MOVE, Enabling the Next Object Based Blockchains | KBW2023

hi everyone my name is Sam and today I'm pleased to moderate this session on move or I should say the S move dialect so pretty honored to have you at the KNE how how are you today doing great moderate as only one person it's easy that it is like before asking you a little bit more about your background I'm actually curious to know more about the crowd here here uh who among you guys is a developer just one don't be shy just one two three four all right all right cool uh who has dabbled with solidity or move in the past okay interesting interesting so um yeah could you tell us a little bit more about your background before we dive into the intricacies of suie why why it's been produced sure uh my name is AD Aban I'm co-founder of miston labs I'm also the chief po officer um M Labs is a technology company um we are the co we're the creators of a protocol called s um a bit of background about um miston and how the team came about um we are five Founders um Evan Chung is a ACM computer science winner he um won ACM computer science award for writing a lot of a software that actually Powers your iPhones a compiler that run the stuff on most of the devices we use today um s blackshare is the inventor of the move language is our CTO um George denes is a world-renowned um um distribut systems expert costus chakas who actually ran a lot of a crypto we did at Facebook uh and myself um I was the lead product manager on a lot of the research and development we did for the lia Liber project the Liber project was Facebook so we all came from Facebook we were the inventors of a lot of a technology that powered the Liber blockchain and when we left Facebook our goal was to build a new Global scalable computer um my background um software engineer um Electronic Engineer by by trade um found out about Bitcoin in 2012 was mining Bitcoin very early when people didn't even know it existed um built a few companies in the crypto space and I went over to Oracle VM with and Facebook to run their respective blockchain projects all right pretty cool at a high level could you give us like the the specs that that makes S stand out from a technical standpoint and what it enables people to do yeah I'm sure people say the same manra all the time high scalable High TPS High availability blah blah blah blah right like that gets very very boring um what we care about more than anything at miston when we set out to buildu was really um the idea of composability was something we cared about intrinsically um one um to say you know as a developer if you build a game today or I build an app today it cost 1 cent to play the game next week it's $5 because the G fees goes up that is ridiculous that is not a design for any business to build on um separately um the fact that most people can't store assets on chain they store a link to some file on ipfs or Google or wherever it may be but all you have on a blockchain is just a hash that again seems ridiculous it's not the promise of what blockchain offers so when we set out to buildu we were Unshackled from a lot of restrictions we had at Facebook in building really a global scale computer so s is an object based um blockchain um the unit compute on onu is strongly typed move objects what that means is people in web in web 2 who are accustomed to writing code um with object with object Centric approach in their minds will come over to sui and feel very much at home so a lot of things you do in a normal object object Orient the program you'll be able to do directly with s um s is also very um you know know very secure we designed it with with a lot of safety things that you just would not get with solidity um for example there isn't um the idea of dynamic dispatch which means you can have a lot of bugs bugs in your in your in your code that lead to a lot of the hacks that we've seen today and we'll continually see more hacks with evm based change because of the numer uh the number of bugs that you have with Dynamics dispatch um seply as well um you know Su doesn't have a maximum theoretic throughput um we've designed it to scale Beyond a single computer so as validators add more machines the TPS of squee increases so because of that there you know TPS or block space is an infinite resource not a finite resource therefore gas inui does not go up because the price ofu goes up or down it's actually very very flat yeah could you bounce back on that OB Centric uh element that you have in sui and eventually put it in perspective with systems that people are more familiar with like the account model in uh in in solidity like with the evm yeah that's a very good question um blockchains typically have different ideas about this some blockchains um are utxo based like Bitcoin um some blockchains are account based like ethereum um so s takes a different approach where it is object based um every object Inu has Fields metadata associated with it and one of those fields is the owner field so ownership is baked in at the base ofu you do not need to write a smart contract or write interfaces to Define what ownership really is so there there's less code to write as a developer and there's also less opportunity to to have bugs so that object-based model is something that's natural to anyone building complex um hierarchical data structures which means you can actually model more of the real world than what you might be able to do with limited um um with languages that kind of restrict you to using um interfaces and so you you kind of like to make um some kind of parallel with the rust programming language you take that boring concept that that we've had with rust and you kind of like reimplement it within Su for better security guarantees too right yes so one benef one one thing from s we when we were set out to build move at Facebook one thing Sam did with the team is we looked at you know we looked at solidity we looked at rust we looked at um even Bitcoin bite code we looked across a whole spectrum of different um programming languages and most of them were not um were not ideal for building you know smart contracts so what we did is we actually borrowed a lot of the benefit from rust IE the borrow Checker from rust and some of the semantics of of ownership in that you have um intrinsically in Rust and we imple implemented that with move um benefit of that is you know there's a it's a language that people will feel more at home with you get the benefits of of rust but also it is those those languages like rust are not specific um enough for smart contract development and do not give you some of the benefits that you might want as a smart contract developer so what we what we did is we added all the elements around um object orientation regarding to you know whether you have an owned owned object or shared object all the things you're going to want as a smart contract developer related to actual mutation of of assets and everything you need really um when when it comes to the functional verification that you want to do when it comes to your smart contracts as well so if you want to have an additional layer of security you can actually functionally verify your smart contract as well so you get that that object orientation uh that memory safety and all the good stuff from some from rust and I believe that it's the language at a lot of I mean like we probably have some systems engineering the crowd and the learning curve when you're trying to to switch from rust to move or I should say swe move isn't that isn't that cheap right yeah um if you're trying to move from rust to to move it's actually not that hard it's very easy in fact I'd argue if you know C or you know any objectoriented programming language you're going to learn we move relatively quickly I do think there will be a bit of a on learning curve if you're coming from an evm World writing in solidity to move just because it's it it it behaves more like a traditional programing language right than solidity in that sense so there there are certain paradigms for example um interfaces that s move just doesn't have We Believe in a world where code is law interfaces are crime interfaces just introduce a lot of opportunity for um for attacks and we think actually it's a spell of how um you know very um inflexible a language actually is so you can use generics or generic types and move and get the same benefits all right so uh I'm John Doe and I understand that you're designing that blockchain in order to alleviate the risk that are inherent to Smart contracts that we design in let's say um previous monolithic design or status quo blockchains so uh so that an accident doesn't happen when I build my business Logic on chain and I don't end up uh having to close doors because the stuff is broken okay um but still if I am building with sui I have to go through audits so I would be curious to know about the state of the auditing market for S move and also like the the other guarantees and tools that you that you provide in order for people to ship safe contracts I understand that you have a move prover I personally am a bit skeptical about formal verification but that's still something that can help you uh in your whole uh contract design process so yeah like I'm that random person who's willing to build on sui what uh what's the flow looking like when I am actually uh yeah going for an audit and everything I'm curious to know about the landscape so the top Auditors already are working with um with s s move AAC and some that you might already know so there is a vibrant auditing Market out there for S move today um the argument we make is um because things like ownership are inherent as a base in the language language uh there is a lot less code a lot less Boiler code to write with s move so the typical checks you'd have to put in a soluted smart contract you don't really have to do with s move so less code I think we've done comparisons with code written in salana written in s move and written in solidity and swe move is way less verbose than all those languages so I think less code is actually good thing um less opportunity for bugs and so on so forth and you you touched on a b the um you know the um move checker these are the things that we're investing time in in including others in in a move ecosystem to make it really much more easier to do your own verification as well um we're also building doing a lot of work now in AI to really improve the developer um Journey whether it's code annotation whether it's um examples uh of of U more um optimized code that you can insert in certain areas or even um investing in ways in which you can learn as a developer a lot faster or at least trying to translate some code from traditional program language over to over to S move with think you know developer um efficiency is one of the biggest areas of investment that we can continually make progress in cool and uh can we foresee a future where you actually expand the the competi the compatibility range of uhu like the blockchain so that it supports other um other languages yeah I mean look we've we've invested a lot of time and effort into s move I mean the reason why we decided not to use evm at Facebook is because imagine we're trying to launch a global blockchain for the world and you go to an auditor you go to an you go to a regulator and then you you can't give guarantees around the security of the code um so we made a a conservative effort back then to go hard and build something that we think would actually solve the Security based problems we actually believe one of the biggest impediments to crypto adoption is actually the ability for developers to pick up and write code very very quickly and without crazy knowledge about the underline infrast structure so as a traditional Web Two developer you should be able to pick up S move and not make as many erors as you would with other languages so I don't I mean I would never say never but I don't imagine a world where s will be compatible with evm I mean bridges are there if people want to bridge assets from other chains people already bridging assets from other chains today onto onto onto um onto sui and and vice versa But ultimately we think it's really a a story about the our narrative is really more about what we're solving for consumers we think the composability you get out of a box with s move is too important um the Safety and Security you get um online from the from the platform is is just something you don't want to give up on and quite frankly I mean if I add to do a comparison um one Department in Facebook for example has more developers than evm developers in the world right there's a massive world out there of developers have not got into web 3 that we have to activate and the more we invest into evangelizing um web 3 to a broader audience the better it is the more users we can bring in all right could you list us a few use cases that are really like specific to like that that we could have with s move like leveraging mutable objects or certain Logics that could be implemented on top of the chain that are non-trivial and really like take advantage of this system that you've designed yeah so um one of the things we've we've we've pitched to a lot of companies is the idea of dynamic objects right now with traditional blockchains it's very is very expensive block space is an expensive commodity so you tend to do many things offchain which is great for some use cases but there are some use cases where ownership matters and the the the history of an asset really matters and you want to add additional benefits for um you know having attributes for an object so Inu you can build assets that are dynamic in nature so if you have a sword or you have you know a car in a game you can build the um hierarchical structure of a car with the many moving parts that you can swap in and out out we've done that with an example with sweet friends or Cappies that exist in the ecosystem today where you can essentially construct assets dynamically on chain with very very low gas fees now in gaming that's very important because you know games aren't really always static items you want to up level an asset over time separately we've invested a lot in ZK s actually support ZK proofs today um one of the Technologies we're going to be announcing soon that's going to be live on mainnet is ZK login it's the idea that you know we think wallets are inherently broken in web 3 anyway we think what actually matters if you want to onboard a billion people they need to be able to use the existing identities that exist today so withu it will be the only chain where you could take your Facebook account your Google account any account that supports web 3 off you can log in and you can basically create a sweet account with that um with that um um web 2 account today and that means you don't need to use a wallet you can log into any number of wallets and you have exactly the same balance across the board and the great thing about that it's neither a custodial non-custodial model the user um the Google will be unaware of what you're doing with your assets neither can they steal your funds um the wallet itself that you may log in through is unable to steal your funds as well so we think reducing that barrier and then you add on what we call sponsor transactions or gas stations inui where a user can um transact on the Chain but never be aware of gas because it's paid for by a different account so you marry the idea of logging in with tradition web two accounts and you marry sponsored transactions you now have really Seamless Web Two experiences now what we're going for withu is mass adoption we want we want you to be able to email nfts to your friend like why can't I email a coupon to a friend or email a token to a friend you'll be able to do that directly on Suite I can send that email and uh only the account or the cookie of someone with a Google account matching my description will be able to unlock those assets so we think that's what it takes to really onboard the next billion users I think right now we've tailored very very much to a very small audience namely I would say early adopters and it's great to get the excitement in the ecosystem but I think the next cycle for crypto needs a ton more users and that's where we're focused yeah that's kind of like your your own approach to account abstraction even though it is not account abstraction it it kind of offers similar benefits so you have um yeah you have zik Logan which is for people who are familiar with like more of the ethereum space that that's kind of kind of like semaphor to prove the inclusion of something in a beer set and you have like these guarantees but I think it's it's a snark ceremony that poers that yes so we're we're running a ZK um um snark we're running a ZK ceremony starting today actually so many people receive an email they'll be able to participate in ceremony and you know the full support for ZK I mean our thesis on ZK um uh ZK Tech is it's great for privacy it's actually great for improving consumer experience we don't have the scale issue where we're trying to compress State we actually have a blockchain that already can do over 300,000 TPS and you can scale it by adding more workers what we're using ZK for is to improve consumer experience making it easier for people to onboard into web 3 and really hide away and Abstract away the complexity of the chain when I go to website tonight uh I'm trying to Google for something I don't think this is running on AWS I don't think it's running on a particular server I just know I'm having experience and I think that's where the tech needs to go for it to be adopted okay and and what is like Miss and the swis foundation approach to open source software maintaining core component of the infrastructure and involving the community into uh further developing the existing assets that you have in your system and what kind of support can we also get from the foundation or M labs when we're looking to build on top of sui sure thing so one thing that's going on right now there's a um there's a liquid Stak in hackathon where 35 million s is going to be given to three protocols at win um for various um categories to bootstrap liquidity into their protocols um we have something called a sip process which is a s Improvement protocol um or Su improvement process where you could submit changes or improvements you want to the protocol that you can Implement um we also have a grant process as well so um people building novel ideas in in s can apply for Grants at the S Foundation at miston Labs itself our Focus right now is really onboarding um major Partners um I don't think people know but some of the largest gaming studios in Korea are actually building on S already and we have over 50 games coming onto onto sui and these are fun games these aren't like you know very you know techy web web 3 games these are games that people can play and have a ton of fun um it's an area we've indexed a lot on because we think that's where naturalistically I mean my kid is 10 he plays Roblox he's always buying Roblox with my with my card if I'm not in the room but you know that world is already accustomed to ownership of assets and we think that World um can be augmented with the technology that we're building today so we're helping some of these large companies on board into sui um build core technology that differentiates them and also really build more engaging um gameplay And in regards to Def like onchain order books um and different def Primitives implemented on top the of the chain what can we already find uh on Su the M or what's coming up next let's say I want to build something that that ex that sits on top of a Perpetual protocol could you give us like some kind of overview of the of the device space and what's coming up yeah so so um as people may not know s's been live for only four months um and in that time we've we've we had the most amount of transaction a single day of any blockchain in history I can't remember what day that was like three weeks ago so we're already scaling we already had 100% up time um and we're building defi out um we have something onu called Deep book it's a it's a um crank Club Central limit order U Central limit order book that I think eight protocols already built on top of so it's a shared pool uh um resource that all Builders who are trying to build def5 protocols can tap into for liquidity as they bootstrap their own protocol at the same time um for folks who are building or extending the functionality of deep book they can receive grants for the improvements that they make as well so it's a fully open source project s um has contributors outside of miston and our hope over a time is the number of contributors to s u exceed our contributions as missed in labs okay and I also like to have some objective conversations and i' would like to know from you ad what are some of the limitations or things that you like to see improved on the swim of Stack at the moment yeah I think there's a lot of work we got to do on dev tooling um it's always that's always a um when you build any platform um the tooling to make it easy for people to on board is always where your investment seems to lag but is always the most critical space so we we have a team u a team that's Focus focusing specifically on dev tools to improve that and also you know there are Grand programs out there for those who are building really interesting Tools in a space I think a few people have built some gbt based tools as well in the ecosystem and receive grants for it so Dev tooling I think is one of the biggest areas that we want to keep on investing in I think um from an onboarding perspective we've done a fantastic job with ZK login I think that's that solves a lot of the problems um the largest companies we've spoken to have in onboarding their users without worrying about the you know the the barrier of wallets which we think is the biggest impediment but yeah um if there's anything to improve it Dev tools my view I do believe that there's um there's a Korean validator which I like call dsrv that's that's working on an ID I believe for Su that's actually pretty used right oh it's one of the top used IDs yeah good work okay okay um okay like are there some next Milestones that that that you have like on uh yeah on SW road map that you like to share with us so um we have I mention mention that we have about 50 games already um coming onto theu blockchain um a lot a lot of these games are also AAA titles so expect to see a lot more users on toi in in the ecosystem very very soon um we have an ongoing um onchain activity called um Quest s Quest um it's interesting we started this off as as a way to give visibility into ABS no ecosystem let me even tell you what quests are we have an nft Inu for fun called buar an naral and if you have a bull shark an naral you're able to participate in certain activities in our ecosystem namely if you deposit into defi or you participate in certain games you can receive a reward if you participate at the top level and what that has actually grown into is a great way for um apps in our ecosystem to gain neity or on or at least get their first set of users and we're going to keep expanding into that program there's going to be more and more Quest over the over the year um as as we grow and our our goal is to keep seeding the ecosystem system with a ton of useful applications and a lot of engaged users who are very tied to the e to the protocols that they support um so that's what we've been doing yeah and I believe that there are also initiatives if people want to connect and engage with the with the the broader s ecosystem all around the world you you have some Builder houses yeah so we've been running Builder houses actually prior to mainnet um although we've been live only four months at mainnet we're running Builder houses I believe um four months prior to mainnet so we have a builder house we actually had a builder house in carea a couple of months back that's why we didn't do another one here um we have a builder house in Singapore um the application is available online so if you if you want to if you want to attend please apply I think there's there's a ton of interest there um we have we on a sweet.io website there's a ton of info on the global Builder houses that we're doing at the at the S Foundation um reach out I mean I'm going to be here throughout most of KBW we'd love to talk to builders talk to businesses who are building or thinking about building in web 3 share some of our battlecars and stories that we have in building in the space and see how we can be helpful I think um that's that's what we have to do all good all good any closing remarks extra remarks to to the like yeah to the Korean Community like um Korea is is a market that um I think most people may not be aware but we we had being I mean I spent I was in career five times last year um absolutely Blown Away with the amount of talent and the foresight that the companies here have and the builders have in not just gaming but defi as well I think they tend to be more way more forward focused than than most of the markets that we've seen um hence why we we we've hired a decent amount of people in Korea including Solutions Engineers we have our APAC lead actually based here in in soou um we we work with a ton of companies out there in Korea who've been building games inui even before mainnet so we cannot wait to see the amount of titles coming out of Korean Studios that are going to hit the market very very soon so yeah I say this is a great Market to invest in it's a great Market to to actually um you know partner with a number of companies with and uh we like to continually increase that cool I think that wraps up that that small panel uh thank you everyone for for being here listening to us and uh yeah I uh I'll see you soon thank you all [Applause]