All about Flow Foundation - ETHGlobal Bangkok 2024

[Music] SOA everyone and welcome my name is Ali and I'm going to go over the two major bounties that we have here at East Global Bangkok um Devcon is one of the largest crypto events of the year and we have people flying in from everywhere in the world it's an exciting time and we've got some exciting things lined up for you we have one of the highest Bounties in place at 20K split between the most killer app potential and I know that this it kind of can be interpreted in a lot of different ways what I mean by most killer app potential is the app that has the most potential to solve the biggest problem for a group of people things that attract mainstream attention um an example or analogy that I would give is AI has been around for decades it wasn't until almost a year ago it feels like decades that chaty PT came out unlocking tremendous amounts of value for millions of people all of a sudden your grandmother could find recipes all of a sudden your your brother could use it to help learn a foreign language help with with their homework you could use it you know with with your work or to help you with programming to help you learn about a a specific Topic in in detail right all of a sudden millions of people it was the fastest adopted product in history and millions of people that were using it most likely the vast majority did not even know how it works they don't they might have heard the term L llm but they don't really know what a gan is what a neural network is they don't the the lower level technology was abstracted away so that people could directly use it to solve real pain so I want you to think about that I want you to think about what that looks like for blockchain what is what is a real pain faced by a lot of normal everyday mainstream people that you could potentially disrupt through blockchain technology the second major Focus area that I want you to think of is best gaming application on Flow as a species we love games we've been playing them for thousands of years there's certain ingredients that make games fun it's easy to play it's hard to master Randomness so that it doesn't become super predictable Etc um we're especially looking for telegram games telegram mini apps which are all about the current meta and um we we want to see what you're you're starting at at Flo if you didn't know like Flo Flo was started by the team behind crypto kitties it was one of the funnest experiences that wasn't Financial focused that came out and it blew up all of a sudden thousands of people all around the world were beating these cats on chains and then pretty much the first mainstream consumer application in the history of web 3 was started on Flow called NBA Top Shot same situation millions of users didn't even know that blockchain was running this awesome and fun digital collectible experience people just loved you know Stephen kery the Golden Gate Warriors they were they were massive fans and it created a way for them to connect at a deeper level um show their support and and grow right so what I want you to do is think about how to build really fun games like what what is a fun experience that everyday people could use how can you abstract away as much as possible from from the lower level details perhaps it's it's a web 3 game that allows people to log in with their ooth and and um use as account abstraction so an account is created in the background and it's it's approval and it's gasless or maybe it's something more like Dark Forest like using data that's constantly generated mixing with like an AI agent that's learning from the data that's going on chain and and creating a generative ever expanding Universe perhaps it's like crypto the game where you have a survival situation and and people are V off at the end of every evening or or you have to go on raids to collect more supplies during a zombie apocalypse and you use onchain random to to figure out what people get maybe their uis maybe their character nfts get updated through through composable nfts and change every time they go on a raid maybe they get gear maybe they get injuries from the zombies that are attacking them the world is really your oyster here really what we want to see is hella fun experiences the last two areas are not are not like overarching bounties but there are additional ways that you could get um you could win something at flow and this is something we did at the last two eth Global events that lots of hackers were super excited about and we had a lot of winners so it comes down to Kaizen and continuous Improvement if you while you're hacking on Flow find any areas that you think could be improved on from a developer feedback perspective whether it's documentation whether it's oh my God you know if this tool was available it would be a lot better I loved this aspect of the block Explorer getting getting gas through the faucet was seamless like we we want to hear your overall experience The Good the Bad and and what could be improved on right so we have two different sub bounties for this one is for the overall best developer feedback and another one is divvied up um equally to all qualifying projects that have have given feedback and of course like this isn't just like finding one typo or using chat GPT to like run against the docks and say oh I found this thing really like what we're looking for here to be a qualifying project is at least some thought at least some experience um and fleshing out where you encounter The Challenge and how you think it it could potentially even be resolved um super excited to see you hack with us all these streams are open to solidity devs evm devs devs that are interested in in in experimenting with new languages like Cadence um The World is Yours let's build something amazing a little bit about myself I work on product at the flow foundation and previously I was a founder of various startups across fintech and defi so what is flow the architecture safety and sustainability as well as the future of web 3 development is essentially what's on the agenda for today under that I'm going to talk about transactions protocol level primitive such as verifiable Randomness functions and account abstraction don't worry if you're not familiar with those terms I'll dig into what they really mean um talk about modding for web 3 you know what what that implies and what that unlocks metadata for tokens and access control all of these things that are uniquely offered by by the flow blockchain to developers building on it before jumping in let's start off with a little bit of a story imagine that you know this is the first time you'd ever heard about block chain or web 3 you know you're not a developer your friends are playing a video game and they tell you about it and it sounds super exciting they want you to join just put yourself in the shoes of of an everyday ordinary person that hasn't gone down the rabbit hole as soon as they go to the landing page for this website they see all right connect wallet all right what does that mean is that how I log in all right I click on that okay wait I need to download a plugin in Chrome all right okay wait they're telling me to memorize this list of words all right let me let me start writing that down in Apple notes oh wait it's telling me not to write it down on my computer all right let me find a piece of pen and paper and and noted oh oh wait where do I find okay all right I got all that done now what I'm trying to play all right I connect my wallet like why am I connecting my wallet like why does it need my bank account info what is this all right wait now I can't do anything in this app unless I have gas what is gas is that like tax like where do I get that from oh oh there's centralized exchanges this perplexity AI tells me all right I'm going to I'm going to go to one of those oh wait what why am I on a call for the last three hours with my bank's fraud department what like what's going on here is this a scam the reason I gave that you know analogy is because the reality of the situation is that there are still major barriers for everyday consumers and mainstream users to interact with even basic web3 applic so something as simple as a game instead of you know spending one minute to start playing with your friends onboarding could take hours if not days and the vast majority of people at least if they're like me are likely to drop off before they even play the game because you know ain't nobody got no time for that at the protocol level what flow offers Builders is the tools that they need to effortlessly remove all the barriers that both Developers and the users using what the developers are creating might face does your grandmother really know what a crypto wallet is does your friend really need to buy gas to interact with the application well on Flow you can do things like wallet lless onboarding and create those types of experiences so that you could log into a web3 application just using your email while you're stuck on gas you could also create gasless experiences easily which I'm going to touch upon in just a bit flow allows you as a builder to do all of this while also allowing for a full spectrum of ownership that is always in the hands of the end user before I get into how all of that and more Works let's discuss what exactly flow is well flow is a layer one blockchain with ultra low gas fees that first launched its proof of stake protocol in 2020 it was co-founded by deer Shirley one of the brightest Minds in the space and a core contributor to ERC 721 better known as the nft a term that he actually coined there are currently two virtual machines or VMS that run on Flow one is Cadence and one is evm evm was recently introduced during Crescendo which is the largest upgrade that's ever occurred on the network and what it essentially does is it allows e flow to become evm equivalent meaning that solidity contracts and popular evm tooling like hard hat Alchemy open Zeppelin contracts remix all of these tools that most of us are familiar with they work seamlessly off the bat on Flow no additional configuration required it's as easy and seamless as building on any ethereum L2 while still being an L1 and having all the benefits of it right so you don't need to have extensive technical experience but you do get extensive technical advantages and these advantages make creating the next new generation daps possible flow is also home to some of the world's most exciting projects the people that are really trying to move the needle in experiences that that people can interact with onchain such as Disney metel NFL NBA tons of defi defi projects gaming projects rwa project and is powering these daps that are actually interacted with by millions of users every every single day in other words flow is the home of consumer applications that everyday people use and love so what makes it unique before we get into that a blockchain is essentially ined by a multitude of computers known as nodes these nodes are responsible for validating and recording transactions depending on the blockchains architecture nodes can have specific roles and responsibilities such as validating transactions storing data or creating new blocks these nodes are crucial in maintaining the Integrity security and decentralization of a blockchain network in the industry when many of us think about scaling al2s and app chains tend to come to mind Flo has created a unique Network architecture that allows it as an L1 to scale without the need for sharding on most other chains the norm is for all nodes to perform every single task like an army of clones in exact same way as Network usage Soares and grows the transaction processing capacity of the individual nodes becomes a limiting factor restricting the Network's throughput and latency the amount of data that can be stored on chain is inherently limited since nodes have only a finite storage capacity the only real way to scale these monolithic blockchains is by increasing the capacity of each note by adding even more CPU more memory and more storage however this has a cost and that cost is decentralization as nodes scale vertically they become more expensive to run and eventually only a few operators even worse energy consumption for every single node in the network increases over time making the chain environmentally unsustainable the monolithic node design of common L1 such as Bitcoin and ethereum overly privileges operator control over block production this makes the chain vulnerable to censorship and meev attacks the problem gets even worse than l2s with centralized sequencers flow's multi-roll architecture provides Mev resistance by randomly assigning transactions to collection nodes that only see a subset of all transactions what do I mean by multi-roll architecture essentially flow divides tasks among specialized no types to enhance scalability and efficiency on node because the increase in energy and Hardware consumption over time is restricted to a small subset of nodes in the network this drastically limits the environmental footprint of the chain the overall energy use of flow won't increase significantly even if the activity increases by 10 50 100x or even more making the per transaction energy footprint decrease over time now I mentioned two different VMS Now Cadence is not only a virtual machine it's also a name and it's the name of the flow native programming language in web 3 we build applications that constantly work with resources or assets such as fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens and a hundred of other erc's out there Cadence was purpose built as a resource oriented programming language designed with user experience safety and functionality in mind you can essentially use Cadence to extend your evm application that's written in solidity and unlock extremely powerful value propositions over the next few slides I'll try to give an overview in as short time as possible of some of the most exciting things you can unlock on Flow by combining Cadence with your application and this is completely up to you again because flow is evm equivalent that means that you don't even have to touch Cadence at all you could like literally take your your solidity smart contracts and within seconds get the up and running onf flow just like that we call this evm Plus+ and like I was saying evm on Flow enables Cadence to superpower your existing solidity code this brings many of the security and developer benefits of cadence to solidity enabling you as a developer to more easily build secure and Powerful software on evm Cadence assets are also compatible with evm apps on Flow and vice versa meaning existing evm assets on Flow gain from what's possible in Cadence and Cadence assets get to participate in the ecosystem of evm apps and tooling the transaction model is super exciting on Flow and it differs from the evm in certain ways so on Cadence transactions allow people to write data directly on chain and flow offers both competitive transaction times which is important for apps like games and defi but also offers different types of transactions in a completely new model so this is this is on the Cadence side the model breaks down s minor roles into the proposer the payer and authorizer so you can separate the payer of the app being the application and the proposer as well as authorizer being the end user this unlocks some very exciting things like sponsored transactions where you can specify who the payer of the gas is and approver and essentially the end user doesn't pay any gas fees but gets to interact with the application this is great for onboarding you know consumer and mainstream users and we've seen cas like NBA topshot that's managed to really onboard millions of users that don't even know that the application they're using is powered by web three seamless another thing that you unlock are bundled transactions which allow you to add multiple transactions together to execute in a specified order if one of them fails then everything reverts this is really useful when you have a complex transaction that might rely on the results of the previous transactions in a sequence there's also multisig transact require a signature to have multiple signers in order to execute which is kind of valuable for things like peer-to-peer trading and escros things like that there's also scripted transactions where you can specify execution preconditions and post conditions super cool for things like adaptive yield farming strategies that that become possible that change based on new inputs of data that get unlocked in real time uh an important thing to note about Spa sponsor transactions which I kind of alluded to already is that on Flow gas fees are so low that many applications decide to fully sponsor all transactions of all their users so it's a completely gasless onboarding experience end to endend and it's really unparalleled we've seen applications more than 4X their users just by integrating this into their app right so it's it's something really exciting and the two barriers that I alluded to at the very beginning of this you know challenges with getting a wallet as well as they both get completely obliterated I'll I'll talk about wallets and account abstraction in a bit though onf flow there're also protocol level Primitives what do I mean by that Cadence has built in account abstraction and essentially the Cadence account model enables each account to function as its own multisig enabling secure transaction authorization and account recovery it also allows for account linking which is essentially shared ownership over accounts you can think of account linking like Google Drive folders and permission accessing an app can start off with owning an account which a normal everyday person uses without having to install a wallet or memorize a keyphrase and months later once the user goes further down the rabbit hole and creates their own non-custodial wallet they could essentially link it as well as all the assets within it into their mother wallet just like how you might create a Google drive folder that you and your friend have access to and then there's a subfolder within that that you give access to someone else think of it just moving a drive folder into another folder that only you have access to right another protocol level primitive other than account abstraction which is really noteworthy is flows onchain Randomness or vrf function within literally minutes you can get up and running with generating a random number and accessing it for free on chain this is a lot easier than using oracles or other tools for getting vrf and it's a lot more secure right the value that is created is inherently provably fair and games and lotteries don't really that that would use random numbers right they don't really need to rely on third parties anymore which Dr risks them you can access this Randomness directly in solidity by referencing a special precompiled solidity contract called the Cadence Arc attachments so attachments essentially offer the ability to add extra data and functionality without permission from the original contract author you could think of this like modding for web 3 if we look at say how Warcraft 3 and their editor allowed for new games that were even more popular than them such as like DOTA and League of Legends to get created that literally shot to the top one inspired by mods like defense of the Ancients which if you played that game or remember back in the day was super popular another example is Skyrim you can go to websites like Nexus mods and see billions of mods continue to be downloaded right by composing on top of existing software by making it easy to compose and extend functionality extend features what you do as a product is you turn your product into a platform and that platform continuously evolves you Empower your community to create more and more value on top of that base application right and it even today people are still creating mods integrating AI like chat upt as well as whisper AI to make you know multi-dimensional NPCs in in games like Skyrim things that the original creators at Bea would never have imagined and and they stopped pushing codes years ago but still new value propositions new levels new character characters are being developed right um web 3 inherently requiring all code to be open source is a massive opportunity to create a fully composable software development experience and attachments are unique functionality and Cadence that allows you to extend that functionality and add extra data seamlessly this is really cool for things in gaming like gear represented as nestled nfts that offer perks or mini games think about gwent and Witcher 3 new biomes levels Talent Tre um decentralized science you could have independently verifiable academic papers and verified citations if you think of like uh all of Academia is just one body or one contract that people are constantly attaching more reviews to or more works that they themselves also have attachments Etc it also has application across Defi and social fi with with news factchecking and so on you could see this with an attachment this little icon that appears under a web three soci F application that says oh this this has been verified by 500 people you know you can trust this information metadata views metadata views essentially allow for future proofing and interoperability while guaranteeing backward compatibility it's essentially adding metadata to assets and Cadence such as a nonf funable token and you could do cool things like specify that you know the creator of this nft is this address and this is the percentage of royalties they should get paid out so it doesn't matter which Marketplace that nft ends up being listed on all of them read from that exact same metadata know exactly who which creators should get paid and how much you get paid out this is really exciting because long after you launch the contract you could continually add more optional metadata to the or fields to the metadata in in the asset right and so in the future as new Norms start being created or new standards maybe there's a metaplace market uh metaverse Marketplace that gets launched and specific requirements for how assets are visualized you can specify unique characteristics of your assets and specify how they should be used in those applications and with those new standards and comply with them right so it's it's really future proofing the assets that you create today so that they continue working long into the future and they're adaptable uh some of the examples that this is useful for is gaming where you could get attributes of gear could help with SEO Dows with information about governance tokens you know voting privileges dii where you could associate papers with specific journals and cities defi where you could have nft yield perks where anyone who holds this nft essentially when they start yield farming or doing this they get a a bonus or a buff right as well as a lot of other options another exciting functionality In Cadence is capabilities and you could think of capabilities as granular access permissioning that is very similar to AWS IM if you're familiar with that it essentially allows resources functions assets to have references to those shared objects which can be saved for future transactions so you could do things like Grant revoke limit access really really exciting gives you a a lot of options to do many many many different things and that's why it is called capabilities couple examples you could have gaming where you could lend out gear overnight or well on vacation you could set up guild Administration for different players you can create an inheritance trust fund where you could use capabilities that unlock access to the funds after a certain amount of time has passed and there's been no transactions in the account and maybe the funds are unlocked by first the attorney and then like you know your next at kin things like that right also with social fi you you this is really cool because it canot unlock a lot of traditional business models whether it's premium models or subscription models that unlock certain access to the contracts and functionality and assets depending on your current status and what permissions you should have access to at any given time so what what does the future look like where Flo is now is FL has a massive worldwide developer and user base there's about 45 million users and it's processed over 600 million transactions with 440 nodes in over 20 countries around the world on every major continents except for Antarctica not not exactly yet you are joining a movement that's happening right now that movement is to enable everyday users as well as as developers like like yourselves towards creating applications that remove barriers to people and create magical experiences towards creating real consumer applications you could think of it similarly to how chaty PT was one of the largest adopted applications in history one of the largest adopted products in Tech and AI had existed for many decades prior to chaty PT's emergence right like llms have existed generative AI models have existed lots of these things existed but they were outside the hands of everyday consumers Everyday People what Chachi PT did was it created a interface a consumer application that unlocked the value of that technology for billions of people your grandmother could look up recipes you know your your brother could figure out how to develop a video game on it you could help ask questions to prepare you for upcoming exams in schools it was one of the most versatile and impactful applications that came out built on a a technology that's been around for quite a bit of time right by focusing on everyday consumers by putting ourselves in their shoes by figuring out what their real pains are and how we could leverage technology to solve them we could really change what future looks like and what tomorrow looks like and I want to invite you during this hackathon to join us in shaping that narrative and shaping that future and be ambitious in what we're trying to solve while at the same time thinking about what the real pains are what are people really suffering from am I am I solving a pain or am I just doing something that's kind of like fun to build and I would challenge you towards solving real challenges that exist for us [Music]