EthCC 2: Ryan Zurrer

first day of ECC and we're really grateful to Jerome and the asset the team to include us in this conference so we have one day of tracks and then day two and day three there's workshops from some of the presenters you'll see today talking about what they're working on and how it integrates with the web ecosystem and specifically with the substrate development stack to build block chains easily and polka-dot a networking protocol to connect block chains easily so we're a couple minutes behind so we'll just go ahead and get started Ryan's gonna render from what three foundations the first talk so have a great rest day and enjoy enjoy Paris all right thanks jack Thanks to everyone for coming out I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the state of web three and crypto governance on polka-dot so what is web 3 just quickly I'm assuming most of you know this is Gavin woods vision for decentralized serverless web where users have greater control over their privacy their financial accounts their data and inevitably their their freedom online we're decentralized peer-to-peer networks leveraging sound crypto economic design allow us to effectively decentralize the web and why do we call it web 3 well we had web one which was static websites monetization was strictly through UI with very poor or sorry monetization strictly through advertising with very poor UI we went through - web - which is social mobile there's far more interaction with web sites however monetization remain the same strictly through surveillance capitalism and and largely advertising and this has created a consolidation of power it's created number of privacy issues that we all face and now we're moving towards a new generation which is decentralized applications built on Waze and virtual machines monetization is built directly in at the protocol layer and there's better user control of privacy and data and better distribution of wealth and power on the Internet so why does this matter web 3 matters because web 2 has failed us a small group of companies owned you know the vast majority of cloud compute cloud storage even a smaller group of companies owned almost all of your data and they commercialize it as a see fit without including you in the process and we deserve better we deserve a more decentralized internet where we have better control over our data how that data is monetized and we can share in that monetization strategy so this is where the web 3 foundation comes in so we believe that we can create borderless public goods through through representation and crypto governance that are trans transparent and enforceable we believe that in our space we need more safe spaces for experimentation and an evolution generally and that crypto governance help helps give us this and that sound crypto economic design allows us to achieve a Nash equilibrium between peer-to-peer agents on on a network and the first project that the web 3 foundation is responsible for is polka-dot this is interoperability for web 3 taking protocols out of the sort of silo generation that we exist now and allowing for different crypto networks to communicate with one another it's an incredibly ambitious project and led by one of the top teams in this base if not the the top team in this base at parity it has a novel hybrid consensus mechanism on novel security model and I will implement on chained enforceable crypto governance natively so a quick 30,000 foot view of polka dot you've got effectively a relay chain which is sort of the main chain or base chain and then a pair of chains which are any other chain can connect either natively if if they're built using the the substrate framework or through a bridge so something like aetherium or z cache will will connect into polka dot via bridge other chains like edge wear or blink will connect natively as they're built in using substrate a couple of interesting things about the crypto governance model of polka dot so you've got referendum so motions being tabled constantly for for voting we've got a council that council sort of allows for quicker tabling of certain items although anybody can contain a function called adaptive quorum biasing which I'll get into and this basically means that the the lower the turnout the more you need the yeas over the nays to carry the vote but we'll get into what that means in a second lock voting so this is where you can give more weight to your if you really believe in something and you want to lock yourself into the system should your vote pass approval voting for for the council and then a doubt reasure e so part of a block reward will go to a Treasury that will then incentivize the network and incentivize not only so the block reward is not only designed to incentivize validators on the network it'll incentivize you know open-source developers of all kinds whether it be application developers protocol their developers many different people contributing to the community and we're incredibly excited about what that means and then delayed autonomous enactment that is just a very interesting and necessary security mechanism so all of these things sort of make up polka dots crypto governance model and just to kind of walk you through is a little bit of a busy slide but sure let me see if I've got a laser pointer here [Music] no why anyways so we've got a council this council sort of rotates regularly via approval voting this would be a group of technical experts that are you know well-prepared to to sort of steward different decisions on on the network all votes come down to the coin holders at the end of the day however anybody can can table a vote any coin holder can table a vote they post a stake in order to table a vote or the council can table a vote either through unanimous vote or through majority vote and if and depending on whether an individual tables the vote the council tables the vote via via majority or the council tables of vote via unanimous decision that will adjust the quorum necessary to carry the vote do we I think we okay all right there we go so this is adaptive quorum biasing an adaptive quorum biasing as you get lower turnout for a vote you need more yeas to carry the vote over the nays so you know those of us who remember the Dow the reason why the Dow blew up and the reason why most crypto governance projects have had issues is on turnout so we didn't have we didn't meet minimum quorum or a very obvious measure that we should have passed which was the moratorium and in this case you can have low turnout as long as you have very strong bias towards one side or another and then as turnout goes further than you just need 50 plus one or or fifty one 1% in order to carry this allows us to make decisions even if there isn't a strong turnout and this will change based on whether whether a coin holder proposed it or whether the council proposed at via unanimous or majority proposal so another interesting thing is time lock voting this is where to every the the standard argument against crypto governance is often well the Plutarch's women and and the rich can just vote in the way that they want but in with this it's actually not the case because if you have fewer tokens but you want to time lock them for a longer period of time you can give more weight to your tokens so we've got two examples here Alice Bob and Charlie Allison Charlie vote no Alice locks up hers for eight weeks charlie only for two weeks they don't in this in this case have enough to carry against Bob who votes yes and locks for six weeks however Bob only only locks for four weeks and Alice for eight weeks but then Charlie for two weeks they Charlie Charlie and Alice end up carrying the vote and Bob ends up losing however what happens there is Alice and Charlie in this case Alice and Charlie are tied into the system for their number of weeks whereas Bob can leave and so what this means is that you sort of commit yourself to continue to be part of the network should your vote go through and should the way it should should the mechanism move in the direction that that you're wanting to so you can give yourself more leverage but then you're tied in to the system and we think that this is an elegant way to sort of mitigate the effect of the Plutarch's one of the things I'm most excited about polkadot is the roadmap I mentioned that it's really an extraordinary team leading this project and they have a history of delivering on time and and on budget and and this will actually this is right now scheduled to be the first project in the history of our industry to deliver Maine that ahead of schedule so originally polka-dot was supposed to deliver in 2020 and right now we are expecting that polkadot is delivered end of q3 early q4 this year and that really makes it you know in my estimation the sort of the next biggest iteration in our industry this year it'll be a massive step forward in a number of things whether it's Waze and VMs or crypto governance or or other things and it's gonna be available this year which is which is incredibly special so we're very excited about this roadmap and some cool projects already being built in the polka dot ecosystem so substrate is something I spoke a little bit about and more people will talk about today substrate is a development framework or you can think of it like an IDE that the abstracts away the low layers of the stack and you can focus on your application or your users in in question it allows you to sort of spin up a blockchain in about 15 minutes in fact the founder Gavin wood did a live demo taking a computer out of shrink-wrap and spinning up a blockchain and a decentralized application about 20 minutes in front of a live audience and substrate sort of gives you all of these things which is very interesting you know using web assembly which is a trend that we're seeing across the space it's also built on lib p2p which our friends at protocol labs are responsible for and that's a that's a wonderful project there's a rust implementation a golang implementation being built by chain safe in canada javascript and others we're also looking for other people to build more implementations so this is a really exciting a tool that allows you to spin up a blockchain very quickly and very easily something that took years before now actually takes minutes Edgware is a project that i am particularly interested in and this is a sort of testing ground or sort of innovation Factory for crypto governance so Edgware will be the first chain deployed on polka-dot it will be the first chain to my knowledge in the polkadot ecosystem to leverage a Treasury Dow so fully half the block reward will go into a dowel which will then be voted on by the token holders to distribute rewards to again you know a player developers or protocol layer developers or so on and so forth this is really interesting because it allows more people to get involved and essentially work for the doubt we're gonna see a number of people who teams and companies who effectively work for this this Dow as as their primary business model other really interesting projects there are really too many to name but we're certainly very excited about polka source and polka scan there are a number of chains that intend to launch on polka dot from from day one I had mentioned Edgware but C cash a Borak which is merck miller's javascript smart contract platform and and many others and so you know come find us throughout the day if you're thinking about building a novel consensus mechanism or interesting decentralize application we really think that this is probably the best the best environment to do so in the really interesting thing that that I have been captivated by with respect to polka dot is is this change in paradigm with respect to architecture where in the past you know ëthere IAM and other ecosystems look at every application as a smart contract that is then deployed on a single consensus mechanism and thusly subordinate to that consensus mechanism with polka dot we look at every application can be its own chain and then you don't need to be subordinate to that consensus mechanism you can just plug and play a consensus mechanism that works for your users and your specific use case so if it's a very high a transaction frequency then maybe a dag makes more sense than pls or something like that and each application can be its own chain and tie into the relay chain which i think is a very interesting approach to scalability and and and also just an interesting approach to be able to build decentralized applications in a in a more appropriate fashion as i chind you're more than welcome to get involved we've got a very strong and growing global community and you can reach out you can find me find other resources and we'll be here all week so thanks very much [Applause]