EthCC 2: Dillon Chen

everyone thanks for coming thanks Jess for coming so I'll be again talking about Edgware thank you jack for emceeing this whole day all I still wait for everyone to kind of take their seats or settle down a little bit cool so hi everyone I'm Dylan Chen one of the cofounders of Commonwealth labs Commonwealth Labs is a company in New York we work we work on multiple products focused on the governance space but in particular I'll be talking about edge where we're still pretty distributed we have people in San Francisco we work with folks in Detroit as well as Europe as well when you spend a lot of time with the parity team as we work on substrate but today I'll be talking about what Edgware is and TL DR or actually let me move on to the next slide what is edge where can I work this what is edge where I guess I spelled it already but this is the first result on on DuckDuckGo I don't use Google anymore so please help us with the SEO as we can so edge where this is this like small I mean I don't want to read the exact same thing so we have a long way to go to kind of spread the edge word name and but hopefully a little bit of what we can do today is doing that but in crypto land what edge where is it's a few things it's a dev friendly smart contract platform that has wasum so you can build within any language and then it compiles down to the wasum tool chain you can distribute sorry we're distributing tokens directly it's the community and I'll dive into each point specifically as this kind of presentation goes on and furthermore from that initial oaken distribution what will happen is people will continuously vote to allocate more tokens from the Treasury to fund different projects to validate different nodes to help other open-source projects within the space and lastly we kind of inherit scale ability from polka dot in building within the the ecosystem and so I'll talk through the first point so if the room is pretty developer friendly it is everyone like what is the breakdown of the room is it mostly developers here can I get like a show of hands really okay all right so everyone now I don't need to know I don't need to discuss that so whaza dev friendly with this little emoji over here so as we know if we've been developing in in the crypto space for a while we previous company of ours called source that was Airbnb for Wi-Fi we were building smart contracts in 2015-2016 and ran into a lot of just challenges around tooling and so we're really excited to be able to build with a whole set of laws and tool chains built by the larger community outside of just cryptocurrency I think one of the things that we also think about a lot is how we can innovate engage developers outside of you know maybe this room or who are kind of familiar with the lingo that we talk about every single day where we're recent grads and a lot of the things that we see on US campuses are still a lot of developers focused on just machine learning or just normal web dev and so there's a lot of communication that can happen around just bringing developers over and over to the cryptocurrency ecosystem and we think a lot of that can happen with web sembly and hopefully with substrate as well other kind of features that help make edge were dev friendly we're built on substrate and so we announced originally Edgeworth the project at web 3 summit right after GAF talked so he at web 3 if you didn't see it'll go down as one of the greatest presentations ever kind of a Steve Jobs like moment in which he built and customized a substrate chain and we we talked about what we're building edge where right after that and so basically the way we see edge we're sorry substrate is it's three layers it's the module level where you can build different components that you want to integrate into your tool chain or I keep saying tool chain your your pair chain and then underneath that you have the consensus layer and then underneath that you have this networking layer and so the things that we don't have to worry about are the things underneath that right we're focused on the smart contract level we're focused on the governance aspects around making that an easy developer experience and so we were able to not we didn't have to focus on the things that were a little bit too heavy-handed so to speak and so for us the the way we kind of like build and integrate with the substrate ecosystem is by building these sets of governance tools and again I'll dive further into this but from you eyes the different voting models social norms an aggregated community that we can hopefully bring to the rest of the polka-dot ecosystem polka dot web three ecosystem and again from the web three slash substrate and polka dot side we can bring in the the core technology that kind of helps make things great and obviously all these things will be voted in with with the Unchained governance that we can we inherit from substrate and again a lot of confusion from our own experiences working on different platforms is the fact that sometimes we have a lack of a clear roadmap and lack of clarity often leads to uncertainty around how things are being built you know and this comes from our own experience so one of the things we hope to do on edge were is to have the community come up with a roadmap you know something a year or two out have that be formalized on chain and then and then voted on essentially to be implemented and so there's a whole set of tools around that built on chain to help start to bootstrap that process and the the wider set of tools around that to help make that developer experience seamless and simple and so this kind of goes to the second aspect from the tooling around edge where there's the idea of distributing those tokens rights to the community ready to start and so we're doing this in a process called the lock drop I can't even remember who coined the term but it's kind of stuck and so the lock drop is a pretty simple process where anyone can time lock their aetherium and they can receive Edgware tokens or edge for short once that lock drop is over and so what the lock drop is is a really simple set of contracts there's the lock drop contract I actually I should have inserted the the the slide to show you how it what it looks looks like but there's a lock drop contract in which you send e to you specify the amount of time that you want to lock up for three months six months or 12 months and you essentially are able to generate your own lock specific contract so none of the cont the funds our custody none of the funds are used to fund further development on the project the lock drop is just to distribute tokens to the community to bootstrap the network and distribute tokens widely and so again we want everyone to participate in this process it's it should be open it should be open to the core developers validators anyone who kind of wants to gain a foothold or an entry point into the substrate polka-dotty ecosystem should hopefully come over to edge where and as the slide says 90% of the tokens are being given away so there's a small portion that's kind of reserved for initial contributors and 90% of the initial distribution as well as the inflation that comes after will be funded will fund different developers and validators and so this is the lock schedule essentially so there's another thing that I didn't mention is this ability for you to signal and so hopefully we can actually further distribution because we know that three months six months twelve months that's quite a bit of time and you can essentially you have to use your you have to weigh the opportunity cost of holding eath against essentially participating in this network and so and so there's a bonus associated with this and we want to make this as friendly as possible for anyone to participate at the additional feature of this signal essentially something that happened with the carbon vote we take a snapshot of the each chain and then once you essentially from a single address you can say hey I want a signal from this address your balance will be taken into account and you'll be able to claim Edgware tokens twelve months after the network launches right and so although it widens distribution obviously there's a few game theoretic things that go on you get if you get your tokens from locking up and signaling you get something you're able to participate in the network already to essentially either earn further tokens or participate and spin up daps earlier so there is a little bit of stuff to play around with the drops and the signals and so who should participate again it should be anyone who participates in a smart contract chain itself so core network devs that want to see further improvements to their own chain they can again experiment with the on chain governance here staffers and validators they can earn rewards we're looking at 20% inflation in the first year 10% oh sorry 10% of the total inflation or 50% of the block reward will be given to stickers and so it depending on the actual the actual amount of tokens that are delegated towards validators or stickers we should see an inflation rate of 28 sorry not 20 something like twelve twelve point five percent which puts us in line with other chains out there so it should be an economically competitive network so to speak and given the on chain governance aspect and the tools that we build around that we should be able to have something where you can create different dows to experiment on the network well I won't dive too far into it right now there's there's we're building an exciting set of tools on the module level to help enable experimentation around this and again it's a fully functional smart contract platform it's something that directly integrates with polka-dot so if you want to dip your toes into the polka dot ecosystem this is kind of the ideal way to start if you don't want to spin up something and mess around with different modules which can be a little fearful but it's actually not that hard so again there's this community governed block board so the community governed block board is governed by Edgware governance and so the the modules that we've decided to build defining storage defining different function calls are centered around these different things so from the center outwards this is actually a module that we inherit from the substrate library itself is this council council module and so in this council you essentially are pure weighted voters so it's one-to-one voting based on an account and the actions the votes that you take here basically affect how the rest of the ecosystem can vote so there's this notion of quorum biasing and depending on if there is a majority vote a supermajority of the council members or even a unanimous vote that will affect the amount of that'll affect the the quorum needed to actually reach something that actually has a binding effect for on chain governance but the council and voting members on to the council is not the only way to participate so within democracy you can actually think of an is a the ring around this kind of central layer of governance so within democracy 1 you're you're always going to be voting in different council members initially well we'll start with six council members as we start to grow the community but we would like to expand that to around thirty again as as Ryan talked about before within the the web through ecosystem what we'd like to see is a set of norms develop we're not just not just validators not just different open-source developers comment to the network we hope all of them will participate in this on chain governance process and so this council and voting different members on in a rotating fashion with a fixed term is our way to kind of help solve that additionally within the democracy module essentially what will happen is that you'll be able to vote and send in a specific proposal so anyone who holds a juror token is able to do this the way that this happens is that they lock a certain amount of token they will send a proposal to the chain itself and then it'll populate and be able to be populated into any kind of API or application that is able to reference the chain and then people will vote and hopefully all things go well and a change gets integrated so there's two ways to participate in edge or governance so proposal as I mentioned before can come from the council module itself it can be voted on by the set of peer voters the Lord can be brought forth by anyone in the community itself but what direction should the community move in what direction should Edgware itself move in and so that's something that we decided needed a little more clarity around well a lot of conversation happens on Twitter on discord on reddit and we love those communities we use those tools every single day it can be kind of tough to decide what actually is the signal and what actually is just noise and so the signaling module that we've built are a set of non-binding polls or voting options to allow you to see okay this is what this set of users or voters actually wants and so we'll start to tailor different democracy proposals different council proposals to this so within the signal signaling module that we've built there's a few different voting strategies and we hope to assent integrate more over time but a few of them that we've prototyped right now are just the normal binary votes that happen multi or multiple choice ballots commit for reveal schemes and we're starting to experiment with some Zeke a snark based anonymous voting we'd like to do some linkable ring stuff we'll see if we have time in the next few months before the chain gets launched and so that whole governance process that I just mentioned before a large proponent of that beyond just voting on cord network upgrades is to govern this edge we're Dow this half of this block reward will always be allocated to this on chain Treasury and so again that should be 10% of the network in the first year and so this should fund different validators different node developers different end-users and it works like Adele and so that means anyone who holds Edgware token should be able to participate we want it to be an open process again I can't stress that enough so I think we've internally fielded 28 25 different proposals and as we kind of start to spin up this custom UI to participate in Edgware governance you can you can kind of start to see that right away this is the UI that I mentioned these screenshots are actually old so please don't judge we are actually a week or two away from having full transact and signing with my crypto and meta mask to engage in a drug governance so this is you know we would like to see essentially a home page as well as different proposals it should look a lot like github something that we all should hopefully be familiar with and it should make it easy to participate in these on chain votes I think one thing to note is that as I click through these things is that we want the UI that we build to be extensible and work across different chains so within the substrate ecosystem we'd like to integrate with those chains as well and in the broader community not just sorry not a juror not just polkadot all chains need governance whether that be on chain and formal or you know just using the signalling libraries that we built everyone has their own governance process and we're still looking for empirical evidence obviously for what types of governance actually works and so the more experiments that we can run the more processes the more organizations that actually participate in this process the more data that we can gather all add to this kind of effort that we're all participating in in trying to help make organizations run better and obviously one concern with token weighted voting especially with in democracy level is preventing plutocracy I won't rehash the same arguments that Ryan talked about plutocracy may or may not lead to bad decisions it depends who holds the tokens and we feel that with the validation and the block award we should be able to one distribute tokens more fairly between the different network actors but wewe also feel like we have a few specific tactics to essentially prevent against plutocracy and of course one thing to note here is that we can always change these things right these are all live processes they're never set in stone it's a binding set of norms that we have with each other that are formalized into a process and so these are the the norms that we want to start with is the lock duration voting that we inherit from building on substrate and so you know a tldr I know there are a few people that walked in but so lock duration voting is essentially when you vote within the democracy level you can say like hey I want to lock for 2 weeks hey I want to lock for 4 weeks it's something you know like the lock trap that we're doing and for the additional amount of time that you lock for you get essentially bonus we want you to put skin in the game for something that you vote for and obviously larger holders of tokens can also do this but if they're really that if they really feel strongly about something then hopefully that's something that you know they're looking out for their own interest here and so quorum biasing is another tactic that we can use so based on the overall participation rate and we know one thing that we've seen within nonprofits in traditional settings the Sierra Club usually has like a vote participation rate of five or six percent right for this organization and we see you know within different Aragon proposals or proposals within a larger ecosystem voting in and getting participation is often tough and so we want to make sure even if there is low voter participation that we can actually get to the the results that individuals actually want for the whole network and so if there's lower participation you should have a supermajority that is larger than just you know 50% just the majority and so there's a formula that again I realized I should have just posted on here instead of describing but essentially what that'll do is as the number of people as the the quorum rate rises you need less of a majority eventually converging to 50% as the the total participation converges to a hundred percent again another way to prevent plutocracy or other kind of malicious voters is integrating identity this is actually another module that were building out is a way to essentially ingest different claims or verify or create different claims about an edge where address one of the things I click through here before if you can see in the top right corner top right corner you you have here Raymond Raymond is another one of our co-founders this is you know this is his github handle and so what actually happens with Edgar and edge identity is you can submit a claim about some different networks that you participate in whether it be github Twitter LinkedIn why not telegram whatever groups that we participate and link your identity obviously this is an opt-in process right so you can obviously remain total anonymous if you so choose to but it helps bring a little bit of transparency towards the network to see who is actually participating this process it also gives the added benefit of when you're actually talking about these things in a public forum on Twitter and stuff you can actually see who actually hold skin of the game right and you can weigh their opinion against everyone else's to have a more informed opinion about what actually is going on and so that's identity and furthermore identity is kind of the the basis for other interesting voting mechanisms that can be processed so for something like quadratic voting we need a stable identity set right if you can move your tokens into from one account to another account then you can start to split your vote and that's a motion stack so we need we need to be civil resistant so if we can divine if we can define an identity or voting set from this identity module that we built whether that be the set of individuals who have linked their Twitter identity to an enter address we can start to run these experimentations around one person one vote one account or one identity one vote or something like Q V which which hopefully may be the Silver Bullet to all of our governs questions who knows and last but not least a juror has inherits a lot of scalability from polka dots so one thing to note is the lock drop will happen June first and so it'll Edgware itself should be able to autonomously boot so to speak right before polka dot actually launches main up so a little bit more on the lock drop process the the lock drop will happen June 1st to June 15th two weeks and then after that you should be able to reference all the events that were fired in the process of creating a lock or creating a signal right and from that anyone can you know go to github look at our client and then essentially say they can use our the the script we've built it's locked drop helper is what the file is called and should be able to pull the etherium chain to see the the the initial genesis config of who's actually locked who's actually signaled and basically spin up that Genesis config and so from there they should be able to participate in this on chain governance process either validating or voting on different proposals within the network and one of the proposals that will eventually happen as polka-dot comes online Edgware itself in the first place will still have to be a solo chain so to speak it'll I'll be all alone on its own Island and as polka-dot comes online it will have to be integrated into it'll have to be integrated as a pair chain within this ecosystem all right and so what happens to the edgeware token holders what happens to the validators and different participants on the network that will be a proposal that'll happen that'll be voted on on chain another question to ask might be why build on edge where if you're a smart contract developer I personally see a few reasons so you still have the the permission list and composable smart contract the design philosophy that we see on something like aetherium where you should be able to spin up a contract without staking or leasing or something like that and still get that guaranteed security from polka-dot itself so it is that still Sam sandbox environment where you can start to play and stack different different layers of smart contracts on top of each other to create a different application should be an easy easier lighter-weight way of interfacing and interacting with a polka dot interface so we hope to be the the playground so to speak we hope to be the the first place where developers kind of come to to participate within the polka dot web 3 ecosystem and again I guess I've hammered at home a little bit but you know why not another comment it should be scalable and here so a lot of the the consensus we we actually inherit from building on substrate grandpa finality there's there's a there's a whole host of modules that are integrated into the the substrate s RML library and you can pick and choose as components and we've chosen to go with the things that that poke it out itself will launch with and that brings me to my last slide which is the edgeware lock drop this is really a call to action all right so again a lot of the work we've done already is towards garnering community it's towards building up a list of 1500 interested lock drop participants its building out the initial budding community of validators I think we have around 10 15 interested parties right now but it's it's still a very very nascent community and we'd love for you guys to participate within that so whether your core network dev you want to participate in experiment with the on chain governance process or you want to develop smart contracts and need like a an easier way to dip your toes into an environment that you're pretty familiar with we feel that Edgar can be that place and so even before the the June 21 20 19 launch date lock drop date we hope you can come and join a community so we'll be spinning out the the test net that's actually already up you can find all the info on Edgware and hopefully boost our SEO on the process you can follow us on twitter at hey Edgar or you can get in touch with us at founders at Commonwealth I am and that is Edward [Applause] [Music] [Applause] does anyone have any questions for good questions we have some some really new swag and great t-shirts up here so if you ask a question you get one I don't need t-shirts because I'm gonna get too many but thank you anyway just questions for the token drop I remember some someone like handshake splashed by like distributing hundred million but that was logic was VC injecting ten million and they put some cash injection are you guys doing something similar or is this a kind of non financial body governance token you mentioned handshake and I guess can you repeat the part about cash injection so like I if I understand correctly they said they're going to give away a hundred million worth of money they are talking to open source community but our logic is they actually have ten million was injected from BC but they inflated by distributing so much like seventy percent or something are you doing something similar why this is period cap and I was talking with no financial value so it is so we're not there's no I guess to you know speak on the Common Wealth / edge were funding situation where equity funded essentially Commonwealth labs so there are no promises for shafts anything related to the edgeware network so the kind of handshake like thing shouldn't happen so it is a pure governance token but actually one of the we do look up to handshake that in the way that they've engaged the larger open-source community so from the the Treasury ideally we'd like to essentially allocate some portion of that to people who you know verify their identity on github and link it to an address in the kind of same fashion right we went to gauge engage those sets of developers that answer your question yeah oh wow that's that's a large question yes so what what challenge - I foresee zero knowledge proof in just in general in the future oh implement yeah okay yeah okay okay okay that constraints it so in implementing zero knowledge proof or I guess trust or substrate so I'll admit I'm not the the exact person on the team talking working on that right now I would be able to refer you to Drew so he's been doing that but I know we we basically what is the work that we've been doing internally I think there was a little bit of trouble trying to get a sparkle tree implementation with to work with as like a rust module or like a substrate module I know I think the the zero knowledge stuff was like compiling independently but to get it to work in a non chained fashion or to get it to work in the kind of like gasless kind of environment was a little bit challenging I think we'll also have a better answer in the next few weeks as we kind of actually are able to focus on that now that we've spun up the new test set but I definitely check back with us you know at any of the social handles that I mentioned it should yeah it should yeah the the economic parameters haven't really been tweaked from the core substrate or polka-dot metrics yeah yeah that's that's a definite large question so to the answer the first question yes for sure we really want to be the first pair of chain as polka-dot network launches I think the the things I'll say the second thing is definitely something that will be kind of emergent so the question was what role will the edgeware play within the larger web three polka-dot ecosystem yeah it'll be emergent I think the first thing is to say is how do we think smart contract platforms or web 3 will evolve in as a whole well we kind of have this kind of permissionless composable composable feature set of features or what we kind of like push it either push innovation - I think this is actually borrowing your language uh-huh pushing innovation outside of the the EVM itself or instead of having some kind of like singleton EVM I guess like the from that side different different architectures are still being tested and worked on we're still so early that I think this is just like another entrant into how the uses some should develop that's nice to have an answer it's basically what it is yeah where do I think web 3 will be or sorry oh one year from now up and running executed three or four different governance proposals so obviously the treasury's that those kind of proposals should happen every single month so we should have at this point given away what is it 500 million Edgware tokens to initial developers from that you know we should have been running one of the governance proposals that we should do should be related to core network upgrades so something on the consensus layer probably not swapping something out but something that that is deeper on technical level we'd ideally like to integrate to improve the governance process so actually implementing the anonymous voting module into signalling or some other core component well we won't certainly won't launch with that but like we would like to integrate that into the future and we'd ideally like to see a growing used system of smart contract developers and governance experimenters so I guess the the tool set and this is something I didn't really talk about in the presentation was that if a theorem is really good and has the the security model that that makes it really good for different financial different defy applications we feel that edge work could be a place for different types of web 3 type applications where you have needs for finality you have needs for essentially like a higher throughput with these kind of like governance features enabled and a lot of the applications that we face today have that need in whether that be a decentralized Twitter a decentralized way to like actually run a wiki and actually run it effectively at scale those are the types of things that that might be able to be built on Edgware itself as well as kind of the other dowel type of experiments that we'd like to see those are the things that I'm personally interested in I know we've engaged with various aetherium developers prediction market protocols other various defy protocols and they're interested in seeing as well as an entry point to the polka dot ecosystem and I guess the last thing I would say is we would hopefully we'll be integrated as a pair chain within the polka dot ecosystem by that for sure thank you so much everyone thanks Dylan of course so the next talk is from chain safe Aidan is not here unfortunately to get the talk but Greg Marco is and chain safe is really it's an interesting development house so it's about 25 developers in Toronto and they're building both the etherium 2.0 spec as well as the polka dot go runtime environment so we announced a the first web 3 Foundation grant and grants are still open folks are interested to chain safe just two weeks ago and so they're building awesome interpreter Lib p2p Ingo and a bunch of other stuff so yeah give it up for greg moore chrome thanks guys