Moonbeam: Boostrapping an Interoperable Ecosystem on Polkadot - Derek You (Moonbeam) - TOKEN2049

thanks thanks very much so um i want to talk to you a little bit today about about our project moonbeam but in order to talk about moonbeam it's pretty hard to do that without also talking about polka dot a little bit um that's kind of the context in which you know we've created our project so i wanted to start um you know polkadot is a complex system i'm going to do my best to kind of distill it down to what i think are the key ideas in polkadot that will provide some context for you know our project and what we're up to and so i wanted to start with this question pretty straightforward question what is the best blockchain and you know this is a question that um you know people get pretty excited about they they have their blockchain of choice they say you know mine's faster mine's more secure mine's more decentralized uh you'll get some you know blood will go up and you know you'll get some pretty heated discussion on this topic and the the reason why i start with this question is this question is specifically a question that when you have the polka dot state of my kind of mindset this like does not have an answer there is not like a single answer to this question and i think a polka dot person would say it's it's even it's it's kind of misguided to think that there can be one answer to this question there's a series of trade-offs in all sorts of different directions and so i think the you know the polka dot answer is that there are many best blockchains it's totally dependent on what you're trying to do right it's dependent on the use cases you're trying to serve uh you know storage optimized blockchain is gonna look different than one that's optimized for a lot of transaction throughput as an example and so there's space to have you know there's the goal is not to try to find one blockchain that can meet all the use cases you know out there in the world uh you know the polkadot idea is you know let's create an environment where we can have many of these things so we the poke id is let's create like a framework the substrate framework where you can build blockchains are specific to your use case and then let's connect them all together so they can kind of interoperate and speak with each other and really i mean for a complicated system that is the core idea the core idea behind polka dot is you know let's have an environment let's give people the tools to create their own specialized blockchains and create an environment where those specialized blockchains can talk to each other and based on just that simple idea you know you get these kind of very powerful network effects start to happen because you don't have to unlike when you're just a stand-alone blockchain you don't have to worry about things you don't want to be good at you specialize in one thing and you can rely on other chains to provide the services that you don't really care about that much that are specialized for those other purposes so i think that the the system as a whole is definitely set up to create these like larger network effects as different blockchains are kind of interacting with each other and so that's kind of a context for explaining what moonbeam is so moonbeam is one of these specialized blockchains on polkadot but what we've done is we've done a from scratch ethereum implementation uh in this substrate development framework and so what that means is you know we've created an environment that looks and feels very much like ethereum does you know same evm you know has similar evm functionality we've collaborated quite closely with parity you know the team behind polka dot on creating this environment and it means you can use all the same tools that people are used to using right so developers you know can use all the familiar tools they're used to uh things like metamask and so the experience is is is very much like you would find on call it like a you know matic bsc these other chains that are uh that are ethereum compatible but because we're a para chain on polkadot there's unique things that we can do uh that if you just have a straight like ethereum clone you can't do so we'll get to those uh we'll get to those in a little bit so we've engaged with a whole bunch of people at this point in terms of building and deploying to moonbeam uh and so a lot of the content of this talk just comes from these conversations that i've had with quite a few project teams at this point infrastructure providers api providers and protocol teams um and um you know one thing that's not noted on the slides is we did launch kind of the sister network to moonbeam about six weeks ago so something called moon river that's our deployment to kusama which for those of you aren't familiar kusama is kind of this companion network to polka dot and when you're in the polkadot ecosystem a lot of teams actually will have this dual deployment structure where they'll have a deployment to kusama and a deployment to polkadot so we launched this moon river deployment about six weeks ago um and yeah there's been quite a bit of interest in that in that time you know i looked this morning before the talk to have some numbers for you uh i think there's been about two and a half million transactions in the last six weeks organically there's about uh over 200 million in tbl like deposited into various d5 protocols that have sprung up there's a number of nft projects as well there's about 125k wallet addresses so um you know pretty substantive um activity you know for a six week old blockchain and we're heading in um shortly to the launch of the main network they'll be deployed onto polkadot as the parrot chain options start on polka dot that's the process by which your project team actually becomes one of these pair of chains so that's just context around like where some of the ideas in this talk came from and you know if i divide the project teams into a couple categories i would say uh there's one way to divide them into two so we're working with a number of teams that are pursuing you know kind of a multi-chain expansion is what i call it that's that's something that's pretty prevalent these days you know you may have a project team uh to name a few you know we've been working quite closely with the team at uh sushi uh as well as cream finance um lido as well and you know they may have started like on ethereum originally but you know they're all of them are in the process of expanding like out to multiple chains i mean they see the world as moving into kind of a multi-chain environment and for them it's pretty simple right i mean they're they're trying to maximize kpis like tvl uh dau mau right so daily active users monthly active users i mean they're running their protocols like a software business and they need to expand so they're looking for new markets to to attack and that's what's leading to a multi-chain expansion and when they're doing that note that it's it's really these evm compatible chains are the ones that are getting the most of the traction and the reason for that is simple it's because that's the text that's the implementation they have and so by targeting evm chains you know you don't have to change the object it's not a whole reimplementation effort you can just deploy your existing code you know on to things like you know bsc polygon and uh i think for people trying to get to the polka dot ecosystem you know we've we've um we're one of the logical destinations here because again you have to change anything so that's one category of of of team but we are also seeing uh you know polkadot native teams that are deploying building one of these parent chains actually turns out to be pretty hard you know you're building a blockchain basically right so um that's not for everyone right i mean that's um there's a lot of infrastructural work you have to do there's a lot of incentivization of nodes to like help produce blocks there's a lot of pretty low-level things you have to do so i think for a lot of teams that want just this smart contract kind of dapp like experience you know they're going to look to work with um a team like us and you know i think for anyone wanting the ethereum compatible kind of environment on polka dot you know we've picked up a lot of those collaborations um so i thought i'd comment a little bit on you know this experience we've had bootstrapping an ecosystem around this ethereum compatible environment and one thing i would say that wasn't obvious at the start is that you know having an evm is one thing i mean that takes effort to create one of those if you're gonna create it from scratch like we have but it's really there's quite a bit of like tooling and other infrastructure you need around this core evm to make for like a complete environment that a developer you know will feel comfortable in so i'd say that that's something we spent quite a bit of time on doing integrations into things like you know oracle's indexing services like like you know i saw the booth um you know the graph has a booth over here um right across uh chris across the hall uh you know a multi you know like a a gnosis like safe compatible like multi-sig deployment there's all these kind of like infrastructural things that developers need that are not part of the evm itself but are kind of around it that are needed to make for like an environment that you know a developer like feels good deploying into so we've done quite a bit of that work and then on this defy side you know the the interesting thing here is there's kind of this chicken and egg problem so when you have like an empty vm and you're like great let's get the five projects to deploy here that turns out to be kind of hard to do because they all depend on each other right i mean you can go talk to a lending and borrowing protocol they need you know oracles to support your platform and they need an amm to be there right they can't work without having an amm also but you know an amm might not want to go there if they don't also have other ecosystem players right to work with so you kind of have this problem where it's kind of all or nothing right like it's hard to get any one person to move you have to kind of talk to a whole bunch of people and get them to agree to move all at once um so that i would say you know took quite a bit of effort um that's something that um i think we underestimated when we started when we started this project so i want to talk a little bit here about about what makes us different and you know so having an ethereum compatible environment having an evm you know that's uh i think that you know that's worked well for us in terms of getting additional adoption and uh you know that's kind of the product that the developers that we were working with wanted but there's a lot of those right i mean there's a you know there's a lot of depth forks there's a lot of uh different environments so the question is like why you know what is it um special about moonbeam what is it that's unique about moonbeam and really the the thing that is special about moonbeam comes from the fact that we are not only an evm and ethereum compatible environment but there were also a para chain on polka dot so what does that you know give us so by being a parrot chain on polka dot it goes back to the idea from the beginning of the talk when you're a paratrain on polkadot you can communicate with other chains that are also on polka dot in this native and like highly secure way and i think this this ability to communicate like between chains that's built into polka dot is a very powerful aspect of the system that many people don't really appreciate now because it's just coming to life now um and you can see it already right there's i think you're pretty hard-pressed these days to say that we're not heading into a multi-chain kind of world right there's significant value and user adoption that's happened on a number of chains outside of ethereum now and i think as a result there's a lot of bridging technologies out there right because once you have a multi-chain environment you know users are going to want to naturally move their assets and move between these different chains so there's been this kind of explosion of different projects trying to address bridging scenarios but i will say that like these bridging scenarios they often they're layered on top right so you have the base layer chains and then you have an additional project layering additional security and other assumptions on top and uh you know that that that can be okay but it's definitely like more risk you know in the system and so i think that the the thing about and there's a couple of examples of this polkadot being one of kind of building in this networking layer directly into the protocol itself so there's no additional security assumptions right you can basically interact with other chains with the same security that you're doing things on your own chain and so that's that's kind of the critical feature that we're leveraging to extend the base functionality of uh of the evm and this ethereum environment so so let me explain what i mean by that so again our system is built using this substrate framework we have advanced functionality like on our chain that doesn't exist on ethereum so we have things like a staking functionality uh on-chain governance like features uh so what we've done is we've kind of um uh allowed access to ethereum developers to these advanced functions via pre-compiled so these are kind of like they look like smart contracts when you're inside of like our our evm but they're actually kind of like accessing these like advanced functions that don't exist on ethereum and so this is a strategy we're using to create a whole bunch of extensions to the base ethereum functionality so not just for staking and for for governance but also cross chain functions and so we have like uh the first of these coming to market shortly and there's a long list a lot backlog of integrations with other project teams on polka dot which we'll be providing um you know into our ethereum environment so uh to give one example here you know for example we're working with the team elido uh for those who don't know lido makes a liquid staking protocol of a quite heavily adopted one on ethereum and so they want to build a moon beam application but they want to control staking functionality that's on polka dot itself right they want to be able to kind of remote control staking operations so that's kind of what we're collaborating with them on is kind of using this native networking so that they can have a local dap in moonbeam but in a decentralized and trustless way control staking operations they can create a liquid-staking derivatives um you know that would be that would be on pokedop because you know the relay chain itself this the polkadot chain itself doesn't have any developer or smart contract functionality they have to work with someone like us to kind of get access either build their own chain or work with someone like us to get access to this to this functionality so i think that's a that's a great example of um kind of the the power of this and you know there's and of course there's a whole bunch of uh protocol teams that want tokens so they want like the dot token itself and tokens from other like chains in the ecosystem they want access to those so we have a whole bunch of integrations which allow for those tokens to be moved onto moonbeam and represented there as like a kind of a special kind of erc20 so it'll look like in the rc20 so they can be used inside of sushi inside a cream inside of you know all these other protocols and so that's you know that's a big motivation then for people to you know deploy to moonbeam so they can get access to this whole ecosystems you know assets and so yeah i think this idea starts to get at kind of what's what's special and i think there's going to be a lot of innovation here in this area around exposing functionality from other chains you know in ways that like are not you know kind of isolated which has been the mode of operation today and you know if i kind of go back to the original picture here that i started with this idea of polka dot having these different specialized chains i think this starts to get into the direction of like where i think things are headed and what we're going to see in the coming let's call it three to four maybe five years and so that idea is that you know the mindset of everyone right now is still this kind of mono chain mindset right it's like i'm a developer i'm building an app i need to pick a chain and i'm going to you know engineer and deploy my solution for that chain i think that style of thinking is definitely going to change you already see it changing right so even for like nft applications being built today you already have things like you might have the base contract deployed to something like polygon to like actually like mint the nft and then the metadata might live on our weave let's say right that's where you put the jpeg itself or the other data about the the nft so you kind of already have this you know an application kind of spanning multiple blockchains that are each good at like specific tasks so i kind of see that idea as really being the way forward where you know on polka dot even right there's a number of different teams pursuing different infrastructure services so we have generic smart contracts you know but there's different bridging uh teams teams fighting oracle services teams providing identity services and so really where i see things heading is that i think of it like almost like an aws right it's like an aws where there'll be a menu of options except instead of being centralized services they'll be each be like blockchain-based services it'll be decentralized services and you know these applications of the future will basically leverage multiple blockchains functionality from multiple blockchains to create like their end user kind of uh effect right and then to meet their use cases so that's kind of where i see you know where i see things heading and that's you know um i think we have a role to play there and being kind of a generic compute component right with integrations to all of these different specialized specialized chains and you know this uh you know kusama as i said like you know the pair of chains have recently launched um and you know we're just heading right now into a phase where para chains will be launching like on polka dot itself that's going to be starting shortly so i think there's going to be quite a bit of activity you know around around that like here from here through the end of the year you know there's going to be quite a bit of activity and um yeah i think that's that's pretty much what i wanted to talk to you guys about um obviously we'd love to we'd love to hear from you um you know there's links to our website uh we have a quite active discord for folks that are kind of builders or trying to build something yeah and i'd love to i don't know if anyone has any questions i'm happy to take uh you know take those as well we got a girl here let me get right to you thank you very much hi i i was really interested in the use case you mentioned about was it lido finance uh did i catch that right about lido lido yeah you mentioned about staking functionality i was just wondering if you could expand on that a bit more yeah sorry i'm getting closer to speaker here go ahead what was the question again now it was really just whether you could expand on the use case that you have in connection with it it seems like d5 platforms like lido yeah sure i'm happy happy to do that so um yeah i mean i'll say that actually if i look at like where traction has happened the primary area is in define so you know we definitely have a number of different like partners across several different like d5 categories so those are amms stable swaps lending and borrowing protocols and so on lido is one of those so lido being you know creating this um this liquid staking derivative right is what they do so currently on ethereum you know they're the leading protocol right now that allows you to kind of have exposure to staking but still like not you know not get locked up right you get this kind of derivative asset that represents staked east and so they want to create so the lydo team wants to expand to different like protocols and kind of replicate the same idea so you know polka dot has a staking feature so they want to create a liquid staking derivative on polka dot because i'm gonna start and then polka dot uh lido recently expanded like to solana like as well right so there's a kind of a liquid-staking derivative on solana so that's the nature of the lido relationship but i'd say that in general kind of assembling this d5 ecosystem is consistent of trying to hit every category you need like all these different ingredients to make for a whole cake basically so you know on the amms as i mentioned that's like the with the team at sushi like we've been interacting with quite a bit i mean they have a whole like d5 portfolio now right i mean they've not they've gone well beyond amms they now have akashi they're living in barn platform uh they've got bento box you know then there's uh you know an nft marketplace coming up soon so um quite a bit of activity there and you know there's long time partners of ours like cream finance who have like a lending and borrowing market capability so i think um you know we'll see we're already seeing and we'll continue to see quite a bit of activity on the defy side i think the thing that actually is quite surprising to me is that we launched this moon river network and we had these partners lined up and we're like okay great we're gonna there'll be an orderly process now we'll deploy this infrastructure but like as soon as we launched it there was like you know six or seven like amms and like all this stuff started happening like before we even had a chance to do any of that stuff so this is where you realize there's quite a bit of demand for block space right now for evm compatible block space on like that's credible you know there's a huge amount of demand right now like if you if you provide it like it'll get filled basically this is kind of a zar take and uh the second the second scenario is definitely nfts though like nfts is like that's also been surprising where you know already in the last six weeks there's multiple nft marketplaces and you know some of these things are you know they're selling for you know a hundred two hundred thousand like dollars worth of uh of mover tokens so that's that was not expected either i think there's just a large appetite for enough to use these days and for places to mint them questions just raise your hand gentlemen over here on the left let's get right to thanks so uh in particular i wanted to ask about uh so i can see the case for moonbeam differentiating itself against other evm environments uh using the precompiles and other sort of specializations in terms of connecting to other chains but how do you see sort of moon beam and moon river differentiating from each other in the future like once as let's say once it's kind of everything's fully rolled out and it's more mature you maybe don't so much need a kind of canary network what what's moon rivers well and what's the relationship yeah it's a good question so and it goes a little bit into like a related question is like what's the purpose of kusama when you have polka dot and i would say this that as with many things you create something with a certain idea but then the market like tells you like something different basically and so i think that's the case here where the original idea we still believe is a good one is that you know i think gab's original idea was we need this environment that has real economic conditions because it's impossible to like test software when you don't have that right you kind of need this i mean it's not right called a test environment but they call it a canary net we need a place where we can deploy software under real conditions we can learn and kind of figure out like you know get lessons before we deploy like onto the you know main net so that was the original idea i think that's a good idea it's something that like you know polka dots spent a lot of time kind of building in upgradability features right so they want to be you know they have the tools are there to like upgrade a lot and be fast but if you're going to be fast you need to be safe also so this is kind of one of the safety measures now that being said i think the lesson that we've learned is when you launch these things they kind of have a mind of their own right so you engage a community you gauge a bunch of token holders and whatever your ideas might be the chain might have different ideas so i think we've already seen that with moon river where i fully expect there there's going to be different communities around moon river and moonbeam and i mean we want to continue to use it in this way where we will ship software first to moon river but i am starting to see that there's probably a you know a potentially like you know a future where they're both like living in parallel and serving different use cases so i think that um you know one scenario that's speculative the one scenario that may happen is that you know gaming and nft in certain nft use cases like may kind of uh prefer moon river whereas people that want kind of like maximum security like economic security like may you know on d5 and other um scenarios may deploy to uh moonbeam so that's one idea but i think we'll have to see i mean they're both like um you know they're both on chain governed so it's kind of the will of the token holders is like what will decide the directions in some way in some way you