Building the future of Smart Contracts - Sergev Nazarov

so we are continuing to rock our interoperability theme um next up we're gonna introduce sergey with chain link um you guys are probably well aware of what chain link has been up to in general but um one of the most interesting things is how this this technology might be employed across uh different smart contract platforms so let's hear from sergey about that thanks for joining us today thank you uh thank you for having me great to be here hi everybody excited to be speaking with you again and excited to be at this great event where a lot of things get built and done uh i think the the first thing that we should really discuss is you know what is going on in our industry and what our what our industry stands for um and what um what it is that you know we're hoping to achieve by building all this uh i think that really goes to a core question of the trust that society has between different participants both in the financial system and outside of it i think there's a really important concept on the shift that we're now all part of and that concept is us going from a system of guarantees from paper and brands that don't need to be honored to a system of cryptographic guarantees that are enforced by math and will be honored and i think this is the seismic shift that we as an industry are driving much like you know the printing press shared information other systems uh like the loom changed you know commercial transactions around certain parts of the economy railroads um various other advances in transportation ships uh insurance for ships uh the internet to transfer information to people all over the world on really small cheap devices now and now really the the way that people form agreements i think this is an idea that will go through the standard set of reactions that monumental uh changes have and you know in the words of one of the the people that i've tended to read and listen to on certain points i think it has already been ridiculed to a certain degree um it's now becoming moderately opposed and that's probably still going to continue and then it's going to be accepted as self-evident and it's really the role of all of us as the people building this industry to get it to be self-evident much faster to the benefit of everybody in our favor we have all kinds of events that basically prove our point and will and already are accelerating the rate at which the larger world wants to use the technology of blockchain smart contracts and oracles the first you know use case that i'm going to talk about is one that you're probably all familiar with it's related to the recent you know on online trading activity around robin hood and a few stocks uh and or or stunks or whatever whatever we wanna we wanna call them at at the end of the day um the existing financial system is skewed to benefit certain better resourced better informed actors and it does that very well because it works in a certain state in predictable market conditions to enable them to make a lot of money and this is because they have certain advantages because they figured out the system and sometimes they're able to to bend the system to their advantage people participate in the system because it's the only system they have and they do want to participate in the global financial markets even if they have limited information and even if even if they have limited control over the various risks that they're um they're essentially involved in now this system you know works fine while everything is fine and and nobody really cares but as robin hood and wire card and others uh are now showing us more and more often on a faster and faster cadence the issue really arises when this no longer works for certain parties and when it doesn't work for certain parties in the system the system stops because the parties that were supposed to be uh benefiting from it no longer benefit from it and that's when the rest of the world and the average user find out how the system really works these types of things will continue and they will only accelerate and they will create a massive crisis of trust of trust in the systems that people rely on to transact with each other to interact with the global market whether it's for global trade insurance the financial markets whatever it is uh the most recent examples are wirecard robinhood now and and many others to come but this is the what i consider to be the redefinition of trust within human society and that redefinition of trust is what our entire industry is about it is about changing the way that people interact in an economically fair transparent and you know fundamentally correct way rather than the skewed and asymmetrically um beneficial and oftentimes predatory way that people interact in many transactions now part of the reason that this is possible is because it's hidden and it's hidden under layers and layers of opaqueness and only revealed in extreme circumstances like this and really unexpected circumstances that that a system wasn't built to properly handle and properly hide and massage away but this will continue to happen because more and more people are informed through the internet more and more people have assets uh global markets are fundamentally global and there will need to be a solution to this problem of trust and proper um problem proper interaction between people on the basis of trust so so this is what i feel we are all a part of whether we're building an application or a developer tool or a piece of infrastructure we are foundationally changing the way that people will form their economic relationships with each other and that will happen through certain flash points where there are problems there will be you know all kinds of debate and violent opposition to certain changes to a system but fundamentally because the system that we are building is better it will win out as being self-evident that that is the way that people should relate to each other in terms of economic fairness transactions and how they will um conduct their relationships within society so i think it's a very very um important thing that we're working on and i always look forward to this event because there's a lot of really smart people here seeking to build something but i just wanted to share with you what what i thought we were all doing as an industry and what we're seeking to achieve the way we achieve this in in decentralized finance is really by the creation of many autonomous on-chain services whether that's a price feed or a d-phi application or some additional service that enables more things to be done we are now all of us collectively building a large suite of services that are on chain and that large suite of services is ungamable and transparent and able to be accessed by the larger global marketplace and just like the internet was laughed at as a way for people to transfer information or as a way to conduct commerce globally it is now self-evident that the internet is the way to conduct transactions and to transfer information what we are doing now is what people were doing in the internet in the early 90s the mid 90s is they were building the initial use cases and the services and the protocols that were then composed into more and more advanced use cases and i think we should all feel you know very proud of that and take it very seriously uh i think people at this hackathon have have basically two things or three things they could really work on i think they can build a use case i think they can build a developer tool that interacts with existing services and makes them more consumable or they can enable you know easier access to infrastructure for people to consume more infrastructure easily i think when building services and building these uh different define applications you have a huge array of pre-built services you have a lot of protocols that you can combine in interesting ways you have a lot of different pieces of data coming from something like chain link whether it's about weather or price you have sources of randomness you have a lot more building blocks than people had even two years ago or even one year ago at the same event and the ability to compose those building blocks into new and interesting use cases is really what the first few years of the internet were about they were about infrastructure getting to a point where people could combine that infrastructure with their ideas in an efficient way while maintaining security now this is something that's obviously taking off and it's going to continue taking off for the simple reason that it's still very early d5 is unbelievably early it's less than three percent of the value it could be based on the value in the crypto format um and so the migration of crypto value into d5 will continue uh and i think accelerate because of the transparency and the yield and the ability to manage counterparty risk and that transition from paper-based guarantees to math-based and cryptography guarantees because you can still have cryptocurrency but be given a paper guarantee that it's properly managed whereas with d5 you get a math-based guarantee which i think the people in our industry are are really the first group of people that are going to realize this big difference and benefit from that understanding i think the bigger picture here is the larger global market and how the structural problems that we will continue to see in the form of robinhood and other other systems like that will drive more and more people to seek safety in in systems that give them crypto cryptographic guarantees rather than paper guarantees and with each additional issue in each of these large global industries people will begin to ask this question and the protocols and the products that give them the answer will be the internet of contracts where they store all of their value which essentially means that society's wealth and value will migrate to a new system of contracts that we are now in the process of building even here at this hackathon which to to me is mind-blowing because it's um it's a monumental shift in how society works society is based on you know information and trust that's that's really a lot of what society gives people um as well as resources and the ability to collaborate and that's the thing that we are building in the newest most advanced form for society in in my opinion the way that we at chain link seek to help the amazing developers in our industry do this is by providing them the many services the many on-chain services that they need in addition to a chain so you have a chain or you have your favorite chain or you have the place where the smart contract lives and the blockchain can be viewed as a database and the smart contract can be viewed as application code but all the other services like apis and connectivity to anything else is really where uh something like chain link in the oracle networks that chain link makes come in we already provide a large amount of price and market data which essentially allows the global finance industry to make its way into blockchains by creating financial products that give these cryptographic guarantees rather than paper guarantees and that's something where we've excelled and where we continue to have both an increasing breadth of different data that's run by the original data source and by node operators and the depth of data in terms of the massive improvements and quality we're continuing to gain from more different data providers and higher and higher quality data providers across our networks the second group is proof of reserves where we are essentially able to prove things about off-chain assets not on an annual basis with an audit but on a minute-by-minute or a 10-minute by 10-minute basis proving that there is for example gold in a vault or assets in a bank account or you know even tokens on another chain proof of reserves is another very powerful tool uh in the toolbox of developers because it allows the off chain world's assets mainly you know bringing the global asset management industry into the blockchain world by proving that those assets are in existence and in a certain state in something like if something like proof of reserves existed and was functioning well before the 2008 financial crisis it's very possible that would have been softened or completely avoided beyond our ability to provide price data and prove things about assets we get into many other categories of data everything from insurance related data about weather events that can be queried and used to build insurance products which are then fed back into the dfi ecosystem as collateral to thousands of other pieces of data such as election results uh really anything you can think of like iot data and i really encourage people at this hackathon to explore both what they can build through the existing price and market data the various insurance data and the many other types of data that we're now making available both from original data sources running their own node and from chain link networks porting data from multiple sources to make it hyper reliable i think the combination of more and more advanced data together with the protocols that allow that data to be combined into products is really where one two three five ten developers can leverage their skills in the most efficient way and they can build uh truly industry defining and industry changing financial products insurance products global trade products prediction markets and whatever else they can think of it's really our goal to provide all of the data and all of the inputs that people need in addition to that i think it's important for people to understand that chain link is not just about data it is about an oracle network and oracle networks are actually responsible for everything that blockchains are not responsible for so an oracle network is not just about delivering data it is about providing all the tools and services such as the trust minimized off chain computation that is needed by a contract right because smart contracts that run in these blockchain platforms are hyper secure and hyper reliable but they are low on feature richness for for security reasons centralized systems have completely lost people's trust in many cases and will continue to lose people's trust in almost all cases um you know everything from social media to communications to now the financial system centralized services are being viewed even by the average person as unreliable and a place that they do not want to have a long-term relationship with i think the middle ground between highly centralized feature-rich centralized systems and highly trust minimized but low feature kind of blockchain systems is a an oracle network and an oracle network sits between all of the use cases and all of the blockchains which those use cases run on and provides it with all the other services that it needs and all the other services is a huge universe of of inputs if it starts at providing different types of data it then quickly moves on to computations that blockchains generally speaking usually don't do and probably won't do at scale and basically need to be done in a trust minimized way it's these trust minimized computations that oracle networks will expand to do in addition to data and actually the combination of those trust minimized computations together with data will enable uh once again a much wider realm of products to be built the first thing that we already have working and is now becoming massively used in the blockchain gaming community is verifiable randomness we have that working for many different uh blockchain games that already use it on production it's going live on you know multiple chains and you can easily use it on ethereum to provide random inputs into games and you know other other applications beyond that we are finalizing some of our plans around keepers and the ability to maintain a smart contract's proper operation through a chain link network because once again even devops and maintenance of contracts is basically given to an oracle network because it needs to be trust minimized and then beyond that i think developers even at this hackathon can think about how do i use the expanded computational capabilities of chain link and the adapter scheme that it has to compute more and more advanced things in a trust minimized way that doesn't require me to disclose things to blockchains so allows me to maintain privacy while getting me the features that blockchain so far so far haven't been able to provide i think this realm of services will continue to grow from us and so if you're a developer and you want to build these cutting edge truly world-changing applications we are fundamentally here to help you we are help we are here to help the developers of the world make trust minimized applications make the decentralized applications that will be the new way that society interacts around various value various information and to me it's very clear that that is is where everything is going because of the systemic and continued failure of trust relationships with you know social media communication systems financial systems and fundamentally our goal is to accelerate the transition to a truly decentralized and fair economic system so this is this is what we're doing here at this hackathon this is what we hope to enable uh with you with you the great developers that we work with and this is also something that we are thrilled to work with other people on within our team so if this is uh a worthwhile goal and something that you think is worth pursuing and spending time building we'd be thrilled to work with you on our team we have a lot of positions open for engineers product managers and and all kinds of other positions both in operations and sales and all kinds of dynamics on helping people understand and get to this decentralized world faster so thank you very much i'm looking forward to to the great things everyone's going to build and i think the the future of you know how society interacts is is really going to be based on the work we all do together as an industry so thank you very much thank you sergey i appreciate the uh the zooming out sometimes we get so focused on the little details in defy and crypto that it's easy to lose sight of the game changing transformations that will inevitably happen as a result of all this so yeah i appreciate it man yeah thank you very much for having me good luck everyone at the hackathon um looking forward to meeting up in person sometime soon thank you guys take care