Most Killer App Potential from Flow Foundation - ETHGlobal Singapore 2024

[Music] hey there my name is Ali serage aka the flow bro and today I'm super excited to introduce you to the flow blockchain here at eth Singapore at Flo I work as an outbound product manager but previously I've done everything from Full stack engineering to product management and even launched a couple startups in the process so the whole in University I studied computer science but also participated in dozens of hackathons which contributed to 95% of my wardrobe in terms of Swag but also gave me a lot of opportunities to explore new ideas to build entrepreneurial skills and to think about what does the world look like when you actually solve real pains my advice for you during this hackathon whether you choose to hack in our stream or another stream is related to a very famous quote attributed to Arthur C Clark you might have heard about it it goes something like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic it kind of even goes deeper than that the atmology of the word magic comes from the Indo-European word maah which means to be able technology is the only thing that if you spend several days of creativity of effort of passion you can create something that enables Millions ions of people billions of people even so if there's one thing I want you to take away it's that you are a wizard during this hackathon I know it sounds funny but it's it's true in the literal sense of the word and that you're making magic in people's lives you're enabling them and don't think of it like oh I'm just going to explore this tool stack or play around with this idea really try to look at real pains that people face and how you could enable them through the process of hacking back to the agenda I'm going to talk about what is Flo our architecture introduce you to Cadence and what the future of web 3 development looks like with flow then I'm going to talk about our defi toolbox the hacking themes for E Singapore and give you a very brief demo Flo has just gone through the most exciting and largest upgrade in its history and I'm about to share with you some exciting Alpha so that together we could explore what the future looks like before that let's start off with a little bit of a story imagine that you know you have a friend that hears about the super cool web 3 game and they they're not web 3 native they haven't went through all of the you know tulous torture that we've went through so they go to the application first thing they notice this this beautiful box in the top right that says connect wallet it's like okay what does that mean like is that how I sign in then they click on it and they they get redirected to a plug-in store they have to download a plugin okay they start onboarding into that plug and they're like is this a scam what's going on and then they're told memorize this series of of words but don't write them down on your computer or Microsoft Word make sure you physically write them down and don't ever lose it or else you could lose your money by that time you're probably panicking you've already spent like a considerable amount of time before you even log into the the game but you know you still go along with it and then eventually you're able to create that wallet you connect into the game you're not able to do a single transaction in that game because you don't have any gas so what is gas fees where do I buy from your friends aren't around you you try to find a centralized exchange is this taxes for web 3 what is this like why is this so expensive where where do I get it from right um if you're in Canada you're probably going to have to wait three hours with the fraud department before like you can convince them that you are in fact trying to make that crypto transaction realistically the vast majority of users would have dropped off before they even started having fun in playing the game whole purpose of games is to have fun but the reason I gave this analogy was because they're are massive barriers towards everyday consumers towards mainstream users to to get onboarded even into the most simple web3 applications it's not very userfriendly right and at the protocol level flow gives Builders the tools that they need to effortlessly remove all these barriers to using your dap does your grandmother really need to know what a crypto wallet is or or does your friend really need to go and grab all that gas just to play around with with you and and their other friends a second thing that I want to touch on that is another huge barrier to to Everyday people getting involved in in um these web three applications is gas right so on Flow you can also create applications that allow the application itself to pay gas fees instead of the end user to effectively create these gasless experiences which is a huge other barrier solves both of them all while guaranteeing a full spectrum of ownership the user always has full control of their assets before I get into the specifics of how that's done let's discuss flow a little bit more so Flo is a layer one blockchain with ultra low gas bees that first launched its proof of stake protocol in 2020 it was co-founded by deer Shirley one of the brightest Minds in the space and a core contributor to ERC 721 he is as a tidbit of fun information also the person that coined the term n f um if you guys are ogs in the space then you might have heard of crypto kitties the original team behind that also played an important role in the incubation of the network on Flow there are currently two virtual machines that run one is Cadence and one is evm the evm was recently introduced during Crescendo which is the largest upgrade to ever occur on the network and it essentially makes flow an evm equivalent blockchain well what does that mean it means that validity contracts and popular evm tooling such as hard hat Alchemy remix open Zeppelin work off the bat seamlessly with no additional configuration required it's as seamless as a building on an L2 evm chain but with the extensive benefit of the technological advantages that Flo offers in creating new Next Generation applications Flo is also home to some of the world's most parished communities and and Best Brands such as Disney Mattel the NFL NBA um it's a network that really Powers these deps that are interacted with by millions of users and in other words it's pretty much the the home of consumer applications that regular everyday people love and use let's touch on the architecture a blockchain network is a decentralized system maintained by a multitude of computers known as nodes these nodes are responsible for validating and recording transactions on the blockchain depending on the blockchain's architecture nodes can have a specific roles and responsibilities such as validating transactions storing data or creating new blocks nodes are crucial in maintaining the Integrity the security and decentralization of a blockchain network in the current industry when many of us think about scaling al2s and app chains tend to come to mind in fact when you go to a lot of these crypto events it seems like there are more chains than there are actually platforms or applications built on them um jokes aside flows created a unique Network architecture that allows it as an L1 to scale without the need for sharding on most other chains the norm is for all nodes to perform every task like an army of clones the exact same set of tasks as Network usage grows the transaction processing capacity of the individual nodes becomes a limiting factor restricting the Network's throughput and latency the amount of data that can be stored on chain is limited since nodes have only a finite storage capacity the only way to scale these monolithic blockchains is by increasing the capacity of each node by adding more CPU more memory and more storage however this has a cost there's always a cost and cost is decentralization as nodes scale vertically they become more expensive to run and eventually you're left with only a few operators that can afford to run such high performance high capacity nodes an oligarchy almost um so to say and and worst even is that energy consumption for every node in the network increases over time making the chain environmentally unsustainable in the long run the monolithic node design of common L1 such as Bitcoin and in ethereum overly privileges operator control over block production this makes the chain vulnerable to censorship and Nev attack and this problem is even worse with l2s that have centralized sequencers flows multi-roll architecture provides meev resistance by randomly assigning transactions to collection nodes that only see a subset of all transactions what do I mean when I say multi-roll architecture well flow essentially divides tasks among different specialized no types to enhance scalability and efficiency on Flow because the increase in energy and Hardware consumption over time is restricted to a small subset of the nodes in the network instead of all of them this dramatically limits the environmental footprint of the chain while the overall energy use of flow really doesn't increase significantly even if the activity on chain increases by 10 50 100x or more making the per track sorry making the per transaction energy footprint decrease over time so evm Plus+ what is that so with cadence you can extend evm in a lot of really exciting ways it's Cadence is not just a virtual machine it's also the name of a flow native programming language that was ergonomically designed for for modern developers in web 3 we build applications that constantly work with resources or assets such such as fungible tokens nfts and the hundred other erc's out there Cadence is a purpose-built resource oriented programming language designed with ux safety and functionality in mind you can use Cadence to pretty much extend your evm application even if it's completely ridden in solidity and unlock extremely powerful use cases and value propositions over the next few slides I'll try to give an overview of some of the most exciting things that that I can think of that you can unlock on Flow by combining Cadence with your app but I challenge you to think on your own and explore even new um use cases that that could really you know change Industries we'll start with transactions because they're pretty much the lifeblood of onchain activity transactions allow people to write data directly onchain flow offers both competitive transaction times which is important for apps in Defi and gaming but also offers different types of transactions in a completely new model the model breaks down the signer into three roles the proposer the payer and the authorizer this allows things like sponsored transactions where you can specify that the application is the one who is the payer they pay for the gas fees but the user is the one who proposes and approves the applications and because gas are so ultra low on flow a lot of applications take advantage of this model to create completely gasless experiences for new applications coming in um one example that I recently saw was someone wanted to make take all the benefits of Drop Shipping if you're familiar with it like remove all the cost barriers associated with it so people could launch new mean coins on the network so they created a gasless um token launcher platform as you could imagine like removing that barrier can open up a lot more use cases towards onboarding mainstream users that don't need to worry about going and buying that gas or can't access the application it also opens up opportunities to introduce premium and subscription models into your app um the second thing that I think it allows us to create which I'm excited about is bundle transactions bundle transactions are essentially when you add multiple transactions to execute in an order that if one of them fails everything reverts this is super use F if you have a super complicated defi um application that the results of the previous transaction in an order you know are very important for the consecutive upcoming transaction um there's also multisig transactions where you could require um a signature to have multiple signers in order to execute which is super valuable for things like peer-to-peer training in defi um or in in gaming as well as escros and scripted transactions which essentially you could think of them almost like smart like um smart transactions where you can set preconditions and post conditions for execution and create things like adaptive yield farming strategies where you only go down One path if the price is right if it's all if it at this moment in time is still better than alternative strategies Etc flow also offers a lot of of protocol level Primitives and two ones that I'm super excited about and want to talk to you guys on are Randomness and accounts so flow offers its own protocol level vrf or verifiable Randomness function which allows applications to utilize provably Fair number generators in things like games or lotteries or gamble FY that don't really need to rely on third-party oracles or Alternatives you can access the Randomness through a pre-compiled solidity contract um called the Cadence Arc contract and you could find more about that in the developer dogs or as well as the hackathon main page for FL I'm going to throw it into the resources section so look there if you want to look more into incorporating that into your app another thing is account abstraction and account linking which allows for shared ownership over accounts so you could think of account linking on Flow like Google Drive folders and in the same way how you might have one Google drive folder have a nestled child folder within it and the parent has certain like your brother could access it your mother could access it but your sister can't access it and the child folder like it might inherit all the the permission access to the contents within it the assets whether they're images or or files right like you could even have it at the asset level specified who has access to what so you could think of account linking in a similar way where by utilizing account abstraction if an application um say wanted to easily allow someone to onboard on it without having them go through a wallet creation process in the background they create a wallet for the end user the end user just authenticates with their email like any other application and that gets connected to that individual child account that the application created for them then maybe that user four or five months down the line you know they collect a bunch of assets like nfts or tokens in in that application they go down the rabbit hole and they get their own non-custodial wallet and they want to be able to link that that account that was originally created in the application to their parent account to their core wallet right um that's possible on Flow at the protocol level and it's so easy to implement attachments are an exciting area um a famous Anon once might have said on Twitter that most devs in web 3 have attachment issues they just don't know it yet trer words have never been spoken in my opinion attachments are to Smart contracts what modding is to video games it Awards the ability to add new data and functionality to a contract without permission from its original author this Fosters a new and unprecedented level of composability that I think really increases the shelf life of contracts and also allows them to adapt fast to changing market conditions an analogy I love to give here is think about Skyrim um the RPG game if you go onto platforms like Skyrim Nexus you'll see millions of gamers are still downloading mods for this game that extend functionality far beyond what the original creators would have ever dreamed of utilizing current tools like Chachi PT and and Whisper AI to create things like NPCs that could talk to you and that are multi-dimensional um really what attachments allow you to do in my opinion that is so exciting is it allows you to turn your products into platforms and these platforms continuously can generate value and iterate and change and new content for your users long into the future other examples of this could be like a socialy application adding fact Checker to to people's posts right or adding autographs on top of nfts of sports stars the the possibilities really are endless metadata views on flow is really exciting um it's also on the Cadence side essentially it allows you to at the asset level associate metadata that helps with future proofing as well as future interoperability well guaranteeing backward compatibility so an example of this might be royalties right like you can set in the metadata of nft hey this royalty was created by this awesome Creator and this is the percentage of royalty payouts every time this gets sold that needs to go to this address that means it doesn't matter if this nft is sold in openc or blur wherever it's listed it's pulling the exact same metadata the front end of the application knows exactly how it should you know render like that nft how people interact with it Etc and you could imagine like Fast Forward 10 years we have Marketplace is for um for metaverse marketplaces where nfts become these 3D rendered like you you get your wolf head nft becomes a trophy you could mount on your Palace wall right like as these new standards evolve metadata views allow you to evolve with the industry and with the evolving Norms right so super exciting capabilities they are a unique feature of cadence that represent references to share shared objects that can be saved for future transactions and what they essentially do is they allow for granular permissions and access control a good analogy for this is AWS IM where you could think of how that allows you to specify who has access to what like functions like what contract calls like what parts of the contract at every single level in in the same way this allows you to um do that in web 3 um like I mentioned earlier like you could mix this with with sponsored transactions to do things like create premium or subscription business models where if this user has done X Y and Z they have access to this and so on so forth or you could also create interesting applications relating to a um an inheritance application right if someone passes on and they have an account with a bunch of assets you could have capabilities that allow their lawyer or their children to access specific assets within their account after a certain amount of time has elapsed if there's no activity in their account like capabilities allow you to access specific resources specific functions in a contract specific like um anything that you need pretty much um if you hit the required requirements and you have the capability to access those um again think of them as access control and permissioning I am is a very good analogy for it so the defi toolbox is your One-Stop shop for everything defi related on Flow here you'll find Cod Snippets guides examples all the current Primitives that are listed in the ecosystem as well as ways for you as a developer to become more engaged on the flow Network again like I I hope that through this hackathon it might be your first experience with flow and that you'll choose to continue developing in the ecosystem in the future if you choose to well what we've done is we've created a system where active developers can unlock more and more exciting things the more active they are such as bount access to bounties job opportunities um free tickets to future events similar to this Etc so if you are interested in extending your hackathon project continuing to work on it or launching a new project post hackathon these tools boxes are the place that like for various different verticals will be the place um for you to to look for those types of opportunities and and how to get more involved so what are the two main themes for our stream at e Singapore the two are most killer app potential I could easily see how that could be misunderstood and most defi app on or best defi app on Flow rather what are killer apps so killer apps have the power to create and Lead entire industries by addressing a paino at the perfect moment for a large group of people now I already mentioned how Flo as an L1 is very focused on consumer adoption and consumer grade products that everyone can can access like we work very hard to minimize and remove as many of the barriers as possible that people face when trying toess a web3 application so what I want you to think of when you're when you're you know hacking in in this stream is what is the next thing that solves a real pain that a lot of people face and it doesn't have to be completely like utility based it could also be a telegram mini app or a game one analogy that I would give is artificial intelligence with chat GPT so with chat GPT AI has been around like decades and decades and decades before chat GPT was ever a thing right yet when chat PT was introduced it was pretty much the fastest product that was ever adopted in history what it allowed people to do is every day people could instantly see the value it would create in their lives and it became accessible to them through a chat interface that they were already familiar with for from years of being on you know Snapchat on Facebook on WhatsApp it was it was a medium that people were already comfortable with a market was already there and it solved it solved a huge diverse array of pains from grammar checking to tutoring to research that that a huge segment of consumers um uniquely found value in so I would challenge you to think about what that kind of consumer application looks like in web 3 how do how do people currently try to solve Marketplace problems for example um are there Marketplace problems related to the gig economy that that could be massively revolutionized with web 3 um maybe a cheaper Uber like I don't mean to bias your Solutions but think think big with the most killer app and really dive into what is the pains that you're solving why is web 3 perfect for solving that pains and dream about what that solution might look like the second one is best defi app onflow right and what I would challenge you to think about for a best defi is in defi there's a lot of Zero Sum game applications what are the positive sum applications that that continuously allow everyone from the investor to the user to the Creator to to grow together instead of you only making money by someone else being your exit liquidity how can we all grow um how could we have tangible impact in the real world what are what are different ways that everyday people are hedging against inflation are investing today that could be massively disrupted through web 3 or their lives made easier an example of a product that recently launched on Flow um is essentially an rwa that tokenizes lease tokens and allows people to investors to get very decent returns of almost 181 19% which is a lot better than than other stock options that they might be exposed to but also it allows Everyday People an easier method of getting approved for a car and then hitting the road faster so what are massive Industries or workflows or things that that could really be improved through through Defi and cutting out those middlemen all right we have a little bit of time I'm not going to do a full demo but what I will do is show you where you can go to get started right now and deploy your first contract in the flow ecosystem so if you go to developers. flow.com and you click on the evm section the best place to get started I'd recommend is using EDM it has everything you need from this cute little button that will add um flow to your metamask to information such as the chain ID the RPC endpoint and things like where to access the test net faucet if you need test tokens or or gas and the block Explorer for Val validating transactions and contracts um you can also see a list of all the Json RPC methods that are currently available on Flow and and more here um after that I'd recommend going into the cross vbridge we'll be adding a little bit more to this this is more useful if you plan to go down the path of leveraging some of those assets and Brands and communities that I talked about earlier and bringing them over from the Cadence side into the evm side into your application and doing exciting interesting things or or composing on top of them or extending them this is going to be where you want to look to figure out how to best you know bridge over assets between the two virtual machines again I really want to highlight like in this hackathon you don't have to touch anything related to Cadence you could just do everything in solidity like on the evm side using tools that you're already familiar with um but I would challenge if you are interested in exploring thinking about interesting ways that you could leverage like the the full potential of the platform um and then lastly I think the easiest way to get started would just be going through the remix guide there's there's various other guides that you'll find under the guides folder and launching your first hello world contract um through the online IDE that's it thank you so much um I'm really excited to see what you guys cook up over the coming days and as always go with the flow [Music]