Polkadot by Gautam Dhameja

hello everyone good evening thanks for coming out here today so I'm going to talk about polka dot in the context of interoperability of blockchains and let's let's basically just right jump right into it so brief about me I'm Gotham the major I'm a Solutions Architect with parity technologies most of the time I'm helping our potential customers enterprises blockchain or governments or startups to help build on the parity stack mostly on the building app based blockchains and how to connect them with polka dot and so on so that's me and let's let's go into the polka dot side of things how we look at interoperability and how we actually realize that we want something like this so it's going to be something in continuation to what Billy just mentioned like why we need interoperability and based what what has brought us to this point so let's look at what's the status quo at the moment first of all the whole categorization and building of these APIs blockchain started when we realize that one framework one platform or one network will not be able to provide all the fundamental characteristics needed for all kinds of block chains we are everyday we are looking at these different block chains popping up around the ecosystem some some of them are providing identity some of them are providing payments some of them are providing us a few other characteristics but the focus has now been moving more and more towards one single use case do it and do it better and do it best basically and it's not about like doing everything anymore so that's one of the patterns that we have been seeing coming up a lot in the recent developments in our blockchain ecosystem and that's one part of it basically the second most important part is the mass adoption what I personally also believe is that until the larger enterprises and the government's don't start using our ecosystem our technologies they will not be gaining mass adoption in the near future so it is important to help them also build the solutions that they want to build for the decentralized space and most of the time their requirements are very different from what conventional blockchains will will look like so a lot of times they need some level of permissioning lot of times they need some privacy of state arbitrary message-passing and so on so those are some of the characteristics which are specifically needed for some of the use cases and not the current frameworks or platforms of today not all of them provide this in a more in a fully decent lies of permissionless way and finally when we combine the last two arguments that I just presented that there are several chains popping up every day and then there are different requirements from the enterprise side and the government side of things we are looking at all these fragments being created in different corners of the world like today again there was this announcement of the Facebook coin chain and then a few weeks ago there was an identity to chain being built by Microsoft and so on so we are again looking at those fragments which we actually wanted to not have when we were starting with the whole blockchain ecosystem we wanted a connected world we wanted a more decentralized and transparent world and now again we are looking at these fragments so how do we basically make sure that we are bringing these things together we are bringing these ecosystems together so that's where the whole need for interoperability is is realized and before before we go into how we solve that problem with polka dot let's also look at what exactly is needed to solve the problem of interoperability so the first thing is a common platform until chains or networks or systems are not able to talk to each other in a standardized way they will not talk to each other basically so it's as simple as that if I'm able to communicate things to you today in English you are listening to me if I was speaking Hindi back from India you will not be listening to me most of you so we need a common platform to talk to each other or the systems need a common platform to talk to each other first of all and hence we are looking at something like an infrastructure for the infrastructure so if the new teams which are coming up with their own app based blockchains they are creating infrastructure for solving a use case we need infrastructure to actually enable their infrastructure itself so that's the first need where we are looking at when we want to solve the problem of interoperability the second and the most important thing is trust of course while we are looking at a lot of trust less systems we talk about environments where we want to give up a trust and look at immutability and decentralization we are also like kind of this is something more behavioral kind of thing that if I am able to communicate with you and if I am able to trust you then I will be able to deal with you and the exact same thing applies for systems as well if they are able to talk to each other which was my previous slide and if they are able to trust each others in some way or the other they will be able to come in communicate and interoperate with each other and that's the most important second part is and when it comes to block chains and in the context of decentralized systems Trust is more about finality if one chain has a state that can be reverted or there are Byzantine actors which are working towards making this chain unstable then the other chain should not be impacted by that secondly the most important point is the security if a chain is feeling basically secured with by connecting to a network by exchanging information over that particular infrastructure then it will be very very helpful for these chains to interoperate with each other so those are the primary two needs when we are trying to solve the problem of interoperability we need a common platform we need chains to be able to talk to each other in an in standardized way and secondly and most importantly they should be able to trust this platform which they are using to talk to each other so that's where I want to jump now into the polka-dot side of things how we are solving these two problems how we are bringing a common framework a common platform into the ecosystem and how chains are allowed or enabled to trust this common infrastructure so let's look at how we are looking at the interoperability side with polka dot so when it comes to block chains there are two basic things that we are looking at most of the times it's one is the state transition that there are these transactions coming in into the chain and they are taking the chain from one state to the next state and that's basically depending upon use case to use is that the first a lot among chains for our identity related chain this could be a creation of a new identity or an update of a new identity for a financial settlements chain it's just subtraction and addition of balances so that's very different from chain to chain and then the second part is consensus on how you basically agree that a state has really changed or not so what we are doing with polka dot is allowing both of these side of block chains the state transition and the consensus to be basically connected together even if the chains are doing different kind of state transitions for their different use cases underlying infrastructure allows them to still interoperate with each other secondly the problem about finality and what's going to be what what was the state previously what was the state next and whether it will be reverted back or not that's the past present in the future of the block chain that also connected and I'll jump right into it in a couple of slides after this and finally the third part is about connecting public and private networks like I mentioned previously when we were looking at Korea how the silos are being created the one thing which was coming up was create and creation of these private chains enterprise chains which were basically being just coming up as fragments because then their needs are very different they are they are required to do a lot of other things apart from just decentralization and keeping the state immutable so how do we make sure that we connect both private chains and public chains is also a most thing that polka-dot helps us solve so high level and 10,000 feet level view of polka dot is basically we have three major components in the system the relay chain which is basically the the central infrastructure of polka dot which allows other chains to connect and talk to each other then we have the para chains and these are the application of specific chains which are kind of being built using the same framework and the platform so that they can communicate with each other if they are not following the same practices if they are not following the same standard standards then again there is a problem of fragmentation so this is how we are basically coming up with this whole framework for building para chains so that they can connect to the polka dot relay chain and talk to each other and finally bridges so bridges are basically allowing existing chains which are not built using the para chain framework which is substrate if you heard about it so if if your chain is not following the exact the consensus and the N is not connected directly to the polka dot network using a slot then they can still be connected to the network using bridges so for example chains like aetherium z cash bitcoin they can be connected to the Polka nod network using aetherium and oh sorry bridges and they can still interoperate with other pirate chains and these other existing chains in themselves how this looks like is basically something like this which I will explain in detail so the core middle part which you see as a dark black outline in the middle that's the religion and those white things inside that is are the blocks for the religion the lines that you see in between which are basically like kind of creating the web are interchange passing so that's how the religion is helping pass all these messages from one chain to other the next layer basically are the validators for the religion so they are making sure that the blocks are being added to the chains one after the other and they are taking care of the security and the recentl ization of the religion itself and the third layer are the parrot chains themselves they are directly connected to the relation and submitting their blocks to validators of the religion and finally if you look at the next level those are the second level relay chains and the bridge chains which are connecting to the religion using bridges or second level or the first level religion itself so this is how basically a whole ecosystem based on polka-dot looks like that everything is fully decentralized fully permissionless but it's still able to interact and interoperate with each other in a very very standardized way so what we are using and how we are building this ecosystem we are again using Rus programming language to build the framework for building para chains and the polka-dot religion is also being built using the same framework called substrate and which is based on rust then webassembly the most important and crucial part of frame our framework components is because if you are already aware of then let me not aware and let me tell you about it that polka-dot is inherently upgradable so it has on chain governance and you can actually upgrade the runtime of the chain at any point in time after getting through consensus and the most crucial aspect over there is web assembly so this vaasam allows us to do that without any problem because you can simply upgrade the environment on wasum and still the native environment is fully functional at that point in time so that's that's the second most important aspect and a third finally aspect is about the lip p2p the flexible p2p protocol which is like designed by the protocol labs team and then we have implemented that in rust and we are using that for polka-dot and for substrate based chains as well so going back to the initial set of problems that we are we were looking at when we were trying to solve the interoperability issues and the first thing that we looked at was a common platform is needed which which can allow these apps to actually interact with each other in a standardized way and that's why we want to make sure that all the apps that are interacting app chains and para chains that are interacting with the Volga dot ecosystem are can be as heterogeneous ingenious as they can be they can have their state transition function as as they want there should be scalability the whole problem of the major major problem at in our space right now is scalability and that's again how we solve it is by pooling these chains together so if there is an identity chain and if there is a payment settlement chain and if there is let's say a supply chain blockchain then they are actually now and they are all connected to let's say the polka dot relay chain they are actually not doing all of the same thing together in one chain but they're you know dividing these users if somebody needs to just transfer a Bitcoin they don't have to really do or not Bitcoin or some financial coin they don't have to really go through a chain which is doing everything which is also having transactions of supply chain or having transactions of identity they are just interested in basically getting and transferring some financial value similarly if somebody wants to authenticate using their identity system or if they want to create an identity self sovereign on the blockchain then they don't have to worry about other transactions that are coming from the financial chain so this is how we are approaching the problem of scalability is like the chains will have their own use cases and they will do that in a more efficient way and they don't have to worry about other things which generally are being being done in most of the current frameworks so to say and finally this security model like we said the other major thing to solve for interoperability was security so polka-dot uses this pooled or shared security model where the validators of the Pera chain are basically allowing or sorry the validators of the relay chain are swapped and they allow and they basically allow the para chains to add blocks to the relay chain and they are allowing all these para chains which are connected to the polka-dot ecosystem to basically be secured in a more comprehensive way by basically interacting with each other so that's how the pool security works and let's look into where we are with the polka dot development so it's it's being approached in a very similar way how cerium was being build in the initial stages and our founder Gavin wood is also he was also the first co-ceo of aetherium and so we are following the exact same approach we are doing a bunch of pocs tackling one problem at a time so we have we have recently done the these some of these pocs and the next ones are basically coming up here we are looking at migration of a substrate build chain to be working as a pair a chain and then we will be hopefully by the end of this year or beginning of next year will be looking at a main net launch well thank you for listening to the story and questions are most welcome [Applause] [Music] you had mentioned that polka dot supports ball chains with a private stay how does that work with fishermen because like how do they guess do far proofs on the private state so the way it works is basically that there will be not all the status private state it's basically a subset of this state which needs to be there on the needs to be looked by the parties which are interested in looking into that and which are authorized to look into that or to be done with that and there is always a verification that there is a state change has happened for examples you don't always proof or something like that so that's for the fishermen to basically still make sure that the information is coming out correctly and the state changes are happening as they should be happening while the actual state is visible only to the people who are authorized to see that we data teams working on that side of things basically so there is a para chain being built called zero chain which is basically doing zero knowledge proof shun substrate and which will look something similar to this what we just discussed what makes you sure that the end game is many different block chains each focusing on their own specialized single use case and then there will be a need for something in the middle to connect them all so actually nothing makes me sure but it's it's more like when the patterns that we have seen in the past how we started with so it's it goes back to like how the computing has evolved in the last few decades it's always the same thing that we start with one system doing everything trying to do all of the things at the same time and then we realize there are limitations to use that framework or platform and then we try to you know fork out of that system and try it like just like Billy explained that in the beginning there were so many folks of Bitcoin because we wanted to scale we wanted to do something different so fragmentation always happens when there are limitations with one thing and people want to innovate so there is always one thing that is I am very sure of is innovation that people will keep on doing that will they will keep on breaking the boundaries and to do that you need extensible framework you need something which can allow for doing that otherwise you will be building something on your own and if you are going to build something on your own separately then you are creating fragments in the ecosystem and how do you connect these fragments together do I answer your question yep perfect all right thank you everyone have a nice thank you so much again [Applause]