Enabling Open Web for Consumer Apps - Illia Polosukhin

ilya is the co-founder of near protocol which is celebrating three years by the way uh prior to that he was with deep learning research and led a team at google working on deep learning research uh ilia whenever you're ready we can get this started yeah thanks luke hello everyone it's great to be here and yeah i'm excited to see all your hacks when the hackathon ends um yeah i wanted to talk today about open web what it is and kind of how to hack for it i guess let me share my screen and we can start yeah just while we're here yeah we actually started uh in august pretty much six six to eight i guess um year so it is actually three years since we started i'm really excited about this journey so let me kind of first introduce a little bit about open web generally like if when we're thinking about web reddit and i mean all of us are using it all of us was using the word but what is this actually right and actually vab was a one of the protocols of the kind of internet in general so when uh just internet was kind of starting there was like arpanet all these networks and there was a set of open protocols that people were using to communicate using these networks and the email is actually one of the few protocols that survived kind of through this time then the app came and that was really this idea of how do we kind of exchange information how do we uh like link to it and share content and do this thing and so this was kind of in 89 it started out and then for a while we had this idea of you know yellow pages and internet and all this kind of like basic stuff let's put information on internet and everybody will be able to have access to it and then about in 97 88 when amazon google and kind of few other big companies were starting the this idea of interactive app came in right this idea that you can actually interact with these applications you can actually able to put in information and see relevant links or you can put information it will stay there and this is where we have social we have all those things but with that we kind of lost some of this open protocol ideas we kind of lost a lot of the spirit behind the original internet and instead we started to kind of give a lot of power to these big companies that are providing us the services right so we kind of became almost like those customers but in many cases products of the services and with that you know you have user data acquisition you have data leaks that's been happening all this time because kind of you have the central honeypot place where you know all of your data is and it's been sold it's been you know stolen and it's been used in all kinds of ways and so what we have kind of nowadays is this resurgence of this of the protocol idea of the ideas of how do we build something that doesn't require this kind of centralized provider that will be exploiting this data and exploiting this usage but really kind of bringing it back to the original ideas now in parallel this has been a growth of of you know blockchain right and it started with just money it started this idea the simple idea how do we make a peer-to-peer money where nobody is in the middle or nobody's in control except the people who actually hold their money and this is where bitcoin was born but as we saw in past few years uh kind of this idea of well actually you can build more than just you know pure transactional money you can actually have a full financial system you can have all of kind of programmable types of applications that leverage money as one of the components and use the same technology use the blockchain uses trustless layer to really start building something that you know now we know as defy or open fire that really transforms almost how people uh kind of operate with money and so open web kind of from one side right we have this pattern of like people trying to go away from this big kind of big centralized companies that are operating and from the other side it has this technology kind of pattern right of well actually we have now a trustless you know no intermediary uh protocols and systems to build on top of which we can actually build this open web and so this is like in my for me this is where you know these two things meet right because a lot of people have been trying to build for example like mastodon and other protocols open protocols and uh even uh the instant messaging protocols but now none of them succeeded because they were not they were building them in vacuum they were just trying to build a protocol and they didn't have this kind of trustless layer and financial incentive layer on the bottom so that's where we are and so what is actually open web right what is this concept i mean and people call it like three as well but open web is really this idea of there's a set of philosophies that people follow when they build applications right and decentralization is one of his philosophies right so it's really this idea that you don't want to have a single center single server single party that is able to control the whole system you don't want this to be able to bring it down or you know big data or whatever you also want kind of this idea of composibility right because uh when we think of you know google's on facebook they always provided some kind of api you can always use their service but they control it and they are really only give you a fraction of things that you can build kind of that you can use from their service if you're working inside actually inside everything is very composable so i worked at google and inside google actually feels like a huge open source environment where you can just like take you know a little bit of here there compose it and launch a new application and that this idea but like actually in a permissionless open you know to everyone way is is the spirit here uh you definitely want it to be open like you don't want you know you need to pass an interview to google to be able to do this stuff or uh there's some kind of you know guards that like oh if you're from this country if you whatever whatever is the property that people like to discriminate on like you don't want any of that and and like this is very hard to achieve right uh you want it to be user first and this is where you know if if you think of companies companies never use it first right it's it's its values are always driven toward kind of company internally and so if you're building companies it's really hard to be the first uh however you know they say because you always like user for you is just a source of income right and so uh you're just trying to kind of um figure out how to how to how to extract that income from them and then in in kind of the sphere of blockchain right this is where you own your keys you own your money you own your you know whatever that is and so we want more of that and more ability of users actually owning their data owning their governance and being able to decide for themselves what they want and obviously underneath you need markets and you need economy because this is a driver like this is the ability to actually uh you know invest in innovation achieve it and kind of sustain it over time if we have ability to create the economy so i have this very messy graph uh i can zoom in a little bit for a second and so this is just to show you like i like to say this is the idea that you know there's always a plan somewhere so kind of the idea is that when we when we started out with blockchain uh there's a lot of components that go into building a blockchain you know storage network and sharding executions and all those things but blockchain is just a small component right and when we look at it right there's a lot of kind of infrastructure that goes into it but then there's a lot of applications and protocols that you build on top and i'll i'll kind of go over basic stuff but kind of you have a whole slew of financial applications you have a host of infrastructure olympics and stuff and so this is just an idea that like as we're developing this there's a lot of things that are in progress and there's a lot of things to be built and this is actually a call for hackers to actually uh you know go and hack sounds and stuff um so let me let me kind of explain what we already have right this this is i mean as we i mean the whole space right uh we have they're actually a set of primitives that are very powerful that are actually enable a number of things uh if you you know combine them in the right ways so we have a programmable ownership we have a way to program ownership of you know some digital information some digital data that can be money can be data it can be you know hashes of some data on uh file coin this can be uh you know nfts this can be uh you know actually some something that maps to a real world right to a real world item and you can program it in in kind of unlimited ways right you can say like well if it's thursday and you try to transfer it actually will transfer to somebody else right you can do whatever you want and this is kind of this is something that's not possible to do in you know normal kind of programming right this is not something that like you are able to program banks to do stuff or program you know ownership databases to do stuff in in such kind of powerful way we have this pseudonymous identity right identity is important because it allows people to um obviously to build a reputation to to accrue kind of information to have the ownership but pseudonymous means also people can have multiple of them that are uh kind of exposing different angles of this thing and obviously privacy and ability to uh really kind of perform things that otherwise maybe it will be harder to do we have encryption and proxy encryption and if you're not familiar with proxy encryption re-encryption is this idea that if i encrypt some data i can actually allow you to have access to it through a set of kind of cryptographic primitives and set of nodes without anybody else uh kind of having access to it and me needing to redownload this data and so this this allows now to share data in kind of different ways with different parties via pretty much trustless protocols obviously we have decentralized storage i mean we have file claim here and a few other solutions we have oracles oracles are actually a very powerful concept because they bring them information from off chain on chain and you know we need this economic kind of we need this information to do both economic and non-economic decisions a really cool concept is your knowledge proofs right his ability to prove something that this is an outcome of some computation without actually redoing the whole computation and you know it's pure magic but it actually works and now we are able to do this in new interesting ways and the thing i'm really excited about is kind of decentralized autonomous organizations is this idea of organizing people around the world in novel ways right just completely no ways uh and still being able to have access to all the programmable ownership to economy to finances to all those things uh kind of through this new new new level right think of it as you know if comp companies kind of the legacy style gauss is a way to you know kind of program a company that is global and you know have all the same can have all the same features or whatever else you want to different uh and it's and it allows us to kind of create this organization that are impossible to do before so all those are primitives that are already here like you can use them today and you can build mobile applications so like how do we have this well actually because we have all this infrastructure built right so we have scalable blockchains that allow you to kind of have this ownership have those identities and kind of things around that you have indexing and querying this is kind of one of the blobs there on the chart where you're able to actually connect uh you know your front end to the nodes kind of in the easy way get the data that they need and all those things right we have scalable storage chains like uh falcon we have economically secured oracles which allow you to you know trust like as a smart contract you can trust the data that comes in with some economic guarantees and i have new ways of kind of getting getting people in right the gateways and exchanges are allowed for a person who never seen crypto to actually start using it and being able to kind of onboard into this so all this is already here its components are kind of built and it's now about how do we combine them so the other side of this right is is really reimagining how we're doing things because when you build things in the kind of web 2 um if you build a sas or if you build a consumer app there's a set of ways how you usually would build an application how you build a company right you would have a marketing budget you would you know go out to you know facebook buy facebook ads and youtube ads you would you know figure out how to get your app installed on all kinds of phones through you know ads in other games or in other applications but it's not really how you would do it in kind of open map because you now have this one of the pieces one of the components you have is ownership itself you can actually kind of program ownership of your company of your project of you know application you're building and you can use it to uh to do all kinds of stuff right so the simplest thing right is able is is really about building a community or an application who will become your most loyal fans who will be also owners of this application through you know various ways and through that they actually will become your you know your marketers and your uh you know influencers and your community members who will go out and bring more users and so this is i call it the usage mining this idea that like what you want to do you want to really align the way people use your network the way your application or network is is growing right in a value and you really just allow people to get ownership by doing that right and like in dfi a lot of it is it's called liquidity mining because liquidity is the way to kind of grow the network but this can be anything this can be a social graph where you know the social graph is its value is um kind of the number of connections and so you can actually align around growing the number of connections as a network and receive kind of value around that and at the same time you have kind of this ownership now becomes you know it transforms how people think about the applications and and and kind of how they associate themselves with him right a good example have been in toronto a taxi company actually used this idea and they aligned their usage mining around drivers driving the taxi right and so drivers became so kind of embedded into into this application they became you know the biggest fans they kept you know selling this app to their customers to their friends to kind of everyone who wants to listen because it aligned both some receiving income and ownership in this application which is you know in in a way captures future income of the system and so like that app before pandemic have outperformed uber in toronto because of kind of really aligning those networks and so you have this novel ways to really build applications that are a almost impossible to build before because you can be global you can be kind of using uh these primitives and you can create new ways of actually aligning people to really push this application grows this application without kind of building a marketing machine without building uh all of the things that we can usually do in our sales machine in uh in web 2. so what's next right uh i kind of talked about you know primitives we have infrastructure we have this new base so like what's missing right why is not everyone you know why is my phone doesn't have all the apps are uh using open web and so the thing that's missing right now right and this is again exerted from that graph is a set of common protocols that would connect kind of this basic primitives and what the applications will be at the end right so a few of the protocols that i believe that needs to be built kind of in incoming incoming a year or years are social graph right like if you think of it when we right now use it on facebook it's on store on facebook then you go on linkedin it's like its own social graph and so you have like every single app has its own social graph and so having a common social graph protocol right where kind of for your identity or identities even you have your friends you have your followers you have your kind of uh you know work colleagues and it doesn't matter which app you go but it's actually hot like you know it's connected to your identity and it's you know encrypted to you and it's kind of yours and you're just allowing apps to use it when you when you are interacting with them pretty much would allow kind of open up a huge set of use cases and a huge set of applications communication is another one is really kind of creating communication channels between you know multi-party right now we again relying even with all you know the signals and telegrams which are supposed to be you know encrypted and everything we're still relying on the centralized party to deliver our messages even though underneath we have internet that is decentralized and so and again like the decentralized communication protocols have existed they just never actually uh beat the centralized one because they're always kind of lost in the in the kind of this investment slash uh like protocol game and now we have an opportunity to build these protocols that are incentivized to be kind of growing music and video and kind of across all the content there's a lot of kind of opportunity to really reimagine and have a common protocol that musicians and video like videographers and all these people they right now receiving a smallest portion of the income that they can be receiving from their fans right and nfts is one way to connect them but really there's a lot to do on kind of on on the basic stuff as well certification and reputation right this is just that ability to track around the identity of the person like the pseudonymous identity or even a kind of some identifier of an object right certifying that something is true or not like that creates a huge you know set of things where if you can rely on this and the next set of applications become way easier to use and so figuring out the protocols that are reliable that like others can build on is huge the really cool one is conflict resolution if we have conflict resolution that is kind of can work between two pseudonymous identities right we pretty much have a court kind of what we have in in you know in in the government that is able to kind of make decisions around you know facts like it doesn't matter who is behind that identity it doesn't matter uh kind of what is the history there it just matters what's uh you know what's this conflict and what's facts that were predating this specific thing and maybe reputation obviously maybe some other things but it's now you know we're removing all those biases that we right now have in the court system we're removing a lot of um kind of like places where people can make mistakes and now we're really kind of simplifying it to a core uh core primitive and another one that i really like is work scheduling is really ability for people to uh to kind of grab a like post some job grab some job and so this actually requires a contact resolution because what if they didn't do it and so that's kind of i mean here on the graph you see some of the linkage of this protocols because they'll kind of connect at the end so this is like set of protocols that i like i believe we should be building and this is again this is a call for hackers to go out and build them and if if you are building this reach out to me i would love to kind of work with you and support you and figure out how we can launch this so i was talking kind of from perspective of like technology i was talking from perspective of you know building stuff but what does this mean for users right because as a user we mentioned before like you wanna you want some sovereignty you want the control right you and so here this idea is that user now is in the center right you have all these protocols kind of around you and you're able to really interact with them and then it doesn't matter which kind of front end you're using right you always have access to your data you always have access to your information to your social graph to all those things to your communities and you're able to really drive um kind of usage and drives the like through this owning of a little bit pieces of this protocol drive where they evolve as well and so this is really powerful for these users because like between you know facebook that constantly changes rules or like instagram removing like like button for for south america right here you have this ability to really like if somebody built a better interface for you know file like image sharing using the same social protocol awesome you know tomorrow everybody flogged there and people who didn't vlog they still see because they're using the same protocol they can still see the same stuff they just you know maybe don't see all of the information that new app is using so we now have this ability for users to choose and to really kind of drive because of this usage to the applications that are the best instead of kind of this centralized platform it's also very powerful for creators right a lot of creators right now and i mentioned instagram because that's one of the complaints they are kind of stuck in the platform they are in right and usually like uh these platforms also use all kinds of ways to kind of restrict them from doing things and so we already see in blockchain that creators love it right part of it is because there's this concept of royalties meaning that as things get resold or get reused they receiving kind of a percentage of the future value that's been transacted back to them and this is something that obviously none of the platforms do and none of the like physical items are have ability to do that but uh we can see this kind of going beyond because now creators have a direct audience that they can connect to there's a way to interact with them in more direct ways and and get feedback and get engagement right and so this is also like the topic here is like passion economy there's a lot of kind of exciting stuff happening there even outside of blockchain but this concept of really connecting them together of a user of like end user and the creator uh through nfgs through the content through the platforms uh that kind of engages them uh is definitely something that like both sides want and we see already this uh happening across discords across you know these platforms and like for developers right you have this um ability to kind of mix and match pretty much already on top of existing stuff right like where before you would need to you know you launched an app it's like zero users zero data you know and now you need to start building stuff here you launch an app you know every single user of the platform already is your user right they maybe didn't do anything yet you already have connections to a lot of data from other applications and now you just you know combine it into new experiences you know create incentives create community and you know it kind of propels it and like defy in general showcase this kind of edit for you know specific slice of use cases like financial ones but that was the idea right like somebody launches a defy app there's like 100 million dollars worth of kind of money coming in because people are exploring what are the other apps they can use but like they're the same the same platform they know the guarantees they don't need to you know be like double checking who built this app because they know so a lot of the guarantees already the example i use is there's no chance anybody would build a like 50 billion dollar kind of financial system on something that's like built and maintained by you know a dozen people by a dozen engineers but this is what ethereum right now is and so like that kind of um conceptually like that kind of ability to build on something on top right something super valuable billion dollar letters of value this few people as well like uniswap is built by a few people on top of something that's on its own is also like a startup and built by a few people is in kind of almost unimaginable uh before before blockchain before opening up so like i mentioned this but like this idea of compatibility it's almost like that's why i didn't give you like examples of apps because there's just so many of them that you can do and like i have some in my in my chart but there's like just infinite amount of things like you know from like just example i was trying to find some examples that are kind of funny like you can do like you know a social network where only people who have enough reputation can talk to each other right or you can have uber for co-workers right because you have social network you can have you know gig protocol for calling cars so you can only you know call dope or force co-workers when you work or whatever um you can have a more interesting like more real example is like you can have this personal medical data encrypted and then you share it with specific entities and you can have a log of everyone who has access to it right and all of this potentially is doable in the real world but like here you have already also like if we have all those protocols this becomes an extremely easy thing to do right or you can have you know what x infinity is doing right now but there's like a lot more opportunity to do with games that i actually have like economy around ownership around uh kind of creation and destruction and really kind of uh moving beyond just uh you know just the easy like pay to play so i just gonna give you like one example of uh how this works already so we have one app on here called near crowd which is uh pretty much an amazon mechanical torque which is a crowdsourcing app and so this is done fully unchained we have about one like 1 500 daily actives on it with like over 2 000 like uniques uh using it and it's already collected over a million data samples uh since launching in april right so this is an example of of an app that kind of is literally what you know like i i use this kind of stuff at google every single company doing machine learning is using this uh to collect data and so this is like an example of this app working in and the benefit is that it pays people around the world and we have people actually from philippines who literally surviving right now because they have this job and like during college there's no other opportunity for them to work at uh in philippines we also have people in russia who live in their like shitty job like on the factory or something that because they are able to earn a good a good wage with this business application so this is really example of like this open web is not just you know conceptual we have already stopped working and like these people are non-crypto people this is not people who you know doing divi trading or any of this stuff this is truly people who are like just you know earning very little and are wants to find an opportunity in their life and creating these opportunities for them right creating this economy and then them being able to participate in it in really easy way like sign up you know not need to figure out private keys all the stuff and start using it so i don't know how many of you know about your protocol just like i didn't want to talk too much about it if you're interested reach me or you know near.org there's a lot of information but just high level right what we've been building right and kind of our driver is really to build something that's ready for mass adoption right and so we we kind of build this in a way that normal people can use it normal people can onboard start using it and as mentioned in case of near crowd and being able to you know not you know it's not going to cost unfortunately right it's scalable via sharding which means like we actually maintain low like kind of low cost because we actually are able to add capacity to the network we've been really focused on making an experience as close to kind of what normal web experience is right we think of it as like almost like firebase right um and so pretty much allowing people to write in typescript in rust allowing people to kind of use existing smart contracts as rest api uh so they can easily add it to their whatever app stuff like this is really what drives us like making it so easy that millions of developers actually able to participate and at the end it is about community right i mentioned community multiple times like at the end this this whole thing is still people who are actually building and who are using and so we have this huge community of kind of creators and you know people who are helping and of course developers who are kind of working together to really expand this ecosystem to make things uh kind of easier for everyone in the world so given you're here you're hacking you might be into you might be interested we actually have a it's a non like it's protocol agnostic called open web collective uh accelerator and kind of founder community to help people to develop their applications into real products into real things help them with fundraise help them with mentors help them with you know talkingrt makes all those things and it's the application process is open right now so if you're interested openwebcollective.com apply there just to mention we have a lot of content that we've been we believe in education we believe in the space needs a lot more kind of information and and teaching and so we've been doing a lot this is just a few examples of redone we have also academy we have certification program all kinds of stuff but check out our youtube there's a lot of videos on how contracts build how protocols work how like use cases can be if you're interested in more about kind of randomness or bridges or economics in general our blog as well as full of that and uh thank you and yeah i'm i'm excited to respond to your questions thank you for such an excellent presentation really glad to have you in today um i wanted to to ask you just a few questions about the direction of near and and the developments in the future i know you're just hitting your three-year mark now um what the big part of the next half of the year will look like for you in terms of development for sure yeah so i mean near as ecosystem has like lots of levels and i mean as this this probably is a great example where it's like well in in this level we have a set of things that's happening in this level so i mean overall if we're talking about specifically the protocol right the blockchain part uh we continue working on the sharding design uh there's a lot of interesting things coming out it's kind of resharting changing number of shards and things like that we're also working on uh really kind of optimizing things like initially we did a lot of stuff just to kind of launch it but there's a lot of ways we can optimize and make the kind of protocol even cheaper and faster to run right and that's obviously going to be a goal going forward um on on kind of next level we have a lot of interesting stuff coming out one of the cool things that just came out uh kind of a month a few months ago have been aurora and aurora is a separate company a separate project that is providing people who want to write in solidity on for kind of evm ability to do it on near so it's actually infrastructurally it's actually we took evm and they compiled it to webassembly and run it as a smart contract so this shows you how powerful kind of our native environment is but this allows like kind of all the developers who want to target evm able to build that and kind of enjoy all the same benefits that they're getting from from near we have bridge that connects to helium there's kind of a few other bridges that are in progress that coming out um there's a lot of kind of nft things that are growing like this like i'm not sure even i know all the projects that are building a mirror anymore in that space and there's also like a huge set of d5 as well that coming out and like i'm pretty excited as like it actually starts to kind of boost the economy of the of near through through a lot of these e5 tools so i think that that's kind of the basics things that probably half a year but and kind of this covers a lot of this a lot of this chart already and then over time i'm i'll be excited about these protocols that i mentioned i mean i don't think like the few i know that i've been worked on but i would love to see kind of all of the ones i mentioned to actually be in progress in a year or so that makes sense that makes sense for our newcomers to the hack i know you you put a list up of some projects that you'd like to be seen worked on um for the specific new to ethereum or maybe new to near hackers do you think those are accomplishable i mean uh were there actionable ones that that you could announce today that might be more efficient for the newcomers so i think you can get to an mvp in a hackathon uh it's not gonna be like the whole thing you're not going to be probably launching it right away but you can get something interesting that you know if you willing to continue and stick with it you can build a company and fundraise and do all the kind of actual like growing it into a real protocol over time i can i mean each one of these is like a full you know full project pretty much off the level of you know some of the projects that are here right so i think that's what's incredible is you could really drill down on any one of these and spend a lifetime doing it i don't think some of our hackers understand the the sort of magnitude of the ecosystem that we're involved in it's it's interesting to see everyone from across the world focusing on the same ideas at the same time i think progress is inherent with that um well that's that's why i was drawing this graph because if you look at it like this is defined and sure it's cool like these things but like there's a lot of other stuff going on here and and it's all interrelated too like defy is powering a lot of the other components so uh you kind of need to have both to kind of really really uh come together what do you think is not getting enough tension attention right now i know we've sort of talked about the parts that are and what's most interesting but what do you think are the stones that are unturned i mean i think the more the like the least thing is where you really need to hit kind of the people side of things like constant resolution is where i know i think kara's been working on that but like uh clara clara's but like an argon a little bit but in general that's kind of a like it's a very messy problem right it's like two entities are not the green and stuff and so people are kind of naturally avoiding it especially like when you can write you know 1000 lines and build something that's like really valuable so i think that's where like the space of things that are not really being looked at is space of where you really need to kind of start interacting with people and communities and really figure out how to like solve some of these harder problems right on well i want to thank you again for taking the time to walk us through all that today this has been incredibly insightful