Let's Talk About... The FUTURE of Web3 | Shawn Tabrizi - Polkadot

hi welcome back we have Sean from parody Technologies to talk about the future of web 3 why don't you take it away yeah testing oh great um hey everyone uh it's so great to be here in eth Denver um it's definitely my favorite conference in the US um it's uh such a good vibe and it's so nice to be surrounded by developers and Builders so that's uh kind of what we're going to talk about we're talk about the future of web what that means for Builders and developers in the ecosystem first a little by myself um before I worked on uh blockchain I was studying physics and math at UCSB I then worked four years at um Azure and Microsoft and then um I basically learned about ethereum and I kind of went down this Rabbit Hole I'm sure all of you have also gone through and basically for the last seven years I've been working on blockchain development it started of course with smart contract development on ethereum but then I um joined polka dot and I've been working on polka dot for almost six years now and I've um you know in addition to doing development I also am an educator and teacher for web 3 development and blockchain development and all that kind of stuff I think it's important to address especially in this current time that there's a growing divide in the blockchain ecosystem I think there's a lot of I especially if you've been around in the space for a long time you have this feeling of people who are actually building for the long term I definitely think ethereum is one of those people but also a lot of other projects popping up which are really having like a focus on short-term results they're trying to figure out how they can basically get their blockchain or their system um to mass adoption tomorrow and that means often cutting corners um doing things like nent multisig small Valor sets using High powerered nodes all the things they can do to basically try to get capture the current mindset versus trying to think about what really scales and what actually grows a web three ecosystem and I think a lot of this divide comes from a basically a misunderstanding of these terms you know we use all these terms kind of interchangeably cryptocurrency blockchain dii web 3 but in fact these terms are not the same at all it's very very different cryptocurrency is just a resource it's just one of the things that's produced by this three space blockchain is just a technology it is a it's a it's a tool you can use to actually produce web 3 resources defi is just one of the verticals in web 3 but really what I think we're all here for what actually attracted me to the blockchain space is web 3 itself the revolution of what we can do and change in the world so before I even get into that I want to talk about why this presentation is relevant for the ethereum community it seems that in my opinion that polka dot and ethereum are both really building towards the long-term mindset I think that's great I think that's really awesome and it seems that ethereum is heading in the direction that polka kind of already explored I mean right now we have this um this forum post which I think everyone's been really liking um January 20 2025 where we're trying to head towards this native rollup solution and I would say arguably polka has already built a native rollup solution so I wanted to share some of the experiences we've gained some of the insights we have about how this works that it is pretty good but how we can actually go deeper and further than that so yeah my goals are to remind you and remind everyone about the meaning of web 3 to explore our our native R solution so we can give you some insights and also share insights into how that could evolve something bigger something more powerful than just blockchain something like a web3 cloud so first what is web 3 I think in one sentence web 3 is the technological embodiment of the idea of less trust and more truth and why do we need why do are we afraid of trust why should there be less trust well I think if we know this quote absolute power corrupts absolutely if you read the whole thing power tends to corrupt absolute power corrupts absolutely great men are almost always bad men even when they are exercise influence and not Authority still more when you super add the tendency or certainty of corruption by Authority we have seen for years that corruption and Authority are one in one and if you look at just the history of blockchain itself you will see that exact same problem back in 2008 this was the Catalyst for Bitcoin to exist we had the global financial crisis the corruption of banks that was then bailed out by a corrupt government by centralization we have the week leag censorship where basically Banks were taking their power to stop Wikileaks from getting funds to be able to do their job to basically um give information to the world and then one of the catalysts for ethereum was the Snowden Revelations right the fact that we learned that the NSA was basically running a global surveillance firm on across the entire world and was capturing this data without our consent right these kinds of systems have shown us that centralized authorities cannot be trusted right and web 3 is the solution to that web 3 is a is a set of principles and properties which provide more truth right web 3 is decentralized verifiable self- Sovereign interoperable you can read all these things this is the kinds of Technologies we want to create and again what I'm really concerned about is that in this space where we have people with short-term mindsets they forget what we're actually building towards blockchain is just a technology just because you build something on a blockchain does not mean you are web 3 web 3 really comes from the having all of these properties and some of these can come from blockchain but more importantly it comes from many other pieces and parts of the technology stack so web 3 is really a revolution in the way that we interact with the world and I think this is super important in a fundamental like starting point for how we should talk about anything in the blockchain space now what's kind of sad to me also is there's such an emphasis on defi in the blockchain space today if you look at kind of all the way people talk about blockchain all the way people are adopting it it is just defi defi defi but we know following these principles that centralized Authority and Corruption is not only found in finance it's found across all the different technology Stacks all the different verticals we need to explore much more than just defi to really unlock the real future web 3 now defi I I admit is very very important it is absolutely a key part of how we're going to achieve a web 3 future but we need to explore other verticals as well and I want to clarify that there's no reason we can't do that because blockchain is just a design for a decentralized computer it is just a protocol which takes many computers around the world puts them together and makes a decentralized computer that you can access now uh if we look at the history of computers early computers were also just used for finance the very first computers in the 1950s they were adopted by Banks and other governments to basically support Financial transactions these are basically simple calculators right but we' seen as the evolution of computers have gone on we've um adopted things like business specific servers on Prem servers and that has led to things like the cloud Revolution where now if you want to access or deploy something into um the tech world you can basically use other resources available in the cloud and deploy it one of my arguments about the future of web 3 is that we will follow the same kind of pattern in the blockchain space if you remember early blockchains like Bitcoin ethereum are basically being used just for finance and we are already seeing a huge adoption of new business specific blockchains think about how many new blockchains are coming out all the time whether they're L2 or L1 and how many of them are just basically trying to attack a specific idea or a specific narrative well the next natural step then is the decentralized cloud Revolution an access to a decentralized web 3 Cloud where basically you don't have to launch a new blockchain to be able to access a web 3 application or to launch a web 3 application that you can actually just host it on existing web 3 resources in a cloud and so this is what polona is aiming towards we are aiming to um towards the next evolution of this blockchain landscape the next step in the evolution right so if you really say that Bitcoin created a calculator ethereum created a computer polot is creating a Cloud Server and I think simply said that we want to do to web 3 what AWS did to web 2 which is make it cheap easy and scalable to launch applications in into such a cloud and of course if we talk about what the difference between web 2 web 3 is it really is resilience right if we want to build a better internet we need to have a more resilient internet and so that's an internet is that is resilient against censorship corruption Network outages hacks and all the above now these ideas are not new all the way back when Gavin wood if you haven't heard of him he's the original CTO of uh ethereum he was the inventor of the evm author of the yellow paper he was the person who originally envisioned ethereum as this ubiquitous World computer but this is a narrative I find that's dying I find that less and less we're talking about ethereum as computer and more as a um settlement layer for transactions or a rollup layer or whatever I think we need to go back to this idea of building a world computer and this is what Gavin is really trying to do in the polka dot space so I want to talk about the building blocks for Native rollups the things that polka dot has already explored and where we can go from there so the building blocks for Native rollups as described in the Polkka do paper are these four things paral shared security interoperability and data availability I'll go through these things really quickly paraliz basically allows us to scale out scale horizontally using data and execution sharding we can execute multiple applications at once multiple programs at once and have them all paralized if there are two contracts which aren't interacting with each other there's no reason why we have to block them on each other right now a lot of the existing L1 blockchains are still serialized and moving towards a sharded solution like what we're seeing with l2s is really great for scaling then of course we need shared security it's not enough to just have a bunch of blockchains run all of them need to be secured and it's not really scalable to have each of them have their own independent economy to to secure their blockchain so what's really nice is that we have a platform that can provide security to all the other blockchains like what L um L2 gets from L1 then of course we need to think about interoperability if we're going to expect a lot of different applications running on these blockchains we need to have them talk to and interact with each other natively and this is not something that we can design after the fact and we actually look at a lot of the current conversations in ethereum space are talking about how we can bring native interoperability to l2s right and of course data availability we just had a presentation right before me talking about data in in um ethereum and how it's super important that data availability that we have the ability to store some data which is only used for a certain small period of time but it's not stored in the permanent State data availability is a key part of what makes rollups work in scale and so this is another key part that we've introduced inside of polka as a native part and we're starting to see do the same um in their uh rollup Centric mindset so what can we achieve or what have we achieved with this native uh rollup solution well polca has achieved the highest levels of L2 scaling um by having the the most data availability bandwidth so if you look at any of the data Avail Solutions including ethereum itself we have the highest bandwidth across all of these Solutions because we have designed our system with this in mind with the fact that we want to H support rollups natively in our protocol we also have been able to achieve the most resilience we have the highest documental coefficient because of the way that we treat our validators and our staking system inside of polka dots this higher noal coefficient means more decentralization more resilience a better platform for rollups we are also the most energy efficient this really comes from a lot from our staking a move from you know obviously not using proof of work but using proof of stake but also our parallelization having different applications run in parallel generally means that the main um blockchain itself is not always using all of its throughput on every single process we're actually able to paralyze and get more efficiency the exact same way you would expect to get more efficiency across your computer or your phone having multiple cores and finally we have been able to achieve and show that we have the fastest TPS across any blockchain in a live production Network we were actually able to run and have uh 140,000 transactions per second on a live Network this is not something that was like hypothesized or this is not theoretical this was actually running on the network Which is far far far surpassing all the other blockchains out there with their theoretical claims now um I want to really quickly say that you know uh this is not trying to shill polka dot I mean obviously a little bit but it is trying to show that a native rollup solution is really great it works and we've actually already seen that 10 of the 20 top rollups um in the ecosystem are powered by polka dot so the direction you all are going in ethereum is good and you'll actually see a lot of benefits from it for example getting high volume with low fees when you go to this native rollup solution you'll be able to process transactions without having other applications interfere with each other they will all be able to scale on their own time and not have to affect the fees of the other applications this will be better for the application developer so all of this is just saying the native rollup solution is great I think you all are going in the right direction but we've already built this and we're headed now in another Direction what is that direction how can I convince you that this is the kind of the path we want to take how we can we take this native rollup solution and build a web 3 Cloud so let's look at at building blocks for web 3 Cloud right the first building block is that we should focus on building a computer not building a blockchain right a blockchain is just a tool it is just one of the pieces that we need to have web three properties but we should focus on building a computer so that any kind of application can use it then we should focus on block space not TPS transactions don't mean anything anymore you can have a transaction which is transferring some token you have a transaction which is calling a smart contract you can have a transaction which is securing a rollup transactions don't mean anything what we really care about is block space this is the resource generated by a blockchain computer and then finally we want to make it accessible to everyone we want to make sure that this resource is accessible and usable by anyone who actually wants to use it so we have designed an updated computer if you want to check it out there's this idea called Jam this is basically a new specification for the polka dot ecosystem which is designing a new scalable decentralized computer it will increase the performance of pokon network by orders of magnitude and is being implemented by 35 independent teams across 14 programming languages you can go to the gray paper and you can actually read this specification this is exactly like the specification that Gavin created for ethereum in the yellow paper so this is a design for a new decentralized computer and this computer is a multi-core computer and I argue is the first this is the big key Innovation when you look at ethereum as a computer you could really think of it as a single core system it processes transactions block by block one at a time in a single core we saw that the evolution of computers was moving from single core systems to multi-core systems and this is the design for how you would build a decentralized multi-core computer with hundreds of execution cores this is a computer that's focused on block space right um as Chris Dixon has pointed out block space will be the bestselling product to be selling in the 2020s right that block Space is really the accumulation of resources generated by a decentralized computer um the quality of this block space can vary depending on how how good the computer is and we're really designing Polkka dot to focus on creating high quality block space and this is a computer that is designed to help you scale so we have implemented in the computer itself a pay as youo model which allows you to access the computer only when you need it and pay only when you need it and also have elastic scaling as we mentioned we have multiple different cores you can actually use more or less cores as you need just like you would expect a computer program right so if you have a program that's very intensive it needs more than one core to run you can access it so you can actually have programs which scale and use lots of Resources pay more money or use less resources and saves you money this is exactly what you expect from a web 3 Cloud a well-designed computer now one of the really key Innovations in our new specification is this thing called the PO ofm this is a brand new reimagined redesigned virtual machine environment it uses risk 5 instead of the wasm or evm it's easy to transpile to Common Hardware like x86 it has near native speeds cheap gas metering and um a very fast compilation if you with the pokm you should check out this link over here um but the key thing I want to talk about is that it supports this thing called continuations and this allows it to do things like run Doom like when you think about building a computer when you think about building any kind of um computer system running Doom is kind of the base level bar can it do that because of continuations it can so I want to spend a little time talking about that so what is continuations continuations is like a Save State it allows you to continue execution after pausing so in the blockchain space you can start an application or a program you can run that program until you run out of gas you can save the stack the registers and all the memory and put it in the data availability layer remember this is not persistent right this is something that's just stored temporarily we can wait until the next block load all the information and continue running the program this changes how we actually build applications the old Paradigm was if you wanted to build a web 3 application in the past you have to design the application with the blockchain in mind you have to build the application so that it can run piece by piece and then you can actually load it into the blockchain and run it block by block right this makes blockchain development very specialized it means you can only basically run smart contracts or other blockchains what we would want to see is the way it should be is you should be able to build an application and just run it in a cloud if that cloud has web three properties you will inherit those properties right and so what we've done with the Polkka do cloud and with pokm is basically allow you to run any kind of regular x86 program any program that you run even if it has a long running program more than one block can handle you can just build it load it into our cloud and in our back end using continuations we'll be able to run it on the blockchain right so you as an application developer don't have to be exposed to all the intricacies of building apps you just build an app and we make sure it's secured by a web3 cloud so we've already built this platform for securing rollups this is good this is great but the next Milestone the next place we're thinking about is how do we build a platform for any kind of decentralized web 3 application the pokm is also solidity compatible this is really exciting so um all of the existing solity contracts um we basically um compile them recile them to Ule and then Ule to risk 5 and we can run them in pokm instead of evm and you can use all the same tooling as you'd expect on the pokm so you can use Like Remix or ether JS all those toolings are available in this new VM environment and we've used this new poke VM not only to boot strap the the cloud and our main polka dot platform but also to create a new product the polka dot Hub the polka dot Hub is a polka dot native elastically scaling solidity compatible smart contract platform and it harnesses all the power of the Polkka do cloud with the polka dot Hub as this platform for smart contracts needs more cores it can elastically scale to use more cores on the polka dot on polka dot Cloud it can actually scale up without having to limit people and have um transactions be um not sensored but like uh bottlenecked or limited to actually get into the block we can actually use more cores and get more throughput as we need and if there aren't a lot of transactions happening then it also scales itself down this is how we imagine the future of a of a um contract platform to look like so yeah the two key ideas that we're moving past the native rollup solution is the idea of a cloud a computer that exposes an abundance of decentralized compute resources and the Hub A specialized platform which allows it to be allows it to be really easy to build and make applications onto this Cloud right and depending on what kind of application You're Building you can access the cloud or you can access the Hub depends on how much resources and how much tooling and how much ease of use you want to access so yeah the pokot E system is thriving it's growing a lot we have over 600 teams across many different verticals Beyond just Defi and it's really exciting it's a really exciting space all these people are coming along with us on this ride towards the web 3 cloud and so yeah I want to just leave you all with the ideas in the presentation that you are heading the right direction with the with the native rollups but I think there's more to be had I hope that you'll look at our technology that you will um join our community and building our ecosystem and yeah really Join the Revolution I mean we're all here to build a better web 3 future and yeah thank you um if you want to say hi I'll be at the booth for the rest of the day at Booth 101 and yeah if you want to link to this presentation you can follow the QR code here and you can um see it for yourself thank you so much okay thank you so much Sean