J3 PAIN 09 Julien Beranger + Wassim Bendella iexec project update

so hello everyone and thanks for being here this is Julia biology head of communications at AI exec and I'm with scene Vendela I work as a business developer and today we're both very happy to be here on stage to talk about AI exec a startup that is building a blockchain based decentralized marketplace for cloud resources and uh just to have an idea who in this room has already heard of Isaac if you can just please raise hands all right so so quite a quite a lot and uh for those who haven't well I hope that by the end of this talk you'll find it just as exciting as we do so as you all know III Amissah is a blockchain that allows developers to build and deploy decentralized applications and the etherium is so innovative because it made smart contracts possible and this has gathered a big community of developers and nurtured innovation so much that today we came on over 1,000 apps running on etherium the smart contracts of these depths are stored on the etherion blockchain Andy theorems virtual machine is responsible for their execution virtual machine of course I mean the miners and validators but what a theorem is virtual machine is is excellent for simple transactions and business logic it struggles quite a lot when it comes to performing heavy computing at a reasonable cost and speed and things will only get worse because there are a lot of projects that made a nice feel recently but have not yet delivered their products and once these projects are delivering their products the computational demand will be so high it's very likely that the etherium will not be able to keep up and that's running intensive apps can cost a fortune and this is why we see AI exec as a complimentary brick to aetherium technology why because i exac allows off chain computing and by off chain computing I mean the apps need to be able to do their heavy computing off chain I also not on the ethereum blockchain but then bring the results back on chain for verification and validation and I exact close developers to do exactly this and with you know virtual reality artificial intelligence or I would see all utilizing advanced smart contracts the need for often computing will only increase and become inevitable in this field so how does I exact make to build how this exact make possible often computing by building a market for cloud resources so usually we see businesses as pipes with value flowing in one direction only so from the producer to the end-user if we take the cloud industry for example a company like Amazon Web Services flows in one direction only so from the producer Amazon to the end-user and what is fundamentally different about new businesses like i exac is the way value flows so today in the world of networks there's a whole range of different flows between different participants and i exac does not control this flow it just enables it and makes it happen so you may view I exact as a as a matchmaking system it's a market that's trying to have supply meet demand to to create some of the most valuable transactions possible by aggregating more and more participants on the on the supply and demand side I exec is able to use data to filter through these sites and then make the right supply meet the right demand so in other words I exec owns no servers but allow those who own servers and in our network we call them workers to meet those who need computing power and this matchmaking system is orchestrated by exec in a decentralized way so you may ask why do we even need a decentralized cloud marketplace for for cloud services well today the the cloud industry is very centralized and has many many flows inherent to a centralized nature for example today the market is dominated by big players like Amazon or Microsoft and since HPC infrastructures are very complex and very expensive the barriers of venture in this market are extremely high especially for individuals like like you and I and what I execute us is that it creates a global and universal market that anyone can join and transact in so if you're a gamer for example you have a great machine but you only play video games two hours a day the rest of the time is just sitting there idle with AI exec you be able to plug your machine in our network and make profit by monetizing it's computing capacity centralized data centers also raise some serious energy problems example power and cooling in datacenters cost more than the IT equipment they support and i exac is more in favor some eco-friendly solutions which has led us to seal some strategic partnerships with the cloud providers like synergy condo computing or cloud in heats basically what these companies do is that they distribute servers throughout cities at strategic places so these servers are running computations for external applications and this process is usually it's very intensive and generates a lot of heat that usually just dissipates and in our case these companies are able to recycle these heats and then use it to a building swimming pools or even tap water and finally there are service disruptions so it happened for example a co2 to Amazon and has resulted in over 150 million dollars of losses with web sites like Expedia Yahoo or github and available for many hours and due to ixx decentralized nature we have outage tolerant protocols that make sure that the end user would receive its result no matter what so how does blockchain fit into all of this well I exactly the blockchain based marketplace which gathers many different types of participants we have people providing applications people providing computing power where it's CPU or GPU and people providing data sets and blockchain is particularly useful here because it allows to store and record all the transactions of value that happening on the I exact network and it's also the mechanism used to prove the contribution of different types of participants for example to prove that a worker did execute the computation it was asked to and that the resulted sent is indeed accurate and trustworthy and on the exact network our token ROC circulates on all this network and links these different types of participants so just a few words on our token last year in April we exact organized a token sale and issued our LC tokens so our LC stands for runs on lots of computers because your computations will indeed be run on a lot of different computers and our C is the unique way to access cloud resources on the IEEE exact marketplace so to give you an example if a FinTech application needs to do some intensive computing it will be buying CPU power in RLC and the participant it provided this CPU power will receive LC in exchange now while traditional platforms like uber or Airbnb take a 15 30 percent cut on transactions i exac does not take any fees at all so there are zero percent fees when cloud resources are traded on the eye exec marketplace and even though we're creating a lot of value with our match making algorithms we envision transactions as peer-to-peer without exact intervening in any way by taking the current transactions of course as a to start up our token is part of our business model our lcz utility token and I exact does hold a reserve of it but we also have in mind other ways of generating revenue for example by providing advanced final services on cloud resources but we will disclose these a bit further on our journey so since our ICO well we have delivered on time order was outlined on our white paper so last November we released our version 1 thanks to this version of I exec decentralized applications now have a simple and practical way to reach off chain computing resources so for now these resources are offered for free by IEEE exec and out there for centralized up until our VT release and actually today we're only a few months before our veto release which is the most awaited component of AI exact because I guess I could move from centralization to decentralization and v2 marks the release of our cloud marketplace where users will be able to launch intensive often computing through a graphical interface or an API and another interesting thing to note about this version is that it will include and introduce a payment scheme so this payment scheme will allow payments from users to providers so for providers whether it's cloud providers local providers or just individuals like you and I this is the very beginning of doing business by monetizing our resources and finally after v2 there will be three more major releases that will keep us busy until 2021 these releases include advanced features for enterprises reaching true supercomputing capabilities with GPU and finally tackling some research challenges in the fields of IOT and educating and now I will let my colleague Julia go into more details about these recent releases ok thanks thanks for I see my hi everyone so yeah we're really excited about this upcoming release of the version 2 people will be allowed to bid and ask for option computation and this is something we've never seen before so the release is planned for May this year so let me say a few words about the version 1 this is what we call the DAP store where you can see all registered and available applications on the network so the SDK is available for you to try you can find several tutorials on cata Kota so you have nothing to install it takes 5 minutes to get the idea of how it works so on this version you can use I execs private pool of workers for free so that you're comfortable to test things out and I also want to mention that our team is available 24/7 to provide engineering support in case if you need while you're testing the SDK and you will see that it's super easy to deploy an application on a exec and because we want to make things easy for developers I exact now supports docker eyes the apps so right now anyone can use one of those famous open-source applications or tensorflow our blender etcetera so I exact I accept really fits the needs of compute intensive applications as long as they run in a batch mode I mean in you know in a non interactive mode for the moment and there will be many others we're going to launch a programming bounty program where we will list the most wanted apps plugins scripts so that developers can directly contribute so those are sort of in-house applications in the sense that we've deployed them ourselves but one of the most important things to keep in mind is that when a smart contract needs to launch some octane computation then I executive solution you want to check so now let's have a look at what other developers in the community came up with so 15 new applications are currently developing with a exec we launched what we call the dab challenge to support the development of those apps so we were so we had 40 candidates which is extremely already extremely encouraging from added from an adoption standpoint so the jury selected 15 projects on the basis of innovation impact visibility and background of the team and so now is sharing the equivalent of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars we were really impressed by the quality and diversity of projects so we had projects in AI data analysis supply chains gaming voting and so forth so so when so now we're following up with those projects mainly helping them deliver the products so I just wanted to quote three of them so cerebrum is a decentralized platform for crowdsource machine learning open mul is a computational engine for custom simulation experiments and web sensors are artificial artificial artificial intelligence based Oracle's for smart contracts so I like those projects because they directly addressing real life problems so they're really good examples of what you can do with with AI exact and you can do it too so let's see how how to deploy your application on a exec so this is this is exactly what Francois did during the live coding session we had here in the museum so so you would start with with the templates that is directly usable then when you type this command I exact deploy you have the smart contract part that goes on it theorem and your binary files go to the workers Network then the third step the the user joins the game he actually pays in RLC when he submits a task that is executed by the workers and finally the user gets the result back so that's the basic workflow for a developer so so let's have a look at the whole infrastructure we built on the on the left you have things happening on chain so a user makes a transaction so an interaction with a with a smart contract that we will call a work order that that triggers the job submission process on the right you can see you can see the often part often part with one single pool of workers represented on this picture when the version two is out you will have many of them many of pools with one scheduler for each pool and so the scheduler basically dispatches the works to the workers and then the result is pushed on the blockchain through a set of Oracle contracts that plays the role of the interface between the unchain and off chain world and this is why we need what we call the poco instance for proof of contribution so this is the consensus protocol I exact uses to act to verify the result of an off chain computation so it relies on a mix between staking and reputation with which itself is based on your computation history it's it's going to be ready you know in a few weeks from now so Adrian is here he's here so if you have if you want to know more if you want to know the details on on the on the proof contribution you can directly ask the VM he already published two articles about it and the third of the series will be published in a few days so it's an important part of the marketplace because it will allow more workers to join the network and until that we gradually open in the network to to several resource providers like we just did with the steam eg condo computing cloud lean heat with with which we had the very first invoice priced in RLC so so yeah again we're really excited about this the release of the marketplace itself because it will allow the network to be fully open and accessible for everyone to participate so some people would start earning some value earning some RLC executing works and and others would start make money with their application accessible on the App Store so I cannot conclude without saying a few words about SGX so so it's a yeah so it's it's it's a very recent technology it was was first released in 2015 so i exac is one of the most advanced projects in the crypto space on this specific topic and I can tell you that things are moving very fast there will be some major announcements before the end of the month so stay tuned and yes it's part of the fascinating rnd side of the project so so yeah I example use SGX enclaves basically to protect the application from malicious workers it creates a bubble in which you can process sensitive data and offer a strong level of security to all participants of the network so the marketplace and the proof of contribution actually works without SGX but we want to anticipate this trend and we're really proud to be able to share the result of those researches with the community so let's keep in touch the website is ie X dot EC we'll be celebrating the first birthday of the RLC tokens in April and again the version to release is planned for May this year so if you want to know all the details on the consensus protocol you can ask had rien who's here of Francois or any of the team or 16 of us here so and if you want to if you need more information about SGX you can ask lei who's here who's in charge of this part so just remember that that now there is no limits in the design of decentralized applications thank you what is computing so yeah it's actually the this paradigm that we want to say give access to everyone so let's say you have lambda user that uses an application on his mobile or desktop and the data are processed for example in the in the heater of the neighbors of the neighbor for instance so that's basically the idea but maybe what and also so maybe I can add that that we know that we know that it's important to have you know data close to the applications so you know it we're sort of optimizing all this what would you say in response to people who are saying that distributed cloud services actually non-viable because for example organizations like AWS have such advantages in terms of economies of scale and stuff that they can easily price out yeah I mean so so those companies really could become server providers of the network and and and provide there so what what's the incentive for those companies to to be on the platform yeah well they would they would they would in fact they would they would because we don't we never intervene in the pricing so those companies can can join the network and accept our LC and and and you know participate to the network why not but as a server provide as for instance as an individual you could sort of set the price a little bit lower than those companies and and drive sort of drive the price low so there are a lot of smaller providers some cloud providers and with i exac they will have access to a new pool of users which right now they don't have access to especially that we're not taking any fees so for damage it's a win-win situation is more customers another thing is that today there are a lot of idle resources everywhere today very soon we'll have even fridges will have cpu power and this power will not be used to its fullest potential so it decentralized cloud computing all these resources will be able to be gathered and use on the Internet so thank you very much for for being here [Applause]