Swarm Alpha Online Event - Panel: Ethereum Foundation, IOV Labs, ETC Labs & Swarm- by Taylor Gerring

next up is our guest panel this panel will be led by taylor gehring taylor joined the blockchain space in 2012 which is a long time ago and he worked on several bitcoin applications including the hive wallets taylor helped establish the ethereum foundation in switzerland in 2014 and after leaving the foundation he started the blockchain institute which is one of my favorite non-profit charities dedicated to educating the public about blockchains and decentralization um i hope you loved the introduction taylor are you there i am here michelle can you hear me yes i can hear you perfectly so i look i look forward to your panel a lot because and you know you have like amazing people in your panel so please go ahead and uh yeah let's do it thank you so much for that warm introduction uh since we took up so much time talking about myself i want to go ahead and invite our panel asan i'm very excited today we have representation from rsk iov labs ethereum foundation and i believe a couple of swarm members are going to join us as well let's see got joseph gabriel gregor victor you're missing donny denny and is terry here indeed i am all right great so just to kind of kick things off and uh give everybody a little bit of background on who everybody uh is like representing and what projects they're working on and kind of what they're building towards i would love it if we could kind of just go around the panel um starting off with uh gabriel just because he's at the top of my list uh and after that terry and then joseph um if you can just talk a little bit about who you are and what you're building and uh why why this relates to swarm why are you here today yes absolutely so thank you very much taylor and the whole storm team for the invite uh it's a pleasure for us at rsk reef and iav labs to to be part of uh swarm and support the team as danny explained before rsk it's a an evm compatible virtual machine that uh secures uh secured by bitcoin by the beacon network uh we've been part of the bitcoin ecosystem and the crypto blockchain space for several years uh some of us eight nine seven years uh and we completely share this vision that uh victor and gregor were saying before and also what um jordy said you know we're building a better world and we can really have an impact everything that we built at rsk and brief it's purpose-driven uh we work very close with the slums in latin america trying to build solutions that empower the individuals and create a different internet that is surrounded around protecting the individual and we understood that swarm uh will play a key role in this uh as part of the reef services we have a payments we have identity solution we have a marketplace and there are two components that are critical in this uh infrastructure framework that we're building which are storage and communications and we're very happy to be integrating communications and reef storage on top of swarm so this is for us a full alignment of interest and purpose in life with the technology that we're building and hopefully making this a reality together with all the team as jordy said so thank you very much for the inviter happy to be here terry you want to go next sure thank you uh so i'm with ethereum classic labs and uh we have two major activities one is we operate the etc labs accelerator where we develop and invest in early stage blockchain projects to help build out the ecosystem and we also have the etc core team which is a team of developers who helped maintain the ethereum classified protocol our mission basically is to build high quality technology look for opportunities to expand adoption of public blockchain and really help fulfill the social promise of public blockchain and this is where our collaboration with swarm uh is most important we are absolutely passionate about censorship resistance um you know i think recent events in the world have shown painfully so that systems can have inherent bias with tragic results uh and for blockchain to actually deliver on its promise of financial access uh and decentralized communities you need uh the kind of infrastructure that swarm is building to make that happen uh so we're very excited to be part of this and look forward to seeing it grow awesome and joseph if you would please go hey everybody i'm joseph from the tierra foundation greetings from prague i work with the research and development teams at the ethereum foundation and as it was mentioned before the swarm team recently graduated from the ethereum foundation to become like an organization for its own um and um as as it was mentioned before um the swarm was originally part of the holy trinity if you want um um as one of the like crucial pieces and building the decentralized infrastructure um and it still remains kind of like an open field for uh for projects to um to work on the storage storage space um as it's like a very crucial part of building basically like any dap or like any service that's you know outside of the current um current architecture um so um i'm still super hopeful to see like many solutions that will be like built on top of the you know the decentralized stack uh which uh i'm hoping swarm to be a part of and to be like a into integral um you know piece of the tool set that people be using to build like an awesome decentralized apps without having to rely on you know the most used services of today awesome thank you i'm uh going to skip gregor victor and daniel for time since you guys have already introduced yourselves but i hope that you will jump in on a question uh perhaps this one actually joseph kind of alluded to this along with uh terry and gabriel a bit but um i kind of want to put the question up there of of you know why swarm uh is needed or potentially is needed in the first place when we've already had multiple attempts at decentralized storage whether that's been made safe or sia storage ipfs is very much out there and very active so a little bit like why swarm what's different about it or what uh from the other projects have not been sufficient enough to continue building atop them so so why another decentralized storage effectively anybody uh want to go for that i would like to go for that if there's no other opinion victor please of course in one answer i cannot possibly do justice to the all the sister projects and if you want rival projects but i mean this we'll be running the same boat really here uh i cannot do justice to all of them but let me let me let me focus on a few main differences in our in our strategy and architecture so on the face of it for for for the general user who wants to use decentralized storage some of the some of the higher level solutions might converge and conceal what's what's underneath there but let's let's focus a little bit just a little bit more technically and then and then we want the general user to necessarily know of particular focus on for example bittorrent or ipfs in general these these applications belong to a family of applications which started from if it's called like the file sharing paradigm it means when you open up your hard disk what you basically do is you register some content living on the on your hard disk meet your pirated star wars episode or or any kind of music or meditation videos whatever and you you you share it with the word you know in a sense the dhta distributed hash table which is very similar to the to the concept of disk that we advertised today it is implemented by me it's it's it's basically survey that creates a situation where that is decentralized a network of moods and serve as a content distribution a solution for this content that that you open up basically by registering and by routing certain requests and also in a clever way partitioning the the large larger data sets to smaller bits so you can parallelize them to the stream as opposed to this paradigm this one has an interesting twist to it because it's opinionated about where stuff is stored so when you open up your hard drive in this room you basically take part in the global hard disk of this one and and uh data is is gonna come to your to your uh hard disk which is different basically depending on the on the on the address space and on your on your notes address basically think of it as as if it was geographical addresses then you store things which are addressed to the same address or close the addresses that that you are located at however this is the profound consequences because this means that you can use one without a hard drive and not necessarily through a gateway but through a lifetime basically upload the upload to this one the swarm can serve as genuine cloud service as a network service and that makes a huge difference another very important difference is that is that we're using the technique called forwarding academia and backwarding response uh which means that uh it's it's a if if you if you know how tour works it's a little bit similar architecture so basically requests and and and messages pass from node to node uh being forwarded it gets to its destination and this technique makes it allows allows the at the core of the protocol allows requesters to become ambiguous and ultimately allowing anonymous uh uploads downloads so basically it provides provides the right way permission as publication and and anonymous browsing if you want there's a few there's a few other differences which come from that basically relating to waiting to have how a communication protocols can be layered on top of that it's uh i don't want to go into the full story of this but the main point is that only this year that we realized that communications protocols could be defined on top of this these basic storage primitives and and results in a very powerful incentivized automatically mailbox automatically a synchronous communication protocol which which has very very strong privacy propositions which is more timely than than ever in recent images of distrusting and some of the communication reaction communication platforms so so it's it's basically there's not so basically censorship resistance of privacy through two class range performance and and and thirdly uh uh force through the incentives it's it's like strong guarantees for storage and of course the possibility of layering a complete communication solution on top of the basic uh basic storage that's only perceived in this form in in the swamp architecture and not in any other that i know of great great thank you thank you for that very comprehensive uh answer victor i want to put out to um this question a slightly different form to the the other panels building on top of this and kind of transition into kind of a larger problem that all blockchain projects are facing um certainly storage uh growth in a couple of facets is one area and that's why decentralized storage can be important but i'm curious to hear um uh from etc labs or rsk or or anybody really if they've tried to build on top of these other platforms or storage or archival platforms and if there's been success or failure in that sense or or you know is that kind of um led you to this point or uh have been kind of waiting for this a bit as we've kind of worked through our scaling issues over the past few years yeah the military to start um so in our case we really uh promote interoperability uh through the ecosystem as a whole we believe that interoperability builds anti-fragility and given that we are trying to change uh so fundamental rules of the legacy internet that we used to have before we need to make sure that we are successful as an ecosystem known as a whole so we are actually as part of reef storage also integrating other platforms such as ipfs we will let our users decide which platform they want to to use uh but especially for the financial inclusion use cases that i was mentioning before where and bank people will be recording their identity and reputation uh we need to make sure that we give them the most powerful anti-censorship or censorship-resistant tools that we have and we fully agree with with victor's vision that the word the the way that the topology of swarm is built is probably going to be the most secure uh solution for decentralized storage in the future but still we're going to integrate with other platforms and let the users so that the developers uh using the reframework choose the one they they decide so does it sound like this uh possibility of leveraging multiple storage solutions uh in the future then perhaps one will live alongside ipfs and other things depending on use case uh can i answer that please uh so we have been talking to juan with the uh visionary behind ipfs that actually there's a lot of room for cooperation in the future because our projects are in a way quite complimentary because ipfs concerns itself primarily with locating the content wherever it is stored and efficiently delivering it to wherever it is requested that's what ipfs does it's very modular so as long as as the storage uh as the stored data has a unique hash the hashing algorithm is pluggable in ipfs you can add it uh it can be found under an ipfs namespace and ipfs is has a very very strong peer-to-peer networking protocol which actually ethereum as a whole is going to adopt so that's the uh elite p2p uh library which is going to be adopted throughout the ethereum project and many of its projects including the first storm so we see a future where ipfs and swarm both coexist and cooperate and the swarm content will be available through ipfs namespace and the advantage of that is that it will have the strong censorship resistance capabilities of swarm it will have the safety that swarm provides to stores of information it will take advantage of the efficient storage space allocation mechanisms behind this form but it will also have the quite sophisticated name spacing and directory uh capabilities of ipfs so that's that division of future cooperation of course both projects were careful and hedging their bets so none of us wanted to critically depend on the other because in the early years of development of both projects there was a non-negligible risk of failure and it would not have been prudent to not replicate at least some of the other projects functionality just in case but i think that if both of our projects succeed then they will work very well together i think there's a lot of room for fruitful cooperation and using both projects together wonderful thank you uh and what about you terry etc labs i know i've had some discussions with a variety of folks uh from the ethereum classic side working the developers working on that side of things kind of how are you looking at swarm um either similar or different to some of the other things mentioned here yeah in a similar way i think look the the technology like blockchain technology overall is relatively new and the problem of storage is universal and uh and large so you know you're only going to solve it through cooperation um and so i think for for us swarm is really important but other projects you know are important too our relationship with swarm is much further along than other storage solutions but i think actually the ecosystem needs multiple people working on this problem from different angles not competing necessarily but but like i said it's large enough that it needs more intellectual focus i think for swarm in particular two things appeal to us one is you know the project has deep community support within uh the ethereum world and for something to really be adopted it needs that kind of community support so to us that was a real uh important value the other is the multi-chain support that they're uh committing to from the outset so it's not tribal to begin with and then trying to collaborate afterwards it's interoperable from the beginning uh which i think is an important institution nice nice well i have had some more questions but uh i'm being messaged that we're running out of time so in the spirit of cooperation i want to go ahead and uh seed another minute or two if we uh have it and thank everybody for participating on the panel um gabriel terry joseph victor danny greger i wish we had more time to chat i'm really interested in swarm as a re-entry point for the average person to get into cryptocurrency again um offering up storage and bandwidth uh since we can't really use cpu for mining cycles anymore i really would have liked to have touched on that but i know if we go for another round uh we'll go over and we'll get yelled at anymore so thank you again for everybody and in the spirit of cooperation uh michelle i think it's back over to you taylor thank you so much for rounding it up so nicely i would never yell to you just so you know i would never take it thank you all uh i also want to thank the entire panel um you're all a bunch of very inspirational uh people and um we are all looking forward to hearing more about you guys in maybe next events