Polkadot: More Than Just a Blockchain? | Bill Laboon - Polkadot/Web3 Foundation

hello everyone uh thank you for coming uh today I am going to discuss polka dot and if it is more than just a blockchain so you probably as you probably expect I did not come up here to say no it's just a blockchain so yes it is in fact more than just a blockchain and in fact in the most literal sense of the word it is more than a blockchain because it is 51 different blockchains so that's just right now more are being added all the time the basic idea of polka dot in a nutshell is that we have a relay chain indicated by this sort of central circle and users and developers can create their own chains that are secured by polka do that can interact with other par of chains in the ecosystem in in a seamless and trustless way so you know one chain could put assets on another or nfts or have a smart contract on par of chain a call a smart contract on par of chain b in a trustless manner so yes so polka dot is more than a blockchain because it is in fact many blockchains yes for another reason you can make your own blockchain with polka dot so polka dot is not just a blockchain by itself that we've created uh but rather a place where you can build a blockchain that meets your specific needs so if you need a blockchain that is a simple evm clone that's very easy to do if you need a blockchain that has specific needs for the gaming industry or for decentralized finance or for social media or for prediction markets just to name a few of the different kinds of par chains that we have right now in the polka do ecosystem you can make it and it will be much more efficient uh and it will be able to interact with all of the other chains in the ecosystem by default and very easily so this substrate uh polka dot SDK is a rust based software development framework that allows you to out of the box create your own blockchain and that can very easily uh connect with with polka dot so yes in yet another way polka dot is more than just a blockchain so polka Dot's rules are not built into the node so most blockchain uh systems out there the rules for the blockchain what is a valid transaction how does it interact with others how does it come to consensus all of these things are built into the node software but actually uh polka dot has a different approach to this where the rules for the blockchain what we call the runtime are stored on chain and I actually I just gave a talk uh earlier today going into the technical details of why this is so but because of because of this you can very easily upgrade without a fork so this is the traditional way for nodes to up for excuse me for blockchains to upgrade you get all of the nodes to start following you know the the new chain with a hard Fork right so you have to tell everyone hey by this point in the chain everyone needs to upgrade to the new node software that has the new rules however with polka dot since the code is on the Chain by definition anyone that's following the chain is going to to follow that code so what this means is when governance or of your chain has decided it's time to upgrade then it will happen automatically for all nodes that are running uh polka dot or your chain this makes it a lot easier than coordinating with everyone running a node that hey it's time to upgrade and make make sure that you do it it generally just happens automatically uh and this is not a theoretical concept this is something that happens on a very regular basis in the polka dot ecosystem uh I actually ran the numbers yesterday so on the relay chain the central chain of polka dot this has happened 52 times since polka dot was launched in May 2020 so a little under four years 52 runtime upgrades you know compare that to pretty much any other chain out there you know where it's uh you if you're going to have an upgrade it's definitely a generally a multi-month process uh to get it out there but it's very fast uh on polka dot and with all of the pair of chains so I uh added them all up there have been 996 runtime upgrades uh and you know things have been going great with all of them so if you are building a blockchain and you think that hey I'm going to want to change the rules at sometime or add new functionality then you know polka dot really is you know the way to go uh for this so right just so you know not to spoil the ending I'm just going to keep saying yes uh polka dot is more than a blockchain in different ways there won't ever be a no so the polka dot ecosystem is built with the polka dot SDK or substrate but a lot of other ecosystems and other projects have actually looked at substrate looked at how we're building p polka dot and the framework that we use for it and said we want to use that as well so just you know a few of the other teams that are using the polka dot SDK to build uh bit tensor Alf zero uh Stark net the Madera sequencer edgear a veil U the midnight um partner chain on cardono energy web there a lot of different projects that have said well you know hey we're interested in building our own chain but we are going to use substrate because it is an extremely powerful way to create blockchains this actually is what got me into polka dot in the first place at web3 Summit 2018 uh Gavin wood had a talk where he got a brand new Macbook out of a you know you know out of its package and a little over an hour later you know after downloading rust and you know doing all the compilation and everything there was a a brand new blockchain running on his computer and I thought wow this is super exciting right that you can just have your own blockchain figure out what kind of features you want there act there actually hundreds of what we call pallets these are like libraries or or gems if you're used to Ruby that you can add to your blockchain if you want to add a democracy or staking or proof of work uh or an onchain treasury you know all of these things are about as simple as you know import whatever the name of the pallet you want is so a lot of other uh you know teams like I said have looked at the polka do SDK and said yeah we're interested in using that because it is such a powerful an easy framework so another way polka do is more than just a blockchain it's actually influencing a lot of other uh ecosystems out there so yes polka dot is more than just a blockchain because polka dot is also the communication between all of these chains right so we have a technology uh called xcm where we uh allows you to trustless interact in a common way you know a common format uh with any other uh e uh excuse me any other par chain in the ecosystem or with the relay chain and this um this communication does not have to be just hey I have an asset I'm going to lock it up on one chain and you know and have a representation of it on another because all of the par of chains in polka dot are operating under the same consensus you know it's it's really a sharded chain and not you know multiple chains that communicate via Bridges they're all operating under the same consensus mechanism which allows us to more easily do trust excuse me to more easily and trustless perform other more complicated operations like getting you know nfts from one chain to another having a smart contract on par chain a call a smart contract on par chain B uh Etc and um again just like I mentioned with the runtime upgrades this is not some Far Future cool theoretical thing we may be able to do someday but rather something that's happening all the time right now um I'm sorry I actually noticed like two minutes before I came on stage I have a typo here so there's an average of over 2,000 XM messages per day uh over the last month on in the polka ecosystem so we have different chains that can interact with other chains that are special made for different purposes but act as though they're all part of the same chain so you get a lot of the benefits of like you know like one large monolithic chain in terms of interactions but you also get a lot of the scalability benefits of you know the of a sharded chain or even you know multiple chains um the inscriptions craze came to polka dot last year uh we had uh about 7 million transactions per day on the uh on the relay chain and we were hitting peaks of several thousand transactions per second and it didn't even impact us enough that the fees got you know the the fees got raised so we had actually a huge stress test uh for for polka dot on the relay chain and passed with flying colors uh and part of that is this scalability right that you can take things and you know run them uh on different chains and that we've really worked to make sure that each of these chains can handle a pretty significant number of uh transactions per second all right so once again yes you hopefully this wasn't a surprise to anyone that I said yes and not no or maybe uh polka is more than just a chain because it is totally controlled by the community polka Dot's governance process which is controlled only by dot holders so there is no special pseudo super user there is no multisig that the developers have there is no you know special account that people from web3 Foundation can do uh or or interact with the chain in any special way any change to the polka dot Network you know from a a small parameter change like a what's the ideal staking rate to changing the runtime code of the relay chain is all done through our open gov process where one dot is one vote and if developers want to issue an upgrade this needs to be approved by the dot holders and so you know we have to put something on chain if the vote passes this is uh automatically enacted you know there's no human intervention once the the new runtime or the the code change or the parameter change or whatever is placed on chain that's all it's all there right and then if the vote passes then it is automatically enacted you can't have a situation where people vote to upgrade the runtime and the developers are lazy or sleeping and it doesn't happen if you vote on something it happens uh and it really is like you know a huge huge example of absolutely direct democracy at least you know democracy for dots and Dot holders so yes polka do is more than just just a blockchain so it is the world's largest and most decentralized Dow right so as part of this governance process dot holders have control over the onchain treasury and the onchain treasury is um automatically built uh basically whenever uh there's you know there is inflation in the polka dot Network a portion of that is diverted to the onchain treasury and this can be given to people in a variety of different ways to develop projects for DOT uh so we have all kinds of different things that are approved by people that vote on this right now uh as of yesterday I think there were 47 different proposals out there for you know different projects for DOT so things like wallets uh for for poke assembly which is the place where people can discuss uh governance proposals uh for marketing proposals for interactions uh with with different teams uh with with different govern you know uh we want to get uh Consulting there's one team that wants office space in New York City uh for for polka dot we have one team that wants to do polka dot branding and this is all controlled by the dot holders and currently in the polka dot treasury there are over 41 million dot that number was uh uh was correct as of yesterday about 24 hours ago uh plus you usdc usdt and we are looking at having the ability to include other uh uh tokens uh in this so it's actually a very powerful spending and spending control mechanism that is powered and voted on by all dot holders so once again yes polka dot is more than just a blockchain the technical developer are headed by you know anyone can contribute obviously it's open source uh but we have the polka dot technical Fellowship which is actually an onchain entity so essentially another Dow uh on that is part of the core aspect of polka dot uh that actually using this Treasury and using an ongoing automatic swap from uh from dot in the treasury to usdt the members of the polka dot technical Fellowship are paid by the protocol itself so I've always thought this was really cool right the protocol is you know going on it's producing blocks as part of this some percentage get sent to the onchain treasury and some percentage of that get sent to the developers who are building polka dot you know in a trustless way and then they keep the network going right they operate they build new features Etc so we' really got like this sort of flywheel or like this circular uh economy occurring inside of of polka dot so yes polka dot is more than just a blockchain because polka dot is multiple consensuses as well so besides polka dot we also have what we call a canary Network known as kusama so kusama is not a test net but rather a network with real economic value that we put code out first uh the tagline is expect chaos or sometimes no promises the benefit of using kusama is you get to try out new features and do cool new things uh but the downside is uh right it's not always code that has been as battle tested as what's on polka dot so generally when a feature is added we we mess with it on the test Nets then it goes to kusama we see how it operates in a real environment if there are economic issues or um problems that may be seen in the real world that are not seen on a test net then you know we find this stuff out on kusama uh kusama has done a great job of finding problems uh and has really helped keep the polka dot main net from experiencing them because they happen first on kusama so polka dot is more than just polka do polka do is also uh kusama yes thank you I don't know if they were that was someone listening to me or someone who just randomly said yes but I love it anyway so polka dot is also the community around that is helping to build and we would love to help you build on polka dot and make polka dot better uh so we have a lot of different uh programs so I already mentioned the onchain treasury uh you know everything is done entirely uh on chain uh web 3 Foundation uh the Swiss Foundation uh I work at has a grants program for people building open- Source projects that will be useful to polka dot we also have the decentralized Futures program which is a Time boxed until June it's giving out 20 million uh us doar uh as well as 5 million dot to teams that are looking to build ongoing projects uh in in the polkadot ecosystem we have decentralized voices which delegates voting power uh from a web Foundation uh dot stashes so that you can have more say in in the uh in the the voting process even if you don't have a lot of dot yourself we have the Thousand validators program if you're interested in building valid excuse me running validators uh to help secure secure the network we have a lot of different educational initiatives uh so including uh several uh uh massive open online courses uh on edx uh we're calling this web 3x so there's mine blockchain fundamentals we have intro to polka dot we have intro to rust uh which is being released very soon and then we'll have intro to substrate so we'll have a whole series of online courses that you can take to learn about polka dot and how to build on it as well as understand blockchain in general a bit better uh finally we have the polka do blockchain Academy which is in a different um area every uh 3 months different part of the world the last one was in Hong Kong next is in Singapore uh and this is four weeks intensive learning how to build on substrate and build something for polka dot so we're not just a blockchain we're also a community so in closing you know yes polka do is more than just a blockchain thank you everyone