Flow Workshop - ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024

[Music] all right hello everybody my name is Ali serage and today I'm going to talk to you about yeah you specifically about finding your Flow State a little bit about my background I do devrell and product at the flow Foundation previously I was in that startup hustle I was a software engineer and studied computer science even though I might not sound like it and um I started a bunch of dii protocols and did Consulting along the way if you want to follow me it's Ali serage zero because there's a lot of copycats out there I was the first um on X I'm gonna start off with a question and I want you guys to shout because it's a little bit loud what makes games and applications meaningful I'm going to pick on you guys if oh oh your lips are moving fun okay all right what else Community what else unexpected situations all right some Randomness in there one more the boys the boys yeah the boys make everything funner even like a crazy trip to Bangkok that you almost die on a motorcycle like if it's with the boys it's memorable right what do you guys think one of the oldest recorded games in history was close dice was used in the game it was a game called Senate and it was about 5,000 years old we we see it in ancient Egyptian heroglyph and it's the oldest one that we're aware of games are an integral part of human life they've existed before written history and the game of senate had essentially two players they had special squares called the Fountain of Life and the the house of of wisdom and these squares when your pieces would land on them would give them specific Buffs the whole goal you have an opponent and you're trying to get your pieces to the other side of the board before them and it Incorporated aspects of of Randomness like you could use dice or sticks that you threw and long story short it kind of It kind of summarized your journey through this life and the next life and the and the afterlife right one very interesting aspect of this game that continues to today is that it created magical circles every game creates a magical Vortex where there are new rules that are introduced that only exist in that time bounded um time frame and environment for example I was talking to Brian earlier today who has an amazing background in games and he was describing how you know you can't just run and Tackle someone on the street but when you're in the magical circle of American football that rule is bent it's acceptable in that time and space right it creates it creates a new force field almost where you where anything could be possible in that environment um games also elicit emotional responses they incorporate replayability and Randomness which that gentleman said over there um they're easy to play but hard to master and they create value one of the most important ingredients I believe you said at the very start is they're fun fast forward about 5,000 years and our technology has changed massively but these core things haven't with the Advent of the internet there was a massive wave of digital globalize Global digitization right connecting people and information in ways that were never possible before all of a sudden you weren't limited playing a game to the people that were in your direct vicinity that were sitting across from you all of a sudden you could play games with millions of people worldwide in exchange common goals exchange information and you know beat The Horde if you're into World of Warcraft the web 3 Revolution came about to disrupt something that was broken and not flowing in web 2 companies kept their code private and proprietary digital assets were infinitely copiable yet you didn't really have control or any ownership of anything you had even your money right everything was centralized the web3 revolution promised a new ethos true ownership and offered to solve problems in human coordination people were starting to get their power back but everything at the beginning of blockchain revolved around finances where was the fun one day everything changed cats the ancient Egyptians loved them we still love them today at an eth Global event about when was 201 17 four about eight years ago very similar to this e Global event right here in waterl there was a team that had a question had an idea what happens if we put cats on the blockchain it started off as a fun experiment let's have these genetics let let's allow people to breed these cats and and over time they could have digital Collectibles of them and they could trade them all of a sudden thousands and thousands of users started purchasing collecting and breeding these kitties these crypto kitties all of a sudden the entire ethereum Network ended up getting throttled people were like who the heck are these crazy cat people why are they breeding cats on who's putting cats on a blockchain these images shouldn't be here gas prices were absolutely blowing up what that revealed was there was a massive scalability problem in ethereum it's the reason we're all here it's what started everything right and so what ended up happening was all the conversations we hear about L2 stemmed from this the team behind cryptokitties came together and discussed what does the future look like they looked at 200 white papers that were from The Cutting Edge um for decentralized Technologies and they they essentially came up with a solution to make things flow again before I get into that I want to start off with a story imagine that your friend who is a complete Normie comes up to you and says oh my God like there's this amazing application maybe it's a decentralized social application or a game you absolutely must play and the first thing that you do when you when you go to that game that decentralized app what what's the first button you're going to see in the top right corner connect wallet and they're like what the heck does connect wallet mean like I am I connecting my physical wallet I don't have a physical wallet is Apple pay whatever I'm going to click that the next thing okay I have to download a plugin from the Chrome Store that's kind of sus but sure whatever I'll Trust this wait a minute now I have to memorize the sequence of like 14 word okay no no no no no no you cannot save it on your computer you have to write it down on a physical piece of paper because it's way too valuable for you to lose wait a minute if I put it on paper it's more losable than whatever I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna do that as soon as you authenticate and go into the app you try to do a transaction you try to do one simple action what's the next thing that's going to pop up what the heck is gas is that online taxes like okay where do I get that from I start googling I go to a centralized exchange if you're in Canada like I'm from and that fell over there sorry for doxing your brother you're essentially going to be on a call with the fraud department at your bank for 5 hours trying to convince them that you're not getting scammed if you're able to successfully do that which you're not then you might be able to enter the app more likely you're going to feel like a drug dealer messaging your friends hey man can I can I interact you some cash for some crypto so I could play this game that is a terrible experience right flow at the protocol level gives Builders the tools that they need to remove all these barriers in using and creating web 3 apps before I get into how that's done let's discuss what exactly flow is flow is a layer one blockchain with ultra low gas fees that first launched its proof of stake protocol in 2020 it was co-founded by deer Shirley who is one of the brightest minds and he coined the term nft right now there are currently two virtual machines that run on Flow one is called Cadence and the other is evm meaning that solidity contracts and popular evm tooling like hard hat Alchemy brownie open Zeppelin contracts remix they all work off the bat with zero configuration needed Flo is also the home of many consumer applications that house some of the world's largest and most energized communities one of the first applications that launched on Flow was NBA topshot and that ended up bringing in millions of people hundreds of millions of dollars in Revenue most of the people didn't even know it was run on a block chain right and then after that Mattel was like Hey you know we want to we want to add Barbie and we want to add Hot Wheels and then Disney was like Hey we're going to launch Disney Pinnacle on Flow if Barb's going to be there we need Disney Princesses and we also need Star Wars so massive communities ended up forming on Flow but it wasn't until literally two months ago that we became evm equivalent and are seeing a huge explosion in games in in defy and the likes but what makes flow unique for building fun application to build these kind of applications especially the type that could incorporate millions or billions of users you need really extremely powerful architecture that can scale with the billions of users that come and the data that they generate flow allows for the storage of massive amounts of data and our goal is to allow a single user account to store over a petabyte of data flow approached the scalability issue with a unique multi-roll node architecture that essentially scales horizontally think of it like a Ford assembly line instead of all of the um nodes doing the exact same tasks you have hypers specialized nodes like access nodes that are only responsible for accessing data on chain or you have verification nodes consensus nodes execution nodes they're all focused on just one thing and that allows for scalability without charting putting this Tech jargon aside it allowed applications to be built like NBA topshot which for those that don't know it essentially allows you to have these clips of these video clips as nfts in NBA history on certain days that one application generates more transactions than the entire ethereum network showing and proving to all of us that there was a way forward for scalability that you could get to the level where a single app could scale to the level of entire chains I'm going to introduce just four unique features of flow that unlock apps first flow offers a unique account and transaction model which evm developers can leverage through Cadence which is a flow native language this allows for things like splitting up transaction roles between the proposer the payer and the authorizer and you don't need a pay Master contract essentially the app can pay for transactions that the user proposes and authorizes essentially creating fully SP uh approval list and gas list experiences for the end users this is is extremely important for social applications extremely important for video games and the likes Flo also supports at the protocol level account abstraction and something we call account linking this makes it possible to create apps where users can sign up using their regular Google authentication and a wallet is created in the background that's managed by the application itself transactions can also either be bundled or the app can even manage all the approvals so you don't have to sign a single transaction with every action that you end up doing on chain as an end user you can get all the benefits of using a decentralized app without any of the crappy ux second flow offers protocol level vrf or a verifiable Randomness function which allows apps to use provably Fair random number generators you don't need to rely on a thirdparty platform or oracles within one line of solidity you can access a random value for arranged directly from the protocol itself this is super useful for things like dice rolls attack damage gaining experience and the majority of game mechanics that we see every single day another aspect that's super unique on flow is attachments so taking a step back everything is inherently open source in web 3 meaning that when you solve a problem once for like once for one specific issue it's solved for everyone at all times and you can move to the next problem that needs solving this allows for composability which is essentially the compound interest of innovation attachments allow developers to add additional data and functionality without the permission from the original author they're kind of like modding for web 3 an example that I would give is Skyrim how many people have heard of the game Skyrim before so Skyrim came out almost a decade ago but similar to Warcraft 3 they created a modding editor or they created an editor where people could create mods on top of their base game if you look at websites like modding Nexus today you will see literally five six billion downloads of mods that are being created literally to current times and some of these mods are doing things that weren't possible a decade ago they're doing things that the original creators couldn't have even imagined one of the mods that I was looking at mixes whisper AI with open AI API so that when you talk to you could literally talk into your microphone to an NPC that you meet it will take that that those words you're saying convert it to text takes that text put it into an like open AI API take the result turn it into speech and the NPC will literally talk back and forth with you about anything in that world all of a sudden you don't have these two dimensional characters anymore you have almost lifelike creatures this is something that wasn't possible when Skyrim first launched it's something that because they made their game inherently modable created more value propositions beyond the original creators Concepts and brought in to this day more users into the Skyrim game right and this is something that easily extends to web 3 easily extends to creating composable experiences and applications and contracts and attachments make it very easy to attach attach additional information and and data to them you could think of capabilities as detailed permissions and granular Access Control almost like AWS IM if you're familiar with it you could revoke limit or Grant um access to assets functions and resources for games this could apply to almost everything from making comments to community permissions for your guild to literally allowing someone to like loaning your sword or armor or gear to someone for a specific spefic amount of time and under specific um um restraints all right enough about the tech where is flow today we just launched the world tour where we were in previous cities like Singapore where we focused on consumer defi San Fran where we focused on Sports and changai where we focused on decentralized social right now we are in Bangkok and focused on two key uh themes for this hackathon one is is the next killer app and I'm not talking about you know Skynet or like anything like that I mean the best consumer application targeting real everyday people and solving real problems you could think about it almost like we've had AI around for many many decades but it wasn't in the hands of everyday people they couldn't access its benefits until it's crazy it feels like much longer ago but it was almost a year ago that chat GPT ended up blowing up and became the fastest adopted product in history all of a sudden that consumer product unlocked the value of AI for billions of people your grandmother could use it for recipes you could use it to help you with coding your application your your brother could use it to figure out if they just poison their cat or not right you could use it for like literally anything so I want to challenge you guys if you're going to be hacking on that stream to think about what is the next Consumer application that solves a real problem that can literally give the value propositions and benefits of blockchain as many people as possible the second one is the best game we're especially looking for telegram games but it's it's a much broader category overall so thinking back to some of those core characteristics that I mentioned at the very beginning of what makes an experience meaningful how could you create games that create their own you know circles and warp fields and and invite their users in with that Randomness with that replayability that that social aspect that connects you to the boys right um we also have two other streams one is for the best overall developer feedback and the other is for giving feedback these are rarely applied to so I highly recommend you you challenge yourselves to put in some feedback there we're all about Kaizen and continuous Improvement this could be anything from hey this documentation is missing or I think that this could be rewarded or you know this type of SDK integrating would be super valuable when we look at the hackathon that we did almost three weeks ago how long ago was eth Singapore my my brain's getting warped three weeks or four weeks ago huh September okay so a little bit over a month so back in September um during eth Singapore there was one product that wanted to make or one team that wanted to make a consumer focused pump. fun application and they wanted it to be as rug proof as possible requiring people to auth authenticate with Twitter they won one of our defi streams and within a little over four weeks ended up going live on mainnet on their first day of going live they generated over $1,000 in fees and had over $100,000 in in assets going into the protocol and being traded right one of the reasons for that is we've created an ecosystem storefront where if you create an application that goes live there's the possibility of putting it in front of millions of pro prospective users and solving one of the biggest problems new applications suffer which is getting their first users right and if there's one thing I want you to take away from this talk today it's that over these next three days you might be hacking on something that you think is a fun idea or learning a new concept or mixing and matching different Technologies but you really have the power to create something that will impact millions of people and go live and I want to challenge you to do that Flo has Ultra affordable gas fees to the point where virtually all mainnet transactions are are sponsored by the flow wallet like the the primary wallet in the ecosystem right try launching something on mainnet and see where it goes if you want it to come to life if you want to put it in front of real people we're here to help you make that dream a reality so with that I will end with let's go with the flow is the randomness compatible with solidity so there's a two virtual machines right there's the evm one and then there's the what's yeah so um the the consensus mechanism as you saw in the really neat graphic is a little different with cadence and so pre randow isn't used and so instead we just feed the native block by block vrf into that so if you just use pre randow the same that you would before it's actually uh unique to that block and it's new meaningful Randomness um if you're doing something really really high stakes there's a couple of additional things you would want to do with security but for almost every use case that is it's verifiable Randomness more than enough for anything any game any app anything like that what game am I most excited to see come on chain oh man everyone has different tastes in games I am really bullish on games like crypto the game where you have these character the social experience it's almost like surv right where every single day you have to vote people off you have nfts representing each of the characters I would personally love to see more like web 3 games around that mixing like zombie apocalypse themes so maybe every night you can go on a raid and you use onchain Randomness for a percentage chance that you're going to get loot but then there's also danger and you could have a composable nft using attachments where maybe you get scratched or maybe you lose a ligament or like your character gets a scar and that nft updates when you go on these raids and like you could form communities and you could attack other people like I really like those kind of like um werewolf type and like social and like zombie apocalypse sorry zombie apocalypse themed games so something that mix all of those things together I think would be badass hey so why hasn't onchain poker really caught up and like made a big splash on the scene cuz like I'm thinking like bringing poker on Chan is like a no Riner but I haven't seen any such use case to date um it's mostly offchain Web Two poer online that's a great question I'm not entirely sure oh do you want do you want to answer that Brandon oh okay because I think this man might have been working on just that oh yes yeah we actually have a roulette launching on Flow very very soon but one of the biggest issues that we encountered legally was there's always a throat to choke when it comes to decentralization and most of the chains that have a random dysfunction available to you are brf like verifiable random but they're provided by an oracle solution and so those people can still be considered operators of that gambling site if you're worried about the legality of you know your Um poker game or your roulette game or your bakara game then there there's always someone that they can go after and it's one of the reasons why we're seeing like R bit that needs to like own their thing and S sanction it away from different places you know make sure that no one can access it from different places and that's one of the biggest reasons that you have seen poker go off I think is because of the legal concerns around gambling in various jurisdictions where you really want to see it that makes sense thank you thank you Brandon couldn't have done better anyone else all right just show of hands who here is thinking of building a consumer Centric application okay and who here is thinking about building a game okay okay nice anyone want to ask any question specifically to their or specific to their application or we have about one minute left no all right we will end it there if you guys have any questions our table is going to be very far in the back there in the corner um more than happy to ideate help you guys flesh out your ideas or even if you need mentorship on how to pitch your presentations at the end we also have flags that you could take from the table if you want to put them on yours so that we could give additional mentorship be sure to join our telegram chat as well thank you guys so much [Music]