How to Onboard 1B People to the Blockchain? Alex Shevchenko

one two three good now yeah so hello everybody uh my name is alex i would like to talk a little bit about uh onboarding quite a lot of users to the blockchain technologies right so um i work for the project that is called aurora and maybe some of you know about this project can can those of you who know who heard anything about aurora raise your hands okay so then i'm going to do the first very very quick first slide just to to give you an overview of what it is um from the standpoint of the ordinary person we are just another evm compatible network uh but with a special flavor inside of it so we are working as a smart contract on top of a near blockchain that is more performant it is horizontally scalable and because of this we are able to to scale well the amount of users the amount of applications now um we are literally taking the best of the two worlds right evm with the rechecker system with all of the tooling and we are putting it we're putting inside of it the engine the performance engine of the newer blockchain now we have some specifics and i'm not going to go too deep into it but our base token is f so that's why we are extending ethereum economy we do not want to you know push our users to buy our tokens and all of the stuff right so so you can you can do absolutely the same thing that you're doing on the ethereum blockchain and we also have a bridge solution so a little you know a little bridge from the previous talk about bridges we have it and it is called rainbow bridge maybe some of you tried it at some point in time yeah yeah somebody said yeah in case uh in case the sound guy is listening can you please turn up a little bit the volume um so uh so the rainbow bridge itself is the trustless bridge right um and well it's pretty complicated breach i can say to you we don't have any validators or people who are approving the transactions the movement of the funds or the calls cross cross chain calls from ethereum to near and aurora now uh let's go a little bit into the actual topic of the speech right and i always would like to start with the question why what is the reason for us to on board 1 billion people to the blockchain it is a non-trivial challenge and we need to understand why do we want to do it right so from my point of view obviously and i believe we're all sharing this this idea decentralized technologies are better than the centralized technologies right so it's better people are in control of their money people are in control of their identity in general they are controlling their lives that's why we're building all of this stuff but better technology does not mean that this tech is going to be adapted right we need to have that mass adoption because if we will not have it we as an industry we are going to die literally online streaming services were winning against the dvds and cities not because on not only because they are great but also because internet is capable of delivering this and internet is capable of onboarding millions and billions people to it right and if not for the content delivery networks the specific solutions that are delivering the the content to your uh to your phones and to your laptops we would not be using it right and it happened not in 90s it happened just recently because the internet speed was was becoming enough to do this trimming right so it is about the mass adoption when the industry starts to dominate it's not about the tech and let's take a look at our current situation in the industry right so on the left hand side you are able to see just the amount of addresses that are active or like that were created in the ethereum blockchain it grows which is good but on the left hand side you can see the graph some kind of graph i'm going to tell you what is it in a minute that shows a little bit different dynamics and this graph you know as you can see it goes parabolic right in the end there is a little bit decrease of the speed of growth and this is natural but it goes much much steeper with the time and it is actually just the amount of smartphone users in just a single country in india right the growth is accelerating and if you will take a look at that second graph from the pure statistical points of view like the amount of addresses on ethereum blockchain and i'm even not talking about the users of ethereum blockchain because this number is much much lower but we are eight years behind the users of the smartphone of a single country in the world i would like you to fully understand that we are and and like the growth is not increasing we right now with the current adoption with the current strategies that we as an industry apply we will never be able to catch up even with the people in india right why the problem is obviously the limitation of the block size right you cannot just put more transactions in a single block and that's that's an ordinary thing and i believe lots of people are talking about it and this is all like all of the l2 solutions and additional errors and one solutions and you know roll ups ethereum 2.0 which is already renamed right this is it everybody are talking about it right but why it is actually the problem so the thing inside of it the core of the problem is the design of the evm right we are going to put a foot into the tech piece here so the design of the evm is naturally one threaded and because of this the um the execution of the smart contracts is synchronous and because of this the smart contracts are composable this is good this allows for many additional use cases like flash loans however this design is limiting the growth of the blockchain and if you will take a look again from the pure technical perspective and you will take take a step back 30 years ago all of these cpus right the central processing units were also single threaded and that's okay operational systems have been working there but at the moment when the tech was reaching its limit it was a quantum leap forward when intel was designing the multiple core cpus and then nvidia was coming in with the graphical units they also you know having multiple execution cores right this is super simple concept that allows you to grow the amount of computations that you are actually doing right so like we again we are we're just going absolutely the same route and the solution was there from the web too it is available to us today we just need to have more evms right we just need to have more places where we where people are capable of launching their smart contracts and not even more but much much more places right it may be different blockchains it may be roll-ups it may be something something else but there is a great deal of sense into scaling up just the number of the evms that are available there in the market and what is going to bring to us also some additional new features and first of all this is the virtualization of the of the execution environments so right now in the web 2 world it will be crazy to think that in case for example facebook servers go down because of the load then it will eventually mean that google servers are also going down it is some kind of strange concept right it is not appealing to us in the web to world but everybody remember the story with the cryptokitties they launched and all of the network just halted right it's not the way how it should work it's not the way so with multiple evms we would be able to deliver this virtualization of the resources right so that's kind of a good thing now obviously there are lots of companies that are moving in this direction so i would like to give here a short shout out to the polka dot ecosystem with the power chains and power threats right this is already a step into it to the cosmos ecosystem and especially uh it is very like super super proud of of the ibc concept and the way how they trustlessly are able to bridge the data and assets in between cosmos chains right but also i would like to give shout out here to near blockchain right because near is charted itself it has the capability of scaling within a single blockchain right and with polkadot and with uh cosmoseca systems to launch an additional evm is going to be pretty hard right in polkadot you need to stay stick to 150 ml of worth of dots right in order to get the power chain in cosmos you need to find validators and you know run your own blockchain um and that's a little bit complicated this is not very close to thinking of the lot of evms that we need to we need to we need to launch but with near and with the the you know in general with the idea of scaling through the amount of smart contracts this thing can be implemented right and obviously aurora is a smart contractor near so i'm not quite sure whether you're following the talk or not and maybe you can you know make your own um your own um outcomes and your own your own thoughts out of this piece i'm not going to go deeper into into into your aurora but is this enough would be the ability to launch many evms actually help us and from my point of view the answer is no and the reason for this is that blockchain user experience is horrible right this is it is absolutely not even close to what web to world is given to us and remember we are not talking about people that are here right one billion people we need to on board them they are walking in the streets they are they are they are instagram guys and they are doing the tick tock right they want to have slick interface they want to have things on the on their fingertips right they are not going to think about chain id the gas limit the gas price increasing the speed of the transactions what is it when you're using internet do you think about tcp iep stack that is underneath it we are stuck in a very low level primitives and we are not progressing beyond it and this is crucial for us in order again to onboard these additional people we need to deliver to the users subscription models to the blockchains because back in 90s we were having that per second terrification for mobile calls but now the whole world migrated to the situation when they when you're buying packages monthly packages so at some point in time people have been registering on their websites with their email and confirmations and all of the stuff and now they are just going in with the google authentication and facebook authentication and that's okay mass market is doing it and how you're buying your groceries you're just using face id this is the user experience that mass market is appealing to we need to deliver exactly this thing to the people in case we would like to succeed as the industry and uh to to put it to put it in a good manner right there are quite a lot of companies in the blockchain that are going towards this so for example in furore in case you're a developer you probably know it and fiora is implementing the thing that is called itx right this is their you know advanced uh management of the transactions right and uh yeah you can say to me like uh everything is already happening what do you want from us right we're already moving in that direction well i am a demanding manager i want everything to happen much much faster right we are again we are failing to deliver we are failing as an industry to deliver and let me give you just one simple example again because we have been talking about cpus and gpus my background is in high performance computing so it was i believe 2007 or 2008 when nvidia was providing the first version of their cuda tech that allows people to do the general purpose computations on the gpu it was super low level developers needed to understand the guts of the chips it's like even not it's it's not even you know the assembly kind of thing they need to understand how structurally the chip the gpu chips are you know assembled and that was you know insane that moment in time because one step left or to the left or to the right and instead of the increase of the speed they were getting insane decrease of the speed of the computation but only six years later could attack that is created by a single company literally it was progressing to the moment where developers were not even forced to think where the data is located whether it is on the hard drive in the ram or on in the gpu compilers were going to the level when they were able to predict the movement of the data and i can tell you this is much much much harder thin than taking care of the prediction of the guest price right and uh what changed with the with our user experience within the previous 12 years in the blockchain in terms of the gas user experience nothing and we are a freaking insane amount of companies here and we are not progressing there right single nvidia is performing better than our decentralized community of the blockchains we are losing again just to sum up we are losing this competition we need to buckle up we need to go straight to the execution we need to get this one billion people to the blockchain in order to survive as the industry so encourage everybody moving to the mass adoption and in case you have any questions i'm happy to answer all of them thanks