Eth2 Collaboration Culture Justin Drake (Devcon5)

okay so I'm going to talk about you know if two collaboration culture from the point of view of if two what this collaboration mean it just means simply working together so I'm gonna try and and have celebrates the various successes that we've had in working together and try and encourage even more collaboration because I think collaboration is one of the most important and precious things that we have in this ecosystem the ecosystem is designed for collaboration it's puts collaboration as a as a first-class citizen and I think we should embrace that more so I'm gonna talk in first about internal collaboration and by that I mean collaboration which is internal to the affair micro system and I guess that shouldn't be too surprising that there is collaboration there because we've been collaborating on the theorem since the very beginning so this is just an extension of our culture the second part might be a bit more surprising and this is about collaboration between dock chains so we've seen this recent explosion of new ideas of very high quality teams and how can we make the most of that in you know win-win collaborations ok first part collaboration within a theorem for a theorem 2.0 so I guess if theorem actually started at the very early days Vitalik already in January 2014 and in the rest of 2014 was already thinking about scalability and proof of stake even before DEFCON 0 even before a firm was launched and I guess this culture of being open and transparent kind of is part of what we do a different foundation and we've had contributions from other other early founders in 450 we've had Gavin come in we've had we've had Vlad and this eventually led to the the more paper which was the you know the first attempt to write some sort of spec for serenity for if to 2016 and maybe early 2017 was a bit of a downer in terms of if to research but in mid 2017 we have if research come in and in addition to transparency and open sue being opened we had interactivity so we had the possibility for researchers to to comment on on our research but also to submit their own ideas and this kind of led to Eve research which is a forum online to become a very active place within the blockchain space and in 2018 a lot of the core ideas of if viewer I born or solidified during that time on omni's research and you know as a continuation of research we have specking and implementation and here as well we've tried to be as open from day one partly to enable early teams to come in and you know this this may have been a little bit chaotic for the early implementers because we keep changing platform every other month and we change the Specht quite a lot but I think it all turns out pretty well because this is a recent picture of the interim Lockean and we have nine different implemented teams from all over the world coming in so you know the costs of being open you know in terms of confusion and chaos are definitely outweighed by by the advantages another thing that we've done to try to encourage collaboration in e2 is at the legal level so there's all sorts of tools legal tools that the creators of a blockchain project can use to maintain some sort of ownership over what they've created and you know as part of the philosophy of you know minimization and simplicity and making a theorem a real common good different Foundation has restrained from using those tools and try to take you know in extreme that decoupling approach so for licensing for example all the work that we do is open by default the patents we have no patents and if we did have a tense it would be you know exclusively for defensive reasons NDA's only for the you know it's for data protection within within the foundation you know not to disclose things like salaries and trademarks we've we only have them for defensive purposes and we've never enforced them and I kind of want to contrast that with stories inspired from the the blockchain space so there's the the there's for blockchain projects in my mind that have taken you know the extreme opposite strategy for for these things so for example there's a chain that has licensing which is exclusive to that chain so if you want to use the technology in their code you can't it has to be for this one chain there's another project which has 30 patients in their white paper there's yet another project that every employee is nd8 and if you ask them what have you been working on for the last two three years they say I'm sorry I can you know I'm not I can't tell you and then there's a number blocking project where the trademark for the the blockchain is owned by a private entity as opposed to the public foundation and you know did this opposite strategy even though it might give you control ultimately I think it's shooting yourself in the foot because you know there's this if you were to enforce these tools they will be a little and forced centrally and it kind of goes against the grain of of our culture so here for the film foundation we're just less likely to use legal tools we've never sued anyone and think we're quite unlikely to sue people and so just to summarize this this legal strategy we make we make the code the ideas the people the brand it's all it's it's everyone that's a common good it is not our code and I guess the strategy has worked out pretty well and for trademarks so with different foundation has actually been unable to get trademarks recently in Singapore and Korea they were like the patent office was like hey no a firm is a common good it's a blockchain the crypto currency you can't trade markets and this is brilliant we've reached a point where we can't even trademark the the the brand that we've created one of the things that we you know I guess also good at is trying to do parallel eyes to try and have different teams work on different places at the same time so we have prototyping teams that work on phase zero phase one and Phase two all in parallel we have quilt was an Trinity and we also have all sorts of different teams working in parallel for Quality Assurance so we have two teams working on form of verification on different parts of the if two spec we have security audits cryptographic audits we have fuzzing we have bug bounties and actually here's a list of five currently active bug bounties that you're welcome to try and tackle and the first one which is the bounties for the phase zero consensus today we're doubling them so all of these bounties should be available them on challenges that experien this is this line okay why did no one tell me okay so these bounties should all be kind of combined on a single webpage challenges dog and bounties is also you know a great way to extend the collaboration from a short-term stint to a more long-term collaboration so here's an example where you know I submitted at any bounty on on Twitter to write the the phase zero spec in a thousand lines of go code a few days later this bounty was claimed and then a few days later the guy proto who actually claimed the bounty was hired full-time and you know also in in the context of you know delegating but also minimizing the the the the role of the foundation is is grants so we've given over forty million dollars in grants we have a dedicated grants team of eight people and in addition to a quarterly grant program we have special grants you know sometimes going up to five million dollar grants and again just to give you like an example of how willing we are to collaborate I gave a talk recently in Tel Aviv on e3 quantum security there was a quantum post quantum signature expert in the room he came to me he said I'm interested in working on this problem that you just presented a few days later we had a call and then a few days later after that we had a grant so if you have if there's a good match we can really move forward fast on collaboration ok so this is this was internal collaboration I guess not too surprising still extremely dynamic you know I don't think there's many blockchain projects out there that have managed to for example have nine different implemented teams for the the one protocol but I guess one thing that I'm you know very excited about it cross chain collaboration and one thing to note is that cross chain collaboration is happening de-facto so these are ideas that we have essentially borrowed inspired ourselves from other blockchain projects that are shipping in phase zero so we have BLS vr x using signatures VDS tree hashing these are all things that other blockchain projects have had photo before us and we were able to reuse their work and there's also all sorts of new ideas that are more recent that are being experimented with that we are very excited about key building signatures snark based like clients you know even the move VM from from Libra all of these things we're keeping a keen eye on and we'll gladly incorporate if these experiments turn out well one one piece of great news is that a lot of these blockchain projects have foundations so for example cosmos has the interchange foundation polka dot web 3 foundation falcone protocol labs etc etc and these foundations as you can tell from their names they have a vision a mission which extends way beyond their own blockchain so for example interchain if you know evokes you know an idea of many blockchains talking to each other Webster II you know evokes the idea that you have more components than just a blockchain you have a whole ecosystem same for protocol etc and these foundations have a lot in common we we share a desire for interoperability for standardization for common goods and another kind of point that we have in common is we we have we have money that we'd like to to to invest in in the broader ecosystem certain you know just to drill into one of these foundations where I think there's this very good alignment is protocol abso protocol labs at the legal layer they have this really nice open pledge where they say that the code that they're shipping is you know dual license and - under - extremely permissive licenses and any patents that they have they have this painted non-aggression pledge they're also trying very hard to build modular components that can be reused and the more modularity that you have I think the better in terms of reuse and there's one specific module that the if - is looking to to reuse and the flip p2p and it's not just something that we're looking to use it's also something for example that cosmos is looking to use polka dot is you looking to use etc et-cetera so it's it's becoming a standard which is fantastic and they're also you know very generous in terms of funding common goods and you know they're very proactive in terms of finding places where not only can they benefit themselves but they can benefit the whole ecosystem so in terms of standards which is one of the the goals if we want to try and be really good at working together I think we're starting to see the emergence of blockchain standards kind of a stack so it started it starts with sha-256 at the at the bottom at the bottom layer the vast majority of existing and future blockchain projects are built on sha-256 and that prevents a lot of headaches if we all use the same thing PGP I think has a really good shot at becoming you know the standardized networking peer-to-peer layer for the the various blockchain projects we have BLS and maybe even more specifically BLS 1281 as part of that stack was them and I think at one of the final layers we're gonna have Universal snark so this is a very recent development but it's very exciting it's the idea that you can have a snark proving system which works for everyone which is circuit agnostic and in particular and the trusted set up like the Z cache for example is it's a they pioneered the use of Zeke of snarks within a block chain set up but they had this significant friction of having to do a trusted set up for their specific application but now we have new technologies to try and avoid this barrier to entry and that's very exciting and one of the amazing things is that these pieces of technology the the the people who actually built them are either directly from the blocking space or have been subsumed and incorporated into the blockchain space so for example plunk the offer the authors of um Falcone and aztec marlin one of the offices from a theorem was am the founder of Ihram has gone to Definity BLS 1231 literal easy cash came up with this curved sean barie and then dl bendlin is that is that the affinity and the same wavelet PGP I guess the only exception is a char 256 that came from the NSA but at least the logo kind of looks like that of a coin [Laughter] you know interoperability as well is is is a great way to collaborate so we have these these two projects cosmos and and polka dots you know that that's part of the whole vision to to be interoperable with with other block chains and so you know they've made an effort to take take modules that are reusable and and share them to the communities that we have IBC from cosmos we have substrate and another interesting trend that we're seeing is a stock based light clients because interoperability between chains is a lot about light clients and we want them to be as cheap as possible and we have coda that's working with the fully recursive snarks M&T for 96 and then we have seller which is working with one level of recursion with the sexy curves all super interesting stuff and one of the successes I think a blockchain collaboration has been with the academics so we have this one group at Stanford which is basically for people looking into blockchain specific stuff and they've they've invented would you know they've they've pushed forward you know this very significant chunk of the crypto which is used today by block chains and this is the stuff that have that they have influenced us within if etherium but there's all sorts of other pieces of crypto that is being used within the wider blockchain space and I guess a large part of this this influence probably came from the fact that the there was a thirty million dollars of funding to the the Stanford center for blockchain research which happened in 2018 and so and here you know we've seen collaboration at the funding level there's four different blockchain projects and others that have funded this and it's been a huge huge success and the Stanford center for blockchain research in addition to doing all this research they're doing all sorts of other programs that are providing value to the ecosystem so I mentioned these Universal snarks and so the snark ceremonies is one thing that I think we can collaborate because it's a shared piece of technology and here actually in the participation diversity is key so we want to try and reduce trust in the system and the more diverse the participants the better so that's another area for collaboration and another kind of interesting trend is is hardware can we use hardware to our benefits and the competition model which worked really well for proof of work is also I believe going to work extremely well for vdf and snack Asics I think at this point we all want Cece stock Asics as as the the next piece as one of the piece of hardware coming up so on that topic in terms of hardware competitions we just finished the vdf competition which was a the first round which led to a 75% speed-up in performance congratulations Eric person for that and we're going to start the second round of the competition in just a few days and you know the vdf alliance here is it's an example of collaboration where we could not have done it alone it's not just that where we would be wasting resources if we if we tried the same thing at the same time is here the project is so expensive that we need collaboration and here I'm excited to announce that tells us is the fourth funding partner to the Alliance Cosmosphere and Falcone tells us I think that's a great team of founders and you know collaboration extends beyond the blockchain space we have collaboration at the tooling level with AWS synopsis Xilinx and also with academics because there's some hard problems to be solved here and you know the space of collaborations is just it's just massive and that's only a partial list so really excited to be working with our blocking projects this is a unique opportunity and I think we can only get to where we want to be you know through collaboration the the division is so so ambitious that we have to collaborate it's not even a choice thank you