Cross-Chain Technology - TOKEN2049 London 2022

good afternoon token 2049 uh my name is Toby Gilbert I am the CEO of coin web and on-ramp and today I'm here to talk about cross-chain tokenization but before I do I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself and about coin web and what we're up to so coin web at essentially at its heart is a layer 2 cross computation platform and we have an exceptionally strong focus on delivering adoption opposed to just focusing on what the core protocol is oh our key focus is enabling The Wider adoption by foreseeing blockchain's biggest problems in advance of them happening our core technology enables interoperability and we are able to bridge an unlimited amount of chains in a permissionless state before I go into it a little bit further I'm going to tell you about a gentleman that's sitting here on the second row who's uh canoe finger our cesio and co-founder knut wrote some of those first papers on artificial intelligence over 30 years ago that both NASA and the U.S Department of Defense not only published but used in their founding technology fast forward to 2017 and we were on holiday in Goa in India and he proceeded to explain to me about what blockchain technology was and also what problems it was facing before they actually occurred he got me so hooked on this point that not only did I invest but I left my life in telecoms and pursued a career full-time leading the coin web team fast forward five years and six points later we've launched on six exchanges on December the 30th of last year cooling mxc Gates bittrex bit marks and uniswap we've also connected to seven chains ethereum main chain polygon BMB elrond Litecoin Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin main chain we have two D5 platforms that have launched on top of us when supporting no less than a hundred and seventy thousand unique users and we've also sold 230 million dollars worth of the stable tokens issued from our platform that represent in excess of three million transactions written down to the underlying chains that we sit on top of we're a team of no less than 150 people including 50 developers and we had seven digital asset consents and licenses around the world that support multiple Fiat rails including Swift separ faster payment and credit card processing in line with our core principle of not only building out our protocol we also build products effectively that is our aggressive go to market strategy so with that in mind we've developed and we're shipping this week across chain tokenization platform that enables you to design set up and issue a token and you choose not only which blockchain it's written down to but you can also wrap L1 tokens as well now A bunch of us on the team are from telecoms and Telco backgrounds and in Telco you have routine systems so when let's say you're calling Africa your voice call can root over 10 different routes that are monitoring the uh cost of the call and also what the quality of the call may be now we've done exactly the same for blockchain using cross-chain reactive smart contracts we monitor the underlying state of the blockchains that we sit on top of so if they become too slow or there's an outage or there's a spike in the gas fees we can automatically migrate transactions across to a different chain delivery on continued to his service to our end users we've also built multi-tenancy wallets so you can white label the wallets or you can choose certain functionality within a set framework those wallets then borrow from our licenses and our Fiat rails so you set up the token and then you can store them in the wallet buy and sell them in the wallet and then we have a simple Marketplace as well where you can list them publicly for sale so to turn key solution effectively all built on top of the coinware protocol right so before I drag you into cross chain um technology and the proverbial weeds part of my job has been to separate signal from the noise for the past five years I'm going to give you some high level Concepts about blockchain blockchains are built-in silos different architecture different coding languages different token standards and large amounts of capital are locked up in these silos with the majority being between Bitcoin and between ethereum you have new players coming onto the market where they are also Gathering Capital centers L ROMs and Solana for example but it's correct to assume that different chains have different functionality and different use cases so one chain might be correct to build one project on top of but not for another ethereum has Rich functionality with their tokenization and their smart contract Frameworks Solana High throughput transactions and Bitcoin as the store of value but they also have their shortcomings as well Bitcoin is slow and it's expensive and ethereum as I'm sure you all know has scaling issues and fluctuating gas fees making it quite commercially unviable to build on top of much of the time Solana has had no less than nine major outages this year alone thus if you have built on top of Solano your HSBC all of a sudden your app just stops to work try and explain that to a mass customer base but blockchain does boast unique properties so trustlessness and decentralization where unconnected parties Miners and validators great blocks in a chain yes blockchain and that those blocks can store that information in the information stored in those blocks cannot be amended or changed commonly referred to as a mutability now Miners and the validators need to be remunerated for this service a question I get asked the whole time is blockchain technology is it really linked to cryptocurrency isn't cryptocurrency rather scammy well the miners and the validators need to be remunerated for running the service they have cost bases they have electricity costs in the case of miners which you could look at as Opex they have mining rigs which you could refer to as capex they need to pay for this their remuneration is the cryptocurrency and last blockchain and crypto are inextricably linked blockchain is a complex but they have little direct functionality so layer 2 functionality is then added on top of the underlying blockchain and you can also sometimes look at ethereum's Layer Two functionality being their tokenization and their smart contract Frameworks which is then making the layer one blockchain ethereum chain in this case useful and usable concept to tokenization separate to the layer 1 native tokenization which is remunerating uh the miners and the validators to being able to tokenize anything real world assets nfts stable token security tokens for example is another use Smart contracts and automation to name but a few is led to functionality which makes blockchain useful another concept that gets a lot of air time is one chain to rule them all it's been a constant race to try and find the new ethereum killer but no one has yet actually dealt a significant blow and achieved it new layer ones elrond and Solana are racing to see if they can make this happen but also scaling Solutions like ZK Roll-Ups trying to fix more established chains such as ethereum and cross-train Technology coming onto the market to connect existing trains once again to make them more useful and to drive adoption we touched upon earlier different chains have different functionality and different use cases so there's one chain actually going to become the dominant chain we think it's unlikely as the market matures layer ones many of them which were driving forward trying to be the dominant chain have realized the how essential it is that they must connect with one another and there are a number of solutions that are emerging to break blockchains out of their individual silos bridges are one of those Solutions but are they actually the answer bridges are responsible for the transfer of a significant amount of capital and secured data between L1 chains L1 chains are inherently secure but Bridges cannot make the same claim in simplified terms bridges are third party smart contracts that enable users to move tokens between them locking up native assets on chain a read by Bridges smart contract which in turn issue rap tokens on chain B the destination chain representing the value of the Native asset on the original chain being chain a in simple terms but Bridges have considerably weaker security than the underlying chains that they sit on top of a good analogy is a blind man carrying a bag of money from a Secure Vault a which is blockchain a in the middle of the day across a road to Secure Vault B being blockchain B if you're the robber a hacker you know exactly what your target is and what you're going to hit now this is otherwise known in Tech terms as being a Honeypot and as we've seen major hacks happen Ronin Bridge attack 600 million dollar loss and more recently the BNB Bridge attack with a 570 million dollar loss today to date 21 billion dollars are locked in ethereum bridges alone so another concept multi-chain versus cross chain what is actually the difference so the two main approaches to interoperability multi-chain and cross train multi-train is an architecture where you can come along and set up your own blockchain within a particular ecosystem that's polka dot for you then those chains within that ecosystem are interoperable with one another but multi-chain systems are still uh stuck they're not interoperable outside of their ecosystems and in a realization and a bid to try and connect that one ecosystem to blockchains outside of their ecosystem they've come up with a solution Bridges cross chain on the other hand is a layer 2 solution that then connects third place he blockchains to one another enabling projects to build on top of them and to take advantage of multiple functionalities of the chains that they sit on top of and a lot of the problems that I've outlined today I hope commits it very obvious of how important that solution actually is now there are a number of significant players that come into the market to try and solve these problems in Cross chain chain link Quant ccip floor chain Credo and the likes of us at coin web a considerable amount of capital and communities are locked in these individual silos on these individual chains and it's our mission and our cohorts mission to unlock this capital and their communities so that they can flow freely and frictionlessly between layer one chains cross-chain technology enables projects to build on top of them to not get what's stuck on one particular chain in the case of an outage or a catastrophic failure if they were on top of Luna or a spiking gas fees for example and also allows projects to move seamlessly between blockchains and take advantage of new functionality of new chains as those new chains become available and the cross train platform connects to them in summary cross-chain technology connects different chains allowing communities to move between them Capital to flow between them and mitigate risks of any one particular underlying chain to learn more about how our approach is quite unique from our competitors and why this subject is so important please feel free to scan the QR code follow me on Twitter connect to me on Telegram and thank you very much for listening to me today