Celer Network: Lessons Learnt from Running the Largest Generalized State Channel Network

oh there we go okay hi everyone we can just keep this it's kind of a very intimated in small talks you know just like let me know if you have any question at any point and happy to answer any of the questions you may have so this talk is gonna share a little bit about the experiences we had running one of the largest I think the world's largest generalized sensationalist working kind of analyzing the process of the user growth and what happened during that process and you know what are the things that we're doing and try to handle that so before going to that detail I'm just gonna kind of quickly introduce what is Center and what is exactly the stuff that we are running tests at all which is a kind of user facing application so it called setter acts and you know we talk about you know why should developer care about what we're building and where what we are bringing to the table as a value add and the finally we will talk about the lesson learned over the past five months as things we launched the to version of our test net and you know we will talk about what's next for that are basically so what is seller is layer two scanning platform and that is operating you know on top of the existing block chains as additional layer and right now we are mostly focusing on the underlying technology of generalized the stage channel as a scaling tool and at the same time we are also having a side chain called state Guardian network with plasma and exciting it's not plasma but with plus a semantics of the pasta history attribution where we run all the security aspect of this like the watchtower services off of the East a channel right so you know if you're offline you know who will be watching for your state you know and ensuring the security of the entire network that's not part we implement us it's kind of a staking based side chain but with class on semantics you know currently we have a bunch of a dev tools available with like iOS Android and SDK all available and you know we went to a bunch of a hacks on Terra they're interesting things build like eight games micropayment services layer to decentralize financing neural processes and a messenger messenger integrated payments and stuff so that is Celer the back end or the network but in addition to that we also release the something called seller X which is a user facing application that everyone can download and kind of act as the user accessing point it uses their network you know this is like a mobile app so what in the mobile app you can do you know you can actually download this here yeah well you can do this is like the old version already we actually just launched as a private Ming that you know in this event it's just nobody knows that so anyone who downloaded the app at our booth is actually running on easier mean that right now but like this is a test our application you can kind of see this as like has a what it what it's feeling and you can do this kind of instant payment without any transaction fee of course it's all free and say Channel but what you can also do is this generalized the station of capability that you have an application build on top of this state channel now this application itself is very simple game it's a board game that is interactive now you know you can kind of you know play with your friend very easily by joining the game and now what you're seeing here is the like you know we're kind of putting down the stake right so we're putting a stake now what is the stake and what happened just now is that you send all a conditional payment towards each other off chain and that's kind of a beautiful part of this that is when we were distilling down the the nature of generalized a channel to the payment network level you basically enable additional semantics of payment that is conditional payment and the conditional payment is conditionally depending on the result of the game the conditional payment is often condition of payment it's going to be depending on the result of the game and the game itself is also implemented as a generalized state channel it's still fully decentralized there's no server and that's why the interaction is extremely fast you can see that you know kind of the state progression is fast and there's no fee involved when you're doing this kind of smart controller action so what really is good use case for seller is to realize seamless user experience for human to human interaction applications either that is a micro payment based streaming or just kind of be extremely interactive games or you know things like decentralize finance system where you can do like offering order matching of prediction market and stuff like that so this is a nature of setter that is a you know when the people are interacting with each other there is no fee because like a the computation effort is carried out entirely by the station of participants and you know it's extremely interactive so we launched two tests not so far one the first test net was actually launched in a theorem San Francisco last year and this is where like this this nice t-shirt thing come from and by the way everyone you know in the room Casa t-shirt if you're interested yeah and you know we recently you know in East Denver around East timer time actually a little bit before you start time we actually launched the second version of the test that there's a huge list of the you know features and that we can support multi node non-cost story and generalized payment you support any ETH in the ERC 20 means that we once we launched I mean that you can natively support all sorts of you know state a stable tokens as well and you know we have generalized a state channel support of course you can build this kind of a games and applications on top and we're gonna wrap that up into even simpler interface for the for the application developer to build so they don't need to worry even about like the payment process part just just only the application logic and you know you know in terms of state channel contract interfaces we provide both functional and the imperative as a general contractor interfaces you know we you know the list gold goes out right so but in the other day you can check out the slick scar or github why do you actually care right why should developer even care about like what we're building here well because of this so this is the monthly active a user that is on our platform I for that one simple in fact and not that even phone game for game okay and the interesting thing we see that it is unlike many of the decentralized applications running today the user across trajectory oft like the existing trail you know things like today it's a kind of tanks right so it dies but here we're seeing as sustainable and the faster and faster growth process you know for this one application that is built on top of a seller's platform and you can see there are some bumps talked about what exactly happened during that process you know feel free to take a seat here oh yeah and you know the the interesting thing is that this is like the beauty of blockchain in general I guess that is like a scene immediately global we have a fire racing level so we see that where our our users are coming from and it's literally like all over the place in a work so it's extremely exciting including you know this very interesting place I don't know if anyone can see you where this is a Madagascar yes and this is like beautiful place we have like about we have a yeah you know ten users in this beautiful place and seriously considering hosting meet up there you know yeah alright so not only the user numbers these numbers are definitely not like the single characteristic of a product gross or product market fit I came from like traditional to consumer product a facing side so and you know some of the interesting this is like of course not exhaustive list often the data the user analyzing there we did but right now we have a roughly about eighteen hundred like monthly active users and you know the good thing about this is like it's extremely engaging comparing to traditional decentralized applications because of this interacting this enabled so roughly speaking for every active user per day they spend about 12 minutes on the app which is like pretty long compared to even some of the very popular wallet applications today and you know the demand retention is consistently high and we process like 4 million of offering smart contracts transactions monthly and that is like in hardly free like even if we launch I mean that those transactions are if asset you can be entirely free because it's not like involving any kind of your network resources of the entire blocking network so you know and and these numbers these numbers that I just talked about resembles not a decentralized application but a application that weighs like a proper gross you know trajectory the interesting thing is that just just one note here is that this is just one application build on top of setter and on a paper money test net like the the token you just saw called a game token is on rob stone and that's talking we print it on Robson who is they're like double literally double fake money right so yeah but still this kind of a smooth interaction attracts people so that you know many of the users we have do not even know how layer 2 works or stay channel works and you know they're I think their knowledge level about blogging is at the point of exchange buying and selling at most and some of them are not even like understanding that part but still the thickness is actually pretty good so we believe that this kind of smooth interaction plus the extremely high transaction volume we see will turn into a very sustainable manifestation pass for seller developers and on that point you know we will be launching the may not on end of June and not only with the bare bone setter you know I mean that but also with a kind of a middleware or infrastructure build around it so that people like game developers can very easily on board their game on whether like a single player game very simple simple circular game or multiplayer game into a state channel game and you know kind of start to harvest you know benefit from running this by the way like how many of you guys are you know developers or oh ok all right so yeah now I can like talk a little bit more about this part so you know during the 5 months is we have some interesting lessons learn this like is the same graph draw in logarithmic scale so we can see this kind of interest bombs more clear so what's happened what happened so we launched only theorem San Francisco here you know we kind of grow a little bit and you know here like we did some promotion on which has platforms but then you know this and I would talk about why that happened you know and then we released a kind of a challenge or kind of a game e5 process online to help people to promote like or try to apply this game to King some more users and you know then we launched the second version of the test net it is and then suddenly dropped talked about like what happened then and you know we about or roughly 4000 like monthly active users basically by by the time of like another big event of the big drop you know another big jump here is that we did a finance launch pad cell and that helped us posts lot of users as well and they are pretty sustaining basically so what happened to some of these bumps this part what happened to like a user drop this huge drop Ming Lee happened because we in the beginning of the development we rely heavily on event monitoring I was like you know because something like you know you open channel on chain and that opening channel event will like a will monitor event there and when a when happens we say we sailor in the SDKs inner of the channel is successfully opened right so we have some we have some external dependency to in fira back then and we were using in viewers WebSocket like interfaces to kind of a monitor those event and if you go if you guys considering doing anything like that I strongly recommend against it because that's horrible experience we had like you know once we start to scale up to users and here we launch at level right remember we child is like this Chinese kind of a blog platform and people can go and download stuff but after that you know it worked for a very small amount of time the connection between flora and then I am not sure whether they that that connection or that connectivity identified as kind of a hostile connectivity so the connectivity to infer ah in China want black alright okay there's like you cannot access to in fury anymore and you know in fear this is a general problem if you're deploying your stuff in a SS and without like all this regulatory approvals in China that's like external website if you have like some he's very some irregular packet patterns the Cunha and does this likely resembles that I guess but I'm not sure what happened exactly but like basically China went dark so we did basically did with growing and then a dark okay nothing happened like you know so so after that we change the some strategy there and switched it you'll not only not using WebSocket but also some other providers I'm just not gonna advertise who we are using right now but like if you guys interested in knowing and finding out like what are the providers that we we what are those providers that we used in terms of the user at a point I'm having to share about the experiences we had now you know many promotions of course like in in terms of marketing because it was a fake money technologies people were covered slowly going down and then we launched the seller acts like the the new so before this like there was no seller AXA it was like very very simple you know a single page apps that you can download and play and we launched the seller acts but with the second version of the test now but it has not actually trigger something of a settlement store because of a protocol of small protocol failure we actually had a lot of people start to instantly settle their channel because they think that the channel the counterpart because becoming malicious which which it's not like it's like a very small you know arrow in the code and that's sort of in a storm and basically trigger a significant pullback of the afterafter of the user account because once the stern channel is settled like people kind of a lose interest to this process and a create additional barrier for them to come back up into the state channel right so that that that caused us something and we quickly fix that and on East amber we kind of a relaunch this thing and you know if you any of you have attended the East hour you probably like saw us like all this you know words and the stuff we still have those by the way if you're interesting you know playing a game and now fast forward to you know end of March in Adam and of March we did a balance related event and our event is basically just like you know the first airdrop event of any money real monetization you know monetary motivation that we had for users and you know they're like extremely powerful in the sense that it's it's I think it's a go-to marketing channel for you know crypto community like if you could get there because within fifteen within 15 minutes of the posted at Twitter allow like this event we receive the 30,000 requests to open channel okay this is like a you know insane but you know what you didn't you didn't see a thirty thousand jump there because the time to open a state channel actually takes a quite long time to open a channel and also gas cost right so the result of that is that we basically congested the entire Rob Stan for about 18 hours okay still it does not match the speed of people flowing in about 80% to 85% of the people who downloaded our app just couldn't even open the channel with the application and then you know people are starting complaining you know people are calling our scams you know all that stuff started happen okay it's pretty stressful that you know 18 hours with our team basically didn't sleep for in like 24 hours or even email longer than that but the problem what add though is like there's literally nothing we can do like fundamentally because of the fact that because of the the the fundamental slowness of the underling blockchain now we have like this huge creation storm tool to mitigate and you know we're putting a lot more considerations in that process because like once we launched I mean that this thing is likely to become problem if we put any of the big event or use across event out there so you know hopefully in a minute lunch no one will even feel the slightest friction there and we have some nice tricks to to to do about that basically so this is like the the technical part so far any questions all right okay I can move on to the to the user experience part so this these are the literally like literal word by word recording of like what people are saying about our app you know it's very encouraging if you look at the user end you know it's you know it's a kind of a power using future instant payment final instantly you know I deploy the transaction so their experience is pretty awesome yeah we're like a you know super awesome this there to you know you acts turns out that we're in a bubble so those those feedbacks with God from East Amer Easter is like they're I would say like a relatively highly technical crowd with a crypto background so they understand what's going on they kind of a suffered from blogging already we all did right so because of the the slow us now slight improvement make them think oh this is nice nice but once we start to push this to broader audience who has like a not deep technical knowledge about layer to scaling you know limitation of scaling and stuff like that all sorts of questions start to pop up and in fact I will claim that layer to getting layer to you acts right is even trickier than getting layer one you guys cracked those are the questions now coming from now to East Amaral crowd but but the the the by Nance airdrop activity crowd okay and you know the the biggest question we get asked is because in stage Hannah or any kind of like of King solutions even with plasma and sidechain and stuff there's a process for to move your fund from the wallet that you hold to a external contract right so there's unavoidability that process so that process feels to a lot of no more user like a process it feels like a you know to a lot more user feels like a process of depositing to exchanges right it feels very much like depositing to a centralized exchange that is that is kind of managed by us so that put a lot of like you know responsibility to us and they are saying like oh you know are you actually holding cost or you know for fun and stuff like that and we're even worried that I could the regulator may think about that and you know that's that's a big big different story you know another thing that I you know some some some people's feel found out that once I open state channel the promise that I can send instant payment you know with with low transaction fee and all that stuff right so now I have my friends you know address what it address I'm just putting my friends what is addressing and clicks and there's a you know arrow pop-up saying that okay your friend did an open state trial look why they kind of a very are very angry about this like you know why why can I just used a channel and send the payment to anyone and you know another thing is that like there are cases where the connection broke between these two like participants of a game right so in that case one party or the other party actually both of them probably want to go on qing and settle the game but during the settlement process you know they you know they their their their money or the initial deposit or found assignment to the game is stalking them in between and the many of the question we got is like why my money is stuck while my opponent actually got one offline because I started a lounging challenge and look yeah all right yeah I started on Teen Challenge but like it didn't actually pass through basically I'm waiting for that time off basically so there are many questions like this and you know I think it to make to really leverage the power of layers of scaling so that it delivers full a and to end the level of user experience everyone would expect you know these kind of user experience questions that I think are very important and need to be addressed and what's next for us is that you know on a technical side we're building a coherent layers of platform using different technology pieces and to with the mass adoption write a UI UX and that including state channel but we are also looking at the side chains as well and you know our Ming that lunch is coming on q2 2019 and you know this is some something will have some excitement exciting activities and hopefully we fixed many of the us problem and it'll be great to have you guys feedback and try out that with that you know that's this is our website and the any questions quick want me maybe one or two questions yes yes so that that there's a whole construct is called the economy that's where you use the seller token and that is kind of a like a staking process basically we have that in our YouTube channel about the full description of the economic construct yeah all right yeah of course yep