Kadena POW: Scaling EVM With Parallel Chains | Stuart Popejoy & John Wiegley - Kadena

[Music] welcome eth Denver we are Caden layer one proof of work blockchain and we want to talk to you about scaling evm with parallel chains great so um a little bit about us uh as John mentioned we run a parallel chain uh proof of work blockchain and um a little bit about me uh my name is Stuart popejoy I'm a co-founder and the CEO and uh my I've been in technology since the 90s and my uh relevant background here is I was a founding director of the JP Morgan blockchain center of excellence and my name is John wiggle I'm Chief technology officer at Caden I've actually been in engineering now for 36 years and my team and I are responsible for the chain web and pack technologies that we'll be introducing and prior to joining Caden I worked in blockchain at definity on the internet computer so we're going to talk about how we're taking uh the technology we've developed at Cadena and how we're going to bring it to the evm ecosystem but to kind of set the stage I want to talk a little about scaling which is obviously a a topic that everybody's interested in and just to get into it and you know and what are the what's the promise and what's the Peril in terms of scaling evm Technologies so first thing I wanted to do is that when John and I think about scaling having been in this industry a long time I've been in Tech a long time we think of scaling very specifically as something where you have a resource that you that when you need to scale you can throw more of that resource and there's no limit on how much of that resource you can throw at it so for instance you have a website it you know you have bnch bunch of users coming in you can throw more machines at it you can throw more nodes at it and there's no limit to that uh in order to be able to accommodate your use case right if you on the other hand say you've got the world's fastest uh single node machine and it can go to whatever TPS once you hit that top TPS you're not going to be able to go further unless you have something that you can then throw at it to handle the next kind of burst of traffic or what have you um so today what we see with ethereum of course is that we're using rollups and L2 uh layer 2 and layer three Technologies to scale and the progress has really been tremendous um we got more blobs coming into uh in into the ethereum main net and it's really been successful um enabling the ethereum ecosystem to handle more traffic um so there's a lot to like but there have been some drawbacks um and and the main thing is with kind of decentralization and simplicity in the sense that I think the reason why a lot of us are attracted to working in blockchain Tech is that the idea is that in in some way it should be centralized and it should be simple uh what you're trying to do or how or more specifically how you do it so let's do a reality check what what is this scaling approach uh what are some of the perils that we've encountered and the first one is complexity and fragmentation and that means that developers uh and projects when they want to build adap and scale adap have to make a risky Choice uh choosing amongst uh diverse layer 2 uh platforms or even run a layer two themselves uh run a validator network themselves there's a lot of uh complexity involved in scaling your app and potential frag M mentation the second problem that is people are very aware of is that uh is centralization has creeped in um as people you know want to get stuff out to Market that actually delivers on the layer two and rollup promise they have had to cut some Corners with decentralization with sequencers Etc and uh this has you know it's something ballic has talked about and it's something that is uh it's regrettable and worse there's no kind of relief immediately in sight for how we're going to address the centralization issues and then the last one is that decentralization is more than just a value it's it actually adds up to real world uh problems such as censorship and fraud uh when you have a small group of actors who might control a particular platform so uh I like to look at decentralization is actually a security guarantee when things are decentralized you're actually more secure so what is the technology we've built to address these problems uh we call it chain web so in chain web the expandable resource if you could go to the next slide please is parallel chains so we built this as a blockchain network that can grow with adoption and utilization pretty much forever without bound um in our Network the expandable resource that Stuart was talking about is our parallel chains this is a this is an environment in which there's no master chain there's no Hub they're all equally independent of each other and this is the only network of its kind right now in the blockchain landscape now these parallel chains are unique in that they act as an oracle of each other's history we use a mathematical construct called an expander graph that allows each chain to operate fully in parallel completely independently yet after a certain block depth they each see the fullness of each other's history that way if an event occurs on chain a chain chain B can validate a proof of occurrence by looking into its own history and seeing the history of chain a and being able to directly validate that proof so this has the unique property that as chains are added while efficiency and throughput increase it actually becomes more resistant to attack and this leverages the smooth divisibility of proof of work I mentioned at the beginning that we're a proof of work layer one blockchain and we chose that for its Simplicity and some of the built-in security and decentralization guarantees we we get with it but it aids us as well in our parallel chain environment because as chains increase and we're we're able to increase them at any time the divisibility of Labor is also an advantage the miners are now able to mine across a growing and growing pool of chains so the hash rate distributes smoothly across all the chains which eliminates minor competition and means that the energy utilization per transaction can actually go down as the TPS is going up so some of the real world benefits of chain web is that this has been running in operation in production without interruption for now 5 years so this is not a w this is not a an idea or a promise of Technology this is technology that has been serving our community for quite a while now um and it hasn't been a walk in the park we have been attacked we have had hash rate disruptions but the benefits of proof of work have shown through every time so this is a technology that's proven and it's here today in this environment gas has stayed cheap congestion has remained manageable and it means you don't have to run any kind of node or validator network separate from the core consensus of the proof of work blockchain itself the second technology piece to our uh environment is we call it packed it's both a smart contract language but also a set of protocols and what pack does is it leverages this secure and effortless cross chain environment that I told you built on the expander graph and allows us to design and deliver a parallel bridging protocol across These Chains this allow this allows scenarios for example where you can do true burn and mint so I can transfer tokens from chain a to chain B where I am burning the tokens on a minting on B and achieving a complete zero sum for balances across all chains and this is done effortlessly you can think of it as a as a kind of bridging in which no Oracle is needed and no validator network is needed it's an intrinsic built-in concept for our chains this means that builders on our Network do not have to worry about congestions or gas spikes now a lot of networks that are new do have low gas fees so we're not new in that respect but as businesses know when you build on any network gas becomes expensive with utilization so as your user user base increases as utilization of your app increases even as external events on the network happen that have nothing to do with your app but represent a huge demand on the network your business can suddenly face gas bikes that price your users out of your business model and we are able to provide an environment in which that does not happen so 5 years into this journey we're now ready for the next step steuart thanks John so we're here today to announce chain web evm and uh we're really excited to be at eth Denver cuz uh you know evm is what everybody's using and it's the technology that we're all you know using every day and very excited about and and want to succeed um so today the cadna network runs 20 chains we launched actually with 10 and then we forked to 20 chains uh doubling our throughput so later this year we are going to once again double our chain count but the new chains 20 chains coming on are going to be running fully standard evm solidity ABI uh that developers know and are used to and are and work seamlessly with all the existing great tools like hard hat Etc um and uh not only that so that gets you evm which you know and and is familiar to developers but on top of that we've also introduced a we're introducing a e we're working on a draft EIP that brings the protocol that John was describing for secure sharing of assets across These Chains uh the mint and in the case of uh specifically erc20 you have uh the ability to Mint burn uh from one chain to the next and the thing to understand there is that this is a unique scaling technology in blockchain because um normally when you move things off of a chain and onto another chain you have to uh lock mint on the other chain and then release and this is a this is a different technology where you actually maintain the same overall balance of coins over all of the chains uh so this is something new for the evm ecosystem and indeed there's no architecture like there's no parallel chain architecture like this outside of Cadena in blockchain today so it's something that uh it's going to be a new experience for developers and that's where the EIP is going to be very important not to mention our experience uh working with this protocol impact um the other important thing to note is that this is not uh vaporware this is not a road map item this is something that we are introducing a developer preview today that where you have a you have our chain web consensus running in a devkit with two evm chains so that you can deploy contracts right onto that and start testing out these parallel chain protocols yourself today um so we have a little demo for you it's not a demo it's a video because we're not crazy um Stuart before you go on to that one point I wanted to make really stress because you might hear the term parallel execution from other other uh vendors I want to distinguish this from parallel chains so you can think of parallel execution just like threading on a single CPU where you're able to submit multiple jobs that could exist and run concurrently on this CPU but the CPU at the at the end still has to sequentially sequence the updates to memory that happen as a result of the work being done on these threads in a parallel chain environment that's more like having multiple CPUs that are all making their own updates to memory at the exact same time so this is true parallelism rather than some sort of optimistic threading scenario yeah that's a good point um so let's take a look at this demo um so uh we had our UI team throw this together because it's you know because it's pretty it's not the most exciting thing to just show Bob sending coins Dallas on a different chain so they uh they put together something that is basically something that shows allows you to run the transfers and give you a block Explorer in a uh interesting uh kind of Throwback mp3 uh skin but this also shows you that all of our stuff works with all the latest JavaScript Technologies it's very easy to build apps uh leveraging all the great evm Technologies and indeed even easy to handle the multiple chains uh in the de in the development environment that you're already very comfortable with so what the demo shows and you know this is just a quick video to kind of give you an idea we are actually running this uh we'll have our booth running tomorrow uh over in the booth area and uh that this will be running on a laptop so you can actually like dive in and look at the the gritty details of how the burn mint so this is an erc20 burn mint protocol you have Alice funded on chain a you have Bob funded on chain B uh and Alice sends coins from one uh chain to the next Bob sends it back um and the important thing is that this is this is very easy to do this is not something again it is fully trustless this is not something where you have to worry about getting wrecked in the middle of the transfer and and indeed it's a fundamental protoc call of our Network such that the KDA token which is the token that runs on our current network will also be on these new chains such that the token moves around on those chains uh with the burn mint and no tokens are burn are created or destroyed in this bridging protocol but you can use it for anything you can use it for nfts you can use it uh you can share assets any asset anything you want across all chains do broadcast all that kind of stuff so it's truly scalable and in a situation where all those 20 chains are uh hitting their utilization limits then we Fork we can Fork to 50 chains we can Fork to 100 chains we can Fork to a, 5,000 chains there's actually no limit on how many chains we can Fork to because as John mentioned the proof of work is smoothly divisible to essentially an infinite amount of chains at some point of course bandwidth and some other considerations start to come into play but we're way away from that time from that moment so how does this impact you um one of the important things I've mentioned a few times is avoiding these gas spikes and not having to fight to get into a block this isn't just about keeping gas prices low this is about keeping them predictable and manageable within your business plan you also don't need to run your own app chain and what I mean by that is one of our core principles is to rest the Simplicity of blockchain blockchain has a lot of promises in it that of course as a maturing environment we've realized certain stumbling blocks certain diffic difficulties related to scaling which have brought up a whole bunch of subsidiary and external Technologies to try and mitigate these difficulties we think they can still be solved within the regime of blockchain itself these are also mature tools you now have available for scaling not just on the ethereum side where you can use hard hat you can you can use block Scout you can use all the tools you're familiar with to work with our evm chains but you also have our mature tooling the five years of experience we've had building these bridging protocols and developing the packed environment yeah and a little more color on that we not just experience building these things but working with Builders so one of the most uh successful apps in our current ecosystem is a deepin uh protocol that they didn't really think about you know they're in the single chain mentality which is under understandable because that's how pretty much every blockchain uh presents uh the compute environment to you um and so they're on a single chain and indeed they were getting to the point where there was congestion and uh gas prices were starting to go up so we worked closely with them to help them scale the app onto multiple chains so because it's a little different for every app and there's many things you can do there's things you can do with uh optimistic protocols for instantaneous liquidity across chains these are all protocols we have so if you have an idea you should come talk to us because there there are ways that this scaling can benefit you that aren't immediately apparent so how can devs get involved so there's a couple things I wanted to point out one is that this is a blank slate for Builders since we're introducing this today really this is an an ecosystem and an environment where there's not a lot of competition yet for building out big dexes or big applications in space so developers coming in have a first mover opportunity to get started before the before the space gets crowded it's also very easy for you to port and deploy an existing evm app into our chains I myself I tried it with Unis swap V2 and V3 in an afternoon I was able to get both running on our chains um we also have an early access evm developer community and there's going to be some giveaway opportunities there if you join us on our telegram we'll have a QR code in a moment that'll show you how to get there and you can come meet us at our booth tomorrow uh we'll we'll have several of our team there our devel representatives and some of our devs where we can talk more about how you might be able to use this technology for your own applications and we're also doing some uh giveaways uh 500 uh $500 giveaways for uh joining our telegram group or participating in an IDE ideation process but the biggest news is a $50 million grant program so we're putting money behind bringing PE yeah yeah yeah put morning where our mouth is uh and again so if you have an idea about an app that you want that you've got running on evm but you're you're running into scaling issues come talk to us because we really want you to check out what we have and we're here to help and uh money always helps with that so you know come on over so that's it we're at uh Booth 425 that's tomorrow and uh we're really excited to meet all you show you the demo that we just were demonstrating here and answer any questions you might have I don't know we got 41 seconds yet I might have time for a question I don't know oh no get the if you have questions keep them bring them tomorrow happy to answer thank you so much thank you [Music]