Innovations on Sui and the Future of Blockchains

hello everybody thank you all for coming here um yeah we have an exciting day ahead of us and uh an exciting panel as well I'm here with Costas from Su very nice to meet you and see you in the all of the F1 experience here I'm so happy to be here as well I recently moved to Dubai by the way and I'm enjoying all of the UA stuff sweet and uh with that let's jump into it um so to start off I think it'd be helpful uh just as a refresher you know what isui and uh what is the goal ofu of course so s was created actually after the collapse of uh the Libra project at Facebook I was personally leading the Facebook team for about three years on the cryptography side if you're running watcha probably you have part of my code because I was one of the Auditors and uh like pretty much creators of the end to encryption on on WhatsApp I'm cryptographer uh like by uh like since when I I remember myself um and uh sui is actually a new generation blockchain I would call it like the modern era of L1 uh chains um what we want to be is we want to be the web 3 uh apple and the reason being is we started even all of the stuff at Facebook as you know there is evm there is ethereum there is Solana all of them I personally owned all of these cryptos in the past I was super happy but I could I could feel there was um like an interest on creating something faster something that is like more robust uh better experience for the users imagine if you're coming from Facebook you're expecting not only digons being on this world but also Bankers governments regular social network users and Su is actually representing this form of new modern blockchain of very fast transactions very easy for someone to un board very cool and when maybe you can elaborate a bit on uh you wanting sweet to be like the apple of of blockchain like what what would you say would be like an end gold for for SED then of course so pretty much there are a few things that the Silicon Valley companies are doing I was personally in paloalto for many years like six years before I come to Dubai and before that in in London there is a certain pattern right they want to onboard users very quickly and what we did is uh we try to change even the way people are uh creating accounts on the blockchain sometimes even if you don't know that you have a blockchain account uh this is the only way to get uh like the m option there is no other way to do that right even if you are like uh very experienced on cool technology if it's very clanky people cannot use it um you don't expect like the average Instagram user or Tik Tok user to come on the blockchain the other thing is the transactions per second I mean Apple can support all of this like millions of users same with Facebook that can support two billions of users just because they made the infrastructure like so with with big brains behind it and all of this stuff and that's why we hired I don't know maybe 50 60 people from from uh funs funs are the the big companies Facebook Apple uh you know alphabet and all of these um pretty much 60 people with P this and uh super successful across the world and we're planning to create more and more cool features here and this is what apple is doing every year right you see okay you're getting the new iPhone although I don't I don't see the the new Innovations lately um but practically they're implementing something new you've never seen it before and this is what we're bringing to the space like some fresh air some freshh ideas on uh like cool stuff you can do with a blockchain yeah and maybe on that topic what are some of the coolest innovations that s brought to web 3 oh coolest Innovations I believe the best one uh in my opinion is we manag to um solve the this trilemma of uh like it's impossible to scale and at the same time to be secure and you know all of this stuff that uh some bitcoiners and ethereum users are complaining about so we can can handle now many thousands of transactions pretty much even better than the Visa Network imagine we're all using Visa credit credit cards and all of this stuff and when the blockchain community is like comparing themselves with the real world it's typically with MasterCard and Visa which is the most uh like transactions You're Expecting in in real life so we surpass these numbers and previously this was uh considered impossible the way we did it is very simple right I mean on ethereum if you want to to get something everybody imagine we want to buy some nfts or we want to do some transactions we have to go to the same place the same bucket we wait in the queue until everybody gets their place on having a transaction and obviously this creates a huge queue and then they can have a transaction every 15 seconds or in the Bitcoin they can have every 10 minutes and all of this stuff so in so we said no no no let's use the model of Bitcoin everything is an object but let's have accounts as the ethereum model and this actually help a lot because technically I can send you something you can send something else but you don't need to wait for me to send you first something to to have the other transaction so we manage to have like almost unlimited parallelization here and this opened the door to compete now with visa and MasterCard but in decentralized space that was one thing parallelization super fast transactions and also very low latency because as you can see sh is now used for many gaming companies triaa companies to say look the average gamer wants to to bring something on web 3 they cannot go with a delay of 10 minutes of course right we we cannot do this and then eventually we realized okay can we do it subsequent and then from the subse every like few months we had the new world record we went to 0.7 then we went to 0.5 and now we're less than 0.5 in many circumstances so this was huge I believe you will see games you will see defy high frequency trading all of this stuff that was almost impossible to happen and all of this in an L1 right because someone will say oh if VM has all of this like other networks on the site ethereum is not fast but maybe like arbitrum and all of the rest can can be super fast because they're running next to the ethereum no now you're splitting all of the liquidity in multiple chains and the gamer cannot do defy transactions cannot play another game you know you're creating all of this island situation that nobody's in the same boat and in suie this made uh this was made possible the other thing I believe which was also very cool is we managed to create accounts with a technology called zero knowledge that you can have a login with Facebook login with Google no pneumonics anymore even Google doesn't know you have an account on chain but now everybody can have access on the blockchain network without remembering a imagine how important it is for someone like me that used to lead Facebook cryptography to go to my wife or my parents and just send the money you don't need to have a password you have a Google account you have a Facebook account Apple account Microsoft account you automatically have a blockchain account and this will solve many of the problems on on boarding I believe which was like super cool and I can imagine even a third one which was even more surprising to me that uh we managed to solve it we we found some algorithms and uh like using some Physics to even have transactions in the absence of Internet imagine there is okay I'm not referring to to UAE imagine there is an earthquake somewhere or something is happening to the internet providers we don't have access to the internet do we stop all of the financial transactions right this is this is a good question right what what do you do here but as you can imagine we have SMS we can fall back to you know FM AM radio signals and all of this stuff we even managed to work with uh dolphin uh like sound underwater and all of these things this was almost impossible before and now we have models where we can decentralize the whole internet not only the the financial instrument of this and very recently we also solved another problem which I believe it's a huge one how do you put large chunks of data on the blockchain because it's very expensive now you will have to pay like a huge amount of money uh just to put a single file uh which is uh like a few megabytes or gigabytes at the moment most of the people are doing ipfs so they have to go outside ethereum they have to store something in another Network or even Cloud but how do you know this file will be there when you need it and we use some very cool algorithms now to compress everything uh pretty much in a decentralized cloud we're going to call this project uh walus if you know the this sealed species with the the big uh teeth here um and in my opinion it will be a big big change in the in the environment where you can have transactions as much storage as you want maybe AI now if you can store big models now on the blockchain you can have ai on chain that was also considered impossible like a couple of years ago so this is where we are at the moment very cool and you mentioned you guys solved the the blockchain scaling trilemma out of curiosity are there any trade-offs that you feel like developers would be making by choosing your ecosystem out of instead of ethereum today yeah I believe the biggest barrier for a new blockchain is how do you convince people who are already on ethereum and Solana because these are the biggest communities at the moment to come to a new language learn something that they were not exposed to before and then you have to to solve this with uh two in my opinion elements one is education something that is is missing in the blockchain space and I'm a professor I used to teach also at Berkeley Stan for some uh like period of My Life um even in London and like in Europe I I I realized that most of the people who are writing web pages today they sometimes feel a fear on how I can go and write a smart contract and now they know oh ethereum is the way to go because that's people uh that's what people know but we created uh we hired all of the PG students eventually we created university courses so you can have more uh like fresher uh like people into the space because in my opinion one mistake that is happening is all of the blockchain says I will get 10% of the ethereum users and then Solana will get the other 5% of this 10% and so you will get the other 3% which in my opinion is a mistake if you see the amount of Vel opers the amount of users on web 2 compared to web 3 web 2 is 99.999% more than web 3 we practically need to bring new uh fresh ideas into the system the only thing that works and again I'm using the Silicon valet butts here you see what Microsoft did with all of the governments all of the universities everything they have to create Advocates they had to do education they had to give certificates how many of you here have a certificate on blockchain on anything on the blockchain probably nobody but some of you have a University degree you have like some uh certification on your expertise or something it's very rare right we have to work on this everybody you myself um companies uh that are doing press uh you know exchanges everybody has to work on education this is what we're planning to do and in my opinion something that is changing now is the help of AI is creating a matrix you'll remember the movie The Matrix where someone was putting like a small USB and in uh in a few second you have all of the information you need do you know what happened after YouTube where people can now learn in just a few months without having a real teacher in in front of them now with AI you can even have someone to ask all of the questions you want so we're closing this barrier not because necessarily we're helping on education the whole ecosystem now on uh the improvements on the AI and everything will make learning by far faster than it was before someone who wanted to beat ethereum 2 years ago it's by far easier now to get into a new language just by watching a few uh videos and then asking a few AI questions totally and um looking forward you know blockchain has come like a pretty far away since 2017 you know we're we're not building these uh proof of work UND differentiated chains anymore how do you see uh blockchains moving forward into the future whether it's like the modular scaling people whether it's you know Tron powering all of Africa whether it's you know um what do you think people should be optimizing for and how are you guys positioning yourselves 100% so there is always the new Administration in the US that I believe it will relax a few things it will offer new innovation verticals in my opinion this is something that we should take advantage um and at the same time we're in UAE as you can see also um the governments now and many like traditional uh like the traditional ecosystem was a bit of a barrier in the past obviously some people are losing their jobs you know the nobody is accepting like the CH and everything I feel what will happen is we're going to have a better framework on privacy on on the blockchain so we need to to create new algorithm for privacy preserving transactions it eventually has to be the same with your bank probably your bank knows about your transactions and you but in the blockchain now everybody can see everything right so um I I have a feeling that on privacy we're going to see like a lot of changes AI will be part of of the blockchain I personally as a security engineer I see so many happening in our like ecosystem you remember we were together a couple of days in a in an event in the F1 race there are scammers there are people who you don't know what they're doing transparency outside web 3 will be also a thing we're going to see startups that are going to do fraud detection AI at the wallet stage I'm very surprised personally why we don't still have a wallet that is a personal assistant that stops you before you fall a victim of a scam so I can see AI being both at the back end of the layer of the blockchain being able to run AI algorithms but I can also see startups even from people here there is a gap now even myself as an angel investor I would put money if someone is building a a wallet with some AI capabilities for security and maybe eventually for optimization of your assets maybe it can tell you no no unstake from here and do this stuff and you're going to get better yield because we we cannot be everywhere right it's a multi-chain world you cannot you cannot know all of the opportunities you have every day and this has to go hand hand in hand they have to go together because many people are falling victims of some crazy amounts like 30% return and all of these things and you know if you are in a tough financial situation you might you might uh get into this trap totally and uh so which category of innovation in the future do you think would be the most relevant foru do you think you know this AI stuff payments do you think gaming do you think you know uh like optimizing for composability or like cross chain ux like account abstraction which which categories of the future do you think are the most relevant for you guys interestingly the nice thing that Su did and this was a model that we had at Facebook small spin-offs under a biger Abella we're having one of the biggest research thems on cryptography and consensus I believe performance will become even faster so sui will remain the the fastest Network in the world we had many PS in the fast that we were uh definitely for for weeks the fastest Network um we're going to have some advancements even on the network layer how the messages go from one Noe to the other you can save milliseconds even if we are laughing sometimes what can you can you get by going from 0.

6 millisecond sorry seconds to 0.5 seconds there is always the barrier of speed of light right what you cannot do many things around this so we're working on reaping the internet there is a company in Switzerland uh the the the project is called cion and cion is changing the way the messages are uh like routed between the network providers that's how you can go decentralized internet now not only decentralized transactions I believe what we're doing with the storage um now putting large files into the blockchain will also change The Narrative of many governments uh imagine you have to do in the shipping Maritime industry oil industry you want to have transparency real PDFs being on the blockchain docu on the blockchain we have to have identity elements that are decentralized now you cannot rely on one single American company to have a contract here in UAE so s having different uh like uh small clicks of people that are the top in the world some of them are actually the the top of the world not in the top list of the world literally the best in the world and we're solving this kind of um performance storage privacy and I would say this will also give an opportunity for other IND jump in I will be surprised if in a few years from now even real estate where we in UA now right Abu Dhabi um it will not be a Google map where you just press a button and you buy some land in Greece or Mexico now it will happen I believe it will happen totally and uh yeah all really exciting to hear uh exciting to think about the future um yeah really proud of uh how far you guys have come withu and also we're proud to be a small seed investor in you guys as well um and maybe on a slightly different topic now uh I know you mentioned you moved to UAE uh earlier this year um you know me as well and a lot of other people in our industry too maybe we can quickly talk about you know where you see UAE playing a role in the future of blockchain too I'm personally a person who lived in all of the United countries I was born in Greece uh European Union I went to London United Kingdom I went to United States of America and now in United Arab Emirates so I've seen so many things across the world UAE at the moment is probably the center of the crypto world for many reasons many of the influential people where you can have real world applications on the blockchain are coming to the region just because it helps geographically I would say the government is helping it's very open um I see the difference I was in Silicon Valley for the last six years before before I moved to UAE um AI was dominating the field and I'm saying Ki is everywhere now crypto is getting again into the second to combine with sayi first position as well I cannot find a better place than UAE I'm I'm spending my time between Dubai and Abu Dhabi the last few days um we're also having the first blockchain Academy in UAE I'm a professor as well helping like new new people to get into the space I told you before about education I haven't seen this in any other country in the world right even even the US you know it's a bit more difficult to to go to the industry directly on a on a topic like crypto well not everybody loves every body wants to explore more the doors that are opening here I guess you see it as well not only on the personal side that you can talk to people who can make a difference on your ideas but also execution is by far higher uh in the pace in the rate than anything else that I've seen in the past so for me this was a no-brainer I should I should be here totally completely agree and Costa thank you so much for speaking today and uh talking about s and thank you everybody for listening and uh hope you have an awesome day thanks everybody