right like there's a number of things and then they are having all on

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    Spectrum I guess it can all be a path as well it is and that's really what it is is you just travel this past decentralization and it's so we always called it a progressive like uh security Progressive decentralization for the users for example because you want to start centralized first of all as a user who's just starting you don't have any assets you don't really care like you it's like you actually can't start fully you know like 50 bucks the question is

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    how easy it is to move out how easy it is to become secure and it's actually super complicated in case of you know a custodian or binance right let's say you bought a bunch of stuff now you need to move it out it's expensive this is why like again what what we've been trying to do is like well okay you have a custodial key for example but now you can flip it and add your non-custodial key if you want and remove custodial key in one transaction like and all of your account is still the same right you

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    don't need to move accounts you don't need to tell everyone that you moved out of this custody service like it's still your account and so for me web3 in general is not about decentralization per se it's about low switching costs how do we deliver low switching costs across everything because this is what Facebooks and Googles Etc are they are a high switching cost data mode platforms this is what banks are they're high searching cost platform that you know leverages their resources and so

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    decentralization is a tool to achieve low switching costs right having multiple wallets having multiple nodes having multiple RPC having multiple of everything means that we can switch everything but the value we're delivering to user is that they're not logged in and that means every of these participants are constantly on their toes to compete for the user because as soon as they do something stupid or start being rent seeking people will

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    switch right is there a certain point at scale where you start to be concerned that things will break down it's very easy I think at this point we did talk about originally nerds and hipsters and we're sort of on our way to to the mainstream and that's very different than a half a billion or a billion or two billion people starting to interact in some meaningful way with crypto so I

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    mean this is our our posted goal is one billion and we're one percent there um they for me like I mean there's still a ton of stuff to build honestly like yeah we're not ready yet but you know the definitely the goal is to be ready and kind of build in all of this both like on the scalability side on security side and on Simplicity still right all of this lectures kind of continuously advancing what we can do so we can get to a billion I I get where you're at now when we were talking before I said so

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    where are you from and he said nowhere yeah how did you end up sort of I guess in crypto in the first place deciding that this is what you wanted to do and now being a complete digital Nomad who's all over the planet every day so I mean it started uh so we were doing actually AI startup and we one of the products on kind of uh tools were built was a crowdsourcing platform that had people around the world we had people in China Cuba Russia

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    Ukraine and it actually really hard to send money from us to all those places right and so we actually started looking at blockchain as can we you know it sounded like a global payment system can we use it and the answer was not and I mean beyond that like coming from open source coming from kind of this open Spirit we wanted to build an open platform that people can contribute value can you know

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    leverage it to to generate kind of data different data sets of different problems and the reality was like it's really hard to build it's really hard to use like it doesn't scale it's too expensive for micro transactions that this were and so we kind of started looking over every single protocol and trying to analyze it that's why we did like whiteboard series and kind of almost investigating what what are the

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    protocols doing um and yeah I mean it resulted in like well there's nothing that addresses this like core problems in the way at least we believe um and kind of in this like more philosophy like a lot of people say like hey we have a new consensus let's you know let's ship a new consensus it's like cool the consensus is not really the core of a problem right consensus may be part of a solution but it's not a

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    problem and so that's why like well let's start with the problem and let's start designing so like in many ways we actually we're shipped first to platform for developers like literally no consensus no sharding nothing just had this environment where you can write contracts and you know ship thing we actually I don't know like three or four months in we had internal hackathon where we

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    had applications on near what was that back then already launched like that people can use that that was the whole thing there was no consent with nothing like it was just like you know it's writing a single machine like a box but that was a developer environment that we wanted and so from there we started designing kind of how it should run underneath and we like we had a couple four stars we implemented like four

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    different consensuses we Implement two different sharding like at some point deleted 20 000 lines of code because we're like oh this doesn't work which was not fun at the moment but this is kind of you know because we had this environment where we already had contracts like we actually our test net runs from April 2019 non-stop like we launched in in uh October 2020 like we had testnet non-stop upgrades you know through everything different consensus different sharding non-stop for this period of time because we had developers

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    already trying to build stuff on testnet and so yeah I mean I think like coming to now right I mean the ecosystem is global right uh we have already five different Regional hubs like you know full-on kind of fund product Labs Marketing in different places we have Eco funds we have you know kind of folks like doing meetups Etc and there's conferences like there's so much going on that ecosystem is so Global um you know every pretty much like I think we're not on every continent just

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    yet uh we need we need to get uh the Antarctica covered but uh you know the everything else is is there's something going on in your ecosystem and so it's kind of really hard to be in one place because there's so much interesting stuff so many people and kind of going around and meeting with everyone and and seeing how I can help as well has became my job so is this all you do or do you

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    actually have time to have a hobby or do anything I mean I think like traveling is fun at least for a bit but uh yeah I mean mostly this this is really exciting and there's a lot of exciting projects I think kind of because we started from this like hey we want to build stuff on blockchain uh I'm really excited about the stuff on blockchain right and so that's why I'm kind of going around and

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    meeting people who are building really different use cases uh and seeing how I can help has become very like yeah it's exciting part of the job it's a totally new world because they're not your employees yeah these are just people who have chosen to who are passionate about your ecosystem and have chosen to build on it and you want to go meet them exactly it's really cool it's I mean gone are the days of like a centralized office and you sit there and you guys

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    have your meetings and you're the boss and you tell everybody to go take coffee and it's just incredible you can build something this big now in this world was that because of kovid um so we were actually going like we were going to distribute it and we I would say the eventuality of of the decentralization of organization uh was there as well like from the start we were designing that like Hey we're gonna launch the pro that first version of protocol uh I mean there's obviously going to be tons of work afterwards but

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    we gonna some in some way decentralize so what happened actually a lot of initial team spun out to build projects on Debonair right we have folks who you know spun out to build D5 we have folks who spend out to do kind of some nft stuff they have folks who are doing some other infrastructure on top right like private chard and so that was kind of part of the spirit like a lot of people we brought in originally were

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    entrepreneurs like they've had companies before or you know wanted to do a company before and were just like join us let's build together this infrastructure that then everybody on top can build and you can go and find your own uh Enterprise on double this infrastructure and that's kind kind of what happened and so because of this yeah like I'm not a boss of anyone but there's a lot of folks who I worked with before who now building their own things that I'm excited to work with so

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    obviously there's a lot more new folks coming in as well and so you have this really kind of um I mean it's somewhat planned right obviously it always happens at the wrong time I would say sure but like uh it was somewhat planned that we're gonna gonna really just decentralize our own team and become like uh you know lots of pieces in a whole kind of ecosystem puzzle I call it an open Google model so

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    I worked at Google and at Google actually internally you have a lot of teams working together in different ways the infrastructure in Google inside is open you can see everybody sells source code you can build on top of any other service you just need to be inside and the idea here is like well what if we opened this model what if we actually have a you know Common Services common platform everybody can build everybody's

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    stuff but it's open anybody can join and you have economic incentives around and not just the platform incentive but actually each company and team can have its own you know token to align and people can you know work together through that so actually creating more direct and citizen structure how do you disincentivize Bad actors from coming in and building something well I mean I don't think you can completely discentivize right this will happen um I think the general generally part of

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    it is culture right like just we've set up a lot more kind of hey this is a builder you know it's not a hype culture it's not a you know people kind of running crazy making ton of money uh type of culture that that in itself you know there's other other places where that culture exists where people who want to make a quick Buck go in result and then on the other side is um I mean all the security and other things that we're going to be working in

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    like it's just you know as as you kind of go beyond when everybody knows everyone to you know there'll be a lot more projects that kind of coming out of nowhere we need kind of a more we need to use the blockchain for the coordination right like we built this coordination engine which is blockchain so we can use it to actually coordinate and desensitive devices right we can have people reporting suspicious things

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    we can have you know whitelists and Blacklist on chain that everybody else can use in their software in their wallets we can have all those things get governed by community that are governed by token holders and so through that you can actually build in some of the systems as well our market conditions as far as price relevant at all to building or is does the same excitement remain regardless of the price of the token or

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    because obviously there's people via tokens a certain price it's very exciting all of a sudden 80 of your net worth or what you believe you had is gone does that dampen the excitement or do you think that people are really just continuing to build because they know that so near started we started into August 2018. so we were started when things were going episode of the bear Market yeah well actually it was like it was going down the slide of down yeah like everything was going down and continue

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    going down and so like I think for a lot of the kind of the ecosystem it's kind of like oh yeah bear Market great now we can focus and can build for long term versus you know trying to like optimize for shorter obviously you know there's like economically there's some things where like uh kind of things crashing means they cannot go as fast and as as like scale up as fast as they want to um and then you should be accounted but I think like being able to focus on on a more longer term you know sustainable

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    business model sustainable token economics I think is is a big benefit here right again it's the amount of you know advice I got from the ecosystem before is like oh you know just zero out prices for the you know transactions do this and that just to go faster and so I think like that kind of stops um uh and like for example for near we have designed our token economics you know during bear Market with you know like what is uh like a sustainable token

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    economic model of layer one will look like right and how how it should uh you know become sustainable through that I mean I'm not saying it was perfectly designed obviously not we learned a lot through the past years kind of how talking economics in general work but like those kind of things is during bull market everybody forgets about it and just like let's try to go faster and then kind of we come back to like oh actually let's let's build for

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    future let's build for sustainability well yeah that makes that makes perfect sense and you talked about having to Once delete 20 000 lines of code yeah what happened there well so we actually build a different shardening mechanism originally uh actually closer to what East 2 was planning to do before and we were like like we actually built it we started running it and we realized there's a lot of problems was was uh was a design around like asynchronicity and kind of finality and stuff and so that's

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    where we're like okay we need to redesign all this and this is why like our current design is very different it's it's actually just one chain that in the shards blocks instead of having lots of different chains just creates very simple model for everyone to understand as well as simple model to implement like the the thing is like it's really easy on the Whiteboard or in white paper to write some stuff and then when you start implementing it realize it's like super

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    complicated and you cannot get it to work um I mean you can but it's going to take you you know years and yeah like train will leave by that time so yeah that was it like we implemented we started testing it and realized it's like it's way too complex and it's way too um like asynchronous for anyone to be able to then later debug and kind of understand that because we also need to

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    build and you know now that we actually have multiple companies contributing to the code like you need to build it such that more people are able to work with it I think Bitcoin actually had a really uh like in one sense Bitcoin has this like it's actually very simple protocol and any you know like reasonable developer can understand it and like you can actually build your own like Bitcoin model I mean obviously right now it's the the implementation is way more complex because they're handling a lot

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    of edge cases but the kind of basics of it is very simple as we're going into this like more scalable platforms they're all very complex now and so it's important to keep them as simple as possible so you can attract more developers to contribute to understand to build on top so it feels like we're trying to do everything all at once in this space which I think is a good problem to have are there glaring things that you think that are being built that blockchain is

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    just not needed or does not fix um well I think so for me it's not about blockchain I mean blockchain is a fundamental piece of F3 but web3 in general is like a like I do think everything should move into web3 that doesn't mean that everything should run on blockchain obviously right so there's storage that you know can use the blockchain for coordination but you know you're gonna run completely different Hardware you know AI machine learning you're not going to do it on blockchain you're not going to run machine learning models on blockchain right but you can

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    use the coordination and payment and stuff like this but you're still going to have you know customized Hardware you know super optimized to do the inference so but I think the benefit of coordination the benefit of openness is there and uh I think that part is it requires a pretty fundamental shift on how like let's say I'm a company and I want to go into F3 you need to kind of shift your business model you need to shift your

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    mindset to do that like that's why I'm like I'm I'm curious to see how mad I will pull it off but I'm not optimistic at all right because it's my like common joke is like if I have to live in the Zucker verse or some decentralized web 3 metaverse that we create I'll take my chances over here for sure um and if anyone wants to become a developer become a part of the ecosystem how do they do that uh I mean neo.org there's really good docs um we now have JavaScript which is amazing

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    um I mean you can build in rest you can build an even like solidity with Aurora um so yeah go to near.org follow the developers there's grants there's uh you know joining Community as well so uh start started Journey now awesome we'll see you in the next city