The Internet Is More Than Email, & the Blockchain Is More Than Tokens From Sean Robb Flow Foundation

[Music] hi everybody awesome let's kick off so I'm excited to be here I'm super pumped to be building in this space and I'm really happy to be talking to you today I want to talk to you about how I view blockchains and so much of the blockchain conversation today is based around tokens this talk is so we can look Beyond tokens and and just token moving machines so I want to qu make a quick analogy to the internet just like the internet became more than just email I see blockchains becoming more than just tokens uh first I'll kick off my name is Sean uh I lead developer growth at the flow Foundation what we do at the flow Foundation is we get to build the blow flow blockchain and what I get to do with my day is I get to spend a lot of time with app Builders and developers building really cool applications and really trying creative things a lot of which you can go check out at the flow Castle or at the flow booth and the main event and I'm really excited to chat with you about uh how we talk about blockchains both first let's start with the internet so at first the internet was a niche technology exciting most people didn't know what to do with it or how to use it but that changed pretty dramatically so what changed what actually made people use it what made people care email it was the first killer app everyone understood it everyone remembers their you got that male moment it was simple it was useful it was understandable email made the internet relevant to the masses but of course the internet didn't stop there there the internet be enabled platforms to rise and completely transform businesses e-commerce digital media created new things like social networks for distribution of these thing of these new n or of these new digital media we started with a niche technology that everyone was excited about no one really knew how to use and we became a foundation of modern applications the internet became the home for developers and became the place to build Facebook Twitter Reddit all of these places were Innovative developer driven platforms the internet's real value wasn't just email and sending messages across the globe in seconds it was that it was an open platform that developers could build on and create in incredible things so let's talk about blockchains most of web 3 today most most of what we see today is focused on tokens it feels very similar to what blockchain space was in 2017 then we had funable tokens Bitcoin and ethereum and we had non-fungible tokens crypto pump but what really changed this what opened people's eyes it was crypto kitties I don't know if everyone here remembers crypto kitties when it launched it was a pretty funny little cat game uh but it was so much more than just the crypto kitties tokens that many people see today on openc um while cryptokitties did introduce the ERC 721 standard and was one of the first nfts to pull it in uh cryptokitties showed blockchains can be more than just tokens it changed how we view blockchains entirely and really radically changed what happened next crypto kitties uh show that blockchains should and could support fully onchain applications just to give everyone a size of the a scope and scale of crypto kitties as of today there's about 120,000 owners of a digital cat with over 2 million digital cats alive today but they're not just nfts they are interactive generative and fully onchain cryptokitties is two major things is generative art there's onchain DNA that you can actually look at every single digital cat and every single digital cat is unique down to the DNA and that DNA uh is is used to Mint new cats so you create have two parent crypto kitties they can be bred together and create a new crypto Kitty all of which are completely unique all of which have unique DNA and all of which you can see the entire lineage of so that's that's pretty incredible for just an ERC 721 that's why I say crypto kitties is more than just a token it's also a game things like minting cats or breeding cats was fully onchain onchain actions interacting with a solidity smart contract and these onchain actions had side effects of the game not only did you make make a new digital cat you actually impacted the parent cats as well so there was cooldown clocks so the more uh uh Offspring a parent cat would have the slower they would be able to breed again and over and over again it would actually it would impact the the the digital cat that you were using and their ability to continue to play the game the Builders of crypto kitties saw something amazing as building this shortly after crypto's kitties launched there are many applications that tried to compose on top of crypto kitties whether it's uh Kitty hats I think is one of our favorite ones where you could buy an actual digital hat to put on your capat and it really opened up the crypto kitties team's eyes to say wait a minute this is more than just tokens this is more than just this quick little game this is a full developer platform that is a platform without platform risk and we should be able to build more and build something different as well but after crypto kites was born one new app category came into play openc was initially launched right after crypto kitties and just entirely traded crypto kitties on its first launch um and honestly that's where it feels like most of the energy has gone since then uh new tokens new platforms to trade them we're just building more and more token moving machines but I want us to challenge us and I want us to think differently about what we can do with blockchains so just like the internet was wasn't just email blockchains are so much more than tokens they are full developer platforms crypto kitties taught us a lot of lessons and we're still learning many of them today there are so many headlines that if you look up crypto kitties or Google it today you'll see crypto kitties broke ethereum but there's so much more to it crypto kitties proved that blockchain should be developer platforms but it also broke down ethereum's protocol fundamentally during the crypto Kitty hype uh ethereum was almost entirely unusable block space was full gas was skyrocketing and even icos were delayed you can see many people that were incredibly frustrated that they had their white paper they had the hype they were ready to drop drop their token and they had to delay it because some funny cat game really ruined their plans there was a lot of flashback to crypto kitties and people saying this is a ser serious platform F finance and you built this cat game and you're ruining it but it was a platform without platform risk there was nothing that could be done to censor to stop or to slow crypto kitties it was treating evenly on this platform uh of ethereum so after crypto kitties after crypto kitties did this to ethereum filled up its block States cause cause all these gas fees to Skyrocket there were two major responses that we saw ethereum's response really focused on more tokens more transactions and more rollups you'll see that the trend of l2s l3s I'm sure at some point we'll get to L4 um and ethereum really doubled down to more tokens and more transactions really focus on how do we just get more people interacting with the evm flo took a step back came from the lessons that of the crypto kitties team as they built it and we rethought what it would be to build a developer platform without developer without platform risk we had to rethink the entire execution environment and think what was best for the app developer and not what is best for the protocol um let's talk about the impact of these decisions and these architecture plans that we we went forward with so ethereum really again focused on scaling apps or scaling transactions not apps the headaches that that led to is fragmentation each rollup acts as its own ecosystem it has it apps and contracts cannot easily interact with each other there's some way where you can move semi fungible tokens across these ecosystems but because you do not have that connection that same Uncharted space it's very difficult to to build on top of other applications in a rollup liquidity then becomes split across all of these rollups and now you'll see all of the Roll-Ups that l2's fighting for liquidity or fighting for tbll and really trying to attract people in and I I want us to really think honestly this is more than just uiux problems this isn't something that can be solved with a clever JavaScript library this is very important that we need to rethink of how we're building applications and the importance of those applications the other thing l2's introduced was a centralized sequencer and the benefit was well we can move faster we can do all these things faster but centralized execution in introduces platform risk fundamentally L2 sequencers are centralized under single operators they can censor reorder prioritize transaction which just opens the door wide open for me for anyone to use on those L2 sequencers and then adding in decentralized sequencing that many people say that's what's next for l2s that's what's going to happen that just slows the entire promise of l2s down the speed promise that they have these fast block times that they're competing with end up being slower because you need to have the decentralized sequencer for that you need to have consensus slowing down and losing the benefit of the L2 fundamentally operators are are the centralized entities so they can be influenced they can be pressured to sensor and we've seen this actually already with sonon uh uh Sony's L2 developers headaches now I I think many of us we can walk around the stage or walk around the the Expo and we'll see all these different l2s how do you choose which one you want to be on is it where the cool kids are where the liquidity is they gave me a cool t-shirt it's very tough you don't necessarily know if they have all of the platforms and services that you need you don't know if they're going to have the liquidity that you want or need and it's extra actually extra hard is they need to have enough liquidity that you can make money but not so many users that you're going to compete for Block space because you need to make sure your app can grow as well it's a very big headache a very tough problem to solve and then you need to look at who's actually running this rollup do I trust them that they're not going to walk away from this in 12 months 14 months and every single L2 is different you'll see a term of evm uh evm uh uh compatible thrown around evm compatible is not evm uh equivalent and it shows very quickly as developers are trying to onboard to these different l2s we wanted to build a a developer platform without platform risk a great developer platform removes these headaches of rollups fragmented liquidity and unpredictable fees most protocols besides flow since cryptokitties are either too Niche to be the global computer or have focused on scaling the protocol and not the impact of the developers that are building the incredible apps on top of it to us a full developer platform must have Atomic composability built-in scalability and no platform risk because it is a decentralized and autonomous protocol fun we seem to talk often about interoperability and I don't hear as much conversation about composability composability is important it fundamentally unlocks Innovation flow has a unified execution environment what this means is there's no fragmentation no rollups assets apps liquidity all exist in the same state space smart contracts can engage and interact with each other and there's no need to bridge across these different sharted execution environments or state spaces additionally in the lessons of crypto kitties we just we decided we want to build a smart contract language purpose built for smart contracts themselves we love solidity we love what it did it introduced the smart contract concept to us but there was a lot of limitations that we felt and it did not seem like these digital assets or first class citizens so we created Cadence it's a resource oriented programming digital assets are first class CI and it reduces security list the language itself guarantees that you're not going to accidentally copy or delete assets they are full things that can be moved across different accounts fundamentally we think smart contracts should not be hard we've seen too many platforms talking about templatized down what a smart contract is because they're just too hard you got to do all these audits to the lowest common denominator of what a smart contract can be we think this is the wrong approach we think this is the wrong direction uh we want to see a blockchain become more than just tokens and token moving machines we should be innovating at the Smart contract level and Cadence is an attempt for us to make that possible for everyone to build in web 3 it is easier to read it is easier to write it is easier to audit we we leverage Quant stamp frequently for our Audits and one of the feedback we got from one of the Auditors was man Cadence is so easy to read you're going to put us out of a job that was pretty incredible endorsement of the language that you can understand it so clearly and so concisely it was really kind of fun we talk with a lot with our Engineers over at the Dapper Labs team who build NBA Top Shot and NFL all day and they they treat uh writing Cadence just like another programming language of JavaScript or react or go all of their Engineers can read understand and want to build with cadence and it's not necessarily just a thing that a few people get to sit in the corner they're the smart contract engineer group last year we recently unlocked evm equivalents so what we noticed is inside of arcade's execution environment we could actually run an entire evm natively within that execution environment what this means is it's a seamless migration for all solidity developers we built flows to help to push web 3 forward but we are not interoperable with the the current existing evm so we introduced evm we wanted to make sure solidity developers could run Deploy on on flow without any smart contract changes and we achieved that late last year in September with our Crescendo upgrade since then we've seen a lot of changes about flow you can see every every few weeks a new project that everyone knows and loves is launching on Flow like axar layer zero and openc see of recently joined the flow ecosystem and they're now running natively on Flow earlier this week our tooling team is working on making sure that Cadence and solidity can live happily together you can compose on top of solidity tokens whether ERC 721 or ERC 7 or erc20 compose with cadence building incredible applications using these interoperable tokens that can move cross chain and using the solidity Primitives to build those awesome applications and on top of using Cadence you could then Leverage The Cadence transaction model that enables gas transactions natively you can use scripted transactions where you can have if statements and for Loops in your transaction you do not have to push all of your business logic into something immutable accessible and risky of the smart contract you could have that natively within your transaction building really cool really cool experiences it's pretty awesome to see what people have done with just simple transactions on Flow we like to say flow is an a blockchain that was built by app builders for app Builders our multi architecture enables horizontal scalability while remaining entirely decentralized multi-roll architecture enables horizontal scaling so as you can see we have this nice graphic the pink uh or now it's orange the execution node allows for horizontal scalability which means we can add execution nodes if we would need more throughput or TPS we can scale those for we can scale those vertically as well so we can add compute power to execution nodes for more TPS but we can do this without necessarily compromising decentralization how we can do that is we have a new concept of nodes of collection nodes consensus nodes and verification nodes so if we want to increase our decentralization while remaining fast we add collection nodes we can be censorship resistant with collection nodes consensus nodes we can remain decentralized with verification nodes and consensus nodes allowing for our our our our blockchain to run quickly and process many transactions with our with our separation of collection and consensus nodes we have native we have proposer Builder separation as well what this means is me is not possible on Flow natively we have a separate node that builds the block and we have a separate node that propos the block to the ecosystem uh simple and fast settlement with dedicated verification and consensus nodes and then as you can see on the on the right here on the chart you can see the different node types and how we see redundancy with those so this allows us to remain efficient while we're decentralized we want things like consensus verification and collection to be run by everyone whether it's a a little little computer sitting in someone's basement or someone that wants to make sure that they can run their run their operation run their business on top execution nodes on the other hand can be these massive nodes they can they can be larger than what we would imagine but we we can run less of them and have less redundancy needed because we can still remain decentralized through consensus uh and collection and verification we designed Flo to support millions of users on day one and we want we we designed it to handle pedabytes of storage other blockchains as you can see on the the bottom right chart while Flo is designed to grow with the successive applications other blockchains have just continued to move up the the glass ceiling as we call it just taking chunks of now we can just move a little bit faster than before not solving the scalability problem just sharding it to some be someone else's problem our Chief Architect likes to say flow is a computer anyone can use everyone can trust and no one can shut down let's break down this statement a computer is a place you can execute applications all of the uh all the platforms you see on the screen check this box uh a place that anyone could use this is another way of saying consumer ready most of these applications check this box you could you could send this to your mother your sister your brother your dad they would use it in a place that everyone can trust some of these applications would be close but I don't think we can say everyone trusts every single one of these platforms and no one can shut down all of these platforms fall flat on that standard today directly a platform that everyone can trust and no one can shut down needs to be a platform without platform risk it needs to be fully permissionless and autonomous and platform risk isn't just a doomsday or or or a chicken little moment this happens every single day centralized platforms are risky because that you can either not trust the person who is running it or someone has the power to shut it down or censor it Apple App Store is the most common example of this you fundamentally have to give them their 30% tax if you're going to do purchases within their on their iPhone and they have full control of what applications can be published and downloaded to their iPhone steam recently in 20121 banned blockchain games with little to no warning removing people from their Marketplace overnight Reddit and Twitter in 2023 completely changed how their API worked and either increased costs or cut off apis entirely killing businesses and third party clients again overnight that is that is fundamental platform risk you have an incredible business like Apollo and one of the largest Reddit uh Reddit applications in the App Store and within a week they were they were dead in the water because the apis changed and they couldn't fund their run their business anymore most recently is telegram has done this they've announced that no one anyone that writes a mini app you have to work with the ton blockchain you cannot integrate any other blockchains to it so this while it has been important for us it's even more important now when you look at the future of of application fundamentally I think they should be the blockchain applications autonomous AI agents they need to be able to run on a platform without platform risk imagine an AI agent that becomes restricted from viewing certain flights because maybe maybe Southwest doesn't love a certain AI agent or United isn't wants you to use their AI agent this is true today Southwest does not work across different platforms if you go to kayak you cannot see Southwest flights you have to go to Southwest to see Southwest flights onchain games gaming assets are digital assets they should be treated with the same respect and dignity as physical assets we accept too many people changing assets taking them away or risk of developers disappearing and not and us not being able to maintain access to those Creator economies we should remove the middlemen get rid of rent seeking Behavior Uh creators should be able to do cool and their fans should be able to pay them for it fundamentally that's how this should work and social networks while the social networks need to be a place where people can trust and no one can shut down deplatforming has been the talk of a town for for many years now while many people like to cry wolf on the topic it's becoming a real problem and demonetized is now a Scarlet Letter on many creators chest that they have to wear uh flow is the only blockchain focused and designed to be a developer platform without platform risk we have some some incredible Builders and brands on Flow today we've processed over about 700 million transactions we are run on 440 nodes across 20 countries and it's time for all of us to think of how we can build Beyond tokens so please start building on flow today check out developers. flow.com build the next killer app with cadence our our smart contract programming language or simply run your your solidity contracts on Flow be faster cheaper and more efficient and remove platform risk from your application thank you everybody