Polkadot: A Scalable Blockchain Platform - Dan Forbes

yes i'm here you have me okay well dan it's your floor take it away all right awesome thank you so much can you see my screen as well yes wow you can alright um okay so um my name is dan forbes i'm a developer advocate with parity technologies so that means i kind of help make it easier for people to understand the types of capabilities that we create and and work with at parity and then i make it easier for people to to interact with these capabilities and so my colleague dan shields you know we try to we're decentralized in all ways except the name dan here at parity so my colleague dan shields uh presented on substrate earlier which was a really great introduction into our kind of preferred in-house framework for building blockchains and so what i'm going to talk about now is our protocol or what some people call a meta protocol that we have developed for actually allowing these block chains to scale and interact with one another in a way that makes it possible to create systems that work for humans in the real world and uh we have a really uh well we have many wonderful people in our ecosystem but one of the many awesome people that we have is this guy soto watanabe and he said that in uh other types of blockchains it always felt like you were molding your problem to the solution but with polka dot and with uh you know substrate you're able to create a solution that solves a problem um and and so substrate is this kind of flexible framework this toolkit for building a blockchain that can do all sorts of different things in all different ways and then in a lot of ways polka dot is kind of like this this boring layer this infrastructure layer you can compare it to something like aws or heroku or an operating system on your computer something that a program built using a framework like substrate runs on top of and the last thing you ever want to do is think about your operating system you almost want that to kind of like disappear into the background and so polka dot is really this infrastructure layer uh we're going to talk all about it um but i guess you know because dan has already done such a good job of kind of digging into the details a little bit more i do want to take a second to just talk uh about a bit the vision of polka dot and at a visionary level what does it mean to you know welcome yourself to the polka dot ecosystem why are we here why are we doing this and really what it all comes down to is this idea of really a new internet that's designed from the infrastructure layer up to allow people to maintain custody of their data in a way that doesn't kind of devolve into reliance on these centralized entities i don't want to go about like naming the names of these companies that we all delegate our personal information to but this is not a good way for people to interact with one another people should have custody of their own data and their own personal information but because of the fact that the internet was basically built as a way for academics to trade academic information freely with one another and there was never really a requirement in this design phase for things to be secure or private in any way that just wasn't part of what would be called the security model uh what what we now operate in is the internet or web 2.0 uh it's really this amalgam of hacks that you know with kind of tape and string we're running world-class global enterprises on a research tool and so polka dot and blockchain systems are new ways for people to engage with one another that doesn't rely on centralized authority that allows people to have control over their data and whatnot and so that's what polka dots all about welcome to polka dot welcome to that mindset and let's talk a little bit now a little bit more in details now that we got the kind of this um visionary stuff out of the way um so yeah i think i kind of just talked about this it's it's a new web and and you may hear us talk about at parody or our research organization that we work very closely with the web 3 foundation you may hear us talk about web 3.0 or the web 3 vision um in fact lately internally we've been talking about these terms and how they can get a little bit overloaded so we're trying to use more uh w3f to refer to the web3 foundation which is our research organization where we write academic papers and come up with new protocols that are you know secure and whatnot and then at parity technologies we implement those as software products and this is all to enable the polka dot ecosystem which which is what i'm here to talk about and get you excited about um so yeah polka dot was it's been a long time in the making it's it's not uh kind of the new kid on the block it's it's been around for a while and and it even traces its lineage as i stated in one of the earlier discussions back to the ethereum ecosystem uh dr gavin wood our our founder kind of the the main guy at parity he wrote the ethereum technical specification and so he spent a lot of time thinking about ways to make scalable blockchain platforms and he's done some pretty amazing work at parity i feel very lucky to get to advocate for his vision it's pretty compelling uh he works very closely with um robert habermeyer who's today working on our parachain protocols which is something i'll talk about a little bit another super duper smart guy and then we have peter uh he's i don't think with uh the web3 foundation any longer but he was uh certainly one of the founders of this helping to create the you know the polka dot white paper which you can go out and read um but this is kind of the team behind all of this and really uh you know gav the ceo of my company uh it's really cool because he's not like a normal cto he writes a lot of code and like is the main committer to like the substrate or one of the main committers if not the main committer to the substrate code base so it's really pretty cool and if you're kind of a dork and a nerd and you like stuff like this um it's you know highly encourage you to check out what we're doing at parody so i think uh kind of towards the end of his talk dan showed this image uh and and let's talk about it for a second just kind of at a high level you know 10 000 foot view or whatever you want to call it what is a polka dot like network because even the term polka dot is a little bit overloaded probably we have some work to do to kind of get all these brands and stuff smoothed out we're better at writing code than we are at doing the branding thing but we're getting a lot better at that so hold tight and in fact there's some really cool uh stuff going on right now where we're doing decentralized governance around our branding but nonetheless polka dot is first and foremost it's kind of a protocol and so you may have heard the name kusama which is a a polka dot like network that's all about experimentation and kind of pushing things forward and there's a kusama booth in the maker space which you should come visit us there um and then there's polka dot which implements the same protocol but the the goal is to be much more business minded much more stable um and so it polka dot is a protocol um and we're mostly i would say going to be talking about things at the protocol level as opposed to talking about the polka dot network capital p capital n i'm a software engineer so i'm going to talk about things in more abstract terms uh maybe if people have questions about the polka dot network i'll be happy to take those but in a polka dot like network which is something that i'd like to talk about you have a couple of different components um i think you should be able to see my mouse because i'm sharing my screen so but ooh can i have a pointer ooh fun um okay so this is a relay chain which is kind of the central part of a polka dot like network and in the polka dot network the the polka dot blockchain would be this relay chain and so uh this is the relay chain that provides all this kind of boring infrastructure stuff that i was talking about a lot of security which we'll get into in a little bit but then also kind of like some infrastructure services like message passing so that all of the different para chains or like applications that are running on this infrastructure layer they can all communicate with one another in addition to getting like security like you're like an application might get from an operating system so think of the relay chain as kind of like an operating system type layer then obviously i've kind of already teased this idea of like these para chains which are these application specific blockchains which offered you know decentralized consensus around the state of a system as it evolves over time but they don't have to worry about a lot of the boring stuff just like the apps that are deployed to heroku don't have to worry about servers and instances and all that kind of stuff they just know that there's compute and that's what they use kind of a similar concept um some of these para chains or like this one in particular may be connected to a bridge which could connect them out to another chain maybe another relay chain so you could imagine this being polka dot and then this may be being kusama out here just hypothetically speaking or as in this bridge kind of is meant to demonstrate here it could be out to anything else like we talked about a little bit earlier maybe ethereum or something like that um so all of these para chains are kind of interoperable by default you don't need bridges between them the relay chain is the bridge but then there could also be a bridge out to some other blockchain network that may be a you know maybe a polka dot like network um and then kind of as a implementation detail for this time let's just leave para threads as kind of like an aside very similar thing to para chains but essentially para chains have a very very high level of reliability and availability pair of threads a little bit lower so going all the way kind of back to a vision of a blockchain as an enablement layer for a better type of web this is a whole ecosystem that's built around blockchains to really make it work and then there's even more like governance and stuff that maybe we can talk about in a little bit as well um if there's ever any questions please feel free like if you feel like it's a good time to ask me a question i'm more than happy to take them i if you don't have questions you're probably not listening close enough um but i i think this was a good overview of kind of what this looks like and let's move on to talk a little bit more about it um i actually didn't make these slides i would never be able to make slides that look this good to be honest with you um but on the one hand these slides look way better than anything that i would ever make but on the other hand they don't necessarily tell the story in the order that i would tell it i think all the pieces are there but if it feels kind of like i'm jumping around it's because i am but it's cool all the pieces are gonna be there and at the end i'm gonna make sure that you understand it all that's my job and and ask questions if you don't um so let's talk a little bit about this interoperability piece and we already kind of talked about this a little bit um but basically polka dot it allows for the creation of custom built block chains but then they're connected to this central relay chain this infrastructure layer that allows all of the para chains or even perhaps the pair of threads that are connected to the relay chain to all be interoperable by default so that's one of the big problems with blockchains and as gav you know has had a lot of experience looking at other blockchain networks and blockchain protocols the lack of interoperability was a big problem and so that's kind of been addressed within the polka dot ecosystem um and then we even talked a little bit about bridges which is a i think it's correct to call that like a layer two solution this is something that i've learned from my colleagues here at parity who i learned so much from every day it's a great place to work um so a bridge is a type of layer two solution that connects uh out to a different blockchain network and so they're not really uh specific to polka dot in any way but we have a lot of infrastructure and uh there's a whole bridges library and a whole bridges team at parity that works on bridges because interoperability is such an important part of what we do i'm just going to kind of grab my phone so i know i'm on time cool all right and again if anyone has questions just ask them throughout i like to be kind of interactive um so dan actually talked a lot about this about how um substrate really and frame in particular the runtime library is what or the runtime framework i should say is what makes it so easy to build custom-built blockchains that are able to solve all different types of problems different consensus engines you know they can have the the modules that they need while leaving the ones that they don't behind this is kind of a central theme of computing this isn't something that we invented here at parity that would be the dumb thing to try to reinvent the wheel what gav and rob are doing are taking tried and true computing principles like separation of concerns modularity and and just extending it out into the blockchain infrastructure layer and so polka dot allows for application specific pair chains and then frame or runtime framework or library allows for the modular composition of application specific runtimes this all works at scale this is the real boring stuff if you ask me i don't even think about this as i shouldn't have to gav thought about this look it works so much faster i mean i don't want i don't even like doing comparisons but polka dot is fast we're built on rust which is a next generation um you know systems programming language and obviously designed from the ground up to work in the real world so speed is table stakes let's talk about the cool stuff yes online governance this is where stuff gets like next gen super cool so you can think of like like what what is like first of all what is governance governance is how a community establishes the flow of power how does the community express their desires and how do those desires materialize into action and and so there's you know you can have like no governance anarchy basically you could have kind of a plutocratic governance system or you can use blockchain technology to build next generation governance systems that are unlike anything we've ever seen before and so beyond the polka dot protocol itself within frame we have built governance applications that are built on top of algorithms created at the web3 foundation by phd researchers who spend much more time working and much less time talking than i do um but we have things like different elections modules that make it so that maybe if i don't have a lot of tokens which would be a very common way for someone to vote in the blockchain ecosystem you know if i have a lot of tokens i have a lot of say in a vote and this is okay this is fair certainly but it could devolve into a type of plutocracy maybe i have a lot of enthusiasm and even a lot to offer the network but i just don't have a lot of money for one reason or another and so in polkadot you can increase the amount that you vote into a vote by increasing the length of time that you agree to stay invested in the network so your commitment becomes a type of currency so this is like a wholly new protocol that's been built on a wholly new type of governance system that's been built on top of polka dot and has materialized through the frame runtime framework yes this is just more kind of details about this i'm not going to get into all the different like ways that referenda you know how a bill becomes a law that's not super interesting but it's there i want you to get more excited about the fact that it's happening in a truly next-generation fashion and and ps this isn't something that's like future state we launched in may we've been through several phases of governance where i think dan mentioned there was like a pseudo root user on polka dot it was gav um and and now that's gone uh now it's completely community governed using all of these next generation governance protocols that i was mentioning and come to our ecosystem learn more about it kusama is really where you can push the boundaries here um industry-leading security again kind of the boring stuff there are cryptographers and researchers and protocol engineers at the web3 foundation that make sure that all of this works someone you know brought up earlier the the parody hack multi-sig happened years ago stuff happens you know um we learn from our mistakes but i think actually what's here's how we learn from those mistakes is that polka dot in at the protocol level it allows for upgrades and so people don't create infallible systems people create systems that people first of all our needs change over time so we need to create systems that change over time as well but we also may make mistakes so the ability to perform upgrades is like the the secret sauce kind of cherry on top that just adds it all to this uh security that's done by the web 3 foundation researchers so dan talked about the runtime i think compiling down to wasm and becoming a part of the runtime storage and so just like i can update a balance in an account in runtime storage by making a transaction as long as you have the right access control rights which in polka dot is through governance that we talked about with you know voting with commitment or with tokens or whatever you can update the definition of the run time and fix bugs add new features and so over time some of these capabilities will spin out of the polka dot runtime itself and out into pair chains so we may have a pair chain that's just for governance and that is no longer a thing that happens in polka dot it's like a a service that the polka dot delegates um so i hope that really kind of makes you understand how this is like a truly composable computing system i'm kind of like you know this was supposed to be a 10-minute talk with i think uh our 20-minute talk with 10 minutes for uh questions so do we maybe have some uh yeah can you see the comments on the right side uh let's see should i i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and yes i see people yeah any can you help moderate some of these questions for me it's a little bit up to like read through them all sure absolutely i haven't seen there's there's a lot of activity to dig through because there's uh some spirited discussions uh i love it i love it dan nukem and dan's stirring things up a bit yup good so yeah but i can just i mean we're gonna get some swag um participate in our events for sure um dan forbes mentioned that your commitment is built into the currency how do you based on yeah so it's based on how long in in polka dot and i think yeah it would be a polka dot concept we use what's called a nominated proof of stake and so you stake your tokens you lock up your tokens your value your commitment to the the network and you can either have a say in a vote by committing a lot of tokens or you can say i'm going to commit these tokens for a long period of time i agree to lock them up for a long period of time and that can have the same effect as voting with a large number of tokens um i don't know much about where to buy cryptocurrency i yeah that's those aren't the types of questions that i answer thank you i love this hat and yes it's always good for uh deflecting questions that i don't want to answer what is kusama really this is such a good question thank you okay so we talked about polka dot as a protocol where you can build it's like an operating system or even maybe like a protocol for building operating systems and so earlier i mentioned that polka dot the network capital p capital n it is kind of like designed to be very business oriented very stable kind of like wall street if you will where you don't really want things to change very quickly because it makes it difficult for people to build businesses on top of like a moving target and this is really desirable in some cases but then of course crazy people like me we want to move fast and break things it and and so because of the way that blockchains work they rely on these crypto economic security guarantees you you need people to stake real value in order for things to really work in order to really see how things work you can't really truly test out blockchain protocols on a test net that has a faucet um because it's just not how it works it's not how the game theory works it's not how the crypto economic security guarantees work so kusama is a value-bearing network it has real value you can lose real money and make real money in kusama but the the zeitgeist of the kusama network the reason that everyone is there is to push boundaries and experiment and see what's next whereas the reason is every everyone is in polka dot is to create a stable platform for people to build profitable businesses so i'm working with a group of people right now on i'm going to shamelessly show something that i'm i'm working on there is a um upcoming art competition being done uh with a group out of china i can't share i don't know i'll put it in the private chat and maybe if someone could share it for me um yeah uh yeah this is something that's being done on kusama art on blockchain is much more of a kusama thing whereas you know like a sushi swap or something where people really want to make money that's more of a polka dot thing thank you for sharing that yes it's blockchain create art and where it's going to be mid-march uh hosted in china but it's going to be global um so yeah that's going to be super exciting you know i if there's i can kind of keep talking to fill the space or if if this is a good time for you to kind of make the transition to the next presenter i think you've got about another minute well yeah i see you know it seems like people are really getting it kusama is more on the creative side the experimental side maybe not even just creatively in terms of artwork but creatively in terms of code we want to see like oh does this work like in fact this art gallery thing what we're testing out is the idea of a native application on the relay chain so this art gallery that's going to be the platform for this competition is built right on kusama it's not a para chain and at least for now this is something that you wouldn't really see on polka dot but dan and you know his crazy friends at parody they want to try this out so kusama's for creativity if you're a hacker that's the place to be if you want to make money go to polkadot i prefer to hack than make money thanks dan we appreciate it man yeah thank you a lot of fun great events all right likewise bye-bye