BBW22 - Day 3 - Developer Excellence & Hack Boston Launch

[Music] welcome everyone thank you so much for being here and uh and listening in my name is Stephania um I work for reach reach is a developer platform uh made to make blockchain more accessible so uh we're gonna kick off just kind of having everyone introduce themselves and tell me a little bit about what you do in your background so I'll start with you JJ okay um I am the head of Applied research at Al Gran and what that really means is that I work on improving our smart contract um platform by taking ideas that come out of our research teams and moving them into our engineering teams and um uh getting things going that way my background is that I used to be a professor at Brown I taught things like networking and um operating systems oriented classes I started a company called fooder which oddly enough uh started accepting Bitcoin in 2013 so that was my first bit of blockchain [Music] um connection but then I ignored it for a long time eventually sold that company soon after that um I joined up with Al Gran because it sounded like really interesting technology and I could start uh doing some things well I thought it'd be fun all right I'm Ann Kenyon I work at algorand with JJ um yeah I I work as a product manager so I and my focus is really on the the developer experience so I JJ brings the idea from the research side I bring the ideas from the our developer users side um in my background I studied uh computer science more on the theory side and then I worked as an engineer for a little while at a place called virgin pulse so health and wellness Tech and that's where I grew into a product manager role and then sort of just happened into algorand about a year ago uh howdy everyone I'm Jay McCarthy I'm the founder and uh the co-founder and CTO of reach as Stephania mentioned we're a developer platform uh my background is that I did a PhD at Brown in fact JJ was on my Master's committee um and uh I finished that a long time ago so for the last 16 ish years uh I've been a professor computer science I was at Brigham Young University and then at nearest Massachusetts Lowell uh I threw away a tenure uh about 23 days ago and now I'm fully invested in the blockchain world yeah excellent uh hi everybody my name is Nick Stanford I am the developer experience lead at reach I am a software engineer and I study at Arizona State University um and at reach I'm responsible for everything relating to the developer experience how do our users come to reach how do they learn and then coordinating and actually running the programs and teaching the programs to help users go from from web 2 programming to web 3 programming in as little as 12 weeks and that's my primary focus it's what I do every single day for reach and I absolutely love my job I can attest it's very good at his and a very very all of you intelligent folk um I'm really excited for this conversation because I think we talk about sustainability a lot especially when we think about Al Grant being the greenest blockchain but there's other aspects of sustainability as well especially when you think about blockchain development and the future growth of it so um I'm going to start with Anne if you could emphasize maybe what sustainability means to you in the developer side or even in the blockchain ecosystem yeah um well I was thinking about what a sustainability mean I almost looked it up but I didn't I think it what it means is you know that you're consuming less value than you're producing and hopefully what you're consuming is not a like finite resource um so in blockchain how do we get there with development I mean we need to make development easier uh and we need to prove out our value if we can do both those things will become a more sustainable sort of uh system um and the other big aspect of sustainability I think is adaptability because you know you might have a nice formula that works right now but things are always changing and uh we're in a great position right now in the blockchain world where we have so many projects and that means you know we're very adaptive because you can throw projects away create new ones like the churn happens and that's that's how Evolution works best right if we're able to throw things away move people around and grow so okay awesome and um when you say like throw things around like you mean like create an MVP see what works see what does it and then through that comes Evolution yeah I and I mean even more at the right like we we know we're in a very competitive space and sometimes that's stressful but I think it's a good thing and you know when one project dies like the people who were working on it they go to join on other projects or create new projects that are better like we have to be ready to right we're we're figuring this space out so we have to not be too attached to our ideas uh unless they're really good and how does that currently apply to what you're building on maybe the research side of the development of our grand as it's continuing to evolve and grow well I think um one example of that is that uh we used to have we have a smart contract language uh that is currently um good enough that reach uses it as one side of the two main blockchains that they support evm style stuff and AVM style stuff uh when I joined it wasn't good enough for that or it was barely good enough for that and there were some serious problems and so for a while we thought we might have to throw it away and have something a totally new layer 2 system that was completely separate from uh almost completely separate from from something that happened at layer one but instead we sort of saw what worked uh we picked the best ideas that we had from Layer Two and we sort of slowly been moving them in right into the layer one system making it stronger and good enough to do the sorts of things that you know any high-level language like reach needs in order to compile to so in that case we didn't quite have to throw something away but we were we were ready to build on top of it and only use it as a substrate arguably throwing it away if we needed to in order to support what our users needed as it turns out fortunately I think our users are going to be just fine with taking the ideas that we were that we were considering so we've evolved the ideas instead of evolving away from the the the project but uh but the willingness was there to try something new if we needed to and how has that impacted the development of creating reach and then making it can pull with the other virtual machines yeah sure um I want to kind of jump on something that Ann said where she said that you know what it means to be sustainable is to consume fewer resources than you produce and I think of that as like there's the cost and the benefit right where if it currently cost a hundred dollars to make a hundred and one dollars then you're only getting a one percent return which is really really low and so you can um you can improve that situation by making it cost drastically less and you can also improve it by making it be more useful and so these are kind of the two big problems that we have and when you look at um various networks so compare ethereum and Al Grant if we look at something like launching an nft launching an nft on ethereum costs on the order of um I don't know I think right now about sixty dollars um and launching an uh a similar nft series let's suppose that you're gonna have like 10 000 of them uh that costs uh on the order of like five or six dollars on algorand and you're gonna be able to do it much quicker um and if you were able to make it so that you weren't launching uh a whole bunch of individual assets but you could instead do it as a single smart contract then maybe it would actually cost maybe like five cents um and so from that perspective what algorand does simply because of its lower cost of operation means that it drastically lowers the cost of the actual deployment of something and so when you think about one of these blockchain products you want to think about where do those costs come in there's like the development time costs the deployment time costs and then there's the ultimate utility that comes in and the reason that I think that algorith has been so exciting is that they have some of the cheapest deployment costs in particular just right now in fact there's an upgrade going on of algorithm where this is going to drastically increase the transactions per second which in some sense is a way of lowering the cost because if there were congestion on the network then that higher TPS would mean that the congestion pricing wouldn't go in and so what we're kind of focused on on reach is looking at those other two those other two questions about lowering the developer cost and increasing the utility now I have no idea how I can uniformly increase the utility of all blockchain programs um but I do know how I can decrease the development cost but I mean so you can have fewer skills and get more work done and the only way that we can do that is if we can provide a development platform that like a normal person can use and they can still produce something amazing and we can only do that if we have a powerful virtual machine that we can compile to on the other side about increasing the value of blockchain programs as I said I have no idea how to do this but what I do believe is that the good ideas for how to do that will come from the next 50 000 people who are building on blockchain and so I'm focused on trying to get those next 50 000 developers and that's of course what Nick's really focused on yeah do you want to add on to that Nick yeah so I love that uh he sort of transitioned that he says that's actually what Nick's focus on because that's exactly what we're focused on is lowering the barrier for entry I believe Anne said something earlier about making blockchain development easier and that's a great way to say it but I really shy away from the word easy because if programming itself is not easy add on top of that the special considerations the goal that go along with web 3. the decentralized aspect the fact that you can't maintain your code you need to be very certain that your code is good as soon as you deploy it to the blockchain right and these are things that add to that barrier so that when users come to us they say why do I want to learn this technology here's all these barriers that I have to get over I could just use this instead and that's where reach comes at that's where reach comes in because it feels familiar to a web 2 developer and the tools and features that the Reach team have have put into the language have lowered that barrier so that a user who's experienced in web 2 can walk in and look at a reach program without ever having seen the code before and tell you what it's doing right just based on the keywords because it's familiar it looks like JavaScript and they they have that opportunity to use the knowledge that they currently have and then apply it to blockchain as opposed to going ground up and learning some new assembly level machine language that's difficult to write if that's if those are the users that we're relying on to take blockchain to the next level that is a finite pool of users did I say small pool of users when we get into abstraction and getting away from the assembly level language and up into a language like reach where you can you can basically speak to it in English I want a only to do this thing that is how we lower the barrier for entry and we we help to teach our users about getting over those hurdles that come with web 3 programs and those hurdles are a direct result of the features that we all love about blockchain right it's it's great because of this this this but it also introduces new barriers because of this this this right so our job and my job specifically is about reducing those barriers and helping to teach our users that web3 development can be similar to web 2 development we can make that transition for you in 12 weeks and you don't have to learn Assembly Language and in my opinion that's really how we get to that next set of users who build the next big thing for blockchain right that's that's really what we're doing here is we're setting the stage for our users who already have a lot of skills to come to us and build that next killer blockchain application and I think the last panel actually talk a little bit about about it as well but that next blockchain application is one that we're not talking about oh this application is great because it's on blockchain no it's a great application that uses blockchain and the user doesn't need to know all of the technical details about that that's really what we're after that's that next step so I love that great answer um it sounds like what I'm hearing is like blockchain's the thing that's going to get us to the next thing and currently the way that I'm seeing the blockchain ecosystem and the developers who are building on blockchain a lot of the same applications are being built just on a different layer or a different blockchain in itself so thinking about two different levels lower levels of abstraction sometimes the same smart contracts day you talk about this a lot are being used and that's kind of what uh the sort of you can copy and paste and plug and play and create this wonderful application that works because it's already been done before and you don't have to worry so much about the security risks of it uh so brings me to my next question is do we think that that's going to be the future of blockchain applications is it going to be just the same thing being molded in different ways or are we going to see new innovation happening from this sort of way that we're building because there are accessible entry points like the reach platform or what do you foresee let me give a tiny answer to this which is that for some context right now on ethereum there are about 15 million active application active active contracts and 75 of those are copies of the exact of the same 15 programs so that means that there are these there's a very small number of programs where there's over 10 million copies of them on the if you're Network right now and so One Vision of what blockchain is is that well right now there's you know 10 15 programs that matter and we're just going to replicate them over and over again and maybe the right number isn't 10 maybe the right number is 50. and that version of what blockchain is I call that kind of like an infrastructure version of blockchain where there's some really important infrastructure that the world runs on like you know uh TCP kernel implementations and network drivers you know there's a relatively small number of these but they're really essential for how the world works so One Vision of blockchain is that it is a new kind of infrastructure where only experts need to get involved and it could have an impact on the world in another version is that it's more like uh you know the App Store where there's two million unique applications and there's um over a mill I think I think right now on the Apple App Store there's something like 500 000 different companies with uh how how unique are they though right I mean how many like marketplaces are there on the web like how many you know and are they really different like yeah they have different lines of code but so how do you actually measure that uniqueness so like for example uh if we tick one domain like um I don't know like video game sellers is steam Gog epic game store Humble do they count as different things or did we just say that like okay well there's one idea and there's you know five implementations of that idea um and uh if we if in general there was always five times five versions of everything then that two million we should just strike that down by five yeah or maybe more yeah I would certainly count each Marketplace as a surely it was written almost entirely separately surely they will have the tackle similar problems but they'll decide to do it a different way so when I think about like business logic that exists in today's you know web 2 applications I would not uh try I would not say like I think we'll be done as soon as we get a few more of these things written no one's gonna need to write any more web 2 apps and but I did like your analogy uh TCP there are probably only four or five TCP Stacks that are in common use these days maybe ten um and how many databases maybe four or five databases so I think there will probably be some uh applications that are so common and people want to use the one that everyone recognizes as being thoroughly vetted um so I think that is true but I I do think people are always going to be right if blockchains are going to succeed they're going to succeed with people constantly writing more applications that you know tweak the parameters of a loan right there's that thousands of people do um Banks put out loans and create uh customized products for individual transactions they say oh you would like to borrow against their big block of IBM shares we'll write you a note that says that as long as your IBM stock doesn't go below this number before this date and so you might imagine these are just template forms but they're they're all bespoke and I think that's that's not because it's because people want a bespoke contract um and so I think people will continue to make bespoke applications forever um if the blockchain the blockchain's powerful then it's going to keep people are going to keep building on it not both on the front end and the bat and the back end I think that's a distinction though that we're not making enough of but uh and I think it's maybe because uh Region's Vision I think tries to avoid this distinction but let's at least admit that it it starts it exists at the beginning and then we see if we can get rid of it um web people tend to think of themselves either as front-end people or back-end people although there is certainly a push to be a full stack developer um I think you can think of a future where the back end developer says I'm this I'm a smart contract developer or on the front end of the smart contract developer and I suspect that the vast majority of the code will be on the front end because in every large system I've ever looked at the UI ends up consuming most of the code however the perhaps the most important code the the code that has to be correct the code that it possibly has to be fast in the old days had to be fast now it has to be efficient in other by other metrics um we'll be on the we'll be on the back end and that's going to continue to be hard I think harder I think to write than the front end but I think you guys want to bring them together and sort of do it all at once and that's a good way to handle that as well perhaps give you a chance to say so um my perspective is that uh in the applications that we've seen built on reach we see that same difference where you know 80 of the time and attention is spent on the front end um the question though is where is the cost allocated uh and I think one of the things that's special is that if you look at traditional web 2 Programs um they may can they may actually be 80 of the cost as well to produce the front end and give it um the user experience that you want your users to have uh but the problem is that right now the back end of the web 3 program it actually tends to dominate the cost um so we've done some case studies of uh existing web 3 programs that are out there and we tend to find that they have about 10 times the cost to build compared to web 2 backends so a web 2 back end might cost ten dollars whereas a web 3 back end might cost a hundred dollars and so I feel that like when at reach we're not really focused on trying to make us a the front end and the back end are somehow combined we think of it more as we want to make it so that the web 3 back end is as expensive as the web 2 back end that's sort of what our our main goal is and um this idea that like that needs to be efficient that needs to be well designed uh so when I uh when I was a grad student at uh at Brown when I first showed up I shared an office with this guy and then when he graduated he went and he worked at Google and I stayed in contact with him and he told me uh I don't know how true this is but he told me that his job is that he rewrites Python scripts into assembly and he does this to lower the air conditioning budget now he could be kind of joking but that's effectively the way that he described what he was doing because there was something where Google has such scale where if they can get a five percent return uh in the efficiency then actually has a really big impact on their overall energy usage and I think that thinking like this about where high margin returns are explains a lot about the blockchain world so clearly the most popular network is ethereum um it may not be the most popular currency but it's the most popular smart contract platform and given the very high prices of ethereum programs this means that there's a very large premium to making them more efficient which I think encourages people in the web free world to be focused on low-level details like quote writing and assembly furthermore because there's so few transactions available on ethereum and the price of them is bid up so high that means that you can only do things that are worth spending fifty dollars on the transaction and I think that lots of the ways that people imagine blockchain to be useful are things where the margins are really really small and until we get to a more efficient Network like algrand it won't be possible to actually realize those kinds of things and so I think that this question about efficiency of cost like this is sort of the um I don't know if it's high-minded to think about sustainability it's kind of low-minded to think about like oh let's like have operational efficiency in this business but I think that they're actually kind of the same thing and that's why in this conversation that's where my mind goes yeah I I would agree with that because um it also lowers barrier to entry making it more accessible for individuals to come in and deploy more contracts and have more Innovation come through because it's possible that someone in a different country who can't afford the 50 because maybe that's a month's salary um is not going to be able to deploy and build out the application they dream of so um I'm gonna defer this question to you JJ uh because it seems like Jay yourself have some similar viewpoints that sometimes maybe a little opposing thinking about you focus on low level and the development of the low level uh language on algrand being teal and so how do you think about the developer experience uh or I guess it's an and question as well how do you think about what you're building out so that it makes sense for how Ann is or showing it and sharing it with the world after saying this that in some sense so I only think about enabling good developer experiences I don't actually think about doing it so in other words if I think if I'm told either by Jay or by someone else who's trying to build higher level things on top of our low-level system that they need that they have a common sequence of operations that they need to do very often um or they're wasting space in a certain way and they say but I keep doing this over and over again and I see that across J J's work on reach and I see that across the high teal where we have what's called a medium level language um or I see it with uh there's a guy who's trying to compile c-sharp to to jbm byte code if they're all having the same problem I try to figure out what um small set of Primitives can be added even if they have weird semantics if they're small and and can go fast uh put that in there and then it would be probably horrible for a user to actually program with that particular app code but it will allow people who are building the higher level languages the nicer experiences to use that op code and therefore you won't have to pay for that high level abstraction and then you guys can take it from there right no we we we have this specific discussion sometimes of should we do this because it would make the developer experience better you know we could change something at the teal level the lowest level and then sometimes think well you know it's something that will be easy to at like abstract at the next highest level so it's okay for us to focus on you know to choose the more efficient or you know maybe slightly less ergonomic option for that like we frequently have this discussion but there are plenty of cases where like the decisions we make at the lowest level do impact all the way up like there's no way to change it so we we do think about it in that sense it's awesome um and low-level languages aren't completely eliminated even with the reach platform because the output byte code is going to be low-level language like teal or solidity so um how does that impact the developer experience if at all yeah so um there's a lot of ways that it matters so one way is that sometimes different platforms have unique benefits that you want to expose that the user really wants to experience so let me use a simple example right now um there are some people who are trying to launch a particular program using reach on an ethereum Network and they've been developing on algorand because um basically the development cycle is faster but they ultimately want to launch on both and so now they're to the point where they're ready to try the ethereum one and one of the things that ethereum sorry one of the things that algorithm has as a feature is this thing called an atomic transaction group so what that means is that I can call and while simultaneously paying her usdc or I can call in while simultaneously paying JJ usdc and this is a feature that means that uh me as the the user experience I can have one signing dialogue and for both of these things that's actually not possible on ethereum networks because the way that um non-network tokens like usdc work on ethereum is that you actually have to call two different contracts so I have to generally the pattern is I first call the usdc contract and say I'm allocating some money for Ann and then I call Ann and those two things can't happen atomically and this user uh they they sent me a frantic email this morning something's going wrong it's making me do two signings when I use ethereum and the answer is uh it's actually that's just how it works there and so this is interesting because it means that um one of the downsides of a high level language is that we pretend that the network works one way and people get used to thinking that it works that way but it doesn't really work that way and so um this is called a leaky abstraction so a leaky abstraction is the idea like an instruction in general is um removing yourself from the details and focusing on the high level so for example my favorite analogy because I always have it on hand is my wedding ring so what is my wedding ring uh is my wedding ring a piece of platinum or is it millions of platinum atoms or is it up quarks and down quarks or is it a symbol of love each one of those things is a different level of abstraction and sometimes it's necessary to think about one and sometimes by focusing on the quirks you actually lose the entire point of why I'm carrying around the wedding ring and so a leaky abstraction is one where sometimes you want to focus on the high level but sometimes you need to go underneath and this example of seeing the atomic transaction be it the lack of it be exposed is kind of a danger and so the more complex your application gets sometimes you need to see underneath the cover so to speak and this shows up all the time where people will write a program and they need to get the they want to get the reach program audited but they also think that maybe we should audit the VM code also um maybe they see an error on chain and they need to translate that error back to the reach code so in the old days um uh when you got an error on algrand for instance you would just get this message that says uh error at program counter 79 and there was no way to like figure out what that was um and then one of the things that JJ added recently or someone on JJ steam added is something that will say oh well that PC 79 that goes to this line in the program and so one of the things that we're working on in reach is taking the that line of the program and translating it again to the higher level reach program so when there's an error on chain we can say you know line 17 of your JavaScript program errored and so this is an example where the ultimate goal of a high-level language is to make it so that there are no leaky abstractions and there's always difficulty in doing this I'm just going to take everything in for a moment um so Nick I want to even extend this conversation to you because you came as a user of reach and that eventually joined the team but how has that impacted the way that you were building especially thinking about code maybe a little differently as a software engineer not necessarily a blockchain developer because now there's a different sort of mentality in blockchain development how has that changed for you yeah so it's interesting for me now in the seat that I'm in to talk about coordinating the reach programs because I I was a reach user first that was my first introduction was to go into a reach program and take the course learn what the course had and I did two of them at the same time actually I was I was doing two right next to each other while studying full-time and it gave me a really unique perspective and having so much background in in general software engineering right when you take software engineering courses they want you to learn every language in the book just about right your first year you do 10 different languages and then I come to reach and I I remember watching Jay do a 30 minute demonstration at the first session that I went to and the the thing that most stuck with me was how simple the user experience was and I swear I watched them say export the reach connector mode equals elgo and he hits the button and then he says well what about ethereum and he turned and one more line of code and hit and I I my jaw hit the floor because in my head I knew what that took to go from where he was at to that low level language on each isolated Network these are different networks you would have to learn the infrastructure you'd have to learn all the different pieces underneath of that and the language itself right so what does that mean that means you have to pick a corner early if you want to write algorand apps you need to pick algorand early so that you can learn the infrastructure you can learn the language you can work your way up right but then I watched him do this with reach where he's in the reach corner and the reach Corner extends to these these different networks and I understood what it was doing underneath the hood and to me that is what absolutely blew my mind about the user experience and where the future of blockchain development is going because if we have to ask our users to become very familiar with one specific language so they can use this one specific Network that is another barrier right if we can have sort of this this language that that can generally approach different networks and now we're just talking about blockchain development that is how we move to that next step where no longer are we building you know low-level machine machine code right we're actually adding features that you would not consider if you had to spend six months writing machine code right if you spend all of that time just to get the basic functionality down and that's where your cost goes up right we talk about keeping the developer cost low and you don't have to spend as much time building out those base features so you can focus more on the advanced features of your application and that's how we take it from sort of some of the clunky daps that you see that are in existence today to that next level where the user doesn't know that that's what they're interacting with is this blockchain application so uh that's a really long-winded way for me to say that coming to reach from the the user perspective and then transitioning to what do our users want puts me in a really unique position because I sat in the seat where the user said hey I need to know about this I have some experience in programming but I don't understand this part about blockchain and we've been able to sort of hone in on what what that means for the user and spend a lot of time and effort there so that we can give those give them that base knowledge of these special considerations that go with web3 but it doesn't take you a year to do right it takes you a much shorter amount of time because of that abstraction level so yeah that I think that's another reason why I love my job so much is because of the unique position that I sit in having come from a user perspective and I still think my Jaws on the floor from that demonstration they gave months ago yeah great answer Nick um I want to bring it back a little bit to uh talking about how webtoon itself even the app store has x amount of applications and a lot of them tend to be pretty similar maybe just with a new brand over it how do we uh sort of avoid that in the blockchain space so that there is more of the thought in Innovation rather than it being a focus on repeating the same applications that people are going to be using how do you think about that in in algorand and in how and what you do in your research I guess I have not worried about that so I I mean let's talk about the real world there are a lot of banks uh if you walk down the street and you see four different banks they're basically the same application but with a different branding on it and I don't think that's bad that's fine there's four Banks and they all do roughly the same thing there's four four grocery stores there's lots of different TV channels that you can make a lot of categories that there are many examples of and I don't mind that I don't think there's a problem there I guess if it leads to user um you know people talk about analysis paralysis where or the Paradox of choice where people are presented with a lot of things and they can't have to decide between them that can sometimes lead to less engagement so if it leads to that then I think that will be unfortunate but the only way it would lead to that is if there are so many people building on blockchain that uh that users start to get confused that sounds like it's probably a problem that's okay to have but you don't think we already have that I mean with like the different D5 apps like how are you supposed to choose between folks Finance I'll go find well so I think when they're when they're very very similar I think that the right answer is that you build something on top of them that if they prevent the exact same interface that's just a swap between tokens X and Y whoever's giving me the best rate right now I'll use that I'll use that application if they're different enough that they I don't know maybe one of them is a loan program where one of them allows you to participate in governance and one of them doesn't or one of them gives you a higher interest rate maybe one gives you a higher interest rate and one of them lets you participate in governance so then you have to decide well which one do I think which which is more important to me um and I think it could happen that there's a real I don't know Paradox of choice but at this point I don't think it's not something that hasn't worried me too much yet um but I could be wrong does it worry you Anne no no I think it's a teacher to have more things right competition breeds Excellence I don't know there's some quote like that right uh so yeah I think and and we see even within like the D5 apps that are on algorand you know they they have some success then another one has a little success this one goes down they're like they're figuring it out as a group you know what if there was only one it would not be pushed forward as quickly right yeah I'm more Doom and Gloom than I think uh JJ and Anna I'm very nervous about the lack of uh creativity on blockchain because although there are quite a few defy apps that all have different trade-offs between them the fact that most of them are defy apps is the thing that bothers me um for example uh if I were to ask the question um so I have a I have a younger sister she's uh 22. uh what should she use blockchain for is there anything that she would care about um and if I if I search my soul and I wonder Kennedy what am I going to tell to use blockchain for the answer is um I don't know maybe you could like take some throwaway money and gamble it on this token going up uh she doesn't have enough capital for it to be useful for her to get like one percent returns being a liquidity provider and this little thing like that's not going to make a real big difference for her life she doesn't care about the governance of the algorithm Network she doesn't care about the governance of the uniswap network because those things have no impact on her what she like she really likes Tick Tock uh she really likes YouTube um she uh she goes she uses rate my professors to decide professors are any good um okay but you know what I mean she uses Facebook like these are the things that she actually does on a day-to-day basis none of them are on blockchain now and so the big question that I have is for the future of blockchain is can the things that Kennedy likes could they be better with blockchain or could there be new things that are like the things that she likes could they come to existence and they don't exist now because you know when I was her age there was no Facebook there was no blockchain sorry there was no Tick Tock and I think that I would have liked them I don't like them now but I think that if I was her age I would have liked them and so what is the next thing that happens and that is the thing that stresses me out because if all blockchain is is defy uh we don't need to have uh tents in Quincy for that [Laughter] um we are getting pretty close to time so I kind of want to wrap it up and say thank you uh one for being here and sharing your knowledge uh with everyone today uh but I also want to ask you Nick a little bit more about what's going on here in Boston as we're closing out here in Quincy uh there is a hackathon going on this weekend in Cambridge uh can you tell me a little bit more about that yeah I can so hack Boston starts today registration around two o'clock I believe today is the start for early registration um and we'll be hacking all weekend at the search building uh over in Harvard I think it's 59 Shepard way uh we've just said this morning I actually remembered that um yeah and we have a lot of great partners that are involved Talos is involved uh fio is here somewhere um and we'll be over the next 36 hours building out uh applications for each one of the networks I know that Talos has a nice long list of applications that they would like to see built uh so the idea is uh we're gonna go we're gonna hack for 36 hours and see what applications we can build I know I personally will be doing a couple workshops on reach and a couple demonstrations on reach um and this is not the first time hopefully that we've had users come in with no knowledge of reach and we've been able to to teach them some reach here in a weekend and actually deploy an application that that may win surprises so we're excited about it and uh we'd love to have you join us uh even if just for the workshops if you're not a programmer if you want to come see some cool workshops join us I heard the word prizes are there prizes there are prizes today there was over a hundred thousand dollars in prizes for um for for different categories and for different applications from different networks so a lot of big money on the table is there a website how do I find out more at boston.xyz of course of course yes thank you to agran also so a major sponsor for this event happening this evening I want to ask what sort of applications would you be excited to see coming from this hackathon something besides defy what nf2s what animals haven't been built yet penguins armadillos I don't know something more games I'm waiting for like the games are starting but where are the great games they're I don't think they're quite here yet I'm waiting I have a free idea this is called uh this is called Grandma coin um I would like someone to build Grandma coin for me so Grandma coin you sit down for a meal and everybody's Stakes uh some money and if they don't finish their plate they lose their stake because when I was a kid if I didn't finish my spaghetti meatballs my grandma would say you're gonna eat the rest of that or you're not gonna have a treat and so I want to try to make a financial incentive for finishing your meal and not letting food go to waste so Grandma coin that's what I want someone to build how do you prove how do you prove that if you just like we have a load of everyone at the table okay it's got to be a consensus for everyone together we use like consensus algorithm okay awesome what about you Nick what do you want to see I I think I'm gonna build that to be honest awesome well thank you everyone for joining us uh that is all I have today [Applause] [Music]