NEARCON | Alpha - Day 2

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

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   so

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   so

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   hello hello nice why don't we just slowly all right josh morning everybody day day two of near con um we're gonna do like a slow rollout here because i know uh i know people are busy in stage uh should have some good talks focusing on usability community and then we have the

4. 17:12

   keynote from ceo of veneer foundation eric troutman just as kind of a reminder to everybody how the venue's structured uh you got all of the talks streamed on the rooftop there are ecosystem partner showcases over on the first floor and then don't forget about the vault it's right on the right when you enter um there's gonna be some pretty good panels there today uh focus on sustainability and crypto focused on dowsing crypto uh focus on a couple of things so let's see if we can get the some twitter

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   up here yeah cool all right so i know this is streaming and uh what i wanted to do for the first 10 minutes or so the theme is you know the open web is here uh in the near ecosystem so wanted to kind of give everyone a quick access to some important people to follow on twitter um to kind of keep up to date with everything going on there's two slides so this was some of the people that you saw on day one and this is some of the people you'll

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   see today or that are just genuinely interesting people to to follow so we can we'll move back and forth between the slides feel free to take a picture um i think to to kind of kick off day two in day one we were able to see a lot of kind of like the fundamental projects that we're building on near the fundamental vision of the ecosystem day two you're gonna have a lot more taste of

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   the different things being built so when we talk about an open web we're talking more than just financial products right there will be a device panel i think that david's doing but the open web really means more than anything the interconnectivity of different products right gaming nfts dows defy and then some new uh cross chain cross industrial applications as we saw yesterday with open forest so

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   yeah this is uh just to kind of kick it off i can go through some of these names so uh human guild is bringing on about 40 games to the near ecosystem for on-chain gaming i don't know about you guys but the the kind of word on the street is that gaming is going to be pretty big for crypto um human guild's got that taken care of on near with shroom kingdom there and then there's there's lots of other

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   products chromecast sputnik v2 astro dao uh you want to switch the slide to the the next one uh move capital funding uh near that's a near native vc fund that's going to be putting money into projects so if you're a developer looking to build on here if you're a founder or you have a team you're looking for some funding nir has the infrastructure to get you guys all set up all right so just to recap to everybody we're gonna

10. 20:11

    kick off uh near con day two so uh if you guys wanna make your way over um we're gonna start with the first speaker josh quintel so josh quintel he is going to come on and he's going to talk about something pretty important for uh crypto and especially building on l1s which is the developer experience right what tools are available for developers what can you expect when you're building uh in an ecosystem so uh josh's background was i think he's been in crypto for a while uh

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    he joined the near team about six months ago and he's doing great work on the topic of developer tooling the before he comes on here the overall structure of this early stage session is going to be josh is going to talk developer tooling then we're going to have uh sofia and visilia talk open web sandbox community and then we have eric troutman ceo of the near foundation uh giving a keynote

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    speech to kind of orient everyone on on what's in store uh for the near ecosystem so should be a great morning and uh without further ado josh uh welcome to the stage nice hello hello hello hello oh there we go good morning everyone after uh this last year of isolation and dealing with covid it's so wonderful to be here with everyone in person and really feeling the energy of this growing near community

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    so let's just jump right into it uh today i'm going to talk about what's new in developer tooling and i'm going to give you a little sneak peek of something we started working on that we uh for now call developer console but first who am i to be giving you this information well as michael so nicely introduced me i am josh quintel i'm the product manager uh of developer platform at near like you said i started pretty recently uh i've

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    been in the space for a while about five years uh did consensus and truffle previously um i'm also going to be exporting these slides after this so you'll be able to click on a lot of these links that you'll see so developer platform what does that mean so we can really sum it up with this one sentence right here so developer platform we aim to empower all developers to build complex applications with simple tools across the entire software development life cycle or put

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    another way we want to get those ideas out of your head into the near verse without getting in your way what's this software development life cycle all about well probably already doing this if you've doing or have done any kind of development this is a really nicely condensed version of it that we have here focuses on this core loop of coding so this is developing your smart contracts

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    developing your front end testing of course testing those things deploying them to a live network or to your hosting provider which is hopefully decentralized storage and then finally monitoring the usage of the application to then analyze that and plan your next iteration so we're going to kind of use this to anchor the presentation and i'll go through like all the tooling updates and talk about that dev console so first

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    up is near cli so near cli is having some big changes coming to it it's a ground up rewrite and so first off interactive prompts are going to be part of this so let's say you're new to development or you just don't want to have to google all of the options that might be necessary for a particular method we're just going to prompt you for those if they're not filled in so really nice upgrade to the development experience there next up structured logs these are really important if you're scripting this is

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    going to let you digest the output of your logs much more easily no more having to parse strings or do any weird juggling like that of those results next up key management so this is going to be very much improved managing multiple keys managing api keys for our pc providers things of that nature so also a much more flexible experience and kind of dovetailing off of that configuration files so these are things like setting the network you're going to deploy to

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    setting the things like your contract output directory really just giving you that customization that is really important and then finally it's actually going to be written in rust the current cli in javascript so running it in rust will give us some nice security guarantees and also you know kind of help prevent a supply chain attacks things like that but i didn't even mention the most

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    exciting part of the near cli changes and that is that the new cli is going to be extendable so you can write your own extensions you can actually write them in any language and we at near actually first party going to work on uh two extensions right out of the gate so the first one is a validator extension so this is really nice if you're a validator you're know there's not going to be any

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    interruption uh in the way you currently work but uh if you are not this will give you a bit of a lighter weight cli since you won't be needing that functionality and then secondly there's going to be a project extension which i'm going to talk about here in a second uh but essentially allowing you to manage uh your local near development environment uh in a bit of a better way than we currently uh handle it so speaking of that the project

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    extension uh just a couple of examples here so there's you can initialize a new project uh you may have currently done this through something like create react uh create near app or something like that but this will now initialize a new empty project we're gonna go over the structure here in a second so really nice very easy way to get started and then second here i demonstrate there's this compile command

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    and currently uh the way the workflow for development works is it's really just the language native tools so if you're building your smart contracts in rust you're using cargo for example uh so this is going to allow us to kind of abstract over these languages uh and deal with multi-language projects a little bit better but very importantly it's going to allow us to do additional things besides compiling to webassembly and in this case it's going to generate what we're

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    calling an aci or an abstract contract interface this is really helpful for front-end development so that you can more easily interact with your contracts we'll talk about that in a little bit too so speaking of that project structure here's an example right here uh within our project folder we've got that configuration file i mentioned so you know networks build folders things of that nature and then you have your contracts folder so a little bit more of

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    an organized structure here in this example this is a rust project so we've got our greeter contract and then we have that extra cargo dot tomml for the workspace there so you also see mentioned there that that's going to support multiple languages that goes back to that compile command that i mentioned so if you've got some assembly script and rust contracts we'll just be reading that and use the correct compiler for that case

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    so once again the kind of the big advantage of that other than you know that language abstraction is that we'll be able to do some extra things after that wasm compilation and specifically generating these aci files so what these really have are all of the functions and function signatures that you can easily consume on the front end so you can pass this right into near api js

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    and you'll just be able to get going very quickly as far as interacting with your contract and then you'll also have all your types and things there too which can be really nice for a typescript integration so speaking of additional languages as you may or may not know we currently support rust and assembly script but the great thing about nir right is that our virtual machine is runs web

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    assembly so any language that can target web assembly for compilation can potentially have a near sdk and to that end the teams at grain and zig languages are working on near sdks currently so i want to check those out if you are uh interested in new languages so now that we've done our coding we've built our smart contracts we've worked on our front end it's time to start testing but you know of course you've been writing tests the whole time you've been coding like a good developer but in

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    this case we'll call it a separate thing so there's been some really big changes and actually like a massive leap here an improvement of the experience of testing and also just what you can test and kind of how the environment works so uh we've just released uh or sorry these tests actually now use something called near sandbox so previously uh there was these things called simulation tests

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    but the advantage of near sandbox is it's actually just a near core node with some additional functionality that's really helpful for development so this gets you a lot closer to like what the live network is actually going to be doing with the addition of things like patching state so this is really helpful for seed data in tests this allows you to massively update state without even having to send a transaction and then secondly there spooning which

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    we are definitely going to highlight that is a very important feature that allows you to actually take a contract from a live network pull it down into your local environment and then of course you'll be able to integrate with that test against it without spending real near if we're talking about mainnet for example more importantly you can write once and run on any network so if these tests they'll run in the sandbox by default it's just one configuration option away

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    to get them to run on testnet they're going to be able to run concurrently so really great for speed of course having them run in parallel rather than one after the other and speaking of flexibility you'll be able to write these in rust or javascript so if you want that full stack rust experience it's there for you if you prefer to write them in javascript because that's how your frontend is going to interact with your tests we've got you covered there too

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    so that's sandbox let's take a little bit more of a actual look here and how this works so you can see here in this first example this is a very basic example we're actually just patching the state of the greeter contract uh the variable status message there and you can see we're updating it to say state but you can imagine that for something let's say you're like an nft ticket master type thing right you'd be able to seed you know 50 tickets into the system

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    right away uh as part of setting up your testing environment without having to fire off 50 transactions so both a lot faster and a lot more readable right because you're just going to be able to see this in one command secondly here this one is incredibly important this is an example of spooning here so you can see we've got refinance and we're grabbing it from mainnet there's the account address there block

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    id 50 million and we do want the state data so this is hugely important this is going to enable or make it much easier to make an entirely important class of daps on there which is actually being able to integrate a lot of these protocols especially in d5 which is why refs the example here so let's say you wanted to make like a yield farm aggregator you'd be able to pull in ref finance you'd be able to pull in whichever other defy apps you

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    wanted to include and you'd be able to have this all running in your local environment without as i had said having to spend any real near so hugely powerful there i cannot state that enough and then in the future uh we're actually working on time travel for this as well so you'll be able to fast forward and you know manipulate time that way if you need to have any like time locked things uh here's an example of writing those

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    tests either in javascript or in rust you can see that it's quite flexible there you know we create the account we deploy the contract um yeah really nice there so here's an example yep of testing anywhere here you can see there's a couple different ways to change the network we've got you know you can pass it in as variable set it in the environment or finally here if you're using ava

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    you will be able to actually generate a config file so these workspaces come in a couple different flavors we've got the rust workspaces as i mentioned we've got a base js version which is compatible with any testing framework and we also have this version which is already configured for ava so you'll be able to get started as quickly as possible if you don't mind using ava as your assertion library and i should also it's also worth

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    mentioning that this is a huge improvement on integration tests but your unit tests can be written totally the same way as before there's no disruption to that so now that we've got everything developed and tested it's time to deploy it somewhere this one's pretty nascent but i'll just mention that you may have noticed uh since this workspace can actually deploy contracts uh this is going to be able to

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    underpin a scriptable deployment system that we're working on i'll definitely want to talk to you any developers out there about how this should work so you've done all this now it's deployed on the network now what right where do we go from here well our dap is in the wild uh and we're going to want to do that monitoring step and that's where developer console comes in really covers the operational needs of dapps

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    so you can see a couple different features here that's going to include infrastructure management this is including an rpc service and also an indexer service you know many people don't want to have to many people don't want to have to deal with the time and expense right of maintaining or writing your own indexer and so this is just going to allow you to stand it up and get going next very importantly monitoring and to

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    get more specific this is going to include alerts of various happenings about your contract that you configure and very importantly for security executing actions depending on those conditions which we'll actually take a look at in a second here then you've got your that index or service so of course you're going to want to be able to visualize and you know number crunch on that data and so there's going to be an analytics portion and really this entire experience really

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    provides a lot of focus and context around your dap and really gives you that assurance and comfort like while it's uh out out and deployed in the wild gives you what you need to continue to improve it so i'm going to go through two scenarios here we've got some wireframes to show you like i said it's very early but i want to at least give you a taste of the final vision of this so first scenario here our d5 smart contract's been hacked how could the

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    developer console have prevented this scenario so in this case this goes back to the alerts and actions that i talked about earlier so in this example we're on the monitoring screen we're looking at our alerts here and just going left to right it's really readable how this is configured so you can see our account here is just in this example it's like a vault contract for this and the conditions of this alert are if the balance drops 20

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    percent uh and this is also if uh that is caused by addresses not from our allowed list so obviously we want to be able to lower the balance of the contract so those the allowed list would include like addresses of anyone that you trust and then finally those are the actions that would be triggered if those conditions are met in addition to actually alerting you so in this case we're actually going to call the pause method on this contract

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    uh briefly if you're not familiar with the possible pattern this would just allow you to flip a boolean and essentially stop all functionality from the contract temporarily and then finally there how you want to be notified so email text things of that nature so here's an example actually of what one of those email reports might look like so you can see here we're telling you like which actual alert was triggered when it

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    happened we've got some helpful links there that can go to the explorer or in that case help you view your allowed list right away and then finally we showed the actual actions that were triggered along with that transaction there once again you can get to the explorer really quickly and see exactly what happened there so second scenario this one's an nft marketplace that wants to see their best performing collections and artists so

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    how can we do that dare i say it's almost trivial actually compared to the last task we've already got the indexer service running so this is just a matter of displaying this data in a way that's useful for us so you can see our app nft orific here the analytics screen is composed of a series of tiles for visualization and so in this example we're creating a new one that we want to visualize our top 10 artists by revenue here in this example this is written in a sql query but this is still very early so

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    that may that may change and i'd love to hear other ways you might want to write this and then finally we choose our visualization here which in this case is a bar chart and so here's a nice example of what that could look like you've got your various tiles here and these are all charts and graphs that you've configured we've got our top five artists by revenue in the lower left there in the bar graph that we specified but we could also you know show a proportion

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    of artists sales uh and then at the top just an example of some transactions right there so phase one of this what's going to actually be coming out soon is going to include a project management portion so this includes adding your project uploading the contracts uh the rpc service so this is going to be really great you won't have to obviously be managing your own node or anything

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    like that to connect to the network operating analytics so you understand how you're using the rpc service and then finally explore integration so that as transactions are happening against those contracts you've added you'll be able to quickly see the status of those transactions and what's going on and this is all going to be available at the end of this quarter actually so to summarize this is near's tooling

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    as it exists today i won't spend too much time on that and this is what it's going to look like so we've got that new cli written in rust with that awesome extension system i'm really excited about that i really hope that could even power potentially even like micro startups around writing extensions for near cli eventually uh and then additional language support there we got the grain and zig teams working really hard next up scaffolding there starting a new

53. 38:29

    project mentioned that near project extension it's going to kind of be supplanting create new app there we've got dev console on the operations side and as far as our api libraries we didn't really touch on this much but it's definitely worth mentioning in addition to near api js we're also working on api libraries for rust and for python so you'll be able to interact with near in those languages more easily and then testing that was the big overhaul so sim tests

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    don't need to worry about those anymore you got near sandbox and you've got your various workspace libraries just choose your flavor there based on what you prefer and oh and that unicode character didn't work but we want to hear from you and in lieu of head shots because we didn't have them all i'm going to have everyone here on developer platform raise your hand in the audience and so so find one of us talk about your

55. 39:19

    developer experience complain to us please actually i'd really love to hear negative feedback so we know where to improve so yeah find anyone who had a raised hand there and so as i mentioned at the beginning i'm going to be uploading these slides actually shortly after this and so you'll be able to click any of these links here that i provided i'll highlight a couple of them actually because i've got a little extra time

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    so in addition to all the things we talked about uh which is mostly on that left-hand side there you can see the near cli proposal actually is an important one to highlight there that's the original governance forum post that led to the near cli that i spoke about so you'll definitely want to check that out and then on the right hand side some really helpful resources as far as education so we've got a new zero to hero tutorial it's building a crossword our very own

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    mike purvis has used this internally it's a really cool project so definitely check that out if you want to learn more about developing and rust that's part of our newly revamped rust sdk docks also really nice and then under that we've got near university so your university's got a couple different options there depending on how you want to learn uh if you we've got live certified courses which are you

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    know in person or you know live in the sense that you're with an instructor the whole time we've got courses offered by our partners and we also have self-paced courses if you prefer to learn that way as well and then finally other ways to get involved we've got the near governance forum there that's where you'll find that cli proposal as long as any other like big like ecosystem shaping discussions we always make everything like as external and transparent as possible so you'll definitely want to

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    follow that for any updates and then finally our near discord as well so great place for general chat talk to devrel uh just get involved really with the community and with that uh that's everything so thank you thanks thank thank you josh for that talk um and a shout out actually to sharif who is a head of near education i know he he mentioned it at the end but the the education team is doing a solid solid

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    job of bringing fresh developer talent into the ecosystem and i'm i'm sure sharif is watching um so in in that talk you know we we saw a little bit about the developer sandbox um in the near for for near developers and i wanted to take a quote that josh shetty says that it provides focus and context around your dap well as near as an ecosystem we also have something at near called the open web sandbox which is in many ways the community version of the near developer

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    sandbox open web sandbox is pretty much the testing ground for new entrants to the near community new projects that are trying to get visibility uh projects like metapool refinance trisolaris cronecats they've all gone through the open web sandbox our next speakers are the uh managing partners of the openweb sandbox uh sophia cachula and vasilia rafakova and they are going to talk about uh how to enable decentralized

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    leadership in a communal ecosystem like the near ecosystem so sophia and vasilia welcome to the stage hi good morning everyone every community requires leadership even if it's a highly dedicated group of people if they're not working full time on the shared course they are probably too busy to be active all the time and participate in every discussion or decision communities usually have dedicated members who are in charge of coordination

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    possibly moderation this is a quote of ilya from his article on sputnik dao a piece of technology that was created to facilitate the decentralized governance of empowered communities of web 3. yesterday and today both of us had a chance to listen to excellent speeches on technology and talk to people project representatives which will undoubtedly lead us to the web web3 world of the future

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    however today me vasilia and sophia from the open web sandbox would like to talk to you about another driver of that change communities and leaders that stand behind those changes those necessary decisions on the way to the world of the web 3.

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    the reason why we would like to talk about this today is because we personally believe that decentralized leadership is an essential element of empowering community members of those communities that actually each and every one of you are building already today so before we dive into the future let's take a look at the current situation right now the community of nir consists out of very diverse subgroups projects and guilds they're all centered around different

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    ideas and beliefs different technology which that's the beauty of it right but there's one thing that unites all of them all these groups are governed in a fairly centralized manner usually there is a leader a manager a person who is in charge of the most important processes who is taking the most important decisions there are also active community members who can take part in those processes as well but let's be honest there is a clear vertical hierarchy present

67. 45:05

    of course it goes without saying that this hierarchy is not formal the communication is transparent and the feedback of all members is highly welcomed at all times on the other hand it does not mean that the accountability is shared or that all of those members participate equally in a strategic planning or decision making processes what's interesting here is that in fact all those remaining members of the communities are given the option of

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    participating in those processes but for one on another reason they've decided or sometimes decide not to do so also because this re this degree of freedom can be sometimes freezing it's a paradox of choice you know having this many options without the necessary guidance leaves people confused and yeah they just don't know how to act on those opportunities and they choose to not do anything imagine

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    if every member of our communities would feel entitled and powerful and act on his plans deploy his talents right away and therefore will feel value as a valuable member of the community right away imagine how much more powerful would the near ecosystem be nice right as mentioned previously the web3 technology can provide the opportunity for people to act like that however technology is just a tool

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    people must be empowered by external factors to take initiative to be active and to deploy these opportunities one of such factors one effect one sorry one of such factors is actually the presence of the of the guidance and creating the safe space where people will feel welcomed and leaded to the right spot where they can actually get their goals well let's talk about this matter in

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    terms of the open web sandbox to enable collaboration between projects and individual contributors the initial plan for the openweb sandbox was to be a playground a free space where everyone can learn about near protocol uh attempt creating something valuable and get rewarded for this contribution after launch in april it became pretty clear to us that that initial plan was rather utopic for the time being

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    without necessary guidance people felt lost they were confused about the purpose of the platform they didn't know exactly what they're supposed to be would quickly get demotivated lose interest and leave at the same point it was quickly clear to us that the necessary the sustainable the the sustained efficiency of the platform was impossible without the steady coordination of all elements because there were a lot of projects a lot of

73. 48:13

    members there was a lot happening it's just impossible to be efficient without controlling all the processes at that time our team started growing we became three and now we are a team of seven moderators each with their own responsibilities but yet keeping each other in constant check in june we decided to shift our payout system to sputnik dao to ensure efficiency and transparency of the payout process at this moment we have four dow council members who vote through the payout proposals and our roadmap reads even

74. 48:49

    more members in the future sorry reads even more members in the future meanwhile openweb sandbox keeps growing our internal processes became more complicated and so did our contribution to the development of near protocol it is we are reminded every day that every member of our community can be activated and is extremely valuable for the near ecosystem the only thing that's necessary is a couple of conditions to be satisfied one of those conditions are is a present of timely

75. 49:30

    guidance provided by the appropriate leader and the right time and the right space now the question is how are we planning to satisfy this condition right so imagine that all the groups are near are owned and driven entirely by the community members that absolutely everybody contributes to the collective decision-making process how does that sound to you i think this is all why we're here we're

76. 50:04

    trying to make the shift towards decentralized shared leadership decentralized shared leadership any ideas one that might entail any associations anything more or less a little bit not really okay compared to the traditional hierarchical companies online communities are heavily influenced by the emergent bottom-up leadership processes what that means it means that everybody can and actually should be a leader

77. 50:46

    by raising active global community members we will be able to grow self-sustained community of people who would be able to use veterinary technology to take control of our money of our data on a large scale it is those people that we need today that was a little too early well we're all trying to experiment here with how to build such a community let's see what the research has to offer and the first one right here which is also the most obvious one probably is formal leadership position

78. 51:28

    occupying a formal leadership position we kind of knew that already before boring but necessary at first it is up to the former leaders to facilitate a cascade of leadership and provide simple positive concise messages to people this is also what we do in open web sandbox communication theory from 50s has already discovered that top-down one-way communication does not diffuse innovation on its own

79. 52:04

    what it does it affects opinion leaders and opinion leaders in fact affect broader audience there we go consistent communication as social human beings we're always looking help and advice from other people which is also true in online communities getting a warm response from your moderator solely based on your membership can be very strong catalyst for a future engagement this is also what we're trying to do in open web sandbox

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    we're using multiple channels to address people wherever they're joining us for the same reason we opened language hubs to ensure that people can ask questions and learn about near ecosystem in their native language network position leaders also tend to be somehow influential we saw in open web sandbox that individuals who are considered inspirational important they get more likes more reactions

81. 53:23

    their actions are considered as having a bigger impact network position researchers see that as a proxy of leadership in fact opinions power and influence is coming from the network of supporting of supporting users but also contributors and people who are interested personal connection it is a great way to feel value with an online community it is at this moment when we start talking to friends to family about how much engaged you are in your community

82. 54:07

    this is advocacy this is also what we're striving for in open web sandbox and we hope that everybody can take our lessons from this formal leadership consistent communication and network position we aim to construct such a network where centralized governance would not be needed anymore where people would be supported and they could motivate each other in a decentralized manner as our new road map and together with the educational unit of nier

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    we're going to implement such a mentorship system new people are supported by experienced sandboxers this is one of our goals we continue building our network and we're trying to help others people to do so as well today one of our greatest achievement is that in less than six months sandbox has become living concept that means that if our team had to be removed the idea of people communicating to each other engaging with projects that are already building

84. 55:25

    a top of near in one digital platform in a consistent manner that idea will stay with us the factors that we just mentioned which is formal leadership consistent communication and network positions those are things that have been discovered already in science in psychology communication theory a long time ago so we should definitely use them as open web sandbox colleagues but also early development developers developers our developers community developers

85. 56:04

    one of our goals is to enable near mass adoption but we're also trying to do is to empower other people to be able and to be willing to do so we're here to facilitate early adoption but one of our mission and vision is to share our passion about the open webinar with everybody who is as passionate about it thank you thank you sophia and vasilia um so we have a little bit of time the next

86. 56:51

    speaker is going to be a keynote speech by eric troutman ceo of the near foundation so we'll take a little bit of time we're well ahead of schedule i just want to announce for everyone else we have a keynote speech that's going to start in about two minutes so if you if anyone wants to make their way over to the main stage eric troutman uh ceo of near foundation will be uh delivering a keynote on the state of the near ecosystem and uh the things to come after that speech actually

87. 57:24

    eric is going to be doing a fireside chat up here with uh richard mirhead from fabric vc so you got a nice little two for one right a keynote and then a fireside chat cool i don't know if it's too much trouble but while we wait for people to to trickle in on that topic um do you guys mind putting up the twitter screen again i think it's like slides one or two just i want to drive in uh kind of what we've seen the developer tooling is there the community infrastructure is there there's a lot of really cool people in

88. 57:57

    the ecosystem and uh it's just you know it's just the beginning so these are the people to really follow along with um as as this journey kind of sprouts in lots of different directions and and there's a place for everybody at near so the people that uh we'll put up here i don't know if that's possible uh it should be at the beginning of the slide deck the people that we'll put up

89. 58:21

    here you know this is for everyone interested from things as diverse as gaming to dows to nfts to d5 to technical updates in the near foundation uh you'll be able to kind of follow it all so this was from day one and if you want to switch it over real quick this is for day two so keep these handles in mind um because this is where a lot of the alpha is gonna be coming out on twitter and i know we all love crypto twitter right great

90. 58:57

    all right so uh we're gonna kick off now the keynote speech from uh eric troutman ceo of near foundation the i think title of his keynote speech is welcome home and you know the overarching theme of this panel was web 3 is here so we're no longer talking about it we're no longer waiting for things to be built uh the tools are here the community is emerging there's things going live and uh that means there's a lot of exciting stuff uh coming and

91. 59:29

    already you know building out at near so uh without further ado eric if you'd like to uh come on stage we're gonna we're gonna find eric this is this is where normally we can say there's a little bit of a computer lag so uh just pretend like it's a zoom call we're lagging we'll reconnect in a second sorry gotta reboot the wi-fi all right in the meantime while we wait for eric to come um quick show of hands so open web at least in my mind open web we have

92. 1:00:16

    gaming we have nfts we have dows we have d5 we have infrastructure if you're in it for the if you're if you're a gaming fan a crypto gaming fan can i see a show of hands crypto gaming kind of sasha and vlad should be here from human guild um sasha and vlad are you guys here no okay if you're coming from the nft side of things um if you're interested in nfts let's see a show of hands nice okay defy defy stack where are we at yeah

93. 1:00:47

    okay i see yeah that's that's most you i think i think we'll be it'll be curious to see how uh near con 2 near con 3 changes this demographic right because everyone's in it for the d5 now but gaming's emerging nfts are emerging dows are emerging let's see what happens so uh is eric oh not yet okay all right i'll we'll wait for the green light and we'll go from there why don't uh why don't we go through some of the schedule of what's to come later today

94. 1:01:18

    so uh you guys are stuck with me today as mc on the main stage here um in the afternoon we're going to get a look into sharding on near that'll be really cool and we're also going to get a look onto alex shivchenko from aurora interoperability in the near ecosystem so that'll be really cool as well there's also going to be a panel on governance in the vault that elia is going to be giving ilya will be giving with lane

95. 1:01:49

    so that'll be at 2pm uh and then in the in between we've got talks on d5 dow and sustainability and crypto so uh should be should be a great day of content um with a lot going on any any thoughts from the audience on uh on what you guys have thought so far about neocon what you guys are looking forward to there there is a d5 panel at 4pm david's actually going to be on it so um there's also a vc panel i think uh

96. 1:02:21

    roon bentian's gonna be sitting on the vc panel talking about uh investing in web three and uh all the crazy stuff so i think while we still wait for eric uh he's coming cool i i can kind of close with um there was a twitter thread the other day and the the i'm not going to say who posted it because it's actually me but that's anonymous so i'm not going to give you guys my twitter handle um but

97. 1:02:47

    uh the twitter thread was all about the benefits of composability in web3 right why why does composability matter i think up until this point a lot of people have looked at the different l1s and they've been like oh this l1 is going to be about gaming this l1 is going to be about d5 this cell one's going to be about nfts but when you think about what can happen when all the different products and dapps can

98. 1:03:11

    talk to each other that's where like the insane magic of crypto comes in right that's where like my dao can invest in an nft marketplace that funds a payment app that's where someone sends a private message you know using a mixer that someone then uses the transaction fee to yield farm from a d5 product right this is i think like where we're going in crypto um and uh most people at least from from the the general uh crypto twitter group are starting to

99. 1:03:42

    come around to that i don't know what do you guys think about uh the value of composability versus siloed products no opinions it's essential it's inevitable in hindsight it was inevitable um alrighty well that's enough of of me freestyling with you guys it's been a pleasure uh now we can actually have a great keynote it's gonna be so as i said before the keynote is followed by a fireside chat so you guys get a two for one here uh without

100. 1:04:19

     further ado we have eric troutman the c is here okay just one more second everybody the the talk was at 11 10 we we are running ahead of schedule if if anyone has a crypto twitter account you know we could feel free to put up some tweets of the day that's that's kind of the best to go to oh good to go all right all right so without further ado um we have eric troutman ceo of the near foundation with a keynote speech on the state of the near ecosystem and the things to

101. 1:05:00

     come so eric welcome to the stage morning how's everyone doing i guess it's still early after last night so thus far you've you've had a chance to hear from a lot of people across a lot of different spectra you've had people talking about technology you've had people talking about products about nfts about art and i think all of these are fantastic avenues to explore in greater depth what's going on inside the near

102. 1:05:50

     ecosystem what i wanted to do is actually cover something that's a little bit different it's a little bit softer but that doesn't mean that it doesn't actually tie down to the details of what you've seen in these other talks so we're going to get a little bit weird um so really what i what i want to dive into is basically what is the weird stuff that sets near apart like why why

103. 1:06:13

     why is it that that this is actually the right ecosystem for all of this to occur why is it that this is the place where this vision is going to go and why is it that everyone is here the most important question is actually bigger than the details when i talk to people so this is this is the first major in-person event that we've had in two years for the near ecosystem and the first one that that probably most people

104. 1:06:38

     here have ever been to because two years ago the ecosystem was approximately 25 people and so this is where it gets a little weird so the book that that you could see up there it's called home for a bunny and that was that was actually the first book that i ever read aloud and it's a story of a bunny it's about 24 pages long it's a story of a bunny who goes looking for a home and it tries out it talks to the toad it talks to the birds it talks

105. 1:07:10

     to all sorts of animals and it can't find its home until the very end when it finds another rabbit and ends up in a rabbit hole and they live happily ever after um and i think what's important here is that when i talk to people and i ask them why is it that you're here why is this actually an interesting place for you to be a part of they don't talk about scalable technology they don't

106. 1:07:33

     talk about sharding they don't talk about anything what they talk about is energy what they say is that this is the place where it actually feels like it used to feel back in the day this is what it feels like this is what it felt like 10 years ago in the technology industry so i don't know when everyone here kind of got involved but for me my journey came through finance and that's a very different world

107. 1:07:58

     and when i first took a step away from finance the first thing that i did was i went to a meet-up this was in houston texas in probably 2011. and the difference that i experienced talking to people in the tech industry versus people in the finance industry was mind-blowing because we walked in and the first thing that people wanted to know was how can i help what are you building oh that's cool how can we how can we collaborate what are you working on right like that energy that energy was

108. 1:08:22

     something that was so special 10 years ago and i think in the ensuing decade it's actually it's it's been harder and harder to capture that feeling in the traditional tech industry uh this is you know we went through the mobile revolution we went through social and i think we've gotten to the point where everyone is acknowledged to some degree or another that we've topped out in a lot of places in traditional technology and more importantly culturally it's actually become almost antagonistic to

109. 1:08:46

     some of the things that that everyone who is in that early days actually fundamentally believed so i think what i want to emphasize here is that we're all kind of looking for a home as well everyone here is an investor you're an investor of your time you're an investor of your attention and everyone here whether whether it's explicit or implicit you're kind of looking for the right place for you to invest your energy for you to

110. 1:09:10

     to create the future that you want and that's because all of us are impatient we're here because it's still early days right this is where if you were patient you would wait until this was already built and then you'd use it but this is where we're builders and building building doesn't necessarily just mean developers it doesn't necessarily just mean uh technologists it means everyone who

111. 1:09:35

     wants to be a part of constructing a bigger vision and making that into a reality and we're impatient and that's why that's why we're in this um so what is that vision so basically everyone here has has probably your own version of what that looks like um you know very rarely would i expect anyone here to sort of explicitly say well what we're looking for is a world where we give back control it's a world where we give people control of their assets of their data or of their power of governance and in some ways those are

112. 1:10:06

     almost buzz words at this point and it can be hard to parse what those actually mean but in the end when you look at it when everything rolls up that's actually what we're going for and this kind of takes us back to that bigger vision that sense of of like what are we building something that's collaborative are we building something that's life affirming are we building something that's net positive for the world and it's real too it's not just abstract and i think the place where it where it

113. 1:10:30

     becomes real right now at least in the last year we've seen this develop more and more is in the crater economy and so what we have here is is essentially the triangle that sort of defines what are the key components that make up the crater economy and so that control community is the ability to actually uh become real almost like real co-ops in a way that hasn't been possible before which allows them to organize which allows them to take on business models which allows them to be bigger than just a meetup group or a facebook group that's that's on someone else's

114. 1:10:55

     platform and of course underneath all of this is finance and the control theirs is giving people control to take their money where they want and that's also that's obviously something that's been spoken about a lot in the blockchain space but it's also fundamental to the creator economy because of course that's what kind of lubricates everything underneath the surface and makes it possible to have an economy um so the vision isn't necessarily new

115. 1:11:19

     we've heard a lot of this before if you're around in 2017 which which most of you probably at least saw saw the edges of it whether or not you experienced it directly we had a lot of these great ideas and i say we as just sort of a general collective as an industry a lot of these ideas have been around for a long time and the problem was the technology wasn't really there and so what's different though is scale

116. 1:11:42

     what's different is the ability to actually take on and and realize this vision at a scale that wasn't possible before in 2017 we kind of got over our skis did a bit of a face plant uh that's okay but we're coming back and ultimately that's actually what near is here for um so near near is basically uh the substrate the the the network that's designed to support that vision of the new future

117. 1:12:12

     and it's a lot of things it's not just the technology it's bigger and that i think is one of the things that i want to i want to really emphasize here and i'll talk about the technology because it's still important but near is more than that and it's about it's about bringing us back to the days when we could imagine a new future when we could when we could actually participate in something that was bigger and we could feel like we were doing

118. 1:12:29

     good by doing that and i think the key part here is also just a bit of a checkpoint because even though we were ahead of ours ourselves in 2017 it's still early web 3 is basically the size of a zit on the sun compared to the real web it's the major opportunity is is in web 2 not web3 right now it's sort of merging the two it's it's how do we make sure that web3 is actually the the underpinning of the broader web too um but we haven't we haven't even gotten close

119. 1:12:59

     um the prize is huge the prizes is is billions of people and giving them the same thing giving them the power giving them control i don't know if you're familiar with the crossing the chasm model i'm i think at this point it's it's become uh pretty ubiquitous it's basically the idea that markets have to go through stages and i think what's what's not what's not in this model is is the optimism of of people in the markets and assuming that they've crossed far further than we actually have

120. 1:13:29

     and we see that again and again and of course i i i live on optimism as much as everyone else does but in terms of being realistic i think it's also healthy for us to understand that this is early and even though even though the eventual prize is a billion people we have a lot of work to do to get there and that's okay because what's cool about that is that is that the people in this room the people in this ecosystem the people in this community are the ones who are actually going to take us there that means that there's

121. 1:13:52

     opportunity it means this hasn't been done yet and there's so much opportunity inherent in all of that we've made skirmishes across the chasm we we've seen uh nfts break through the mainstream front page of new york times we've seen um we've seen uh for instance nba top shop we got a lot of people coming out of the the consumer web starting to try these things out play to earn axi infinity all

122. 1:14:14

     of this i think of these as almost skirmishes because because they're sort of they're like proofs of concept that busted through um but they never but they still haven't fully fully landed that beachhead and gotten us to the point where your brother your mother anybody is is is just onboarding to this stuff using it and using it every day and the other thing worth noting though is is this is actually where it does come back to technology because

123. 1:14:40

     the tooling or the the underlying technology matters we've already seen the limitations of a lot of platforms that have come before and we're not even close to where we need to be so it's something worth keeping in mind that that this is a long-term game and the design decisions that are made early are the ones that actually bear fruit years down the road when you start when you start to see limitations in certain design decisions and you start to see limitations in

124. 1:15:03

     certain cultural decisions and that's why it's so important that in early days that this this group that we're able to kind of align behind the right things and so i think all this really starts with first principles and so to get to a billion you have to keep it simple and you have to you have to really work backwards from first principles and so for us that's that's been pretty obvious from

125. 1:15:27

     day one i mean we got our start in uh in san francisco and the culture out there is really about making something people want that's that's a famous y combinator quote or logo or slogan but what's different that we need to do is we're not here we again speaking on behalf of a collective that i actually have no right to speak on behalf of um we aren't just here to make something

126. 1:15:50

     people want we're here to help other people make something people want we're an ecosystem and we're a collaborative ecosystem so that's why it's not about individuals it's about the ecosystem first and we've made distinct decisions that support that in order to in order to get to a billion you have to you have to you have to lift other people up you have to get back to that original tech industry mentality of of one plus one equals three

127. 1:16:14

     uh you have to be open you have to be pragmatic there's you can't be dogmatic you can't be you can't be close-minded it's about open or the open source ethos it's about it's about sharing knowledge sharing education right empowering other people it's still early days you have to be always growing always evolving and ultimately the most important thing is to break through to get across that chasm obviously you have to make sure

128. 1:16:37

     that this isn't about the technology this is about the users this is working backwards from the journeys that matter this is remembering that that real people don't care about technology real people care about what they want whatever that is in the moment whether it's playing a game or or accessing their money making a transaction so what we're actually what we need to design for is making it feel simple it doesn't have to be simple in fact that makes it harder that's a much

129. 1:17:02

     bigger design goal is to make it feel simple it's easy to design something that's that's complex that feels complex it's extremely difficult to design something that's complex but feels simple and so i guess i just want to i want to benchmark there and come back to that that these principles matter and so this is the part where i think the technology actually has to come back into the picture a little bit because the core design decisions like i said matter

130. 1:17:26

     so i don't know how many people are aware of what the original story of near was and i won't go into the details of it but basically it got started in the summer of 2018 which which as far as the layer one protocol goes is quite a late entrant most of these protocols got started way back you know 2014 15 16 well i mean obviously ethereum but 2018 that was coming off of the big bull run that was coming off of that that over the skis face plant

131. 1:17:51

     that we made as an industry and that was a time when when the hammer that everyone was hitting was scalability it's about tps tps tps tps and i call that the summer of tps because i remember every white paper that came out had a higher number it was it was it was you know who who can theoretically design 100 tps a thousand tps a million tps it was crazy and the team here we were impatient builders like anyone else uh the core group of people who got together in a in a tiny wework room that smelled like armpits was

132. 1:18:21

     you know eugene ilya alex bowen uh sasha pie guy um we were we were in patient builders we we didn't see anything they didn't see anything that that that allowed them to actually build what they wanted to build um and and realized that that we had a solution based on prior work at memsql which a number of the team members had done on charted database systems which could theoretically deliver a more or less infinite level of tps but at the same time it's kind of ridiculous because like who cares right like why why why is

133. 1:18:53

     tps the thing that we're going and by the way tps transactions per second for everyone who who's not familiar um but what actually matters is working backwards from from those first principles and it was kind of crazy because we kind of entered a religious war at that time and and not coming out with a number and not saying that you know this is this is the level of tps that nir is going to deliver and we promise that at this state was was a really strange approach to take but the stranger thing was

134. 1:19:18

     actually that tps doesn't isn't the most important thing that matters when we started talking to people when you start to think and you work backwards from actually what we're here to do is make stuff that helps other people build things people want which is a bit of a mouthful what matters is usability and so it doesn't matter if you build the biggest stadium in the world that can seat 100 million people if it's built out in the middle of the desert no one can get there your usability sucks so what you actually have to do is you

135. 1:19:42

     have to build technology so that the developer years down the road can create experiences that users can actually use and that requires a lot of things that requires onboarding that feels like web too that requires the ability to build experiences that are engaging in a way that you can't actually get from web to because obviously it has to be 10x better otherwise they're not even going to use it and as importantly and this is something i'll talk about a little bit later you also need to make sure that these products have growth engines so that

136. 1:20:06

     they can actually reach more consumers because again it's not it's not about just the technology it's about building successful businesses that reach consumers and that's where when you work backwards you know okay well what we need from the platform that supports all of that is it has to be secure obviously we're dealing with a lot of money and a lot of a lot of value a lot of assets it has to be scalable i mean that's not to say that tps is a problem

137. 1:20:30

     tps is just a cost of entry i mean it's important um and so that would that was that was the entry point that we had was okay well we have we have a sharding design that supports that but again that comes back to simple how do we make the technology feel simple how do we make it feel simple for developers how do we make it ultimately so those developers can create experiences that feel simple for end users and that's where when you work all the

138. 1:20:54

     way back down backwards from the first principles that's where you get to okay well if it's going to be secure and scalable you better have a sharding approach because you don't know what the level of tps on the platform that it's going to have to support is and you obviously need to make sure it can through through that level of scaling that it can support the kinds of experiences we have

139. 1:21:11

     but that's also where kind of the secret sauce that doesn't get a lot of love necessarily because it's it's kind of hidden is the account model on near the account model was was the piece that connected scalability with usability because the account model the contract-based accounts being able to execute essentially arbitrary code from within the accounts opens up the whole world it gives developers a level of flexibility that you don't get from

140. 1:21:34

     something that's much more statically defined and that's that's actually the secret sauce in a lot of ways and this is this this is just a screen grab and it's uh you don't have to read too much into it but but essentially what is the design goal of simple how does this all come back to reality um this is this is essentially what is the fewest number of steps that you can actually take a user from instagram from the social web and bring them into an app get them using blockchain based primitives without them

141. 1:21:59

     actually even having to do anything unusual without them having to go buy tokens without them having to to sign in for anything more intense than an email and ideally not even that and so if you want to do that if you want to pull that off again it feels simple but it's not underneath the surface this is where the technology has to support you this is where in order to pull that off you can't pay for gas or the consumer can't pay for gas fees obviously you have to be able to use the single sign-on model something that's much much

142. 1:22:26

     easier to sign on to it has to scale of course if you if you get the oprah hug that app better be able to stay up as well as any web 2 consumer-facing app you have to be able to create accounts on behalf of other people and then securely hand them off uh you have to be able to to do things on b you have to allow the user to do things that are kind of expensive and unusual the same way that you would in a in a

143. 1:22:48

     freemium model in in web 2 right it's the same principles apply it's just we haven't really gotten to the point previously in web 3 where where you can get to that same level of simplicity and usability for users and again uh number six you have to you have to make sure that those apps can actually have growth toolkits so that those apps could reach new users well that's owen wilson

144. 1:23:12

     um so just shifting gears real real quickly one thing that i hear a lot when i talk to people is oh my god i didn't actually realize that there was so much going on with nir and i think there's a meme out there or a series of memes that graded technology not very good at talking about it it is what it is so um but there is a lot of momentum there's a lot of momentum buzzing and

145. 1:23:36

     bubbling beneath the surface which of course everyone who's here in the room you've seen that you've seen that talking to everyone who's here um but we've only been out for a little over a year and in a little over a year we've reached 40 million transactions we have over a million accounts there's 100 000 community members we have over a thousand monthly builders building on the platform with more than

146. 1:23:58

     200 projects 200 dows 100 guilds and over 45 million in funding has been distributed this is one year the other thing we're not always good at is celebrating small milestones because when i look at this i look this looks like a far cry from a billion but we i guess we have to acknowledge that this is going the right direction the ecosystem has been growing phenomenally right we've every single area of it whether it's on the technical

147. 1:24:32

     side on the integration side on-ramps off-ramps i'll talk about some of the details right but like every week we have to redesign this chart because more and more companies are starting to participate more and more startups are coming together this this chart is on the website so if you want to see it check it out on the funding side funding is another indicator it's kind of a leading indicator of an ecosystem that things are happening right because

148. 1:24:56

     i'll talk about the journey in just a second um but funding is happening so we've already deployed over 120 grants from the core grant program that's where that 45 million number comes from uh we but we've also crowdsourced we have ido's running running on uh on skyward we have we have a series of other ideo platforms that are coming out we'll talk about those in a second there's outside funding

149. 1:25:18

     startups are getting funded a number of you here are actually in funded startups some of you have announced and some of you haven't and as importantly there's a lot of community funding that's been going on grace and and the community team has been doing a phenomenal job of helping people from the ground up from the edges in access capital because of course we have to eat you can't build unless you can eat and so what i want to talk about a

150. 1:25:44

     little bit is is more on the market side so there are a few key areas i mentioned the creator economy triangle and i think that's pretty much uh that's a good model for for understanding sort of where are we as a as an ecosystem where do we need to be and so the uh so the first the first component of this worth talking about is defy and d5 is usually the leader in in a blockchain

151. 1:26:08

     based ecosystem um and for good reasons because fundamentally it's still a financial technology it it needs the the sort of the core building block is still can we transact can we can we move value whether or not those are tokens or nfts or or assets and so finance on near decentralized finance i mean it almost had sort of a coming out party maybe a month or two ago and since then since then it's been

152. 1:26:32

     cruising we have we have a series of components an interesting thing about d5 of course is that you don't actually need that many core components but they're almost infinite permutations of those components um and so each of those ideos with amms liquid staking metapool just just came out recently a series of series of announcements i know some of these have already been made made today others are upcoming for sort of filling

153. 1:26:56

     in the core building blocks but there's a lot going on there's over 100 million locked in tbl and there's more to come on the nft side obviously having a million wallets is a good place to start because when you have when you have these accounts the question is can you get them to do other stuff than just participate in the app that brought them in and that's obviously a goal but ultimately uh we've we've had a lot

154. 1:27:18

     of success uh also in asia some some nft i don't know if you uh if you've had a chance to to see some of the talks from amos out in asia uh in china um we had a collaboration with taobao with an nft artist that that was sort of one of the first times that you were able to sell nfts using a conventional platform which is sort of the amazon of china and then others have mentioned human guild is supporting over i mean i think this number is now low uh 20 games and then we have a series of guilds that are

155. 1:27:47

     that are driving things on the um on supporting the consumer side uh for me one of the things that i'm really passionate about is is the community side is daos because we we've all experienced the arc of nfts we have we still does are fresh dows are new i mean they've been around for maybe the longest they're also completely incomprehensible to the average human and so what we're working to do is

156. 1:28:10

     back to those first principles how do you make a dow feel simple how do you make a dial into something that real people can use the mainstream people can use and that actually creates value for them how do you support creators by allowing their community to participate in the intellectual property that that creator creates how do you how do you how do you give them value for being early how do

157. 1:28:27

     you give them shared incentives these are tools that we haven't had before and these are things that are starting to come out i i don't know if you've had a chance to see the talk by jordan who's running the astro astro dao or astro tool basically um and that's basically that's built on top of the core sputnik dow pro dow contract and that's basically designed how do we get daos to back as many consumer oriented

158. 1:28:51

     communities as possible up and down this back up and down the spectrum a lot of really cool stuff there but even so um we've distributed funding of over seven million dollars through over 200 uh sputnik dials on near and when you look at the numbers obviously the the dollar value will go up but the fact that there are 200 communities on near that are already working that are already voting and distributing funding is something that

159. 1:29:18

     you don't see actually in a lot of ecosystems so we're getting there and they've done they've done things from from you know paying for for actions within the ecosystem to things that are totally outside the ecosystem like covid relief for for india or vietnam and then the other piece of this is interoperability which i think is something that that it's always a little bit hard for people to fit together

160. 1:29:40

     because the question is always you know why interoperate but the point here is like if this is technology that's designed to work for everybody that's designed to kind of break through and touch consumers we need to welcome everybody in from all sides and so that's where that's where aurora and octopus help apps come into the near ecosystem and take advantage of a lot of the core tools core primitives core value that's stored in the near

161. 1:30:03

     ecosystem from other areas so aurora is is a fantastic piece of technology that's built on top of near that's actually an ethereum layer two that uses eth as its base token it's pretty incredible and they've been they've been roaring out of the gate and there's a lot of momentum behind them octopus is is almost on the other side and that's that's focusing on app chains that's focusing on uh who who who out there is trying to build slightly more complicated applications

162. 1:30:28

     um using substrate and and allowing them to hook into the near ecosystem as well and then of course the rainbow bridge is about bringing assets in but if so kind of coming back to all of this it's like why should you take why should you be here why should you join this but everyone has a part in this equation of what does it take to actually build a successful startup to build a

163. 1:30:52

     successful consumer-facing experience i mean if we're if we're going to realize the goal of reaching a billion consumers a billion people we're going to need a lot of really big apps we're going to need a lot of very successful apps and to get there it takes it takes a village um and so one of the through the lifecycle stages of a startup and we've had a lot of experience at this point talking to talking to founders along the way understanding a lot more about the pain

164. 1:31:16

     points of building in web 3 or also the pain points of building towards web 2 from within web 3 or vice versa it takes a lot uh it starts with funding um we we had a major announcement yesterday about 800 million dollars worth of funding that's going towards the ecosystem it's an overall package um and that's that's kind of the core ingredient right again you can't build unless you can eat and there are a lot of ways that this is being distributed uh the most important thing is that this is actually being distributed towards the edges though

165. 1:31:49

     um you can you'll be able to see this online i think in terms of it's basically oriented towards how do we how do we support startups how do we support regional communities how do we support anyone who has an idea and of course in any of the go to market categories whether that's defy nfts consumer but really the core principle popping up a level again is about decentralization is actually not just a buzzword um it's real and how do you how do you

166. 1:32:21

     how do you uh get 800 million dollars to the people who need it there is no way to do that without without pushing that to the edges and empowering other people to do that and so this is where we as an ecosystem cannot scale unless we're decentralizing unless we're pushing control unless we're pushing responsibility unless we're pushing empowerment to the edges and so on the funding side that's a huge that's a huge thing we're

167. 1:32:45

     the whole point of that of that package is how how can you get the people who are passionate about a particular region about a particular startup about a particular platform about a particular ecosystem the resources that they need to bring in all the next the next layer of people into their ecosystem and that's where sharding comes in as well and this is this is again where the technology has to follow the principles and the goal is to make this network

168. 1:33:09

     more distributed to make it more robust but charting is also it it opens up more than just uh technological scaling because by having more validator seats it allows us to uh to use something called endowment funding we haven't really made any announcements on that but what it allows what it allows us to do what it allows the ecosystem to do is actually create sustainable funding models long-term sustainable funding models for these

169. 1:33:32

     regions for guilds for communities related to them running validators and so it's not just about the technology it's about what does that technology unlock for the ecosystem another note on the community side where decentralization kicked in is that again coming from coming from that that tiny little we work room you always start with that with that seed that centralized seed and then you have to progressively

170. 1:33:56

     decentralize over time and what we found in this ecosystem of course we had a whole bunch of very early builders uh forward-thinking people and once once once the platform was was launched everyone started started wanting to build other stuff wanted to build cool things wanted to move in different directions some people wanted to want to explore defy other people wanted to explore community tools other people wanted to

171. 1:34:22

     support support things more in the creator space and so the core team members began spinning out and and that's that's great so we have people coming from outside with great ideas we have people coming from inside with great ideas and everybody's meeting in the middle and that's that's about not trying to trying to do everything from one place it's about empowering other people to go out and see sees what they see as the opportunity and our job i mean speaking

172. 1:34:47

     on behalf of the foundation at least our job is just to make that easy for other people and so guilds is one of the most powerful tools that we have and and this is something that that really differentiates near from a lot of other communities which is that our guild's ecosystem so guilds are basically communities if you've been in gaming you understand one version of guilds if you were in the 16th century you probably understood a slightly different version of guilds

173. 1:35:10

     but fundamentally the goal here is that everyone has a home everyone has a place where you can contribute everyone has a place where you can also receive value and this is this goes back to that idea of it takes a village to make a successful ecosystem and what guilds are we have we have over 100 guilds that are currently live and guilds are basically dow backed communities on near and they're communities that have a whole bunch of different categories so some of these are what you might think of as as more

174. 1:35:35

     traditional geographical oriented meetups others are more functional so we have a legal guild which helps help startups within the ecosystem understand their legal and regulatory thoughts in the near ecosystem or referring projects for grants or things like that so it creates a really beautiful mesh where everyone's incentives are aligned and we're all building together and the important thing is that this is real this is actually like these are happening on chain so this isn't this

175. 1:35:59

     isn't about running a bunch of meetup groups from meetup.com or something like that this is about actually using the technology and dog fooding it in a way that you normally wouldn't really be able to do so i encourage you if you're interested in that um near.org guilds and we also have a number of guilds wandering around and so hopefully you've had a chance to talk to them another team that's that's worth highlighting is the ecosystem success group and

176. 1:36:24

     this these are these are your sherpas uh see todd over there and basically this is that it's it's kind of confusing to to build a project in an ecosystem that's as broad as this and so how do we just make it easy how do we how do we say you know as a founder you you have a question that's kind of a weird specific question that you're not sure who to talk to well you have a single point of contact and this is a group of people that that they're actually moving

177. 1:36:48

     towards running a guild themselves which is which is then going to allow anyone in the community to sort of become this support network to help ever to help the startups come together uh thank thank you jake for uh for the graphic um but of course of course this isn't about just like launching startups out of the gate and actually one one of the cool stories from the ecosystem success team is uh the there was a project that they

178. 1:37:13

     were able to help you know and and it's about sort of swarming resources together it's like oh you know you're doing product development great let's get you beta testers oh you're you're coming out there and you need you need people in discord to to try it for the first time to start talking about it great like how do we put you in touch with teams in the ecosystem that are doing marketing with the marketing guild growth guild um and so they were able to they were able to get this this team uh over a thousand discord users and i

179. 1:37:37

     think 24 hours which is pretty cool just just by organizing the resources that already exist but if you want to go big and this is the point like we need to go big this isn't you know right now we're small and we're going to be small and that's fine but in order to get big this is where you actually have to start breaking out of just the thousand people in discord and you have to you have to give applications the tools that they need to then grow themselves because the only

180. 1:38:01

     way to reach a billion people is to create feedback loops it's too it's to allow these applications to reach out to normal people again to bring them from the social web to bring them from wherever they are to give marketers the tools that they need to give growth hackers growth teams the tools that they need to use product driven growth and that's where i highly recommend checking out the the gen c growth hackathon and this is something that to my knowledge i haven't i haven't seen before

181. 1:38:26

     and we have there are a series of teams that are building essentially growth toolkits and so it's okay well if you have essentially more or less free nfts how do you use those how do you use those as growth mechanisms if we do a million nft drop how do you use those nfts to reach out to new people from web too and how do you give how do you give a team who's building a game that toolkit to allow them to put some of their funding to work

182. 1:38:50

     with these new primitives to then reach out to new people to bring into their game and engage engage these users to uplevel them things like that this is all stuff that again working backwards from the technology and from the product you can only do this if you have a if you have a product that people are actually going to use that they're not going to drop off at a 99 rate right and this is one of the coolest things about the newer ecosystem this is one of the coolest things that's cooking you've got ross over there who's driving a lot

183. 1:39:13

     of this and uh this this personally excites me because because people people don't necessarily they don't build just to build right you build to create impact and to create impact you need users and to find users you need tools that actually allow you to find those users and the best way to do that is to have those tools be embedded have those tools be native to the app and the ecosystem and the technology that you're using

184. 1:39:37

     and so that's where it's super important that we're putting together these these growth toolkits that are based on on blockchain primitives and that's why i'm so excited about that so i wanted to invite you there the education team you've heard them mentioned before they're doing a fantastic job of putting a bunch of stuff together and this is an area that's near and dear to my own heart because my background is also in education they've put together a series of courses for pretty much anyone who's coming from

185. 1:40:03

     any direction to up level themselves and get involved so this may not apply to you but this may apply to your friends do you have developer friends who want to learn rust do you have developer friends who know russ who want to learn smart contracts do you have do you have people who just want to understand what is blockchain there are there are boot camp models there are learn to earn models all of this is coming together a lot of this is actually coming together from the edges and there are guilds now that

186. 1:40:27

     are that are driving education there's funding for for developers and residents entrepreneurs and residents and things like that so there's a lot of cool stuff that you should check out but in the end the point is that there's a path for everyone who wants to get involved and to pull it back like that's that's that's kind of what makes this cool and special is it's it's not just a rallying cry behind a big vision

187. 1:40:49

     it's not just it's not just a cool technology that does a lot of really awesome stuff it's uniting all of those things together in a way that feels like everyone is working together to help make this possible for everyone else right it's bringing back the the sexy to being in technology a little bit and that's what's fun about nir is that is that it's it's it's based in reality like many of you bought tickets that that are nfts that are running on near like this

188. 1:41:14

     is this is real today so again we're not always very good at talking about it but there are people who are using these tools today the communities are running on near today if you have ideas and you want to build and you want to help out it's there it's launched the smart contract platform is running i mean sharding sharding if you go to max's talk he'll talk about in details about what's happening on the sharding roadmap but the point is

189. 1:41:39

     you can build smart contracts today you don't need sharding and of course the point of his talk is that you shouldn't have to care about charting either because it's all below the surface but my point is that is that like one of the things that i think that just makes this special is that those core principles of of the ecosystem comes first of being open and transparent wherever possible and sharing knowledge and growing um and

190. 1:42:02

     ultimately most importantly creating experiences that feel simple is something that actually unites all of us in a way that i haven't really seen in a lot of other places and that's kind of what brings the energy back and that means that everyone here has a friend i mean you're already here but everyone here probably has friends who are curious um and there's there's something for everyone to do so come on in join a guild start a guild right there

191. 1:42:25

     we need product people we need designers we need to reach out to people who aren't traditionally in web3 because this has been a playground for technologists for years that's that's not the difficult part the difficult part is how do we how do we reach out to people who still feel like you know maybe this industry isn't a good fit for them or it seems like a religious war on twitter every time that

192. 1:42:42

     they try to try to even mention it you hear that a lot from artists how do you how do you uh cross the boundary where everyone seems to think that that if you run if you launch nfts that these things are are you know melting the ice caps in greenland it's like no there's a path for everyone to get involved in this and so i guess i just wanted to say what ties us all together is that is that you're here and that this is a

193. 1:43:05

     home for you this is home for you this is a home for all of us and i hope that we can together create this vision and make it feel at home for everyone else thank you is this one you're on stage yeah hello hey some fans in the audience my name's matt i'm the head of content here at nia um eric's being defragged as a keynote speaker and recompiled as a fireside chatter so i'll just give him a few minutes but um yeah i thought i'd just recap on what eric had talked about this idea of a

194. 1:44:07

     home and the idea that near is a home under construction it's a home that has some things built some things have furniture in them some things are a raging party um looking at some of the bleary eyes from last night you guys were in those rooms last night um and some rooms are empty uh and under construction and my my job really at nia is to find people who are building and creating things in the ecosystem and to invite them into

195. 1:44:39

     the near house uh to tell their story so while eric is just being the final touch is added uh i wanted to just sort of give an open invitation to anybody on the fringes of near who may be just starting out in their building journey and have a story to tell whether it's you know i've seen some amazing stories here i've seen the open forest protocol and i'm going to be speaking to those guys if they're here

196. 1:45:05

     um about climate change and near i want to talk about music film art anything that's blockchain and crypto because i think for me what gets us the adoption what gets is the thing that eric talked about the big the big graph up to a billion users is stories right and you guys have all got stories to tell and we want to help you tell them so if you want near to tell your story or you want to work with near to tell your

197. 1:45:36

     story about what you're building what you're passionate about come and talk to me i'll be sat next to the incredibly well-dressed man uh in the corner this guy's chad he's near's video guy he tells amazing stories of video and that's something that you're going to be seeing a lot more of in the coming months um story is going to be a massive part of everything that we do video photography

198. 1:46:02

     illustration animation all the hits all the content hits so if you guys want a story to be told come speak to us and we will we'll work on it so now that i've waffled on for at least three minutes of the five um let me just check to see if if our next speakers are ready for action give me one second please they're nearly ready they're nearly ready um so yes so you're getting a two for one here you've got eric coming back

199. 1:46:43

     back to the stage for a fireside chat with dr stephen waterhouse um they're here i think we're gonna do chairs are we doing it we're doing chairs chairs are coming there's one chair eric's gonna stand behind that chair and that's fine he's gonna sit down um i'll step out of the way and we need are we digging into two microphones you got that one there okay all right all right thank you so much

200. 1:47:15

     thank you matt thank you pad thank you bad are we going to battle rap now all right are you are you a rap battler testing i think this is is the feedback working check check all right so i guess uh would you like to introduce yourself is this thing on the doctor isn't it can you guys hear me is it working okay um yeah so i am a last-minute stand-in for my good friend richard mueller also at fabric ventures that's uh working with eric on the board of the foundation and um

201. 1:47:54

     big supporters of nia i'm a venture partner at fabric and i'm based in lisbon i live here my day job is i run orcid labs which is a decentralized vpn on ethereum sorry guys um but but i also do a whole bunch of work in other parts of ecosystems and i'm in full node with the mm-based team so i spend quite a bit of time thinking about nir and uh what's about to be nearly happening

202. 1:48:23

     that's how i always do that joke yeah um and for those who don't know me my name is eric troutman and uh i run the near foundation and yeah basically we're going to jam a little bit on everything anything and honestly open open to some some questions to to pop with maybe at the end as well uh so i i don't know if there's anything that that you specifically want to want to jump into but

203. 1:48:46

     i i am actually i'm interested on your side actually uh being being involved with fabric which is which is a team that's pushing very actively into web three um what what are you seeing across the ecosystem that's a little bit different from from the web 2 world you've also obviously been deeply involved with orkut um that that sort of that where like what does it take to succeed as a startup um

204. 1:49:10

     yeah um so i've been doing this blockchain thing for a while i um was a co-founder of pantera capital back in 2013 and um did a whole bunch of stuff in peer-to-peer uh i guess like 20 years ago in napster and nutella kind of days um so i i have this uh a little bit of a history in terms of seeing new ecosystems develop and trying to figure out um initially from an investment angle and then as an entrepreneur again and then now doing investment trying to figure out what is

205. 1:49:41

     um how do you move from like a great technology um i i have a lot of support um belief in the technologies that's being built here we spent about a year at orchid also trying to build our own layer one like a very private kind of uh decentralized architecture but realized that we needed um really powerful small zero knowledge approvers so which that technology wasn't available so we just put everything essentially on ethereum and also exci

206. 1:50:07

     that the the kind of lessons in terms of how you build these layer ones and how you scale them out into finding their niche and finding what what the adoption comes in um has been something that's now a fabric and we're supporters of near we we think a lot about um so with the layer one space right now we've got um obviously a lot of liquidity on the main ethereum and also the evm family of chains

207. 1:50:31

     um and then all the punks and the apes and all the kind of uh the um the world of energy space and those have become the the two big use cases that everyone's kind of coalescing around these like large d5 large nft cells um as we as we look at other applica other layer ones um we're also supporters of uh we're in polkadot we kind of like look at a lot of different cross-chain architectures there um over time um

208. 1:50:57

     i i see this less as a battle about which layer one is the one that kind of wins them all i think that's almost like a mistake of this maximalism kind of thinking you have the bitcoin maximalist and you have the ethereum maximalist and like kind of evm maximalist and you sort of like have this this family of behavior where people often get very invested in something and then think through oh this is the only thing that can win because i'm in it um and i i think you have to abstract out a

209. 1:51:22

     bit and try and have a much longer view of things um when i've been looking at uh at near one of the things that's been exciting to me is you know very fast finality um like cheap transactions and but still with this decentralized architecture um that is is lacking in say some of the kind of layer two chains you see with like the worst offender being something like a finance smart chain where it's

210. 1:51:45

     just a cartel of behavior um so some of the areas we've been looking at is bridging of um ethereum and near we're investors in aurora um and but then veneer itself on its own like in an isolated thing we've also been looking um pretty carefully at uh some of the nft meeting platforms and sort of the the idea of could you could could near be the thing that goes direct to real world use case without having to think about the blockchain at all and that's that's clearly a very exciting place for all of

211. 1:52:18

     us to be worried about yeah um i'm also pretty interested in i mean essentially what's different about what it takes to succeed in this ecosystem not necessarily as a layer one protocol but as a as a startup um building right i mean you have some some ingredients that are core every startup needs to get funded um but what's what's different about being a startup in web three uh that you're seeing from from within the portfolio and from your own experiences uh obviously you're

212. 1:52:52

     maybe more focused on the infrastructure side but yeah i think um so i spent about 23 years living in san francisco i just moved here last year one of the things that that occurred there was um both the funding and the hiring ecosystem was just sort of at your doorstep you just you know walk down the street and you'd hire a developer and then walk down the street get an investor that's that's changed now and uh you

213. 1:53:17

     know i like balaji's tweet so he talks a lot about how the internet is a new silicon valley and so it's what it really means is is that your ability to build community and connect to people um continuously not just through the fundraising round or the hiring round but just kind of continuously establish yourself i see that as very important to building companies building startups in this space um

214. 1:53:41

     and you know we're so was it like a very kind of mimetic generation community we're always like building a meme about this i mean about that is is that sort of what that means is you're you're trying to change the way people are thinking about something so uh kind of having that initial like why is this interesting to me what is this going to do that kind of like generating that buzz around i found is is very powerful and quite differentiated um

215. 1:54:05

     there are kind of parallels to the older models but but i think that's a very important thing so i think a lot of it is and as we talked before in london about and in paris about the idea of um being kind of friendly to other systems i think this um there was some of this maximalist idea it can take you so far and you know maybe if you've got a nba top shop or something you can kind of succeed on that but but it you have

216. 1:54:28

     to connect you have to think about the principles i gave this talk the day about the the principles of decentralization decentralization is not just having people in a bunch of places it's actually connecting to other things it's connecting not just to other applications in your ecosystem but thinking how do you connect outside of that and what what's relevant you've got this huge wall of liquidity sitting in in the evm chains how do you bring that

217. 1:54:51

     over and we've seen this we talked about aurora but how do we how do we think about nfts for example maybe it's not that we um take apes and punks and make near apes and near punks and then hopefully hope for the best maybe it's like something different maybe it's nfts being used for tickets like we see here today or um nft is being used for software license keys and if you have this ability to do this on a much cheaper and

218. 1:55:16

     faster basis and still decentralized then uh you know we can start seeing a different kind of use case so i don't know i don't know if there's like significantly different ideas to how you scale these website businesses um but there are certainly some some some interesting unique aspects that are emerging yeah i should be asking you questions too you're interviewing me this is funny

219. 1:55:40

     i like it though um well i'm gonna i'm gonna flip it so so um so if you kind of think about like the near the near foundation that they've been other foundations before and we've sort of seen like the the pros and the cons of of different ways of building things either on a i mean let's not sorry shade on too many things but you kind of look at like eos right it was like very centralized

220. 1:56:04

     architecture in the sense very very centralized it's kind of like you know friends of the people who who knew the people who ran the validators and and it was a really hot thing for a minute and then all of a sudden it just kind of like dwindled and i'm not even sure why it's even being traded anymore sorry eos holders but um the uh and this is not investment advice um but the um and then you see the the ethereum foundation you know i have a lot of love for like the kind of the the early work

221. 1:56:28

     they've done and so on but then you sometimes get those things like well how is this going what's going on it seems sometimes a little chaotic how do you balance those things of being centralized versus like chaos raining and how do you see that working out over time that's that's a totally fair question and i guess i guess it really kind of works back from both the journey towards decentralization and then again the first principles of like

222. 1:56:51

     why are we decentralizing as well um so in terms of the journey obviously you have to start with a core team and a core idea and then at some point you you take off the rocket boosters and hopefully something is in orbit um and somewhere along the way you've crossed you've crossed the pin and you've said okay well we're we're pretty decentralized and and then it's kind of a question of okay well like but why and and like what's effective about this

223. 1:57:15

     and i think i think i mean i also don't want to throw any shade on any particular uh model but but i'll do that but just be nice great um i i do agree that we've seen we've seen effective models and less effective models and the way that we we basically view things at the foundation is how do we accomplish things indirectly uh our goal our goal is certainly not to not to drive the ecosystem our goal is really

224. 1:57:38

     to honestly to make ourselves irrelevant in over time it's it's sort of in in a lot of ways it's it's almost like thinking of like as almost like a vc model where the foundation is just kind of its portfolio just happens to be everyone who's out who's out there um and and then if your portfolio is potentially a hundred thousand companies then you start then you have to work forwards and say okay

225. 1:58:01

     or work backwards and say okay but what does it take to get to that point and just and to make sure that those that those teams have the support that they need to be successful and so and so that's i think where actually decentralization comes in as well which is that you know often the conversation around why decentralized is oriented a little bit more towards defense it's uh you know things like regulatory come up a lot but really actually i think there's something that's a little bit more like

226. 1:58:24

     offensive decentralization and that's obviously not not to mean offensive but um it's it's it's like using decentralization as a tool to accomplish the goals that we have and uh that's that's where the the only way that the foundation can be successful to support a hundred thousand companies is by making sure that the ecosystem actually supports those those teams uh the foundation like if you remove if you kick out the leg of the stool that is the foundation

227. 1:58:48

     it the stool should continue to stand and not only that like it should it shouldn't even shutter and that that's actually the design goal that we're going for and so i think i think what we haven't necessarily seen or i haven't at least seen out there is a model where the foundation's goal is actually to make itself irrelevant and that's that's the way that we've basically structured things is how over five years can we get to the point where the foundation doesn't even need to exist at all and if

228. 1:59:13

     we think of things a little bit more of of how are like how do you build a country the the uh we're really almost building a a nation state and in the nation state needs to be able like it it runs on a free economy so so like there shouldn't be some some marketing team that that you know you go to for all the marketing issues that you have there shouldn't be a single grants program or a single funding opportunity for everyone in the ecosystem because the entire goal should

229. 1:59:36

     actually be that you have you have a free market where all of these things exist because there are there are great opportunities because people on both sides have are running sustainable businesses that make it great like obviously we want to encourage it let's just say as a marketing example we want to encourage an entire ecosystem of of teams and and agencies and and you know large small supporting startups supporting large companies who are all integrating up and down and then

230. 2:00:02

     connecting them with with these hundred thousand teams that are operating in the ecosystem uh that's the goal uh so for us we're just the starter motor and then the starter motor you know it's kind of it just disengages over time and and the resources should be given to the ecosystem the resources are all i mean i mean they're already they belong to the ecosystem and so really our goal is to make ourselves irrelevant through that through that decentralization um

231. 2:00:26

     and yeah you can't do it without it uh so yeah yeah i think it's some good thoughts there um the i mean i'm a big believer in decentralization as a principal and um i i've probably left a lot of money on the table as an investor from passing on things i just don't like and then but the thing that i've i've noticed is just over time these these systems that are decentralized not only are more sustainable over time um but do attract these much larger ecosystems of of supporters which in the

232. 2:00:59

     end makes the whole thing um you know more sustainable like kind of sly real rules where do you see the the niche veneer like when you think of the things that are being built out today um and i was for example like really interested in some of the sort of recent kind of stripe integrations i've seen and looking at you know my friends at mimbase and um the kind of work that's happening though and then also um you know like with with the sort of the different programming language framework

233. 2:01:31

     and kind of seeing how a lot of developers are saying we really prefer to use this kind of environment how are you seeing those things go together and say we think this is where it's going or like i mean i'm not asking you to pick a winner here obviously as an independent um but if you think about it from a you know short term and then kind of like holistically where do you see the sweets if you were telling someone today is like hey you probably should go take a look at this area what would it be

234. 2:01:55

     well that's that's actually the the the hard the hard question and the easy question uh of being basically a general purpose platform which is which is you have seen a lot of platforms go out there and aggressively niche down and say you know this is the platform where defy lives this is the platform where games live this is the platform where you know consumer web lives and and i think for us that's been very difficult because it

235. 2:02:20

     almost feels it feels strange building a general purpose technology and then saying well it's a general purpose technology which is designed to support pretty much anything and then but but no no this is where we're going to start and it totally flies in the face of conventional wisdom like uh obviously you know uh riches in the niches and that whole philosophy and you know it makes it harder to message and one of the biggest challenges that we've actually had is how do you even message usability like it's such a it's

236. 2:02:45

     such an easy thing to say and such a difficult thing to have and so it's i think it is in some ways it feels it feels like we've taken the hard path of of not niching down but what that's allowed us to do is it's allowed us to create the space where people can actually people who want to take on a particular niche can go in there and do that and that's where each of those key go-to-market areas at least in the current stage of the market where we have the creator economy really driving a lot of things

237. 2:03:11

     for instance defy for instance the nft and consumer space for instance dowsing communities um each of these spaces now has a whole series of teams that are devoted specifically to those spaces so so rather than niching down on the protocol level or on the ecosystem level what we focused on is is empowering other teams to then go out and and do what they need to do to take the opportunity that they see uh and so yes it's it it's been it's been a hard slog to get there until now but that's that that's where uh spinning out core team

238. 2:03:42

     members and and and you know really supporting them to go out and say yeah we're really passionate about building financial tools uh you know maybe for financial inclusion maybe for trading maybe for for for uh asset management or anything else great there's space here and and and there's a niche for that too uh if there are people who are really excited about about bridging to ethereum and really really working with the the the

239. 2:04:05

     the components and and uh the teams that have already built on ethereum and now we have aurora and and that's that's essentially their goal it's like how do we how do we sort of work with the ethereum the existing ethereum ecosystem and then in a way that that allows them to also take advantage of some of the cool stuff that's happening in your native so in in a way like i almost kind of like not quite reject the premise but but you know the niche is not to be niche oh yeah i mean i mean the niche is not

240. 2:04:30

     to be niche as an ecosystem the niche is to empower other people to niche as they want to on top of it and i think we're actually seeing the benefits of that substantially right now so i'm going to continue on that niche conversation but with a different one so uh the area that we've been working a lot at orchid is is what i kind of call web3 versus like what most people call web3 is just like let's just call that blockchain but to me it's like decentralized services so

241. 2:04:55

     it's something that most systems haven't really applied to you've got stuff like ours you've got um lip here and ethereum we've got a bunch of different kind of people trying to do this obviously filecon is its own ecosystem have you seen any work in that area and do you see that as a sort of a a potential space given the usability of near and how that can can make just things a lot faster cheaper and easier to do still decentralized well decentralized services obviously

242. 2:05:19

     it's a pretty big category um i think i think one of the examples that i'll cite it's it's it's probably not apples to apples for what you're what you're talking about but um the the near crowd app on near is uh so so quick history is that the near team originally near near got its name because of the book near.ai because alex and ilya are both very very talented machine learning researchers and and engineers and uh so originally they were they were actually trying to create the singularity the singularity is near and

243. 2:05:52

     near.ai was the original company that was that was that sort of merged and became uh the near blockchain and so so there's still a lot of like energy and momentum in the ecosystem around the idea of like how do we help support the the machine learning community and so one thing that grew out of uh out on top of the ecosystem that is a consumer facing experience is this this app called near crowd which is a essentially a mechanical turk which right now

244. 2:06:19

     is creating what i believe is the by multiples the single largest machine learning data set for image categorization in the world through through basically allowing people primarily right now i think i think the communities are mostly in southeast asia and india um through allowing people to to basically like who are poor consumers who you know i mean they didn't know about this before and then they had to be onboarded to it um

245. 2:06:41

     who are basically allowing them to to do work categorizing images and then and then get paid in in doing that um and so again it's maybe not exactly in line with the services that you're talking about but but this was this has actually been one of the most successful apps that's been built on near so far and the fact that it's it is it is a marketplace that's being created uh it's i think i think it's probably going to end up expanding uh to support more use cases than just machine

246. 2:07:04

     learning um but but like you know that's that's literally one of the like og use cases built-in any final words for the for the supporters here no no no um i i think for i would be interested though in your perspective about what makes you the most excited on the way out here over the next 12 months across any ecosystem across any space that you want to see built whether it's startups that you're curious to see whether it's technologies you're curious to see or just impact that you're curious to see coming out of this ecosystem

247. 2:07:39

     yeah um that's a great question um uh i i'm yeah so so from an investment perspective i've been looking a lot at uh i'm a bit of an nft ape myself so we're not looking a lot at how that's changing the art world um and also how these new communities and uh kind of a lot of the kind of conventional entertainment world is starting to move into that space and we've been chatting a lot to the studios in hollywood and sort of seeing that whole world emerging quite quickly um

248. 2:08:11

     again you know going back to what i was originally saying i i'm very interested in the the decentralized of the internet in general of the web that internet is decentralized theoretically but just kind of um technology like handshake um which you know like somewhat some forgotten uh architecture decentralizing dns um and uh this is certainly like a personal sort of passion of mine um anything from my perspective that that improves privacy decentralization um kind of like breaking the control

249. 2:08:42

     structures of centralized entities i'm really a big fan of um but i think over the next 12 months we'll see i hope um a lot of movement out to people who can use these technologies without knowing about them uh you know you're using this technology we don't even really know well there's a blockchain behind it whatever i don't really care i'm just getting this ticket or i'm doing this cool thing that this

250. 2:09:05

     thing enables me to do um and i'm always on the lookout for things that um i don't necessarily know what they're going to be because it's things that you can do with these technology stacks that you couldn't do previously like it's just it's kind of impossible or really cumbersome to do it using a web to architecture or or another blockchain so those are the things that i look for a lot great thanks thanks for the conversation

251. 2:09:28

     thank you me

252. 2:10:40

     hello yes so this is the last uh session for today the morning session and now we are ready for lunch so get your way out and enjoy your the rooftop and we'll see you back here at 1 30. thank you

253. 2:12:09

     so

254. 2:13:36

     so so

255. 2:15:28

     so so so

256. 2:17:33

     so

257. 3:06:50

     do do so

258. 3:10:20

     hi everybody so we're gonna kick off the afternoon panel on the main stage the session title is interconnection and scalability and it's actually going to feature three talks one is going to be about 50 minutes long so it's a solid keynote on sharding by max starting on near and and the future of sharding on near the second one is by adrian brink from anoma who's going to be talking about privacy and sovereignty

259. 3:10:50

     on year and then the third one is a 45-minute talk by uh dr alex shivchenko from aurora who is basically going to talk about interoperability and what they're figuring out as aurora's launching and you know onboarding projects so i would encourage everybody upstairs or on the ecosystem partner showcase if they can to make their way to main stage i know there's also tvs upstairs and without further ado we will kick off our discussion a keynote speech by max

260. 3:11:24

     from near inc titled sharding and things to come welcome max all right everyone hey whoever it is all right charlotte and things to come if you wanted a very tech heavy deep down low level presentation this is the one yeah um right so uh my name is max i'm a leading engineer at nero inc this is about sharding and other protocol upgrades that are going come out this year and next year also we're going to talk what it means for the community i mean meeting you builders and

261. 3:12:24

     validators so um most of the talk is going to be about sharding but we're also going to talk about tps because you know what sharden is not the only way we increase dps at near and uh finally like what it means for the scalability like what it actually unlocks in terms of developer experience scalability for near um so sharon is here uh congrats everyone thanks for sticking around with nier we promised to sharden yeah before mr starting

262. 3:12:56

     here it is we launched it on testnet on october 20 well we planned to launch it on october 18 but there was a couple of days delay which i think is uh you know it's not too far off uh we actually had like a minor incidents which were mostly around the fact that we just did it way too quickly and some notes were not able to upgrade in time if everything goes well which assuming it will we're going to have it on mainnet on november 15th so many of you think that near is all

263. 3:13:26

     about sharing like this is our super weapon but the fact is it is not so our super weapon at near is ability to do the protocol upgrades we never thought of near as a kind of a blockchain that we would just create correctly from the start and never change we always thought it was going to be an ever evolving system that we're going to be adapting towards the community and needs and needs of the our partners and

264. 3:13:51

     we would also look at other blockchains and see whether we like any features that they have and maybe cherry pick them in our blockchain that was always the plan so since genesis we had 20 protocol upgrades in just 15 months which is quite a lot now we have them on a regular cadence because we have a robust release process which is like very controlled very stable and the fact that we actually met

265. 3:14:15

     the shard and deadline launch this time is a direct reflection of us having a very stable software release process now so now we are actually when launching even more protocol upgrades we just bundled them together in a single protocol upgrade but we have many more of them actually launching now so if you read bowen's blog post you would know that we launched in chardon in four phases and uh all of the credit for the work on the shard and goes to bowen who couldn't attend uh this time

266. 3:14:46

     mean and uh node experience and and uh core teams who actually doing all that i have no credit uh for work on the sharding so phase zero is what is happening right now we're launching it in phase zero we're shot in the state so that's an important part of sharding phase one is going to be out in january february next year and that's when we're going to also start some of the processing

267. 3:15:10

     phase two is the most exciting one that's when we're gonna have full-blown state and and process processing sharding that's when you can call us legit charity blockchain and i'm the most excited about this specific phase the final phase three is just a nice cherry on top of the cake we're just gonna add dynamic scalability to to our blockchain which will allow it to automatically adjust to the needs of the community without any kind of

268. 3:15:34

     intervention or all governance or protocol upgrades so now let's talk about phase zero what is happening like right now so until now we've been running notes that were executing basically two roles block producer and chunk producer what we did is that we upgraded to the nodes that execute four chunk producer roles so they basically validate four shards at the same time it's more like a logical sharding of the state rather than physical because what we do we we actually split the state

269. 3:16:06

     into the four into four state tries uh you can validate these these charts independently but we still store it on the same physical machine in the same database because it's more convenient to rule out sharding like that in incremental way what it means for the community well above all it means that well we we actually deliver our promises we promise to sharden here it is and we plan to keep to stay on track with all our promises going forward

270. 3:16:38

     we also didn't have to do any kind of trade-offs here in terms of safety so you would expect that block when blockchain launched sharding there are probably some trade-offs happening we had no trade-offs so it's exactly the same safety mechanism here and what else is that we're even further away from reaching the maximum capacity so communities usually care will blockchain at any moment capsize is it going to be congested will someone

271. 3:17:04

     launch a smart contract that will suddenly use 100 of the capacity of the blockchain so the highest spike of the utilization on here we had was only 13 this year and with chardon we are now four times away from that and we're also going to have another protocol upgrade that launches together with shard and that gonna make it even twice further away from that so we are pretty far away from reaching the

272. 3:17:27

     maximum capacity and even if we see that we're getting there we're going to be able to share it even further with it with another protocol upgrade so that's that's a good news for the community it just tells you that near is becoming more and more robust and stable so many people were coming to me and asking max how do upgrades smart contracts to run on sharding or what is how do shortened transactions look on here how

273. 3:17:52

     do you communicate between the shards well the cool thing is that you don't need to care about that all of your contracts that you wrote already they're going to work magically as is with through all of the phases that i presented before like no changes no defects or ux changes are required for your stuff to work it just automatically happens and that's because we built the run time at near with sharding in mind from the very early days

274. 3:18:17

     not only you don't need to upgrade your contracts there are no incentives for anyone to even care about charting so independently whether your stuff is running on the same chart or on separate charts you have the same fees you have the same finality time and there are zero incentives to try to collocate with some other smart contracts in some other blockchains where you might have sharding you might have an incentive to actually

275. 3:18:42

     try to live on the same chart with some exchange because it's cheaper or whatever well it near there are literally no incentive and and the cool thing is that with phase two launch it might actually not be possible if you try to collocate with some smart contract on the same chart the the boundaries between the shark may be just adjusted in the next epoch and now you're not anymore on the same chart so just forget about the charts even

276. 3:19:06

     exist on here as a developer of a smart contract that should be completely relevant to you so know the back changes what else does it mean for the for the builders uh it also means that you can launch resource-heavy application on near more fearlessly because we're increasing the capacity so if you like some virtual machines like for instance aurora launched evm you can you can launch it on your two

277. 3:19:30

     and if you have some if you're a fan of some blockchain or some virtual machine let's say move and you wish it was sharded then please come to nier and launch it on our blockchain and you're going to have sharding for free so one of the ways for instance how aurora might do sharded evm and just like a hypothetical scenario here is that they could leverage the cross-charted communication that neo already has so they would have some pre-compile or like cost function that would exist only on evm

278. 3:20:03

     leaving on near that they would use to talk to other evms and you would just have a shorter tvm and you can do it with any other virtual machine so what else does it mean for the builders well it also means that it's much easier to do interoperability between nir and other smart contract platforms um so one thing that near has is a very light client like much lighter than in other blockchains with near you only need two headers a day to verify

279. 3:20:32

     anything that happens so near that day and i mean like state transactions execution results and these headers are super light they are so light that aurora were able to validate those headers inside solidity smart contract which are usually quite expensive and and uh yeah it's hard to have heavy resource usage on them we also have powerful virtual machine that allows you to validate almost

280. 3:20:56

     anything happening on other blockchain so if you have some really expensive validation that you would need to do to establish the bridge you most likely can do it so that allows you to have a bidirectional cryptographic trustless breach with almost any smart contract platform out there and well finally the other thing that is launching uh with this phase is us switching to wasmer 2.0 it took some time because we wanted to run through all of the safety checks before we did it

281. 3:21:28

     but it allows us to uh decrease the cost of asthma execution almost twice which means you're gonna have almost twice more capacity on each chart which is great it's especially great for resource-heavy application like virtual machines so what it means for the validators well one thing is that unfortunate evaluators would need to run a more expensive hardware and they already do

282. 3:21:53

     so instead of using four cores you need eight core cpu but it's just gonna translate to about 100 bucks more a month for you which is probably not that much considering that for other blockchains you need to run much more expensive hardware and if you're running near validator you're probably already paying three to four hundred bucks a month so this is not a huge uh price increase and it's and it's temporary too it's gonna be like that until phase two and

283. 3:22:16

     then it's gonna be cheap again so now i want to go into even more low-level technical details uh specifically tell you exactly how the sharding is getting enabled like right now on the air so this is a nap 241 written by min that explains it in a very high detail i encourage you to go and read it but i also going to give you like a quick brief summary here so what is happening is that at some

284. 3:22:42

     point when validators update their notes their nodes collectively recognize that they're able to execute chardon and they do it in epoch let's say t minus two then they decide to switch to chardon in epoch t and they prepare for it during epoch t minus one during this epoch they compute both sharded and non-sharded state so there is some duplication of the resources happening there but it but it's fine it actually works

285. 3:23:09

     and uh yeah when apoc t kicks off they just switch to new chard layer state layout there is also an interesting thing happening with shard identifiers so if you notice the definition of shard zero is changing through those epochs so the beginning shard zero is the one that has all of the state and at the end it's the shard that has only a quarter of the state so we realized that we need to have a proper identifier for the shard and we now combine it with the layout id

286. 3:23:35

     and shard unique identifier now uniquely identifies shard with its layout so what it allows us is allows us to basically repeat this process in the future and potentially increase the number of shards i don't know like 8 16 or how many we want because we just introduced a new layout id so that's a neat trick here well and finally there is a bit of a low-level technical detail with how we process the transactions so you probably know that uh on any blockchain the order of transactions in

287. 3:24:06

     a block matters because that defines what are the execution results which transactions succeed which of them fail so when we're switching from a single shard layout to a four shot layout now we need to split the transactions into four groups and so their order is different so what we do in epoc t minus one we still execute transactions as if they were ordered within one chart but the state of that hand maintains their execution

288. 3:24:36

     result is actually sharded in into four pieces so it's a bit of a mental gymnastics in in there i just wanted to let you know this low level design detail here yeah now let's talk about phase one so phase one is coming in uh january february next year and what we're going to do we're going to introduce the new type of the node which we call chunk only producer and yeah this is a node that basically is going to be doing only the validation of a specific chart so it's going to keep the state of that one chart and

289. 3:25:08

     it's going to do the processing only of that one chart but we're still going to keep around the notes that do block production and all of the validation of all other shards so what it means for the community well above all it means that you're gonna have more validators because now you can join as a chunk producer you can use cheaper hardware for that you don't need uh eight core cpu for that anymore and which is great i mean it contributes to decentralization of near there are other cool things that we're

290. 3:25:38

     going to be launching around that time so one of them is a light client sync so that's us leveraging our super light client even further to actually be able to join the network really fast so with with this slide client sync you would be able to join the network in a completely trustless verifiable way in a matter of hours which is again really great for the decentralization of the blockchain and we're also going to add a new validation data selection algorithm

291. 3:26:10

     so today theoretically we can have up to 100 validators in practice we have 60 and we cannot really adjust this constant we cannot just increase it because otherwise we start breaking interoperability solutions like aurora and the reason why that would happen is that every validator today has to include the signature into the header so if you just increase the number of voltages your headers become heavier

292. 3:26:35

     which means it's more expensive to verify them and aurora is doing verification of the headers inside solidity right so that's that's quite expensive so we don't want to do that so what we're going to do we're going to increase the number of validators on here but only a subset of them are going to be including their signatures into near headers and that will allow us to increase number of letters to like i don't know 400 maybe we'll see

293. 3:27:00

     so what it means for the builders again no developer experience changes that's a pretty consistent thing for nir we don't envision any developer experience changes anytime in the future for our for our developers then we're also going to have other cool things launching around the time well one of them we're going to have a new gas injector so some of you might know that gas injectors are pretty difficult on a

294. 3:27:25

     blockchain so if you if you if you look at other web assembly blockchains you would see that actually the gas injector costs you like 95 percent of the fees so the actual execution of the contract is like five percent of the fees when you run it and 95 of it is actually just running the gas injector which is pretty pretty expensive so what we did we rewrote the gas injector we came up with our own gas injector that leverages some low level virtual machine magic and it becomes like 45 times cheaper and it means

295. 3:27:57

     that our capacity increases proportionally especially for the contracts that are really heavy in cpu which are virtual machines and uh like yeah and any kind of runtimes running on top of near like second layer virtualization we're also considering adding the gas price auction just like on ethereum so right now the way near handles uh the case when you start having a temporary congestion is by increasing the gas price slowly but exponentially

296. 3:28:28

     what we decided is that better mechanism would be actually a gas price auction that we're going to bring into near but also it would be very good for the shards because shards will not be interfering that much with each other anymore and you might even have different uh gas price cost on different charts so that's the cool thing then we might redesign the state we're already working we have prototypes right now we're using

297. 3:28:52

     miracle patricia dry just as like as is from taken from ethereum there are certain issues with this it's actually vulnerable to adversarial attacks it's also not that efficient and not that friendly to sharden so we're considering self-balancing data structures like abl3 for the for the state because avl allows you to split the state in log and time which is pretty fast and aligns perfectly with sharding and finally we're also going to look at some non-protocol changes to our state

298. 3:29:24

     handling uh like low level optimization so how we work with uh with the disk and and database that might decrease the i operations even further so about about this time the the cost of the wasm is not going to be the bottleneck anymore and it's going to be io and that's what we are preparing here for with redesign of the state and redesign and the redesigning of the low level database and disk level here what it means for the validators again

299. 3:29:54

     we're going to increase the number that means you're going to be able to join near easier you probably would need much less stake to do that and you can join as a chunk producer and use much cheaper hardware which is again all great because it contributes this decentralization of near protocol right now phase two is the most exciting phase to be and that's because that's where we're going to have a proper state chart and proper processing sharding so what we're going to do in this state we're going to get rid of the

300. 3:30:24

     type of the node that is required to validate uh to do the block producer and the chunk producer on all of the shards and we're just going to have a block producer notes in addition to the chunk producer notes so what means for the community well that would be the proper sharding that we actually aiming for we could stop there and actually not improve our shard even further and we're probably not going to have major bottlenecks in there because if we decide to increase the number of shards the requirements for the hardware of the

301. 3:30:57

     block producer will not increase that drastically because it doesn't need to do the processing of all shards anymore we're also going to be adjusting the boundaries between the shards automatically based on the load that we observe for utilization web server on these charts which again is good because it tells you that our chain is going to be more robust and more balanced and again community cares about

302. 3:31:20

     knowing that blockchain is robust what it means for the builders one thing that builders need to know and be aware of but not necessarily take care of is that in order to enable this kind of sharding you need to have challenges because your shards are now being executed completely independently so you kind of put trust in the shard producers first optimistically and then later if you find out that they have colluded and they have produced an invalid state

303. 3:31:52

     then you would slash them through the challenge mechanism so this is just an unnecessary technical thing that you have to have if you want to have this kind of sharding but it also means that if that happens which is super unlikely to happen because people will lose a lot of money they try to collude and produce an invalid state if that happens we're going to revert this state on that chart and all other shards to the time before the collusion

304. 3:32:18

     happened and this is something you need to be aware of again not super possible to happen but you need to have it in your code um also we might add near as a way of attaching as a way to pay for it for transactions so today developers they need to think about two things at the same time gas and near tokens when they develop smart contracts and this is just an unnecessary cognitive overhead that we don't want our developers to have again nier is all about developer friendliness

305. 3:32:50

     and we don't them to just you know to think about those things so what we're going to do we're going to allow you to pay with near and not even think about the gas and if it turns out that your transaction ran out of near then you will be able to top it up and this will even happen automatically in our tooling like near api gs and rpirs so you might not even even know that this is happening but this is the cool thing to have that

306. 3:33:15

     we're going to launch around phase two and finally we're gonna listen to our community and we find out that you guys still really miss synchronous execution we might actually add it and we already have several designs in flight so one of them might actually land and you might also have an opt-in synchronous execution on near protocol that again will not break existing developer experience again what it means for validators you're going to have cheaper hardware

307. 3:33:46

     it's always great and no one needs to run expensive hardware anymore because even block producers need to only execute block producer role so finally phase three in phase three we're gonna do dynamic scalability which would be the ability of near to adjust the number of shares in response to the utilization and the load of the blockchain and uh it's great because again it makes our blockchain more robust

308. 3:34:15

     uh oops what is happening how do i close it all right thanks yeah so it makes it more robust the blockchain becomes more sustainable again contributes to the trust that community has in it in here so now i want to talk about tps in general because increasing the number of shares is not the only way that we increase dps to near protocol another way we do it is by increasing the speed of a single chart which is the speed of a single runtime and we have done quite a lot of work in there

309. 3:34:47

     and again all the credit goes to alexey bo nikolai and alexander so one thing that we did that is launched on november 15 is the migration to wasmer 2.0 which now makes wasm execution twice faster we also have another thing thanks alex we also we also have done another thing we we adjusted our fee estimation tool so nier has been extremely conservative and extremely careful with the estimation much more careful and conservative than other

310. 3:35:18

     blockchains we really don't want to underestimate the cost of certain operations so we've been staying on the side of way overshooting our fees all this time and alexei had written our fee estimator recently to make it tighter and more reliable and now we can reduce some of the fees so the our cross-contract callbacks are now 100 times cheaper and some of the pre-compiles like ec recovery is like 12

311. 3:35:43

     times cheaper which is again great for everyone especially for aurora and evm what is gonna happen in phase one is that again we're gonna have new gas injector which is gonna make it four to five times cheaper no one has this kind of gas injector it's it's our own the innovation here and in phase two we're gonna have the new state design uh we're gonna have a new way of actually operating with it with a disk and we might even get rid of the roxdb and all that gonna make our io much much

312. 3:36:15

     cheaper too which is probably gonna be the bottleneck since we're gonna take care of wasm speed already by then so what it means for developer experience scalability well so far if you've been listening to josh quintel's talk we have two languages that you can use to develop smart contracts to near this is rust and assembly script and they appeal to both worlds of developers rust is appealing to the back end developers

313. 3:36:47

     assemble script is appealing to web developers we also have grain and zig coming in grain is the great web language it was specifically developed for web developers and to to compile efficient at the web assembly so we actually expect this language to be highly efficient in terms of the contract size and execution and zig is a contender of rust so it also appeals to back-end developers however we want to go much further than that near is the developer experience

314. 3:37:17

     first blockchain so we want developers to have like zero barrier when they start working on air we don't want you as a developer to come on near and learn some other language if you come from the python world we want to be you'll be able to develop in python if you come from java world you should be able to develop with java because you probably have all your dev tools and ids configured for that and that would be the best for you to just like reuse them for near development

315. 3:37:41

     so we are considering adding javascript typescript java and go and python and all the general purpose languages as sdks to near and we might even go much further than that if we're going to have javascript which we're currently working on we might have all javascript compatible languages immediately available which would be typescript if you like pure script or copy script we're also going to have them and if you have java it immediately will

316. 3:38:06

     enable kotlin scala enclosure and whatever else for you to develop there are 35 languages out there that support webassembly compilation some of them have are stable some of them are semi-stable but we're considering all of them so if you're a community member and you're particularly passionate about some language and you wish it was on near please contact us either directly or apply to the grants program and let's develop as the case for these languages so there is an interesting thing

317. 3:38:41

     that is now being enabled by the performance improvements of nir javascript and all of these languages are not efficient to compile to webassembly which means it's going to be costly it's going to be slow and so on but because our web assembly runtime is improving so much you might be actually able to compile the entire javascript runtime into the smart contract just like avm team just

318. 3:39:06

     compiled entire evm into a single smart contract so this idea is very similar to the execution environment that ethereum had where you have like second layer virtualization on top of near so taking javascript as an example one of the ways of how you could run it you could compile the entire javascript runtime together the javascript contract into a single contract web assembly

319. 3:39:29

     contract and launch it on nerm so advantages of this is that you have consistent contract interface that looks exactly like other contracts it your all of your contract development tools work out of the box but it's probably going to be large in size but not prohibitively large so could be more expensive to deploy the second option is how evm folks are doing uh their stuff you basically only compile the runtime

320. 3:39:54

     into the smart contract but then you kind of host your javascript contracts on top of it it requires you proxy all of the all of the operations through this runtime so you need to wrap it into the function calls which means you probably would need to write a whole bunch of the adapters but this thing is really cheap to deploy probably the cheapest one that's a huge advantage and finally the third way is when you separate the runtime again in a separate contract but every time you have your

321. 3:40:25

     javascript contract you actually wrap it into a little bit of the webassembly code that is able to do the the cross-contra calls to the javascript runtime and the javascript runtime will also hold all of your state so that is going to be just slightly bit more expensive than the previous method but probably really cheap too your your contract interface is going to be consistent you would don't need to write any kind of adapter so all of your tools work out of the box but you're

322. 3:40:49

     going to have a couple of seconds more finality time which is probably also forgiving so given all that as a developer in your ecosystem what should you do if you are super passionate about some blockchain that you wish nier could integrate with consider building bridges we have a super light client we have powerful virtual machine if you have some platform that supports smart contract you probably can interpret interoperate with near if you have some virtual machine that

323. 3:41:21

     you wish was started you'd consider deploying it on here just like we did with evm and you're going to have shorthand for free if you're passionate about any specific language that also compiles the assembly which almost all of them are consideration now reaching us out and developing sdk for this language on near it's like a huge amount of opportunities to to build developer tools on here you can also go to thegrants.new.org and apply there

324. 3:41:52

     and this is the end of my talk please fill in this questionnaire here this is for the blog producer right thanks uh anyone have questions okay um you said you want to migrate out from roxdb and work to be for those who don't know it's the fastest embedded database on the market and what is the alternative forex to be will you develop something like specific for your problems like in

325. 3:42:42

     house development or you will use some other open source technology well i probably gonna have part of our storage completely outside the database like stored in some i don't know memory mapped files or some low-level stuff working directly with even like west ssds and we might consider like other databases that allegedly are faster like single store i'd like to ask is there going to be a limit on number of validators in phase two phase three

326. 3:43:18

     yeah we don't know that yet again this is like where uncertainty becomes too much yeah okay so phase one will be about 400 500 validators yeah or more and then we'll see okay thank you all right that's it i guess oh here we go uh for those of us running our own indexers uh we run ours from in pace what what kind of hardships are we gonna go through well one thing is that we actually gonna have indexer as a service so you you should consider using that instead

327. 3:44:06

     and we're just going to you know solve all the technical problems for you and you're just going to be in the fee in here but also like we're improving the release process which is usually where the hardships with index are usually coming from and uh hopefully that will be much smoother going forward uh max thanks for tremendous talk i encourage everyone give a round of applause to the core team they're doing

328. 3:44:36

     super great work um yeah then i'm just simply amazed of the things that you're doing so the thing that uh that is pretty close to me is the synchronous runtime right so you you said that you're going to do well this this can something that can happen yeah can you elaborate a little bit on this and on one specific token uh topic within this uh runtime which is the automatic reverting of the changes that transactions are

329. 3:45:07

     introducing so there are multiple ways that we can go with for the implementation of synchronous runtime so we might try to implement synchronous runtime across multiple charts in that case we would take care of all of the like lock-in of the of the data on the synchronization primitives for you like right now you can actually implement synchronous execution yourself if you're like really into concurrent programming and you know how to mutexes works and how to avoid deadlocks you can actually do it with

330. 3:45:38

     like sdk it's just going to be too much it's going to be very difficult to do so we could do that for you on our runtime level and revert the state also through that mechanism but we could also potentially and we're still considering it make a single runtime parallel and then within this parallel runtime we might have synchronous execution and then the only thing from the developer experience that might be different from you is that we might ask you to annotate the transactions within with the keys that you're going to be touching with

331. 3:46:11

     this transaction and if you don't do this it's going to be asynchronous and if you do this then it's going to be a synchronous call so it's similar to what some other blockchains do but again still there are multiple designs that we're considering okay um any plans one this is only for the phase two right so the closer to the end of the next year yeah yeah it's a big undertaking yeah okay cool

332. 3:46:41

     right well thanks everyone thank thanks for that max um so we're gonna have a 15-minute break before adrian brink from a noma foundation is going to come up and talk about privacy followed by dr alex shivchenko talking about aurora interoperability so see you guys in 15 minutes or so don't run off thanks do

333. 3:48:07

     do so

334. 3:51:09

     do do

335. 3:52:24

     oh

336. 3:55:24

     just a heads up everybody we're gonna start moving back to the main stage now uh for the second part of the talks uh adrian brink from anoma is gonna be talking about privacy and uh its importance in web3 and then we're gonna have the another keynote by dr alice shivchenko from aurora on interoperability with some alpha from aurora so uh if you are upstairs outside or with the ecosystem partner showcase maybe consider making your way down to the

337. 3:55:56

     main stage for these next two talks we will also have a panel after that uh with ave discussing ave's deployment on near so you got anoma aurora and ave in the lineup it's gonna be great and uh if you can y'all should make your way down to the main stage

338. 3:58:57

     all right everybody welcome back the next three talks we're going to hear from is adrian brink from anoma dr alex shivchenko from aurora and then two members of the ave team uh ajit and mark talking about deployment of ave on near to kind of provide some context for this next talk with anoma the the topic is privacy and you might not have known this but nier actually has a cypherpunk guild uh they have about

339. 3:59:30

     four hundred thousand dollars in grants that are open to be given to developers and founders interested in building privacy related uh solutions on top of near so check out the cyberpunk guild they're on twitter uh the ecosystem as a whole values privacy and i think that uh web3 privacy is definitely a trend to keep your eye on especially when we think of things like surveillance capitalism and exploitative data structures so this

340. 3:59:59

     next talk is by adrian brink co-founder of enoma is titled resilience sovereignty and privacy to save the future without further ado adrian welcome to the stage great thank you very much for the introduction all right let's see if this works cool it works all right thank you very much for the great intro i think today i'm really going to focus on financial sovereignty and privacy and why it matters and i think why a lot of

341. 4:00:56

     people are currently very much underestimating where we are in terms of the tech and the capabilities of it and also where we are in terms of why we really need it and why i think it's not going to be optional because if if we treat privacy as an optional feature i think blockchains as a whole won't actually work all that well in the public sphere to start off with though i think for most of us here and most of us in western europe and north america

342. 4:01:29

     or europe in general financial somewhere anthony privacy is a fairly abstract concept it is something that we either think we always have or we have institutions which are strong enough to actually protect us to some extent like european banks are not perfect but they provide a fair good amount of privacy from sort of any random person on the internet knowing how much money you have or where we think where we live in this bubble where we think well we don't really need it like i don't need it i'm

343. 4:02:02

     not i haven't done anything wrong i'm not doing anything wrong and i'm not planning to do anything wrong going forward i have to say though this is not true for most of the world's population right like most of the world's population lives in uh countries where you can't really trust institutions to protect your data where banks really aren't all that stable necessarily so financial sovereignty

344. 4:02:26

     becomes a lot more important all of a sudden and i think we should not underestimate the likelihood of this becoming true for us too right now we live in a very comfortable boat but it is it seems fairly likely at this point that uh together with the rest of the democracies in the western world they're still decaying and these structures are just not going to be around there forever to protect us um sort of in the open market yes

345. 4:03:05

     all right so why does it actually matter and by the way quick is this a timer down there is this cool okay fantastic this is not a random number flashing on the screen um so why does it matter well privacy is fundamentally how we seek to protect ourselves ourselves and society against arbitrary and unjustified uses of power right by controlling what can be known about us and done to us

346. 4:03:36

     while protecting us from those who aim to exert control of our data and ultimately all aspects of our lives it's really when you think about it how privacy allows individuals to compete with nation states or to compete against governments it's what levels the playing field it is what tilts the power balance away from everyone knowing everything about you and towards the the individual it is what allows people in sort of in falling regimes to protect

347. 4:04:11

     themselves against the overreaching power of that nation state and i'll give you here actually a quick example why financial privacy really really matters so think about messaging right i think most of us here have signal and whatsapp installed um or one or the other or at least telegram even though telegram provides terrible privacy guarantees and encryption features but this is not the point by default telegram is fully public just keep this in mind or like public to the company

348. 4:04:44

     but our intuition tells us that it's very very important to keep our the contents of these messages private right this is like signal matches these expectations it's like if i'm sending a message to my best friend or my mom the contents of that message are private but i think what a lot of us are forgetting is that the metadata is fully fully public um and this really comes into play with financial privacy because in financial privacy we don't think about it like we're sending like if i'm sending a bank transfer to someone i'm

349. 4:05:17

     not thinking about encrypting the bank transfer because that's not the mental model i follow because in financial transactions there is no message to be encrypted it's only it's pure metadata and so i think a lot of us when we send a transaction away when we swipe our visa or mastercard somewhere we don't really think because it doesn't follow our intuition uh how much data you're leaking i think it'd be very very different if

350. 4:05:40

     every time sort of you're also sending like the actual important thing when you tap your visa card is not the metadata not the fact that you've transferred some money but rather like some part of the message and when like this is the crazy thing the financial data we hold is some of the most important data to us because it were fundamentally revealed uh the books we buy the movies we watch the kind of health insurance providers you have the medical bills you're paying

351. 4:06:11

     where you live and where you shop open so opening your entire financial data to everyone in the world is terrifying because it fundamentally reveals everything about who you are as a person um maybe the other thing here on like the third point i mentioned earlier which is uh some people just don't care privacy is not an individual choice uh even if you personally don't care about your data being private you still benefit from

352. 4:06:44

     there being privacy preserving tools out there in your society because these things is what allows journalists to uncover the corruptions in your government um improve your local governance structure so even if you personally don't benefit because benefit from it because you don't care about it it's still we achieve a collective benefit here by just simply having these tools available

353. 4:07:07

     for people in your society to use i'll just i'll jump into the first example here surveillance capitalism and actually use this and this wasn't coordinated unless you watched my slides but surveillance capitalism is something we should all be very very concerned about and i'll give you the example of visa here uh but visa really is analogous for other companies it could be mastercard wechat uh we pay alipay i guess uh paypal it doesn't really matter any of these financial service providers

354. 4:07:39

     have the same problem where they are collecting a ton of data on your behavior and at some point their business model they're going to ask themselves like wouldn't it be a better business model if i see and figure out how much is bob willing to pay me to keep the fact that he has a pawn-up subscription and also donates to his local church group separate from each other right like

355. 4:08:02

     they are sitting on treasure troves of data and there's nothing that really prevents them from starting to abuse the data that they hold on you and this is sort of maybe a little bit of a construed example but practically speaking the best case with visa and these service providers is that they will sell your data to advertisers like this is the best case scenario where your financial data just becomes another point in a

356. 4:08:28

     data set for an advertiser so that when you like buy dog food they can start serving you cute puppy pictures but the worst case is somewhere north of the pawn up example it is where governments are starting to coerce these companies into creating completely transparent people because you start cross-linking the financial transaction data together with your mobile phone location data together with surveillance cameras and even though

357. 4:08:58

     all our messaging was still encrypted like we still have a completely public uh citizen effectively uh really the existing systems aren't resilient at all they have been abused because they all honestly haven't been around that long like they've been around for like 20 years really in sort of active circulation and the tools are just catching up to the fact that all this data exists but there are really real risks that people start cross-linking a lot of this data and start exploiting it

358. 4:09:35

     the second example here is nation-state weaponization and this sounds sort of very large and terrifying but it has a very practical implement implication so i was naive once and i assumed that the financial system is fairly neutral right so if you go well a germ company does business with a french company with a portuguese company they can do whatever they want it's like a number of sovereign nation states doing business with each other the only thing that really should matter here is

359. 4:10:08

     what laws individual countries implement and interesting enough when they designed the swift banking system uh in the 70s this was actually something they didn't mind which is you need a mutual financial system to facilitate trade and commerce between nation states this was the idea at least behind swift practically it ended up being captured by the u.s government via the control of the us dollar

360. 4:10:34

     this has led to some really really weird edge cases here which don't really impact us yet in this room but for example it is inadvisable to to buy tardigrades using paypal and put tardigrade into the messaging field because there is a company in malta called target ltd that's on the u.s sanctions list so these transactions will simply be blocked not because they're illegal but because it triggers the automatic detection detections here effectively and

361. 4:11:04

     via the control of the swift banking system the us government actually has a tremendous amount of control over what individual countries can do and so it allows them to in extent enforce their own domestic policy objectives upon the world right so if they can say what is an acceptable behavior and what isn't right now again this is a removed example for most of us here but imagine a world where in 10 years the u.s government swings hard to the right and all of a sudden says well

362. 4:11:34

     contraceptives aren't really a reasonable thing people should be allowed to do there's nothing that currently safeguards against a world where the u.s government just says well people abuse condoms aren't allowed to touch the banking system and they have enough leverage over the existing system to effectively drive these places out of business and i think this is again like at the moment most of us are fairly well aligned with u.s policies most likely at least at a high level but we have no guarantee what the u.s

363. 4:12:06

     government is doing in 10 years from now or whether it's the u.s government doing it at all and i think as soon as we start living in a world where it's the chinese government saying what we should and shouldn't be doing a lot of us would feel a lot more uncomfortable very very quickly um oh wow okay i'm somewhat running out of time i'm going to speed up a little bit here oh i'm good okay never mind no speeding

364. 4:12:32

     up um so d5 everyone here should be aware what dfi is right and i mean this like fairly broadly as in a decentralized financial ecosystem uh on a public blockchain right now predominantly on ethereum i don't mean this in the narrow sense of building yield farming aggregators on top of other yield farming aggregators for in some weird ponzi scheme like setup um this does that doesn't seem to be too

365. 4:12:56

     useful but let me start by saying that i love default to some extent i love the idea that it provides unfettered banking access to a majority of the world it's an incredibly resilient system that has provided millions of people the ability to effectively hold a savings account by simply remembering 12 words right like there's tremendous power in the technology we've built here and the ecosystem has grown up around it

366. 4:13:28

     but at the same time what we're currently building is pretty much every autocrat's wet dream because currently the financial system isn't perfect but at least it's private to a majority of the world they're like seven nation states maybe that can do global mass surveillance whereas in d5 pretty much any random dude with an internet connection and a computer can do global mass financial surveillance and just as a little bit of the thought experiment here think about what would

367. 4:13:59

     happen if we moved the entire financial system tomorrow to ethereum or to near for that matter at the moment it'd be a terrifying terrifying world because we would have lose all safeguards all data would be public and anyone can run global mass surveillance programs and i think the bigger problem that people also don't realize is this data never goes away like never it's not like after 10 years someone starts threading

368. 4:14:29

     some files it's as long as someone has a copy of this data somewhere on the internet this data lives on and i think especially a lot of the americans among you uh will that have played with defy may come to this realization that saying five six years down the line once the is has started figuring out how to start taxing this stuff um oh no all right and and really like think about this like this data never goes away whatever you do currently on a public blockchain there is going to be some record that

369. 4:15:00

     will remain for perpetuity like when you're 70 this can still come to haunt you and oh anyone that says well i'm using pseudonyms and like all these address addresses don't have my name attached to it uh talk to the folks on tree analysis and you will be terrified by what kind of analysis they can be running to figure out who owns which assets and under which addresses and maybe the other thing here is so now we have this financial system this decentralized financial system but it's incredibly incredibly hard to

370. 4:15:32

     build on privacy effectively afterwards like once the data's out there it's out there and once you have these systems it's like you're not going to make these systems private by like doing one extra transaction in the beginning at the end and all of a sudden all this like public crap in the middle is like totally private as well this is not how this works the scary reality is that we are heading

371. 4:15:58

     into a world where a few centralized entities in the existing system in the legacy financial system hold a lot of power and what we're currently building in terms of like public blockchains is not really all that much better because it is yes more inclusive but at the same time it is also just incredibly easy to build public transparent systems so real effort is required to move away from this model and move towards a model that is more privacy preserving where people have

372. 4:16:29

     more control over what kind of financial metadata is being leaked out there in perpetuity and maybe here i'll just very quickly go into that not all is bad because we are hitting a really interesting point like the first privacy preserving their knowledge proofs came about like let's say four years ago or so and at the time they sucked like they it was like early early research that went into production way too early but

373. 4:17:01

     started in 2021 and 2022 we're really hitting uh some major breakthroughs that make this technology really really usable at an end user level it is now possible to generate um zero knowledge proofs for private payments for example on your mobile phone like two years ago this was compute computation completely infeasible but all of a sudden like my iphone can send a fully private payment

374. 4:17:25

     um on some blockchain the blockchain actually here is irrelevant but the technology the cryptography behind this that allows us to fight back is just getting really really good at the moment and the other aspect is things are becoming interoperable like things start to talk to each other beforehand we always lived in this world where well you had to live with a system uh that had sort of the most network effect you had to live with a system

375. 4:17:51

     like we had to effectively live with the evm and hope for the best but we're finally moving into a world where a lot of these assets can flow free of state machines like i mean we have aurora here the bridge right like being able to move acids from ethereum into near and usmania all of a sudden is fantastic because now we can start building privacy solutions on near but this also works the other way like assets from near can move into pocket

376. 4:18:13

     out and can be used privately over there so we have a lot more flexibility in how we engineer our systems that we didn't have two years ago and maybe just to give you one of the coolest examples in my my opinion in terms of like recent uh privacy technologies is the multi-asset chill pool and i'm giving this example because it's something that we've worked on when you think about zcash sapling right like you get very very good privacy for single assets but an external observer can tell which assets you're interacting

377. 4:18:44

     with because you instantiate sapling over some acid identifier effectively where you know well this is a private pool for uh eth this is private pool for uh zac uh this is a private pool for like the one unit nft and an external observer can see which privacy pool you're interacting with with the multi-asset chill pool this isn't the case anymore all assets live in the same pool and to an external observer it's indistinguishable whether

378. 4:19:10

     like you're moving a housing nft to a new address that's worth a hundred million dollars or you're sending someone like five bucks and die for the coffee you just bought so the tech is getting really cool um ah not the updated slides there we go i'll just leave you this at no point in the history of mankind have centralized entities whether it be that companies or governments had more control of our financial lives than now this is not going to get better unless

379. 4:19:40

     we do something about this and like a king 500 years ago could have never imagined the amount of data that he has available to that is available to governments nowadays to control the population it was simply technologically not feasible we are just hitting the point where all of this is like digital and you can build humongous data sets over like seven billion people and just do metadata surveillance

380. 4:20:15

     but practically speaking we've also never been in a better position to solve this like we finally getting to a point where we have the technology to actually fight back i mean like public blockchains are the first step in moving assets outside of centralized control the cryptography is catching up and we're starting like i've never been more optimistic about the future let's say this way i think we are at a really cool point in history for

381. 4:20:38

     the first time have a lot of the tools that are necessary to start building true decentralized and private systems that can bring a lot more individual financial sovereignty and privacy to people thank you very much

382. 4:22:10

     so the next talk that is going to start in about two minutes is by none other than near and now auroras dr alex shevchenko he will be talking on token consistency and solving the interconnected blockchains problem now aurora has come a very long way as a as a product as a an opportunity it started about a year ago with the rainbow bridge and they have you know uh significantly grown raised significant amounts of funds and there are now

383. 4:22:50

     significant opportunities in the aurora ecosystem for founders and developers looking to launch dapps and other projects so alex from what i've told from what i've seen on crypto twitter has a fair amount of uh alpha updates information about where roar is at what's coming uh everybody upstairs you're probably not going to want to miss this one without further ado dr alex shivchenko co-founder of aurora thanks

384. 4:23:21

     hello everybody welcome here at nerdcon super great to see all of you here so okay just to give you an outline we have here two main i in my deck i have two main parts first one is about high technology high science the way how you need to build stuff um the second one is about announcements and i believe many of you are here to hear about the announcements or in case you are not you better to be here to hear the announcements however i'm going to start with the first part because from my point of view

385. 4:24:04

     it is technology that leads you to the big announcements right that's the way how near is building and if you have been listening to max that's the way how you are going to achieve the scalability that's the way how you're going to achieve mass adoption in developer world so talking consistency right let's start with some questions to all of you can you please raise your hand in case

386. 4:24:35

     you have been using rainbow bridge at least once time one time okay quite a lot of you what do you think about what do you think about the experience of rainbow bridge you can you can clap you can yeah so that's the credit of all of the people who have been contributing to the rainbow bridge and as you know rainbow bridge development started in near inc max was one of the leaders of the bridge development we have here marcelo

387. 4:25:11

     somewhere there uh he's here yeah so give it up for marcel marcelo is the guy who actually launched rainbow bridge um uh back in in march uh 20 21st right so it's just like nine months or like a little bit more than six months ago um and yeah but but this this this great piece of technology have been in the development for uh for a couple of years even before that right so the development started in 2019

388. 4:25:45

     by another great guy anton bukov he should be also somewhere here who is a co-founder of one inch so let's give it up to anton so the bridge is great the bridge is great and again several announcements regarding the bridge also in the end of the talk but there are lots of different bridges right now there are lots of networks right now people are bridging their tokens and with the ability to bridge your tokens in between different

389. 4:26:22

     networks there is a layer of the problems that is revealed right now that we need to account for and we need to solve somehow and i'm today going to talk about one of these problems the token consistency problem uh and i'm going to present you the solution that is going to be implemented by aurora team for the whole new ecosystem to make it a better place cool let's go so just to remind everybody just to remind everybody because i know that there are many people have been using

390. 4:27:03

     already rainbow bridge and already know what the bridge is but just to remind everybody a bridge is a thing that gives you an ability to interconnect blockchains right it's not only about moving the tokens from one blockchain to another it is about being able to call other blockchains get the data from the other blockchains maybe move something move some kind of messages in between the blockchains

391. 4:27:32

     bridges in general are more wide thin than than you usually experience in the normal world right and the reason why we need bridges is just because a blockchain is a sandbox runtime right because of all of these things that are connected with the blockchains the need to have a consistent environment uh hundreds of validators all over the world they need to execute the transactions in the same manner they need to get the same results and because of this this validator

392. 4:28:05

     simply cannot go to the api of amazon and check something there right it's just because for them the results may be different and then in case tomorrow somebody will connect to the network they will not get the same result from the amazon api right that's why blockchain is a thin in itself that's why you need to have bridges there are lots of bridges at the moment many since again we have many networks there are lots of bridges there however

393. 4:28:36

     there is already lots of terminology mess around the bridges right and i'm not the guy who is going to put right now the standards how to name things but this is how i'm going to use the terms within my presentation today okay so i'm going to name i'm going to use the word bridge for the solutions that are locking tokens on one side and issuing digital certificates of the tokens on the other side right

394. 4:29:11

     they're issuing and what is called the iou token right on the other side and so so if we have a source chain right for example ethereum then the liquidity the tokens are locked there it is not moving anywhere and we have a rainbow bridge in between ethereum and near and then on near you have the iou tokens which mean only the fact that you can bring them back to the rainbow bridge smart

395. 4:29:44

     contracts and exchange it to the liquidity that is locked on the source chain this is what i'm going to name a bridge okay there are other solutions and i'm going to call them exchanges and many people are calling these solutions also bridges right now but they're literally doing the other thing they have they are working with already existing tokens you have used the t on ethereum you have used the t on salona that was officially launched by gemini right

396. 4:30:17

     and what these solutions are doing they're holding the liquidity on both chains and they're just taking a little bit of use with the amount of fusibility that you would like to move they're taking it from you and they're releasing the liquidity releasing the tokens on the other side right this is another type of solution these solutions are not the solutions are able to work only within the limit of the liquidity that they have right they're able to work only with the

397. 4:30:47

     things that they have right they cannot mint new digital certificates this is the other solution i'm going to call them exchanges both of them are right now existent many of them are mixing the stuff everything here mainly is called bridges however the difference is drastic the difference is drastic and because of this i i'm saying that we are going to to have this difference in this talk

398. 4:31:19

     so this slide is about how rainbow bridge is working like i encourage you if you would like to if you would like to see the long talk about the rainbow bridge go and find my talk on scc um however just to just to make it super super simple and super super fast because of the efficient near-run time developed by near-core team we were able to create a light client of near on ethereum blockchain as a smart

399. 4:31:50

     contract and the like client of ethereum blockchain as a smart contract on the near blockchain literally what does it mean that in case we're keeping synchronization in between ethereum like client on on near and the whole ethereum network and e and vice versa this means that we have an ethereum node running inside of the near blockchain and a near node running inside of ethereum blockchain these nodes do not have all of the data

400. 4:32:22

     but they're able to prove things because of the like client technology and exactly because of the fact that things can be proved we are able to check what is happening on the other blockchain so what is the problem what is the problem with the bridges imagine that you have multiple networks ethereum near bc polygon and you have dye token as an example and you're bridging this dye talking to

401. 4:32:57

     other networks and i'm calling it and i be di and pedi right this is the polygon bc near version of the dye so you have them but then what you can do potentially if there are all the bridges in between all of these networks you can bridge so create an iou token right so i'm when i'm saying bridge create an iou token of b die on near so you'll get you get nb dye npdi but after this you can bridge p dai to bc you're going to get bp die

402. 4:33:36

     pb die and then you are going to bridge this to near you are going to get npv die and stuff like that okay are these tokens different yes they created by different bridges they are relying on different um on different piece pieces of technology they have different risks for for holding these tokens and these are literally different smart contracts they cannot be managed through a single smart contract right they are different is this convenient

403. 4:34:14

     no in case you will take a look in your wallet and see 100 euro banknote there do you actually know in which countries this banknote was no you are not taking care of it right and here with nbp die you literally know where this this dye was traveling through right it is something that is not appealing to you this is something that you this is an additional cognitive law to you right

404. 4:34:46

     this is something that should not be implemented so this is the token consistency problem with the bridges that are creating iou tokens these breaches are spawning new and new tokens and somebody need to take care of this right somebody need to make sure that all of these tokens are some kind of exchangeable you need to do something with it literally okay what are the possible solutions of this problem

405. 4:35:18

     first of all and what is happening right now with the whole blockchain ecosystem nobody is given a hack on these tokens so in the existing bridges you can find you know tokens with 10 prefixes that that have been been bridged so literally people are just acknowledging that this is the problem of the blockchain user they need to pay their attention what exact token that they haven't and where they are bridging it and then they need to some kind of interchange it somehow or maybe bridge

406. 4:35:56

     it backwards and then forward and stuff like that one type of the solution not really convenient to the users another option how to solve this is to introduce curve-like stable swaps right we have literally n b die and bp die all of this stuff right they're similar tokens they're something like stable coins right in ethereum ecosystem so you can just implement the curve solution put all of these tokens there as liquidity and then users would be able

407. 4:36:27

     to interchange them again cognitive load for the users they need to think about the token but there is a way how they can interchange it nice approach it is going to work in the short term but however at the moment when we will have four networks interconnected the amount of tokens that can be spawned by this type of the bridges but by the bridges is infinite it is literally infinite which means that it will be just not enough liquidity in the liquidity pools when you would like

408. 4:37:04

     to interchange the tokens into one one into another and that's the problem no liquidity high slippage bad prices pissed off users i do not want to have it and all of the d5 doesn't want to have it right additional option to to do it is to introduce obstacles right into the deployment of the bridges so what many protocols are doing right now not near uh they're just saying that okay we have our own bridge it was developed by our team it is

409. 4:37:43

     robust and you need to bridge the tokens over our bridge and that's it and in case there is another bridge solution that has come into the network and asking for a grant then they're just not given the foundations are not given grants to the solutions they're saying we don't need to have a bridge we already have one that's it this is the centralization this can be an option this can be an option but i do not want to live in the future like that i'm not i'm not working in the blockchain because of the centralization of the

410. 4:38:16

     stuff right and last but not least again this would be probably the best approach but unfortunately um i do not think that we would be able to uh to pull it up so so this is the introduction of a new set token standards that are going to track the origins of of the token they are which are going to to understand how the trucking token was bridged and so on right so this is like an extended erc20

411. 4:38:48

     where we also put in the information about what was the origin blockchain and then through these you may potentially understand how the token was breached and what was the the direction of the bridging so you can you can for example in some cases loop back all through all of the bridges the token in case you have some kind of loops in into the bridging of the token right a nice thing would be good to to have it

412. 4:39:14

     there but uh again erc20 is there there are lots of lots of you know initiatives how to improve your situation standards many people are pissed off of their proofs in the earseed one is standards but it is not moving anywhere just because everybody is already using it everybody is using it all of the major tokens are your c20 tokens they are not upgradable you cannot change it you cannot track the

413. 4:39:46

     the place where the tokens are originated so today i'm going to present you my proposal this is a standard that i'm proposing for all of the people who are building bridging solutions and people who are building exchanges i'm proposing to follow these standards to make our users happier to make our users not thinking about the actual token not thinking about the liquidity pools not thinking about slippages and additional swaps this is a thing that i cannot impose

414. 4:40:27

     because we are living in a decentralized world and i do not want to impose but i encourage everybody to to follow this pretty simple approach to make life easier we're calling it inter blockchain transfer standards it is applied only for the token transfers and within this standard uh again i mean like already said that that we have the difference in between exchanges and the bridges and i would like to keep it in the standard now everything that is making iou things

415. 4:41:05

     are you tokens these are the bridges right everything else is just the exchanges solution so let's start with the bridges we are going to use where i'm proposing to use these bridges as a settlement layer for all of the transactions that are happening in between the blockchains this is the only way how you can move liquidity in between the blockchains and create new tokens on the other blockchains

416. 4:41:40

     it's better for them to be implemented as trustless as possible so rainbow bridge is the trustless solution and from that point of view it is good because there is no party no single thing no single entity that you need to rely on within these bridges if the bridge is trustless then well you can trust it it is a little bit strange thing but this is it right there is no single you know person or organization that can extinct

417. 4:42:09

     and then the bridge actually breaks right so the bridges must be trustless let's implement trustless bridges we can do we have the tech for it you just go to rainbow bridge just copy paste everything implement a little bit of different consensus algorithm as a smart contract and you can do it right let's build trustless bridges let's make them more even more let's make them free to use rainbow bridge right now takes zero fees the only fees

418. 4:42:41

     that users are paying they are the gas fees you need to pay for the transaction execution on ethereum we cannot diminish it we cannot diminish the fact that the user need to pay for the transaction field near blockchain but let's keep it like that let's not introduce any additional fees let's let's make bridges free for everybody and moreover let's change let's introduce a small piece of the

419. 4:43:14

     censorship here let's put in the front end of the bridges i'm not talking about smart contracts let's put on the front end of the bridges the ability to breach only tokens that have been originating on these blockchains that are connected by the bridge let's say that pancake swap would not be bridged from ethereum to near because pancake swap is the bsc token just let's say this on the on the front

420. 4:43:47

     end and then 99 of the users of the of this bridge they are not going to do this they are not going to bridge pancake swap talking over the rainbow bridge small thing that is not hurting the decentralization of the bridge but it's just going to put a little bit of an obstacle for the ordinary user to bridge the wrong token and since the bridges are the settlement layer they can be slow and this is what we can see here in the current market with the with a

421. 4:44:29

     good bridges like rainbow bridge uh which takes about eight hours at max with the transfer and what we can see in the in the roll-up bridges that are taking one week for the settlement right it's okay let them be slow let's let the the transfer fees be also high that's again no problem that's okay because the bridge is only the settlement layer right we are not thinking of it for the micro transactions that are happening or for the user transactions right and let's give an ability for the

422. 4:45:09

     bridges to have additional business models on top of them right that are not connected to to these basic transfers of the tokens and well what kind of business model the bridge may have right that's the question like it just transfers tokens okay it needs to take the fee but no no you can implement these things the basic transfers may be slow but for example fast transfers they can be first of all they can be

423. 4:45:38

     implemented also in a permissionless way but the fast transfers can take fee right and that's okay that's okay this this can be a business model or for example exchanges that we are going to talk about on the next slide they in order in case they are using the bridge they need to pay some kind of subscription fee or something like that or they're just going to donate to these bridges for their operation right there are multiple options how you can implement this but let's just keep

424. 4:46:10

     again for one very simple specific reason let's just keep bridges free for everybody and and and just find a way how to fund how to fund these bridges what aurora is doing right now and this is another option for the business model for the bridge aurora is running its own validator on the near blockchain because we any any way need to have the full node of near right so we are running a

425. 4:46:41

     validator too and through the near users who are staking to our validator there is an additional revenue that is coming into into aurora so we are spending this money to keep the bridge running that's it this is literally a cr you know another business model that is attached here so the bridge maintainers can be really really creative right and and you just just just make sure that it

426. 4:47:10

     is free for everybody why it is important because we have exchanges we would like to leave the empty space in the market for other product projects that are going to implement fast transfers bridge settlement layer something like a swift in between the banks and on top of this you have something like a revolut a thing that gives you fast transfers in between users or a paypal right obviously the bank transfer is not

427. 4:47:49

     happening when you're doing a paypal transaction that is completed within seconds right something is happening there so this is literally the exchange this is literally the exchange in between users these are the solutions that are given uh the good interface and good experience to the users they obviously are in most of the cases they are centralized right you need to trust you're given your tokens on one side you're receiving the tokens on the other side

428. 4:48:21

     and this is okay for the retail users especially when you're transferring not big amounts of money right just like uh i don't know 100 bucks worth of tokens you can trust it a little bit and that's it if you're transferring one million well go and use bridge because it is trustless but it is not convenient so use exchange when you are a retail user when you're transferring small amounts

429. 4:48:46

     super good it might be centralized or as i said these solutions might be decentralized as an extension of the bridges right and moreover you can add many additional logic on top of the exchanges you can introduce not only this the the transfers of usdt into usdt but you can for example sell brev token into e skyward skyward and ethereum right so this can be something like like

430. 4:49:19

     binance can implement this right binance can just take and you're just swapping and like literally this is already there in case you have been using binance with for example um erc20s that are released on the uh on the other networks right not on the ethereum main net this is literally what they're doing let's keep it with them right that's okay it works super cool and however what is important for the exchanges is actually to work with their own liquidity and make sure that they have

431. 4:49:58

     enough liquidity on both sides that they're able to release this liquidity right since the liquidity flow is not going to be unilateral from time to time they would need to do the settlement but this is going to be an aggregated transaction aggregated from the thousands of user transactions small user transactions and they would be able to do it over the slow bridges that are taking lots of gas fees but that will be acceptable

432. 4:50:35

     let's take a look at this at the at the simple use case so on near there are lots of uh lots of different tokens already spawning one of them is ref token right so over the rainbow bridge this ref token can be bridged to the ethereum not right now because rainbow bridge doesn't have this functionality but theoretically it can happen same thing can happen with bsc with a dragon bridge right so nobody probably heard of this but some guy from the community

433. 4:51:07

     like in couple of weeks after the launch of the rainbow bridge was was proposing to launch a dragon bridge on the governance forum so i'm just using this name and just to tell you uh we are at the moment at the review and testing phase of the bridge to the bsc so this this dragon bridge can happen pretty pretty soon okay so you have e-ref and b-ref and for the bridge for the bsc bridge to

434. 4:51:40

     ethereum obviously i'm not in control of this right what what we need to according to this model according to the standard what we need to say that let's not put in the front end of the of this bridge and ability to transfer b ref to ethereum and ability to transfer erev to ethereum right let's not use it as an iou bridge like let's not not create another iou tokens but the binance itself can do the transfers of erev into can do

435. 4:52:15

     the swaps of the erev into brev or for example another solution all bridge right um you maybe you're already the users of this solution too they they can implement the same thing right they are actually right now they're in the integration phase with aurora and they will be able to to implement this stuff another big problem here is actually wrapped assets and this is another topic and again i would like to propose an

436. 4:52:48

     extension of all of this solution but it goes in hand with with ev with everything that i have been talking about uh just a second ago let's again not not introduce any terminology messes mess at the moment i'm going to name wrapped asset as a fungible token compliant asset fungible token standard compliant asset that can be exchanged one-to-one with the base token of the network right

437. 4:53:20

     so on ethereum it is wrapped ethereum right on near it is wrapped near and so on yeah so in case you will enable the bridging of wrapped ethereum and ethereum on near you're going to have pissed off users again because on near you have iou token for ethereum which is nf and then you have nwf and people will get used to the fact that they can rap and unwrap the tokens but now these are different tokens and there is no this wrapping and wrapping

438. 4:53:59

     smart contract in between them and when the user would like to say that okay i want to get a unwrapped f on near my answer to this user will be well you need to bridge it back then unwrap and then bridge it in it's not very it's not very convenient right obviously you can solve it you can solve it with the curveballs right and similar things but again it's not very convenient thing let's just build the bridges the way

439. 4:54:30

     that when user is trying to move the wrapped asset to another chain the unwrapping is is done automatically and that's it do not spawn wrapped eath on any other chain except of ethereum just do not bridge it that's it unwrap it move it and that's it simple but yet efficient solution for this problem however another big topic is custom token deployments right i was saying about are you tokens right which is a digital certificate it's just it's just this

440. 4:55:12

     just the vanilla implementation of the erc20 but what about the tokens like tether right it's not the vanilla erc20 token this token is actually having quite a lot inside of it if you'll open the ether scan you will see in case you don't know it but gemini is able to blacklist you and you would not be able to transact your usdt and there is a big reason for this they are trying to be compliant with the us regulations and all of this stuff

441. 4:55:45

     but there is another also there were another options right for for the custom erc20s right this this year's situanis are uh somehow the they're working with other smart contracts and one of the great examples here is ample force token that is doing rebalancing and then the amount of tokens is changing on your account right how to allow this behavior with these bridges that are creating just vanilla ear c20 tokens or vanilla fungible tokens on the other blockchain we need

442. 4:56:17

     to have a solution for this well my proposal is the following in order to track all of this transfers like well first of all in case usdt would like to have a blacklisting functionality on near they need to deploy their own contract on near right and we need to bridge their the tokens into their smart contracts we need to somehow to implement this however besides this this custom usdt smart contract they need also to do some accounting of the transfers

443. 4:56:56

     because from their point of view in case they're not tracking what liquidity is moving from one chain to another and just think of this usdt there are 60 billion of usdt on ethereum there is some kind of transfer happening and then to the rainbow bridge smart contract okay no problem but from their point of view this is yet another holder of usdt and then something happens and then on the near side the new usdt is spawn right so in case this is a one billion

444. 4:57:31

     transfer then it's just one billion of new liquidity and it is not matching the amount of dollars that they have in the bank so how to do the accounting for all of this stuff uh it's not that simple right so what i'm proposing is that for any custom token that needs to be deployed on the other network this token need to work with the bridge in a very specific way first thing like this the token creator need to deploy two smart contracts one is for accounting of the transfers

445. 4:58:05

     in this case this is the usdt account in token smart contract on ethereum and another one is the actual custom token deployment on the source chain and how it is going to work it's going to work the following way the user is going to approve the transfer not to the rainbow bridge smart contract is going to approve the transfer to the accounting smart contract this transfer is done as a step number one after the accounting and all of the procedures

446. 4:58:38

     are done then the transfer is going to the rainbow bridge smart contract as usual then the transfer is going over the rainbow bridge step 3 rainbow bridge spawns this iou token which is instantly redirected to be swapped into the custom usdt token but important thing again what is happening here a little bit small piece of centralization is that the front end of the bridge is actually starting to point

447. 4:59:11

     to this custom path for this token to be bridged so at the moment when usdt is going to come to near and in case someone knows people from gemiini here just redirect them to me i'm going to tell to them that hey just deploy a couple of contracts you can have all of the functionality and you you would be able to do absolutely the same thing that you are able to do right now on the ethereum blockchain

448. 4:59:41

     and we are going to change the way how our front tent is working with this smart contract so you're going to be in control the thing that is actually also going to help uh gemiini right with this specific example is that the majority of the people the the vast majority of the people are going to have this custom usdt uh tokens not the iou tokens and then the gemiini would be able to block the users that are using usdt on near too right blacklist i mean blacklist

449. 5:00:22

     so that's it on the technical side here and obviously the first i'm where we're moving to the funny part so the first announcement is that everything that i have been talking about right now this is something that we are going to implement for for the rainbow bridge which is not yet done right the thing that is that is most important for everyone here all of the developers that are

450. 5:00:53

     having their own projects is that they would need to to go through in case they would like to have their custom tokens on near and custom tokens on aurora they would need to go through the application process for the custom token deployments again we're going to make it as as trustless and as permissionless as possible through the github and pull requests there it's going to be super simple the way how you're going to prove that you're an owner of the token is just by providing the signature of the

451. 5:01:25

     same key that was deploying the token um so that's it like super simple process for this the important thing for everyone who is sitting here who is the user of the rainbow bridge is that rainbow bridge is going to drop the support of wrapped heath transfers from ethereum to near okay that's good so pretty soon we are going to delete wrapped ethe option from the rainbow bridge

452. 5:01:57

     in the direction from ethereum to near and the only token that can be bridging only ethereum token that can be bridged to near it would be ether for the existing wrapped ether holders on on near we will be working with ref finance in order to change it into ether we are going to remove incentives on the wrapped earth pools and we are going to get put their incentives for the athbolt so users will be will be required to move their wrapped ether liquidity from near and

453. 5:02:31

     and move it back into into f there's also another type of solution where we would be able to help swap it but it is a little bit more complicated so let's see how it's going to go okay let's go so another thing that maybe not all of you have been following uh but just yesterday late at night trisolore's project announced that they're going to launch their tree solaris token so let's do it up to three solaris

454. 5:03:17

     so you can read a little bit about tree solaris in this type of communication in in their in their medium article uh there are lots of stuff there they were saying that they would like to do the fair distribution and trisolaris as you know is this is the first amm solution that is launched on on aurora so in case you would like to get these tokens obviously 70 is going to the community and incentives

455. 5:03:40

     so it's worth staking or like was provided liquidity into three solaris to get there talking okay next thing the thing that was i've been uh also pretty people have been very passionate about is that aurora now has the first launch pad on it and the company so if you're looking forward to launching your own protocol on aurora you now can do the ideal right since yesterday we have a smart pad it is working it is live on aurora it is tested with some test ideas already so

456. 5:04:25

     if you would like to do the sale of your token you have a platform right now to do it moreover there are others that are actually in the implementation right now so if smartpad is not your choice you can you can choose some somebody else but not right now a little bit later already right here right now another small brick of the ecosystem or ecosystem is is here the thing that was long awaited

457. 5:04:55

     by at least satori team nft connector is live on the testnet you can you can find it on the address on the testnet nft.gurley.testnet and we're inviting all of the developers that are interested in the nft transfers from ethereum to near go and test it and in case the testing is successful we are going to deploy it to the mainnet and we are rolling out the second version of the rainbow bridge ui it is accessible right now on the rainbow bridge dot app

458. 5:05:43

     for everybody it has ethereum near and aurora in one interface as i said we are testing the integration with bsc we are going to add bc also to this ui and any additional trustless bridges that are built on top of rainbow bridge technology that are going to be rolled out by anyone here or outside of this conference we are go we are going to give the support to add to this front end check it out it has lots of new features you have

459. 5:06:13

     filters and transfers this is something that was asked by our users a lot especially the users that have been doing lots of the transfers it has the context ethic use for people who were not seen because of some reason that the cost of the transfer from near to ethereum is pretty high so this is going to to be just in front of your eyes on on the on the rainbow bridge 2.0 interface it has the links to the explorer transactions

460. 5:06:46

     something something new right so you can you can easily check and since we have aurora explorer too so now these links are pointing to all of the three networks so all cool it has also token addresses because for many of you who are using started to use aurora it was a little bit of a mess how to find the talk and the actual rap near talking on aurora so now you have the the token

461. 5:07:11

     address there you can add it to metamask and you will see it and it has also animations so it looks also cool so so yeah give it up this is this is the courtesy of the product team at rainbow at aurora they have been working hard to pull it off just before this conference some of you have been seeing that there is a notification in the in the ethereum bridge to near already that you

462. 5:07:43

     can try to use it super cool encourage everyone to use it works really great and since i was not i was not sure whether the next announcement will be happening or not i was put in here just the final slide and however it happened it happened right so so this is not the end of the presentation this is the biggest announcement of aurora up to date and we have in this question around 100 times a day

463. 5:08:29

     about the airdrops about the token sale of aurora and finally yesterday evening aurora dao was approving this we are going to have aurora ideal it is going to happen in three stages i'm going to be very very short here three stages you will see lots of communication in the media about this