Bake Me a Layer Cake Layer Cake – Panel Discussion

hello everybody oh well that is loud nice I am Hudson Jamison from the etherium foundation and I'm pleased to thank you I am pleased today to present these awesome panelists for the panel bake me a layer cake a layer two adventure I added that last part on but I think that's a good complete name for what we're gonna be talking about today which is some layer two technologies what they're all about and how different ones come here in the ecosystem and in the community so let's get started go ahead and one by one give us your name where you work and just like a little bit about yourself hello I'm Jacqueline with the scale Network scale is a block chain scaling network that provides smart contract execution and and file storage and essentially etherium as a service to deaths building on etherion I've been doing tech startups for a long time and really happy to be here today thanks hi my name is billy rainey camp capricorn my favorite color is blue I'm a developer relations engineer with tenorman and cosmos yeah hi my name is Jeff Redick I'm CEO and co-founder of I exact weathering a decentralised cloud computing and before that I was researcher at INRIA which is a main place in Europe for doing research in computer science hi my name is Andrew I am a senior partnership manager chain-linked I like long walks on the beach and cuddling with my dog hi I'm Moe from Center and we are a layer to skating platform tries to unify different a layer to scanning technologies in a work right now we are focusing on state channel networks and we just launched the mainland upgrade for the word first to generalize they channel multi help network and you know we have cool t-shirts so if you're interesting you're tapping unicorn teachers find out the elbows awesome thank you all so you all mention your projects and some of them are really all of them are pretty well known in the etherium ecosystem you know from chain Li to seller everybody else what and like just a couple of sentences or less than a paragraph what does your project solve as far as what the goal is and how it helps developers yeah great question so I would say the main goal of the scale network is to help solve the user experience problem for both developers and the end users of decentralized applications so the things work faster smoother better and in a less expensive manner I would say that we help build and scale application-specific block chains yeah can you hear so we're providing solution for doing option computing private and - and privacy-preserving of Shame computing so we are dressing actually free issues with respect to blockchain Cal ability privacy at the so connectivity I'd say that chain link allows for externally connected smart contracts to be inden secure and reliable by allowing for the centralization at the data provider level and the Oracle node operator level and etherium of course provides the decentralisation at the blockchain level center aims to build a layers of scaling platform that allows the internet scale adoption and mass adoption because we allow the developers to build real-time interactive application with extremely low cost you know for the years that developers great great so I'm gonna go to just someone random for this let's go mo and my question is so there's a lot of UX challenges when it comes to some of these solutions that you guys have just described what what's like the biggest or most complicated challenge that you faced within your project from a UX perspective so I think the u.s. so first of all the UX problem the biggest thing we realized that if there are two layers of UX problem the first layer of the UX problem is the blockchain us problem basically trying to make a blockchain easier to use or layer to easier to use for blocking users and then there's a second layer on top static that is trying to make the platin technology in general including all the layers of scaling technology easier to use and easier to adopt by normal user who have no idea what watching what browsing is and we find out that you know closing that gap is the actual very challenging part to hide away not only the blockchain but also the layer too on top of it sometimes when we're building layer tool we're effectively adding a layer of interaction on top of layer 1 and that inherently may incur additional user experience issues especially on the onboarding process so you know we actually tried very hard to solve this by launching something called seller acts which is a eSport gaming application where user can just download and play game and we hide away the fact that they're using stable tokens like dye to play the games in layer to stage channels but just to tell them that hey there's this token just like game token you can buy with your tablet card you know $5 you get five token you can cash all later but at the same time we hide away the transaction fee from them by using matter transactions and then whenever they want to withdraw in a cash short we then detect the transaction fee away from them as kind of a withdrawal fee so our approach to solve the u.s. problem is to kind of use familiar concept of the existing internet application and kind of use that to present to the user without telling them too much about the blockchain and you know we have been trying to do that at we have been claiming that has been working pretty well to bridge the gap between the blockchain user experience versus the blocks user experience for math adoption that's really cool like abstracting away the complicated layers and making them invisible is definitely something that I feel like I've seen time and time again and like it's getting easier people are really stepping up with things like meta transactions like you mentioned who else wants to answer this question about difficulties with UX anybody what um I think yeah I think a key component here our API API base wallets and so one of our approaches is to build seamless integrations for scale into 4matic Portas bits key torez madam asked other solutions and ideally completely obfuscate this whole what's my RPC part IP address like the end user should just be able to use the application authenticate in through the api wallet and not even know they're using scale in an ideal scenario so that's that's what we're trying to do and also make that not too difficult for the developer as well great anyone else last person won't take it sure Billy so something that's really nice when you're building a blockchain from the bottom up is that you kind of have control of every moving piece in that stack so kind of out of the box an SDK blockchain is similar to aetherium but you have the ability to modify certain things that can really improve the user experience for instance you can set up different accounts that have multiple keys attached to them keys that can be replaced keys that have certain mic privileges like maybe one key can only spend a hundred dollars a day so you're able to get all the sorts of like features of like a contract based wallet another thing is that you can sort of build in authentication from both providers like Google because at the end of the day it's just a golang framework you know it's much closer to like building a ruby on rails app or something you know you can utilize all this legacy tech and then just integrate it directly into the blockchain great great answer um let's throw another question out here got some written down I came prepared all right as eath 2.

0 comes out there's gonna be a whole nother level of new aetherium tech layers new technologies that are just a whole different dynamic than a theory of 1.0 how are you going to adjust to aetherium 2.0 coming or are you generalized enough that there's not much you have to do anyone want to take this so I don't do that I mean what we are doing that we are providing the apps and if high shutters for them to - so I don't think that if you're true that always going to change a lot with respect to what we offer those dads will still be able to do ocean computing they will still be able and we still need it I mean many people will develop their dads having stuff running on chain and stuff running option they probably want to interoperate with any kind of legacy application and so we are doing we are building this bridge between the two worlds so we are waiting for it to with a lot of impressions I hope in a similar way chain lengths really excited for any kind of scaling solution because it really expands what developers can do with chain link what developers can do with the space there's a lot of these use cases IOT is one example that I feel like we've been talking about for years and years but because of the amount of API calls because the amount of data you need to get on chain isn't going to be feasible until there are these real scaling solutions so something like e 2.0 is going to be hugely important for folks building with chain link in that it's going to enable these potentially really revolutionary use cases that otherwise weren't economically feasible similarly it's why we're excited about our integration with arbitral the great folks over there another scaling solution that allows for folks to handle a lot of the on chain computation off chain in a secure way all this kind of stuff is really going to vastly broaden their horizon of what's possible and really enable some of this stuff that people have been excited about for a while but haven't actually been able to do all right great so I'm kind of wondering with this whole new hot business of intra blockchain or intra blockchain interconnected blockchains polka dot cosmos stuff like that what what makes it important about your business to cater to different brought block chains what makes it like important to embrace things that have been aetherium because right aetherium conference and I haven't really seen a lot of maximalist but that's something that they'd probably be wondering what's the benefit here so anyone can take this first we're really excited about it set about these 2.0 as well you thought of 2.

0 specifically because there will be blocked finality so you can use IBC to communicate without a trusted third party like Peggy but the idea that my cosmos is really just to be plumbing inside of the Internet of blockchains and if the area has one space that has like very specific and powerful features massive security tightly coupled composability is like a very valuable expense for many applications but obviously there's other features and other blockchains that might be useful in different ways and the more block chains that are connected each other the more shared acquittee that's possible the more compounding composability was possible so we're really excited about every block during the table anyway IBC obviously is our preferred my excellent who else take it a lot a lot of the requests I'm seeing are within the etherium ecosystems so scale is entirely focused on interoperability within aetherium whether it be a theorem a net to a scale chain or scale chain to scale chain or and essentially let's let money flow freely and smoothly and with minimal UX issues within the etherium ecosystem so that's I'm seeing it from that frame and and seeing actually a lot of a lot of needs for for interoperability and entertained messaging well anybody else so I think I just want to try me here quickly that is you know if we look at how internet evolved one thing Internet did really well is the layered architecture and layered architecture allows each layer to have different technologies you have different physical layers you have different routing layers well you don't have different routing layers but you have different kind of you know transport layers and all that stuff so from our point of view layer two is a increment layer comparing to layer one and we're trying to help whatever layer ones is becoming more and more popular and becoming more and more use and of course we have deep root in a theorem community and we have been building most of our stuff on a theorem to this point but you know we have been designing the layer to inter layers of ecosystem as a relatively blocking agnostic solution so that we have the claim decouple between different layers to a lot better evolution in future anybody else ok so just get another one out here oh this is a good one so how would you describe the community around your projects we're all gonna look at one potential for some one very prolific community so we got to get an answer from you Andrew but how would you describe the community that's been built around your project whether that be a subreddit maybe a discord maybe people just you know interacting and spreading the word well how would you describe your community sure the community with chain-link obviously has a reputation we're known for being extremely engaged some of the stuff that people might not know if they're not deeply involved in the community though is through what degree there's a lot of education that happens within it I think it is one of the more technically informed communities out there I think that our meetup program is a great example of the kind of passion that they have this is a program 30-plus cities across the globe were co-hosting with projects we're trying to spread the word not just about chain-link but about smart contracts in general and what they can accomplish the fact that we can have this kind of advocate program entirely on a volunteer basis I don't think that's something that a lot of other projects can boast and so you know maybe a little bit of a reputation but I suspect a lot of it is just a touch of unearned alright anybody else yeah something that's really nice about the community around cosmos is that it's sort of like a rising how come what is the phrase rising water all ships rise because the whole idea is that there should be many different block chains that's sort of like an anti fragile system all of the sort of tooling that comes out benefits all of the other projects which are built in similar ways similar to like somebody makes the block Explorer for an IRC 20 token every other year some twenty can use it at the same time so this is like a block Explorer for guests is automatically being able to be used by all these different block chains and so you get a lot of you know projects which end up being useful all across the place and community members driving that well anybody else wanna grab it yeah so this is maybe a point of view on the etherium communities so so if you look at scale where the skill networks actually built into aetherium there's a series of smart contracts that interact with the scale nodes and the scale network and you know in the same way I think the community operates and really our goal is just to support theorem developers and I don't I don't mean to just call it scale there I think there's a lot of projects that across the etherium ecosystem that really are aetherium and so it's very cool to see the way that we have this really amalgamation of teams and people from regions and areas and all kind of again working the rising tide lifts all boats right and you thank you and we're we're all trying to make it happen so it's pretty fun all right all right man I should have written more questions that's okay I can get them from my noggin so there's a lot of so like when you're doing just like a smart contract at the cell there's a lot of people who are getting smart contract audits because of prolific you know incidents like the Dow what kind of precautions whether it be audits or other forms like maybe formal verification I don't know how far that goes into the layer to ecosystem like what's being done on that really nerdy side to keep things safe yeah ODT this particle size is something I've been doing for a very long time actually we release four versions of Isaiah and the if one of them have been audited by a photon chain security and this kind of deter people from epfl Zurich in Europe so a bit of background is in the formal verification I don't know exactly if at the moment are people actually doing formal verification I think it's more sort of analysis of the source code of the smart contract trying to identify some of the potential weakness we're also spending of obviously a lot of time reviewing reviewing our own code there's no magic here I think it's a experience and sometimes good sometimes bad things happens we all know that I'd say that I think one of the things that chain-linked really excels at is helping other projects mitigate some of their major security risks what we see over and over again is that developers don't see the need or the value in a highly reliable highly secure Oracle service either until they get to some fantastic scale they realize there's so much value being transacted in their contracts that they need greater security or something bad happens and so we have a good problem in that developers all eventually come to see our value proposition just not always under great circumstances we're really working to try and get in the door of young projects a little bit earlier trying to make ourselves as easy to integrate as possible in order to remove these issues but the way we see ourselves of course we audit all our code but we see ourselves as a security layer for these other projects that want to get externally connected well anybody else something that's kind of unique to our ecosystem and I believe that we sort of started around last year is this concept of an adversarial test Network where before we launched the cosmos hub we had this project called game of stakes and it was basically come and participate in this network test network and try to attack it try to bring it down try to find flaws do anything you can and we'll pay you for that upfront so Kay creates a sort of like game atmosphere where people are incentivized to attack the network early on you know fail early so we were able to identify us with the things and we're about to start a similar thing for IBC called game with zones so that'll be a test network of test networks a bunch of them all trying to you know interoperate talk to each other and also attack each other and any sort of damage that they can do is rewarded by Adams as long as you don't take down Rob's did it gets enough hate yeah we are going through this right now so share some learnings we're launching main net and q2 pretty excited about it but one lesson schedule your audits early good auditors are jammed okay so so we got lucky we got them scheduled we got two scheduled and then also be ready to get a mix of and I think cosmos did this well with hacker one and another bounties we're going to be using heroine and get coin and trying to to get people to white hat hack the network and then also set up an adversarial test set so these things all take time and get your audits scheduled early and make sure too that your timelines take into consideration the changes you need to make based off what you will learn so yeah so on the security side the layer layer two security auditing is a little different from no more smart contrast so if your everything the first a layer is always the anchoring smart contract because layer two draws security from the layer one and there are artists pure contract settlement contract on layer one and those contract need to be securely audited and then on top of that there is the notice system that you know the the although the layer one a smart contract was supposed to be catching any layer two fault we still need to have that part security audited it in to ensure that there's no leak of private key remote execution that type of issues basically and I also want to kind of a quick lay circle back on the community question you just asked earlier and for us the community starting to shape a little bit different from many other blocking project in the sense that of we start to took a approach to a track and you know approach communities outside of a blockchain space on both developers side and also on the user side for the user side will launch the center acts gaming application that is a skill based real money gaming application that attracts the normal audience in fact a 70% of our you know users demographics are 25 to five year female users which is very different from the normal plot demographic zero see and for the developer adoption side we focused heavily on the monetization and a sustainable revenue generation for developers by launching the center axis gaming SDK as well so you know we're approaching game developers and game studios instead of directly approaching and you know blockchain developers and we want to kind of pitch the blockchain as a additional and the lucrative monetization to for these vast image vast amount of developers outside of the circle good answer all right I'm gonna maybe throw a curveball here there's some people who are really needed the ecosystem here and if you are new welcome aetherium welcomes you but people will see these layer 2 solutions and some of them have coins and some of them don't so if you are a project that has a token that is used on your network why do you have it what's the point of the token for your particular instance that I'm not sure which ones have tokens opposed to view I think I can answer this question a bit I simply really important probably underestimated at the moment when points at which I said we are building a marketplace so the token here is used as a mean of famer and plus as a technology because we are using a token we can use back on track and we can build a consensus protocol on top of this so without without the token that would be much much more difficult unless we want to build it decentralized because the protocol was taking I mean stakeholders have to take money and if they behave wrong we can and the protocol will take this body and reward the participants who behave correctly right so if you don't have a token you can't implement that as a decentralized thing and that causes all kind of issues and plus the way the token is structured is you know it's a fixed amount of tokens for a market that should be growing so here there are plenty of I think implications regarding token economies that are really important and that we I think don't really understand at the moment what happens is something important in France we have several economies working on that matters they build the mathematical model for that has been published and I think it's something really sting I love to talk about the scale tokens so it's it's entirely geared around security and pooling security so if you think about it the scale tokens actually in ER c77 token but to participate as a validator you have to stake tokens into the network that actually gets staked into the main net to pay for a scale chain you actually have to pay in scale tokens those that get passed back through the validators there could be a thousand nodes at any given time 16 are running for you and what's happening is because of this pool security model and because we're the networks randomly pulling nodes in and rotating them that work on the application specific block chains or sites elastic side chains the cost of attacking one sub chain is probabilistically as high as attacking the broader network because it's so hard to get collusion and bribery when you're pulling from a big group and you're rotating them so having a token is critical having a specific token lets the network monitor and design economics in a more specific way as opposed to writing the ebb and flow of the ether ether so yeah the logic for the existence of the chain link token is similar to that for scale and I exact there's a system by which note operators are paid in the token its utility token and there's also a staking functionality that is currently in development this helps you know power.this what will eventually become an entirely self-sufficient ecosystem using this utility token so just like layer one has crypto economics problem of producing blogs and the reaching consensus layer to also have the corresponding blockchain phenom because a crypto economical problems to be solved and that need to be solved by a well-designed game theoretical mechanism and it also incentivized by Tolkien and for us we use seller token in-state Guardian network as the decentralized Watchtower service for the you know State Channel network and also use that as a staking token for relaying any kind of information as we will roll out more you know updating terminals our expansion to other layer two techniques to bridge the information we need from layer two to layer one as kind of an incentive and stating token there basically so the only reason you ever really need to token is if you need some mints new tokens right and we believe that perfect steak makes the most sense with a highly inflationary token but the economic model of at least the cosmos hub is very much based on the idea that you shouldn't make money from the inflationary token but rather from fees so if you decide to secure your blockchain without proof mistake but maybe with proof of authority then I would say you actually should remove that token and just let people take these and ether or people can pay fees and Bitcoin which is also what happens on cosmos currently all right great answers everyone we have a mic it's hot it's live come on with your questions it's right there anybody have questions about anything they've heard today from these excellent panelists layer two problems anything we answered all the questions I know it's like amazing they're gonna have to use all your products now okay we don't have any questions there I'll just throw out a couple more we have about five or six minutes left or so so oh great I have a question all right applies to all of you what do you personally think is your biggest risk like what is the biggest risk to your project it could be anything like what kind of risk I'll take I'll take a first cut and I think the the biggest risk for any project and scale included is is just timing so we need to get to a point where we have millions and hundreds of millions of daily active users using these systems at some point and I think we will or at least have at that type of volume in the ecosystem to support the amount of capital and investment and jobs and and growth that we're all looking for so I'm feeling incredibly confident this is coming and I think the risk is timing us when when is it going to happen is it gonna have at the end of this year is it gonna happen next year but I think we all see the building blocks coming together and see the leading indicators and and make most people here are not really watching price timing is the biggest risk I think the biggest risk is losing out to centralized solutions most of the stuff that we're offering can be done without a blockchain and done when you just have trusted partners from entities that are businesses that have laws that regulate them I do think that that solution creates a scenario in which technology might not be as proficient or there might be enough friction financially between partnerships that you end up having large fees I think that these are things that decentralize tech can really undercut but it comes to this very high technical cost and unless we can solve that technical costs and deliver a product which is superior to a centralized alternative there were all that risk of being out of a job I think the bigger risk for us would be to underestimate the adoption the challenge this is something we are taking very seriously at the moment well thank you for putting a lot of effort on that I mean adoption it's not only a question of water and crypto this kind of thing fine sense when enterprises want to use an idea they need an invoice and so you know current production on it as I said this is the payment for many companies on counter and all this kind of things Jerrica takes a lot of time to solve so that we can build an ecosystem which is viable for everyone and not only for people who have total crypto time and that I used a circle system yeah I think anybody who's in this space knows that the biggest risk is trust we're fighting against a deeply entrenched system that currently functions just fine and has this mentality of it works because it works and so we do need to build that better product the value prop can't simply be the decentralisation the trust lessness trust lessness we need to make sure that it's not only going to offer everything that the space is proud of and believes in ideologically but that it also gets the job done better and if we can't do that then you know where are we going I think the biggest biggest raised here is to find the right adoption niche basically find the right market to cut in bloating is a young technology it has the advantage but it has more you know it's much higher adoption barrier comparing to all the other available technologies out there and you know we need to define what is a right adoption niche where the blockchain technology and you know the corresponding projects for each of us can truly shine in that particular marketing that particular business model and you know some ideas around that are this market need to be you know with extremely high trust call today for example if you're you know if you're just like opening a straw a shop today you have you're paying 2.9 percent of stripe fee it's really not a that much a cost in terms of trust but in on the other hand if you're running a high-risk business but still 100% legal and the highly adopted the you know business they're you know that might be actually a good niche to cutting as blocking significantly lower the the trust acosta on that front so that's why we kind of entered the real money gaming arena which is a legal highly regulated uh but still traditionally with extremely high trust calls extremely high transaction processing fees and then offer a differentiator there by using the technology that we have so you know whether we can quickly identify a bunch of these small niches but highly sustainable and the big enough to let us plant the root and grow from there and think you know if we can identify those we can mitigate the kind of a risk overall but if we can't then it's become a major risk so very very last thing we got about a minute left lightning round ten seconds remind everyone what your company is and where they can find you here if it's a booth or a website or whatever scale network go do scale networks Celtic a also read the top the stairs the booth you're hacking come talk to us we love to talk to you cosmos network cosmos dot network we're at the top of the thing in there come on back we are I and we host Pro just damn I'm with chain link and we're on the second floor as well center Center thought Network and you can find us and our cool t-shirts on second floor as well all right thank you all so much this has been an amazing panel let's give everyone a hand thank you [Music]