War and Peace: The Multi-Chain Reality

at this point i'm going to uh put on my mc hat and hard fork myself and become an mcguy instead of presenter guy however we're going to stick with our our topic of interoperability and introduce a panel this panel is really going to be excellent i've been looking forward to it um we have uh ryan with massari moderating it and uh they're going to be delving into a lot of um just a lot of uh explorations of this multi-chain space uh ryan i want to say i give a quick shout out uh this is not a paid show but uh guys if you subscribe to um asari you're gonna get some great insights from ryan every morning i sit there and drink my coffee and i i appreciate that the thoughts you have it invariably leaves me feeling more positive and bullish on the overall ecosystem every morning so it's always a good read well i try to be mr brightside as everybody in the industry knows yeah that's right the optimism pervades um and on that note i'll throw it over to ryan and the uh the rest of the panel excellent billy peter how's it going ryan alex good to see you hello i believe we have one more waiting on that two more and we will get going while we wait for the last two to join we have a very very short amount of time for this panel there are five panelists one moderator i am going to get out of the way and i want you guys in 30 seconds you can introduce yourselves and maybe go round robin with your hottest take in terms of a trend to look out for when it comes to interoperability and this multi-chain future that we're going into let's hit the ground running full speed ahead we've got 25 minutes check that 23 minutes so let's go billy you're up first who are you where are you from how does take related interoperability to get us started howdy i'm billy from kentucky actually but i'm here in berlin i work at the interchain foundation i run the funding program there so i have a sort of bird's eye view of the ecosystem everybody who's sort of working on or towards the internet of blockchains and of course the trend to look out for is ibc pete hey all i'm peter morick head of public affairs at parity technologies obviously uh working quite a lot on polka dot these days after working on ethereum for a few years there and my hottest take on interoperability is the solution uh that that is most adopted for interoperability in the space is not going to be a pure interoperability play i'll have to unpack that in a minute alex hi i'm alex i'm one of the co-founders of mir and i think one of the interesting development that's happening in the interoperability is uh there are bridges that are being built between many protocols so as they get deployed the boundaries will disappear and so assets will not be confined to the protocols on which they are born and that will uncover many new use cases so that's pretty exciting hey guys matt luongo i'm the project lead at keep where we work on tbtc um i'd say trends that i'm really excited to see play out probably in this panel are permissionless versus permissioned um interoperability and whether or not uh interop should be paid to play and whether the general decentralization wins uh theme we've got so far in cryptocurrency extends to interoperability anatoly last but not least yeah hi i am anatoly resen i am a co-founder and the blockchain architect at parsic and it's pleasure to be here and to represent completely another side of the blockchain interoperability because now here all is speaking about the interoperability between blockchains how to deal with non-finality how to deal with all those those complex things but i'm representing the client side interoperability how to deal in real time with all those things that come from blockchains uh with their uh with with their problems so excellent uh peter uh you had the uh maybe the best teas of a take in that um the interoperability solution will not necessarily look uh like an interoperability solution what do you unpack that and um and let's talk about what it takes to actually abstract away um the fact that you're bridging between protocols and just getting to the essence of what users want which is uh something that is fast cheap and that ultimately is uh is going to be functioning and secure yeah at the end the end user shouldn't even really know what protocols they're running on right obviously our us blockchain nerds in the future will be interested in sort of what's under the hood but the most seamless user experience is going to be them opening up an app to you know deal with whatever application that they have that they want to engage with and that's why i say the uh the sort of i guess if there's going to be a winning interoperability solution or most adopted interoperability solution it's going to be a protocol that's doing a lot more than just connecting the blockchains right it needs to have a robust infrastructure of applications um sort of at the nexus of these uh interoperable links uh in order to fulfill that end user uh uh vision that we all have right so like if you're if you're you're looking at a pure just a simple bridge or um you know uh uh trustlessly swapping tokens between chains like that's interesting and a good step towards an interoperable future but what you really are going to want an application developer is really going to want is the ability to access all of the different technologies in the space from one uh uh i won't say central protocol that's that's enabling that uh trustless transaction across chain and and presenting it in a way to the end user that they don't even necessarily see any of the any of what's happening under the hood billy uh cosmos has been in the market longest after uh ethereum at least when it comes to main net uh implementations what are some of the key takeaways that you have um seeing not only different spokes in the cosmos ecosystem and kind of working through this multi-phase roll out of ipc but um what takeaways you have as other one alternatives also come online and start that bidding for developer mind share attention and ultimately looking to run some of these applications that have seen success on ethereum on their own uh discrete at this point network well it's been great to see some of our early sort of proposals um be kind of kind of uh come true as tested in other other projects so uh stuff like incentivized test nets kind of become a standard for how networks sort of roll things out we've also seen a couple projects sort of follow this hub and spoke model they sort of are starting to subscribe to this application specific model as a way for sovereignty and for scaling coordination via hub you could even say that there's you know you could put this in the category of sharding to some degree um and so it's been great to see some of our sort of oh we don't like that it's been great to see some of our early ideas play out uh across other projects you know i mean in some ways this is a competition and say you know they're they're providing similar solutions uh what's been sort of great from our perspective is that at the at the top of our priority list is ibc we think that the cosmos hub is a a really useful blockchain in the configuration of the internet of blockchains as a hub and spoke we think there's a lot of sort of interesting value propositions there but there's no like lock in for that and so as a priority ibc is something that we want and have been seeing happen on other networks as they come out so polkadot for example you know having ibc inside of substrate so that you could build a substrate chain connect to these internet of blockchain it's really sort of opened up so we're working with projects like cello to make sure that this protocol is available inside of their framework so we want to see all these sort of networks blossom we just want to make sure that they can all talk to us and to each other the ibc alex anything to add on that um you're one of the newer main nets uh in this conversation um how how does that impact your go to market and ability to attract new developers when you have folks like billy that have a minor head start in the grand scheme of things but multi-year head start when it comes to crypto uh developer adoption yeah i think i think when we were starting the fact that cosmos started one one year before us or maybe it was even more was definitely helpful not only from perspective of showing uh what works what doesn't but also uh i think cosmos was who built the entire validator community that exists today right so many validators that exist across protocols today they started from cosmos and or volcanoes i guess uh the second thing i think that cosmos showed to everybody is that uh once you start building bfg chains you can build interoperability between them right so bc i guess is entirely around that and so we're taking something uh what we believe is very close to abc and i guess abc will be part of it eventually uh or maybe we will see how it unfolds but once you start get once you have a lot of dft chains uh coexisting uh in in dft chains the light client has almost the same green tenon always the same security model as the full client and that allows building extremely secure bridges between the chains so if you want to bridge cosmos and mirror or if you want to bridge polka dot and cello the you can build a bridge which is making almost the same security assumptions as uh as the union or the intersection depends on terminology of the security assumptions of the underlying protocols which is uh i think what will what will enable what i was talking about before the the connection between the protocols in the way that the assets can be born in one place easily moved to another place acted upon them brought back matt uh peter was shaking his head at one point when billy brought up sharding and so i want to go back to your initial points on trusted interoperability solutions versus trustless is does that matter because at the end of the day you're either trusting a fledgling network or a fledgling company what is the difference in your mind in terms of trustlessness and and how teams are optimizing for cross-protocol bridges and um and being able to release cost route transactions or applications uh between these different protocols yeah sure i mean uh sorry ryan i'm gonna hear the question i wanna hear which which is like um i mean i think the kind of battle we're gonna see right now is whether or not we need to see monoliths um that everyone opts into and agrees like this is how the network or the network of networks should look or or whether we're going to see something a little bit more patchwork earlier peter said i think it was something like you know developers are going to want to have a unified experience across these chains um and i actually i don't know if that's true i mean as a developer i don't like to learn new things but i'm also not seeing people like deep down the door and say give me the most abstract and fancy library that can do everything because mostly they're just on ethereum and everything else that we're talking about right now is sort of speculative right so i hope that our community across all of our networks continues to care about being permissionless and open innovation rather than just sort of like pay to play from the get-go but um a lot of that i think is about the ideals of people on this call rather than what the market has said and we're going to find out over the next few years you know the market will weigh it and it's only anything to add there you're on mute if you are sorry sorry uh so i'm i'm uh looking at those things from different perspective uh because uh here when blockchains are connected everybody is interested in uh submitting transactions to other chains from one chain to other chain but uh we are speaking only about finalized transactions finalized realities from uh one finalized reality from one blockchain connects to uh finalized version of the reality of other blockchains but what what we can do in situations when we really need real-time uh real-time communication between blockchains are there any ability to read from one blockchain and non-final state of other blockchain because when you are inside the same blockchain you are kinda uh okay so i'm i'm doing everything but when uh when we're connecting different blockchains what to do and uh here we're trying to propose a solution uh and we will eventually work with all the inter blockchain communication protocols but this is not only relevant for uh like ethereum and maybe a couple other chains majority of dft chains they only have final reality right like if you think of cosmos or near there is no yeah which is not final and yeah but that's true though because if you think of these newer chains not the casting dispersions to anyone on this call as a user we can say oh they have instant finality but as a new community they can't fall back on social consensus so maybe they technically have instant finality and that it's just signature based but um you know if there's a community hard fork which is much more likely uh with a new chain than it is with for example ethereum or bitcoin um then all those finality guarantees that sound great to us techies kind of go away to end users yeah uh but in any case we even for those blockchains that have instant finality we have a difference between uh the time when the transaction is submitted to the mempool and when it is delivered and finalized and if we want to organize calculations on top of what is already submitted and visible then then we can have this um substantial gap for for some applications this gap is not a deal but for some like trading like making fast decisions it's really crucial yeah i just want to touch back on why i was uh wanted to shake my head to the idea that cosmos is sharded and i think it may make sense to step back and sort of define the two main types of multi-chains that we are seeing evolve so theoretically right now ethereum 1.0 is a multi-chain right it is a coordinating base layer with many different implementations of side chains and some bridges to other networks it's very similar to cosmos except the difference being cosmos is the the base layers tendermint on the cosmos hub and the atom and um i guess a ibc is like an additional sort of implementation where the side chains can talk to each other more efficiently that is in contrast to a sharded multi-change why i shook my head where in cosmos or ethereum 1.0 side chains all those side chains are required to provision their own validator set and provision their own security and their security as the uh the last speaker actually said towards the end of his presentations like when every individual chain is is required to provision their own security and maintain a token price to maintain economic security um you're going to see some chains that are much more secure and some chains that have no security um the difference with the sharded protocol is that all of those chains that are connected to the coordinating chain share the security of the entire network so this is like ethereum 2.0 except in ethereum 2.0 you can't own your own chard it's also similar to near but within year the sharding is sort of abstracted away and you sort of have capacity if you need it so it's less i guess customizable the way in polka dot you can actually own your own shard and not have to worry about say keeping your token price up or doing all the work that many in the cosmos community and polka dot near have done to build uh strong economically secure validator sets you can really share in that security rather than having to go out and lobby the world to uh to secure your change to the point where it is feasible for a developer to say this is a secure base layer for me to build my application on this of course being a design choice on our site because we believe that the features of a blockchain should be matching the purpose of that blockchain including security security should be designed exactly for its purpose and have its own properties there's not just one size fits all security on the scale of yes secure no secure we don't want to make that decision for you we also don't want to create a central point of failure where if our security proposal fails the entire network cascading fails with it we have segmented security we have segmented sovereign chains for that reason exactly right but you're not you're not saying that that is a fault in polka dot because it's not it's a design choice i mean i think that there's a we sort of embrace all design choices right polka dot is a choice and it has chairs which are great for a huge class of applications right but even if the security of the relay chain had some catastrophic failure that doesn't necessarily mean that parachains are immediately insecure their validator set can basically disconnect and continue securing the chain uh as a solo chain pretty rapidly there's a very simple path for that so just wanted to add that point as i would also like to add that cosmos was making shared security available through uh the the atom itself so i've been working on an ibc update that actually allows the validator set to be transferred over ibc which means that you can look towards any token that you like like the atom uh as your as your staking token um so again you know i think that we sort of embrace the entire spectrum of designs for security and capabilities and we're active and trying to push those forward matt uh you're one of the few uh buyers of uh interoperability uh having uh released tbtc so it's actually thinking about which other change you would want to operate with um aside from security assumptions as billy and peter going back and forth on um what are some of the other things that help you prioritize uh updates and support for a new level chain is that all about security is it all about users do token incentives play a role there are a number of areas in the quiver the folks have um but um what moves the needle uh from from an application provider standpoint well what a question um so i think when i look at i mean i'll start with just cosmos and and polka dot um you have this tradeoff [Music] well you have this trade-off and actually you know what let's talk about different people let's talk about altitudes for a second because you have a similar thing happening right now with altis look at something like arbitrarium and optimism so we have optimism in the ethereum community and they're clearly the d5 favorites so far or the biggest projects they've already said that they're going with optimism you have arbitrary on the other side and they have very similar tech very different games but as a developer you have to ask yourself which of these things am i going to build on arbitrary can build on today there's an open test net i don't need to talk to anyone i don't need to have a conversation or a partnership that needs to happen i can just do it and with optimism i can read the docs and i can prepare but unless i'm sort of blessed uh i don't get to join that test net or that may not roll out so i kind of see some similar trade-offs going on right now in the cosmos and and polka dot opportunity where you know it might turn out that this sort of like more centralized tribe of people who use one asset are actually more powerful but as a developer it is tougher for me to get involved because i'm going to have to talk to somebody i'm probably going to want them to give me some money for something versus ibc that's something that i can start working with potentially on ethereum and then slowly move toward like how do i get onto my own bft chain so i'd say that's one but the other one is just the evm and i hate this because there's a developer i i can't stand the evm i it's bad tech it's it's old it was great when it you know was created but since then we've everyone on this call probably has strong opinions on it and yet all my tools will work um and i would expect though i don't know um that it'll be easier to get users faster because i'll be able to ship product faster i would say the last consideration is users and the reason that i say the last consideration is none of us have users relative to you know ethereum um so you know i think the first chain that does have users developers will go there like you have to if you want people to use your stuff you have to go over their users but in lieu of users ease of experimentation and then ease of of just integrating your tech makes it a much easier pill to swallow and that's where i think actually nir has some serious advantages on the evm side and it's only uh thoughts on users user acquisition and and is there a way to abstract away the non-evm tech that you're using uh and uh and just come up with uh with a solution that is cheaper that is just as as simple for people to use but ultimately eliminates some of the headaches associated with ethereum today anatoly we're going to work on your mute button this next time okay sorry sorry sorry uh i would say that um yes there are there are ways how to abstract things uh for non-evm uh for non evm technology uh but i see from the user's perspective uh from not from the user from programmers because programmers are our users uh from from progress perspective i see a huge difference between uh synchronous blockchains and asynchronous blockchains because uh main value proposition of blockchains was connected uh uh with simplicity of creating financial services and if you are trying to create financial services on something that is as incredible where it is too easy to make and mistake and mismatch between intention and implementation and in asynchronous world it is it is too easy to make such a problem then uh i see that uh something like that uh something like evm will still be there we will work we will live with the evm uh for for a long time uh because of its synchronity and we will we will connect to it from from other blockchains where we will create uh non-smart contract related things like games like updated centralized applications but not financial things yeah matt's uh matt's point on uh you know wanting to see users versus then developers moving we're actually seeing a little bit of the reverse with a couple of these polka dot pair chains so moonbeam is a really good example on the evm side where it's going to give developers access to all that tooling that they're used to right is basically you can copy and paste your eth tooling into moonbeam you can copy and paste your solidity code into moonbeam you can run evm in a more on a more scalable chain that also gives you the open opening to say explore the functionality and other chains within polka dot and over bridges um in order to integrate so we're seeing a lot of these d5 projects starting to move obviously we had the announcement of ample fourth building on akala a little while back about an hour and a half ago it was announced that curve is implementing on equilibrium another parachain building on polka dot that's optimized for defy and then obviously moonbeam has seen quite a lot of take up with some of the dexes and other ethereum made of d5 projects that really do want that ease of developer experience say copy and paste my code into a uh development environment that's going to then open up the door to all the other potential optimized d5 primitives that are going to exist on say akala or equilibrium which are more like non-evm native development environments that really going to give these applications more oomph while still not losing that baseline of work that you've done implementing uh in a smart contract environment like on ethereum six men 25 minutes that's a wrap alex i was going to try to get to you for one more speed round we're gonna have to wait till next time thank you for the insights gentlemen um i'm a very strong believer that uh with respect to layer twos we're not gonna see just one or even two i think users will self-select for the the right type of use case uh and i think it's gonna be very similar with uh you know different layer ones uh maybe the shared security is preferable for some types of dapps and users and uh perhaps we didn't even get to the layer twos on polka dot that's where it gets really far up era chains on polka dot uh billy mentioned the fact that that cosmos uh cosmos hub could actually uh provide a validation layer for any zone so i think the key takeaway here is this is evolving very quickly and uh in just six to 12 months we'll see it'll look vastly different with a lot of um benefits accruing to users and developers alike um so thanks again panelists and ryan appreciate it thanks all thank you everybody