EBC22 | A Layer 1 Maker’s Perspective: What's Next for Web3?

three two one [Music] can you hear me okay great uh super it's nice to be here so let's see if this works uh slides please i click something okay there we are so uh amazing it's great to see all of you here thanks for being here this early in the morning so we'll actually do something slightly different from what we planned originally we're not going to quite focus on nfts as much we'll actually give you some of the perspectives of an l1 maker given where we are in the state of development of web3 where we are in the market as well and hopefully you enjoy this um also and this is slightly more philosophical than the topics i typically give so kind of bear with me right i will cover a little bit of our progress and you know the first slide sort of focuses on that which is we've actually made quite a lot of expansion in terms of getting people into web 3.0 in terms of getting developers into web 3.0 i mean compared to where things were in i don't know 2017 2018 we have lots of people working in the space and this is really quite amazing to see now i think it's still just the beginning and uh you'll see why now is actually a good play a time to look back at our progress and to try to anticipate what's uh what's coming what's ahead of us in the next couple years let's say um and so in this slide you see some of the numbers some of the statistics in terms of things like uh the amount of money that's put into space in terms of transaction volume in terms of activities in terms of popular energy marketplaces and things of that sort and these are probably numbers you've seen elsewhere um as well now when it comes to zilliqa our focus has been actually relatively steady so these are some of the points of focus that have been there for us for quite a while so being a fast blockchain being affordable in terms of transactions transaction costs being focused on safety so avoiding vulnerabilities as well as being green in terms of you know being nice to the environment and those have been you know there from the beginning of the project and those remain there as areas of focus and some of the highlights that we bring to people who choose to build in silica as well now we are in a down market clearly right i think all of us will acknowledge that and now it's a good time to actually maybe stop and take stock of what's happened and look around and see what opportunities are ahead of us and also to see what kind of worked and what not what might not have worked and i'm sort of here to look at some of the dominant narratives that have been out there for quite a while now and actually take a bit of a closer look at them and see if they still apply or if this is something we should examine and you know maybe twist them slightly and maybe take them you know somewhere else going forward and that's going to be the focus area for me for the next uh you know what is it six minutes or so so these are some of them using so take it as such so let's start let's go through this and so the first narrative has been uh you know making things more scalable making things faster right higher throughput lower latency lower finality that sort of thing and that's been one of the driving narratives in this space for quite a while since at least 2018 and so while this is obviously very interesting and while it's obviously nice to be able to pump more transactions through than visa networks and things of that sort the demand for transaction volume actually has been not quite as high so if you focus on something that's really you know push this narrative forward like uh the solana blockchain you know while some of the claims from solana have been you know peaky to the peak capacity of something like 65 000 transactions the utilization if you look at the last months or so of transaction volume unchained has been closer to three or four thousand right so well so these numbers are clearly thoughts right so that's the one thing to point out and so what if the level of demand is not quite growing fast enough so that's one of the questions i'd like to post the next question is you know the question of uh cost and affordability has been one of the corner stores of zilliqa's value proposition as well so this is something that's near and dear to our heart so but i guess one question you could pose as well cheap compared to what right i mean compared to what's what's your baseline compared to ethereum at you know peak times so compared to something else like a centralized distribution right the deployment or the strategy like azure or aws and so you kind of need to maybe look at that a little bit more closely i'm not going to give you all the answers but i'll post some of the questions here next one is extensibility and this has been at the forefront of attention for blockchains like for example polkadot has made that one of the you know their value propositions to allow people to combine you know different consensus protocols with different approaches to vms and languages and things of that sort and while this is certainly an interesting experiment actually the demand for that has also been fairly mixed i would say i mean there are chains on polka dots such as moonbeam that has enjoyed a lot of adoption but it's actually debatable that people want quite as much extensibility and so the question here what is the right level of extensibility that people want from an l1 here next question is of course the thorny question of centralization or decentralization right so why this while this has been a significant focus area for the space from the very beginning of course um so that goes back to what's the right amount right i mean in a sense the cost of decentralization is also very high which is what we see from the case of ethereum of course as well and so i think that there's actually quite a lot of more depth and people acknowledge to this question as well and you know what's the right amount it's not the the way that people look at it most of the time and actually we are starting to do just that programmability all these issues in terms of like which language you know which language to use and clearly we've seen a lot of adoption from solidity and uh wasm communities and that's that's really quite nice uh and uh at the same time some of the languages focused on sort of other concerns uh haven't quite enjoyed nearly as much adoption that's sort of a problem and uh one of the reasons it's sort of a problem is uh because as uh probably some of you will acknowledge it's actually a lot more challenging to build large-scale applications right so it's quite easy to take uh you know write a dap from scratch it's relatively easy to take an existing dap and clone it and maybe change the ui and that the future features here and there and certainly we've seen these kinds of design patterns emerge with various chains out there during you know different periods of the of the bull market as well but it's a lot more difficult to build scalable and sizable modular applications the kinds of which you see deployed to you know in the cloud let's say yeah okay and then that sort of takes me to uh more or less my last slide here right so what do we do with these things uh which is to say how do we go from where we are both at zilliqa of course and as a community as a whole because there is a number of l1 makers and some of them maybe are in this room as well and try to deliver on some of these other uh areas of focus that i have covered right so going beyond where we are now and figuring out how to bring more people to web 3.0 and of course that means you know focusing on uh the concerns of builders of developers and that's where a lot of my focus has been thus far and also of course you know delivering what users need and my claim here is that it's not one size fits all it's not just one goal that we need to chase such as you know being bringing musculability or uh you know a lower finality let's say it's actually fairly domain specific it's fairly dapp or application specific it's fairly specific depending on the vertical we're in and i think in coming years as we come out of this bear market i think we'll see some of the answers to these questions and this is what's uh significantly on our mind at silica in terms of how to you know go deeper into these focus areas and how to bring solutions that go beyond what we've accomplished up until now and deliver these things to builders so that they can take these solutions and deliver them to the next billion users let me stop here thanks very much happy to take a couple of questions if that's the format that if the format allows for that [Applause] [Music] if someone thanks a very quick question [Music] anyone everything clear okay if not if you're shy you can ask ben i'll be i'll be in the hallway exactly thank you very much ben thank you