The EEA Technical Roadmap by Ron Resnick & Conor Svensson (Devcon4)

like to share with you a little bit of the vision of the EI and how we are working toward intersection and working collaboratively with aetherium Foundation and other organizations as well moving forward just a little background from where I spent 12 years in in town and the telecom side of things so it's very interesting in my world and how it can how it addresses the world of more of open-source so it's been a learning experience to to figure out how we how are you married the best of both worlds and I think that's one of the reasons why I think I was even invited to take the the role of heading up the EA is that we we we need to do that we shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel and so there's lots of benefits from both aspects of looking at what's a pure a purist version of open-source and how does that work and how do you also protect the the enterprise's of which we we address and that's how we we started I joined last January but as many of you know the EA the initial date has gone jo zuban told me was February 29th the prior year and so so in any event it's a very new organization but the intent was okay we have the the open May net and there there's a vision a purpose for it but again what about the enterprise and and we are leaving out the opportunity for enterprises to do good in the world as well as be profitable so that's partially if the role of what I believe that we should do and how we work so so we formed and what we ended up doing we took a look at initially the EA was even thinking of writing code but when you look at the organizations that I am very familiar with our or standards orgs that I'm familiar with and have been actively engaged in the last 15 20 years such as the I Triple E and I don't know if you're familiar with some of these at sea and then 3gpp and the 3gpp is a partner project it's a it's a group it's not even formal they write a spec there's no code and then it goes to ed C which is the European the version of a standards or got it covers international and then it gets rubber stamped and then it becomes a global spec and the the the end result and this is the the philosophy that I'd really like to see is that when you buy a if you buy cellphone here in Prague and it's made made in in Korea and and then you you show up in Venezuela and you buy a SIM card you expect that phone to work and that deals it that that's all about interoperability and global in are by interoperability and that's the vision that I'd like to see our world be and and and the way to do it is to have a standards org and so a standards or doesn't write code we should never compete with our members who do work and then and then in order to enforce the standards code you need some form of certification and that's the reason why all these phones work and where I come from it's called NW IOT network interoperability testing every one of those operators by that phone they plug it into their own network or they don't sign off on it so we can't do all those things because that's hardware but there's things that we could do for software and there's lots of ways you guys Justin Lee he was came out an entertainment gaming industry as a product marketing manager there's a lot that you can do to assure interoperability so that's where that's where I'm coming from that's where I've got support from our board and the folks in our world how do we do do that using the EA so I've walked you through I'm not going to go through all the slides but you'll be able to get them so I already share with you why standards are really important because without that we can't accomplish that goal in our org we have a very good Board of Directors and initially I was telling some of the guys I don't want you to think great I know it is all the biggest companies in the world where are they and compared to the smallest ones so but and as you know in the world of blockchain and the enterprise I want the lowest hanging fruit our financial services of course and there's amber hi amber so she helps start the quorum side of things so at Quora so in any event that was low-hanging fruit but it but if you take a look at some of the folks on our board Andrew Miller from the University of Illinois and then so we try to have a balanced approach and everybody gets one vote no matter how big or small you are and the organization since I started we've doubled in size and I can share with you the the argument that we make is okay if you're looking for interoperability if you're looking for sure insan' die can tell you it's not easy to convince the enterprise's to bet down let alone understand what blockchain is but to bet down and make a commitment not easy and so that's our story we use that we use what the EA is about and it can help all of you even if you're looking at where we're headed which I would like to see us and when we talk about the roadmap Inc enhance our specification so we can do things to help accelerate the adoption on the public maenette because right now we're not doing that but we want to so we have 500 members and we're growing continually growing more and more and the reason why is they do want the these big these enterprises whether small or large and particularly if they buy from smaller companies and I'm an ex Intel guy but I can tell you if we're competing if Intel is competing and that a very small company it's really hard for the small company to get some traction so being part of an organization like in EA when you say you're you're writing code that can form CVA here it's certified they feel better about taking the risk we're diversified we're we have members from all over the world with different categories of business so we try the bottom line is folks are joining us in all all the different areas the way we're organized we have a legal advisory group we're not doing a tremendous amount of legal work but we do try to intersect the technical spec work is bit headed by Connor Svendsen he'll come up and talk to you about a road map and our stack and then we'll forming a certification working group and actually now we're going to form a global test net and that global test and that means if you guys are writing solutions based on enterprise aetherium and you can use our test net and that we have a goal of getting that up and running we now have a commitment from different companies including Microsoft to help us do this so we plan to implement that and then you can actually have your customers that they don't have to be a member of the org and they can they can they can use it and I'm just checking the time is it tracking there or where is it the track the time you're there keep me posted okay so another another thing that we do is we now have associate member program so I don't know some of you saw but we entered an agreement hyper ledger and I was invited to present and we did get an applause when brian behlendorf and i know if he's here it invited me but at the end of the day I encourage the the folks who work on fabric to develop a version that could conform to the a spec and and since they they're not a standards org there's a very good synergy and we invite all these other orgs and around me that could be synergistic because there isn't any one org that really solves all the problems that you need for delivered developing solutions for blockchain we also are very involved with the the the deaf organization some of the folks are familiar with the organizations that do social impact we we don't plan to deal with and write solutions for identity we'll partner with the w3c with deaf ID 2020 and come up with the solutions Perce again we don't want to reinvent the wheel and so how we operate we have technical work technical working groups we also have special interest groups and so we have one for financial services one for help and it's we're member driven org we don't run the org the members do so if anybody wanted to have more visibility whatever you whatever members want to see they join and they raise their hands and they they can make it happen so that that's how the org works and that's how while standard sword works so with that I wanted to bring up Connor so I come out of the world the telecom and telecom they have it's called an OSI 7 layer stack we want to formalize how work is done technically so you can have multiple vendors of choice and by the way this stack you don't even need to take a photo if you go to our website you don't even I now you don't even have to say who you are because you can just go to our website and you can download our stack and our spec everything and just do whatever you want in developing whatever you want and then if you want to use our logo or go through our certification process process then you would we you would be asked to join because of intellectual property requirements etc but anybody here can can download our spec and work on an enterprise etherium so I'll turn it over to Connor he's going to walk you through and talk to you a bit about our architecture stack thanks Ron hey everyone so I'm the chair of the tech spec working group but I'm also a guest developer by background I wrote web 3j the Java library for working with the theorem and have my own blockchain technology startup as well so I come at this from a I guess they've perspective ultimately the idea they with the architecture stack as Ron said you know I guess inspiration was the the eye size seven layer model but really it was that the first artifact that they produced and put out there is a reference points to try and capture everything that we're thinking about with respect to the EA the actual inspiration for the stack was a talk that was done at Def Con last year where one of the developers working for the foundation did a talk on the anatomy of an aetherium clients and one of the really neat things that they did there was they highlighted the components in yellow that were aligned with the yellow paper and basically adopted that idea as well so I thought it's a really neat way of you know talking in terms of where these things are formally specified in the yellow paper then also those components that are core to just general aetherium and then we added on a piece which was what we see as being answered more in surprise focus pieces the key you always would be EA has been about aetherium technology and so we will always see the initiatives that we're doing as being a superset of what's happening in the world of public aetherium and we never want to sort of be separating ourselves from it because you know many members of the you know passionate about a theorem technology that's why they joined up that's what got me into it as well because I came from an enterprise background but then you know really likely theory and technology and it reminds me of the community reminds me somewhat of the Linux community back in the day and we all know how well that panned out there as well but the the stack I'm not going to go through all the different layers about it now but I think that the key point is is that we're trying to just encompass you know everything that we believe is in scope there and she can do certainly review it in your own time and go over to the website to review it what I did want to talk about though was the the specifications that we've released this week we released two new specifications on this slide here we have organizations that directly contributed to this these specifications I think historically there's been sort of a perception with the EA that there was you know only a few firms contributing to it but I think what's really nice about this is it shows that you know you've got a fairly good cross-section of different companies getting involved in the actual specification work which i think is really cool to see and so this week the two specs that we released one of them was the client specification v2 and so we released v1 to coincide with the consensus coined s conference in May of this year we're now on a six month release cycle with the specifications whereby every six months that the next version will come out so we'd envisage the next one will be likely April next year all of the development of these specifications now is taking place on github we're following similar sort of processes to how the w3c specs are being developed so people members of submitting issues and pull requests with changes they get approved by just different members there's actually going to be a lot more transparency as well very soon in that we're going to be the actual repo is no longer going to be private so people can see exactly what's happening as the specifications evolve but in terms of the highlights just wanted to bring your attention to a couple of them one of them is that we've now in in the EA spec we have a core set of JSON RPC a API implementations from aetherium that you need to implement to have an enterprise aetherium clients we've also added some additional ones this.e which we use in EE a namespace and this is mainly right now functions around supporting the privacy models that are specified by the EA so these are your your quorum type approach to privacy where you have a you know transactions being stored off off chain and but also there's some on chain techniques as well that the likes of Claire Maddox have been promoting with their actual client implementation we also reference the precompile contracts as well so we list the eighth's precompile contracts that are specified in the yellow paper they're all now referenced in the EA spec as being mandatory requirements and the other thing as well is that we've actually provided a an API and for network permissioning the you know the government governance of private permission networks is obviously a you know it's a challenge and so we've we've now included in our specification an API for this based on work that some members have contributed so it's you know for us it's I think it's you know a good move forward in that right now there's not really any any standardization around this just yet and we've also added in a security considerations section but that's more based on just best practices around you know security for these mission Jane's the other big specification release was the off chain trusted compute spec and so this was mainly driven by Intel and I exact but a number of different you know contributors did get involved include including Oracle ice and I think consensus did some stuff but the point is is it provides a JSON RPC based API for vendors whereby they can achieve well really really achieve a few different things there one is use it for Oracle type services another where they just want to use a secure Enclave to do some sort of computation or it could just be doing some sort of computations off chain in a again you know as a secure environment but stuff that wouldn't actually be easy to do unchanged you to the performance requirements so it's it's it's you know for us we're really happy that it's made it out there because you know this it's a second spec we envisage that there will be multiple specs appearing over time but you know especially given that you know it's ready in time for this conference as well was you know happy to have it out there and I'm really keen for people to take a look and start feeding back into it and so that was all I was going to say here and I'll pass back to Ron's talk about the road map thank you so we we have a timetable for road maps and we try to tie it to events so it puts pressure on the folks doing work and so that helps but so what we our plan is to have a six-month as Connor said a six-month cadence so we're an open door anyone who wants to be involved in yeah can be a member and just to share with you so you know it's $3,000 for a member with a company that has 50 or less employees so we try to make it affordable we're a non-profit so the money that comes in just pays for the work that we do trying to support the activities to get get the spec done we're not not it's we're not a profit-making venture and we don't make a lot of money and what we get we get approved by our board and then we spend it on making sure our tests net will get in place we have a test net we'll try to promote to the whole world the benefits of blockchain technology so so those are the things some of the things we do and and again we hire a folks to work on our spec and as far as making sure it conforms to the quality and caliber that if we show our respect to a standards org and there's they're called sto standards development organs so we can do marketing so the quality and caliber of our spec has to be top-notch and that's why our spec version is 4.5 is 0.5 for the trusted execution because it's really our first one out so we're not making it a formal spec yet compared to the other work that we're doing so every six six months we'll be coming out with a new one we're done we're trying to get to the point of you don't see the test not there because I wasn't sure that we'll have one until I get commitments from members to say they're gonna do it and now I just got those commitments here at Def Con so we absolutely this is this and and in order to make that happen you need a common consensus mechanism correct so that's what we're working on so anyone who's interested and and you could have a reason not everybody's looking at enterprise side things but we do want to scale so our solutions can can support all kinds of future aspects of what maybe some of the things that you're working on and and then we'll have so we'll be you tire a next one time to like the consensus 2000 eighteen event timeframe and then by next Def Con we'll have released four and then our plans to launch certification you do certification through independent labs so I want to leave it just a couple minutes so we're just about done I just shared with you were really committed to social impact part of the reason why I have this here is that we're going to work hard to get the enterprises to support and they already do I've learned about it through some board members but we we really want to do a good job to help the south side of social impact so with that said we have just about five minutes for any questions so there you go Connor you can come up in case it's technical Thanks on the roadmap is there going to be another client implementation of quorum okay that's that's a good question so initially a quorum jump-started the work that we did and but right now what we I'd say there's about six months ago we transition that there was a quorum working group and Amber was completely involved in she can tell you we transitioned that and we did change the name because we want the work it we want this to be a collective so there isn't anything at quorum quorums work contribute to the technical spec that's built into the spec that you'll download and so there are multiple clients that are all incorporated rolled into one that should be have the level interoperability is defined by what they all agree upon that's required must have so you have Claire Maddox you have block apps you have the new Pantheon solution all of those folks worked very closely together so quorum quorum is a platform or you can download the source code write the quorum and but it'll the goal is that and it is because the quorum guys are very involved in our org it'll conform to the a spec any other questions Alex sorry could you share Allah I know that there was a couple sessions that we had on interaction with like public etherium could you just give a high-level overview of what the outcomes of those were yeah I'll I'll talk a little bit about and where so we've had multiple meetings with the folks from public etherium and our goal is we we should be very collegiate ly working collaboratively together and we are and and so we we we track the roadmap that goes on and they therein foundation we had some meetings where we talked about like the EIP process and how the EAP process should benefit we should be mutually benefiting each other so we had a two hour meeting that Connor actually presented on in others and so we will actually look at what we develop and if we see things that can work on that yet your and these yours or any of the VIPs that make sense will do it and we were also giving visibility to the folks in the Theorem foundation to they can go participate and see what we're doing what's not on here and I'll just don't I right now the work we're doing is private permission networks I've talked to our two folks in our org and teammates we we want a roadmap to to address public commercial networks that use the etherium a net and so part of what we're looking to do and I've talked to a number of companies they too can join us and contribute how do we how do we bring that in and and so we're leveraging there's so many opportunities for the public may net that are commercial and I could think of some that I'd love to see like get rid of the ticket scalpers a secondhand ticket market I would pay money to have that done so there your imagination could just take you everywhere for what we want to do because there's a lot of work but you definitely need to create a spec you need to get get it certified if you're going to get like Faiza or anybody else to say I'm going to buy into it they're gonna want to know that there's 500 companies behind it there's multiple vendors that they can pick from any other questions great thanks very much [Applause] you