Roberto Infante - Author of 'Building Ethereum Dapps' - Ethereum London Keynote - #ethldn

[Music] hello everyone so my name is Roberta Fanta I'm a software developer I tend to work mainly in the finance sector tend to implement risk management systems so while working with one of my clients a couple of years ago after following a bit Bitcoin from a technical point of view experimented a little bit with Bitcoin around the beginning of 2016 I was in contact with a team that was working was starting to form a consortium with a few banks to develop a platform based on aetherium basically a platform to reconcile static data in an animal anonymous way across different banks so so that it could be tracked consistently with with the blockchain technology and and however the technology in the end did improve the to be the idea well the other dl1 but I got exposed to a theorem and I got passionate about it and I started to develop an interest and while starting to research the technology for this project that in the end was done with a different technology I started to learn by myself as most people around 2016 there weren't too many resources so in the end I had the idea that given that there was no consistent resource to to learn a theorem in in in an easy way I proposed a publisher the idea of a book so in the end I started this personal project I started to write this book the publisher obviously was interested because they saw that blockchain and especially theorem was an epic up-and-coming technology and they thought it was a good idea and the launch was around January 2018 which was at the peak of the the the blockchain craze so was kind of lucky launch around a period obviously started to fade a little bit away and me got just published a couple of months ago in the paper so however the talk has nothing to do with the book but actually is kind of related with the book in the sense that while I was preparing the content of the book there were so many things going on obviously in etherium and actually was very challenging to write the book because every single piece of the theorem platform was moving so it was quite hard to write something that could be used one one year down the line or even three aslam night and at the same time while I was preparing the content of the book obviously I had various ideas to put you know chapters or more experimental topics that we were started to be developed but obviously with the publisher we thought it was it was best to stick with the basic outside core technologies for the book so while preparing you know what writing the book I focused made on the technology but on the core technology like gas truffle all the core tools that you used to develop a distributed application decentralized application from end to end but on the side I was still reading up on lots of topics and trying to sneak something in the book in the end I decided to put some some of the most experimental ones in in the last chapter of the book but given I collected lots of material I decided why not to present it you know to give a talk on on all the outside technologies that are still fluid at the moment around aetherium and I would say there might be the next trends for the next the rest of the year or the demands of the coming months so the idea of this talk is again to talk about the evolving ecosystem and with a special I would say focus on outside the technologies that hopefully will give a push better push on on adoption on the adoption of a theorem that is still not although there is obviously lots of trading of it but in terms of applications there are interesting ideas being developed but there is still not massive adoption given the technical limitations there are still impeding you know a bigger push to mainstream so the talk is about all the technology the technologies that hopefully will allow a better I'd say adoption on Alby theorem in the next coming months so so I will give a very quick overview of the current ecosystem so everyone is on the same page I guess lots of you are coming from different backgrounds more technical was done some development and who's just read about the theorem so I will try to keep quite kind of high-level but I will try to to go a little bit more in depth on some of the most interesting concepts although I will try not to go too deep so the next stop so I will start with just a presentation of the ecosystem then I will highlight the mein I would say limitation of the current theorem protocol and platform I will try to present you to give a an overview of what is being of how these limitations are being addressed are various levels in the ecosystem and then I will just conclude presenting a few interesting trends that will be probably quite fashionable in the next few months and you will hopefully make the platform for more interesting also for people from other blockchain platforms so let's start with a quick presentation of of the current ecosystem so I'm gonna just list quickly the the main tools just to give a background on on the topics that was present next so I guess most of you know the concept of level 1 so level 1 means the core a theorem technology so it's the core protocol and the core tools like gas parity and some of the technology around it like swarm like this in tries the content systems with all technology that's been developed by outside the etherium core team so some of this technology includes also languages like if you've played a bit with a theorem obviously we'll have play we'll have liver of some smart contracting solidity you'd have probably use some libraries like open Zeppelin to develop the smart contracts easily if you want to develop a full-blown DAP including a UI you have to implements and connectivity from the UI to the smart contract and generally you'd use web 3j s if you want to develop easily you'd use kind of professional tools like truffle that will allow you to work more in a professional way continuous integration and testing and all of I'll say the practice is that any software developer use in any language then securities are quite important concept of in India theorem ecosystem because one of the I'd say of talking about other developers I've always noticed that all the people are enthusiastic about the technology they always a bit scared about the fact that the technology is new and there are potentially I'll say weaknesses that might jeopardize an application being launched into production because not only of mistakes that you might make as a software developer on the application that you are developing but also on potential weaknesses in the underlying platform because it's so new so there are lots of security tools that are being developed at the moment that will allow easy checking of your code and spotting automatically weaknesses and all of that then there are other networks always part of the core ecosystem like I mentioned like content management and messaging like ipfs swarm whisper protocol for messaging another important part of the ecosystem are Oracle's Oracle's are components that allow blocked the blockchain any blockchain and also theorem to connect to real-world data because as you know the blockchain processing is deterministic so you cannot just connect to a streaming source that is gonna send you kind of real-time data that is gonna change continuously this data needs to be channeled in a certain way so that every node of the network will process it will process it exactly in the same way and so Oracle's are a component an important component that allows just that ENS is the ECM naming system it's a little bit like DNS for the traditional internet Makoto did a presentation on it a few months ago other major dots now there is a trend at the moment about decentralized finance DV that is the area that hopefully looks like it's gonna push a bigger adoption of etherium especially around security tokens at the moment there are a regulated form of tokens they are different from ICS and utility tokens in the sense that utility tokens completely are regulated obviously it's a good say ground for people the malicious with malicious intent and run scam sort where a security token are completely regulated and that's why recently in the last few months financial institutions especially are looking closely at that area because they're going to be managed exactly in the same way and actually with companies similar to do once they run traditional finance so it's an area that might push the mind jacked capital into the blockchain ecosystem and and it might be an opportunity for growth so so though this was the say core I would say ecosystem that was I'd say applicable until a few few months ago now in the last few months something started to evolve all these components so just quickly I will mention what's changed the main changes around the technology stack have shown you before so gas and parity are still domain clients but there is M PI cerium is being used mainly for for prototyping even by the core team but there are around the the core clients there are there is there are some new entrants in the managed clients area in for you used to be the main manage clients for managed clients I mean there are servers that you rent and I've got the full installation of an Assyrian client and you don't need to maintain your own local client and that's usable so for development teams because you don't want to continuously update your blockchain and sorry so you want to if you want to to develop more consistently and you want to come back to to a certain project after a few weeks so you don't want to waste time resynchronizing the blockchain and so forth but and so there are new entrants like that node via teaming node D node and other companies they're starting to set up manage clients then there are new language like viper that started to get some adoption ether ji assistant you get adoption the same adoption as web 3 js4 the communication between UI and smart contracts then truffle used to be met the main development tool but now either lime or embark as well as Sochi together to gain some adoption now security tooling as I said before is an area that has got a proliferation of tools and lots of interesting solutions therefore checking automatically your smart contracts so let's say if Oracle frameworks as I said before one of the main providers of technical providers of Oracle's is used to be called Oracle eyes now they changed the name to provable things I'm gonna skip I was planning to give some explanation of about how Oracle ones but I'm gonna keep it very high-level because I think I'm concerned about time yeah ENS I've mentioned it it was presented you know other present so this interest finance as I said is an area that is gaining lots of attention I would say the most important application of say frameworks in this era are the Xerox protocol there allows to develop this decentralized exchanges so for this is decentralized exchange I mean in at this level I mean exchanges that where you can swap each year see 20 tokens and other like related token like here seed 77 to 1 like for non tangible tokens and but tokens within the ECM ecosystem there are other technologies that allows allow you to swap tokens without the cryptocurrency across block chains but I will will mention it later but I'd say the 0x protocol is one of the the most important tools around indeed within the interior micro system and the Hydra protocol as well is gaining some traction in terms of major decent rise applications at the moment the two men one Aragon and oh girl that have outs a considerable number of users considerable within say a theorem so the coracle system I'll say of the strictly the tool that generally developer use would look like this with the Ethier and clients and the development tools around it but in general the wider ecosystem I'd say would look something like this if you put also the if you include the decentralized content networks like ipfs swarm and decentralized with messaging systems and all the other development tools that have popped up in the last few months now so what's wrong with a theorem 1 0 so the although with the latest for Constantinople folk there was small improvements to to to performance and from a technical side to make the life of developers easier there is still the big elephant in the room which is the two main limitations they are affecting the the outside the adoption of a theorem ah scalability so the network still not able to handle the out say hundreds of thousands of transaction that I'll say traditional platforms are able to handle and then there is a limitation on the privacy because obviously being a using public key theorem just strictly but public key theorem network obviously privacy is a limitation but there are solutions around it as as I will show so in terms of adoption of scalability I just wanted to show just some charts - show the extent of the problem the highlight extent of the problem so if you look at so this is pretty much the capacity of the network so one is full capacity so you can see that since May 2017 we're reaching capacity and obviously and capacities pretty high surprisingly even if the number of transaction is not that high I mean it's around 1 million transactions per day but 1 million transaction per day for any other system like like credit card operators for example is a relatively small number so so the the consump the capacity so it there is a saturation of capacity we'd know much workload there so there are other say proofs of the fact that you know there is of calamities problem the number of recorded users there are statistics about recorded users apart from pure is crypto currency transactions decentralized application users are no more than 50,000 per day according to the statistics so and if you remember the crypto kid kitties craze showed that as soon as you put a little bit more load on the on the network things don't work very well so but it's not all gloom I'm going to show you the solutions that are started of being introduced into the ecosystem to address these problems so there are two main areas of solutions so-called l2 solutions so level 2 is a layer on the top of the theorem blockchain so it's not part of the core a theorem a ecosystem so it's based on technologists have been built on the top of it weed so it's technology there still guarantees provides the same guarantees as the core a theorem blockchain but it's not built-in in the ethereum blockchain so it's built on the top and that l1 improvements are obviously being introduced with the theorem 2.0 with the Serenity so I will give you a very quick overview of what this innovations are so l2 solution so level two solutions are mainly around two major areas one is payment and state channels so what's a state channel is so it's a technology that freezes the state of some blockchain state in a smart contract and then allows this state to evolve outside the blockchain in a system outside so there is no limitation of what the system on the technology of this outside system provided that then this outside system is able to resubmit the final state so I would say enacted the state of all devolution of the state that has happened outside the blockchain so what's the advantage is that all these intermediate state changes that happen between a restricted set of participants are not recorded on the blockchain but they're still recorded in this outside system and so in the end all the final state only the final state is resubmitted back to the blockchain and obviously this improves the the scalability because it limits also it reduces the number of number of transactions happening on the main blockchain a similar solution is side chains but side chains are based on a similar technology of of the theorems or based blockchain technology but it's smaller block chains built on the side of the main chain so the again is similar to that of state channels in that the main blockchain will hand over some state to this side chain and then this state evolves in a separate block chain that is smaller in size so it's much quicker it's January he has a restricted set of participants this can be even permissioned participants or just participants that know each other and want to do business together and then eventually when I'll say this this adds a call of collaboration between this participant and the state can be resubmitted back to the name blockchain so again same same benefits of reducing the vault the the load on the main blockchain and allowing much quicker finalization of the transactions because they don't have to go obviously through mining plasma is an e etherium implementation of this concept of sidechain and it's a little bit it provides a bit better guarantees than a similar technology side changing technology that was introduced for Bitcoin and other block chains so I'm not gonna go if you are interested to know more about how state channels or sidechain work you can have a look at the slides you serve I'm not going to go into detail here but I just want to emphasize a couple of points so state channels can stay pretty much permanent or permanently open so that means that once you have opened a state channel once a set of participants have started to transact between themselves with using state channels a state channel they they can let that channel open almost indefinitely and generally you one of the participants would partially close the state channel if you want to live or the state channel can even be closed if there are some participants notice malicious behavior and anyway there are some guarantees on the on the technology of the state channels that will allow will prevent manipulation of state and and some and submission of of incorrect state back to the blockchain so the two main benefits again just to reiterate are high perform higher performance because there is no mining and privacy because all this state evolution that happens outside the vein chain is private completely private II nobody has visibility of it apart from from the participants possibly that are interacting together one of the main technologies that has been developed in the etherium ecosystem on state channel is the Raiden Network and especially the micron micro Raiden sub network that is there allows micro payments so at the moment I would say most of the state channel concept is really a micro P is a pay I'll say some payment challenge channel concept because the easiest thing you can do is just to to move tokens in and outside the network well outside the domain blockchain and then handle them there and and resubmit so there are other interesting side projects but they're not related with these two main projects like Raiden it's like connects to fanfare there's a platform specialized in casinos counterfactual which is a framework allows you to build your own state state channels sidechains it's a concept appeared in 2014 in in the Bitcoin space plasma as I said this the main technology in the Ethier M space at the beginning it was starting to get developed by vitalic muttering but at the beginning there was a bigger ambition out say to progress with more impetus on this technology but then he got it he got focused on payments as well here in this so there are I'd say most of the technology is being used for micro payments the major plasma implementations are loom the luma network plasma pay or mice ago I would say loom is the ones more complete from a technical point of view and it's there pushing I mean the the owners of this project are also pushing interesting concept concepts are out integration with gaming and and also there that developed kind of tool to teach a serum technology through this through through the loom network so this is pretty much the two main solutions as I said so state channels on one side and as I chained on level 2 now level 1 the next I would say release of a theorem 1.0 is gonna just marginally improve on on the current platform but it's not a major improvement the major improvement will come later so this one is just the next release which is in stumble which you will come will come across in October 2000 nineteen is just around the proof-of-work algorithm so they will make they will try to make life a bit harder for a sick Bay's mining so so that GPU miners will have a but better return but the major plan is mainly on a theorem 2.0 so just touching the main points of serenity so there are I would say three or four major improvements that will come with serenity so first of all is proof of the interaction of proof of stake so with proof of stake I'm going to show you what I mean for proof of stake so at the moment you know that most block chains are based on proof of work proof of work is based on competition between miners so among miners so every miner in the network is trying to compete against the others to try to upend block on the blockchain so this causes as you know consumption of a very high amount of electricity and also a kind of scalability problem because you need proof of work is also time intensive so going forward there would be a set of validators rather than miners and a validator will be picked by an algorithm so that only one validator will have to process a block so it's a different concept now a validator will put a kind of deposit and if if the validator prove proves malicious that deposit would be will get confiscated so obviously using the validators are encouraged to to act to play well the other the other improvement is charging sorry so sharding is a concept that is already present in this interest in the distributed databases so if you have if you have worked with databases no sequel databases like Couchbase or they all use sharding which is which means you distribute the records across of a kind of table or collection across different servers and they are generally located closer to the users a similar concept is being adopted also to improve the etherium scalability so nodes would process will store and process independently only a set of transactions not all of them I'm simplifying a lot just to give you an idea of what sharding will do sorry then another improvement is the EVM the Ethier virtual machine will be based on the new technology which is most standardized webassembly so the new machine virtual machine will be called he was based on assembly technology so these are the main I'd say improvements on the on on on the core I would say probably we could end the presentation here I was planning to give you an idea of other related technology I'll say the main the main one outside I'll say these improvements on scalability and privacy atomic atomic cross chain swaps so what's that it's basically it's a technology days that allows you to swap cryptocurrency across block block chains without having to go to a main centralized so most of you if you have traded any cryptocurrency you generally use the classic coinbase or kraken or centralized exchanges but this new technology will allow you to trade with other peers without having to go to a decentralized exchange and it will lock the cryptocurrency on both sides and it will make a swap in one single operation with all the full guarantees that you will receive the the the cryptocurrency from the external blockchain and your cryptocurrency will be transmitted to the other side security token as well as I said just at the introduction is one of the main I'd say up-and-coming applications there is a full ecosystem that's developing around it there are lots of token flavors they're appearing for all sorts of reasons the next presentation probably we touch on year c77 to one or not no fungible tokens they're being used for our trading property trading so these are Oracle's are being decentralized so there is emerging technology so I presented earlier oracle eyes or provable things that is a used to be the main Oracle technology but now there are some challenges to that like chain link probably the cryptid traders are among you will have noticed that they spiked 70% up a couple of weeks ago so chain link is one of the technologies that allows decentralized Oracle's and so I'll stop here I would leave space for the next presentation yes [Applause]