A Multi-Chain Future - Zack Seward, Elizabeth Binks, Alex Skidanov, Elena Sinelnikova, and more...

hey everybody thanks for being here uh so yeah this is a two-parter stick around we're gonna do 30 minutes from now until 4 20. nice and then we're going to bring out the second panel for another 30 minute session so let's get ready to do this thing uh first panel the builders take a seat all right everybody give the builders a hand they're gonna do a quick intro and then we'll get going on questions [Music] all right so we are going to do tweet length introductions when i mean quick intro i mean quick intro but i just want to know where you each are all coming from so we can have this conversation with a little context for the crowd out there i'm going to start with you alex who are you what do you do hi can you hear me mike check test test awesome okay i'm alex i'm from near next hi i'm eric i'm on the avalabs bd team um building our avalanche hi i'm elena i'm ceo of metis hi i'm lee can you guys guess which project i'm from i'm from harmony and uh we do uniform sharding with proof of stake we're building bridges to all the blockchains maybe that's why i'm on this panel hey i'm elizabeth i work at chainsafe um in my time i've worked on polka dot cosmos various interrupt protocols so that's why i'm here all right that's the panel okay here we go let's do this thing all right so you hear a lot about the multi-tuned future but you know you go to d5 llama and you kind of realize that we're in a multi-chain present so before we get going on sort of future looking uh prospects i kind of want to put you on the spot for the multi-chain present what is working what is not where are we i'm going to pick on lee to start for that one cool so uh yeah that that was going to be my opening comment that it's not the multi-chain future it's the multi-chain present today and what you really see that's working is all these ecosystems are growing like all these projects up here and they all have really great communities and this is great this is we're bringing millions of people into web three from all of our communities and what's working today is is that diversity and the next thing that we're you know this whole industry is moving towards is bridging right we we see every attempt of every flavor of bridges and it's really about making them trustless and secure and easier ultimately for developers and users so i guess so what's working is you know the multi-chain world is here what's not working is yet is bridges need to get better uh the user experience need to get better i don't i shouldn't have to have like i still need to have 10 wallets on 10 chains to do all the things i want to do it should just really be one wallet and uh you know that that's able to connect to all the chains and abstract that away from the users so start with that all right so uh alex i'm gonna i'm gonna ask the same question to you but a little bit differently you know lane mentioned in the intro right like oh we're all here because we love ethereum but we love other chains too right so the multi-chain future what is the multi-chain future seeking to accomplish so chains are not born equal there are different chains that go to different things some of them scale better some of them provide better security some of them have usability tailored towards different people and uh today they all siloed uh with the several bridges already up and running many of them uh yet to be built so ideally uh in the future if i have assets on one chain that that happen to be the chain where i started this happened to be the chain that my friend introduced me to where my first nft is born and then i hear about other chain with another project where i can use it i should be able to easily move it from one to another without thinking much about it so i guess in the multi-chain future ideal users shouldn't think much about where their assets are uh and they just they just interact with the multiverse uh and uh yeah and it's just all transparent for them so that's the future today today it's neither transparent nor boundless so yeah lots to be built all right cool lee i'm glad you brought up sort of this cross chain this bridge season that we've seen uh of late i think there's been a lot of talk lately about cross chain versus multi-chain i think sparked largely in part by a vitalik post last month and then that wormhole hack that followed a couple weeks thereafter um what's like that cur like i just want some comments on like sort of the current dichotomy of cross chain multi-chain a precision of language and how should we be having this conversation i'm going to put i'm going to put elizabeth from chain safe on the spot for that one since she's working with a lot of networks yeah for sure um yeah so to be honest i don't exactly know the definition of multi-chain versus cross chain i don't think any of us really know just because this is super new but from my point of view um cross chain is something more like bridging distinct chains versus multi-chain um yeah that's cross chain which is distinct bridges um and then cross chain which is more along the lines of layer two solutions um roll-ups scaling like one specific chain um with the security sort of being on one base chain in a way i'm not sure if this is everyone else's definition but this is kind of how i think of it that's cool um good times thank you the hype section i appreciate you good looking out um so yeah the thing that was interesting about the vitalik post that i thought was well that i thought was interesting was that vitalik said he was pessimistic on a cross-chain future but was very optimistic about a multi-chain future relating to some of the security strengths of a cross-chain sort of interoperability dynamic um are you seeing that in the work that you're doing uh is that the state of play that we are in right now as it relates to this multi-chain vision i guess i'm gonna put eric from avalanche on the spot on that one actually so if you want to tackle that one go ahead yeah here on avalanche um we really don't see as like one chain versus another right um for any chain to succeed nowadays you need bridges you need ways to be undoubtedly other chains um and you know that that kind of infrastructure as it gets built it's all pretty experimental right now it does add a layer another layer of risk and as dapps are considering you know starting on one chain and then moving on to another right you have to take that into account and i think when they are thinking about bridging their tokens bridging their nft you know messaging bridges you know any anything that involves more than one chain i think that's gonna that's gonna be an important factor to consider and i think a lot of dapp teams they really uh they might not put as much thought into it as i think i think they should all right elena i got to get you on the board here uh when it comes to cross chain security like how are you how is that top of mind for your work like how are you sort of making sure that we don't see another wormhole in a few weeks well the honest answer we don't because that is something that you know it's up to the bridge that is uh crossing the funds over so first of all we need to protect the bridge and second of all we need to make sure that the chain that we also relate the funds on is it decentralized enough that 51 attack of it happens our funds are still safe is it happening in the real world right now all the chains decentralized well no they're not and they probably will not be in the near future while we fighting this you know cost over decentralization or speed over decentralization the trilemma right so we focus on the decentralization and then we know that the funds of our uh people will be safe if we suffer the 51 attack but once we cross to another chain that is not decentralized well it's a big question and it's a big risk so this is kind of disaster that waiting to happen hopefully it never happened but this is something also for if denver for the hackers if you can solve this for us we're golden please do it please provide us with the solutions we rely on the community for that all right good call there good call there all right i'm going to go back to the post because i thought another really interesting thing from this cross chain multi-multi-chain metallic post was this line there really are a few separate communities with different values and it's better for them to live separately rather than fight for influence over the same thing so we have some layer ones here i think i'm gonna it's an interesting question and we have someone who's worked with a lot of layer ones and i'm going to get to the end here and she's going to be my arbiter of truth but i want to put this to each of you guys representing these various layer ones because i think it is interesting sort of the cultural aspect here so i'm going to start with alex so do you think that the values of you know near in your instance are different from those of ethereum and if so how that's an interesting question i think that generally if you if you walk between communities and look at the values a lot of values are the same so i think crypto community generally has a lot of values which is similar and uh that's one of the reasons why this venue cannot fit all the people because people people like coming to people who who think alike uh and uh um like i guess all of us here want to have privacy of data uh control over our power to transact etc there are differences in the communities right so i think some communities are more focused on creators some community more focused on device some communities are more focused on uh on various aspects of uh daos etc however i think generally all the all the layer one protocols are quite agnostic to that right so whether you choose near or kolkata or cosmos etc or ethereum they all work you can deploy nfts on all of them you can launch dials on all of them right so this is more of the communities forming themselves so i think this is exactly where uh where cross-chain future so yeah i guess i i disagree with i i don't fully agree with the italic on this i think that uh chains layer once it's efficiently a general purpose not to have those specialization and that's exactly why we need better why we need to remove boundaries so that people who are into nfts they don't have to be on a specific chain which happen to be earlier and more focused on the nft so they can they can move easily between them so they can move to a marketplace which exists on another chain which happens to be better at this particular point so if we have a dao then dao could use uh that you can participate in the down no matter on which chain you're initially coming from no matter where your assets live etc yeah all right same question to eric speaking for avalanche what are the cultural differences if any and do you kind of agree with this statement that is sort of positive by vitalik in this post yeah i think alex really hit the nail on the head when he said you know a lot of most of crypto we're all kind of built from the same dna right we all value decentralization to some to mo for the most extent uh we all value scalability as as far as the new layer ones are concerned um and i think you know with within each layer one there are you know distinct communities being built distinct ecosystems and that's really kind of the reflection i think of the difference that i think vitalik had alluded to right it's really um and i think each layer one has its kind of pros and cons right some some are better built for d5 some are better field for nft some are better built for you know kind of dallas and kind of metaverse type projects right and at avalanche here we we really try to um cover all the bases um right now we're seeing a big big growth in a d5 over the past year and we're trying to really lean in on that right but other areas can't be ignored and i think you know as each layer one develops they will have a very distinct community so when dapps are choosing to deploy on each layer one choosing a home chain to play on for for instance at first right i think they're going to really kind of look into that right look under the hood and see you know what what is that is this community really value right and that's going to be reflected in twitter post that's going to be reflected in you know blog posts different forums um and i think that's gonna be the way that you know different chains kind of develop over time all right elizabeth i'm gonna pick on you because you have a hype section first of all which is tight second of all chain safe works with a bunch of different networks so i think you have an interesting perspective on this culturally are these communities distinct do they have different values are they separate enough at this point or are they all pretty much the same uh i'm going to agree with vitalik and say yes they are distinct because yes we all share the same values by being in blockchain however the protocols themselves on both the code protocol and community level are quite distinct and that's why they're distinct protocols um like for example like polka dot um value shared security that's why there's a relay chain that all the pair chains plug into um cosmos um share um values sovereignty more which is why you're not forced to share security with some sort of relay chain like you can have your own um more distinct chain that kind of has its own security um ethereum obviously is ethereum and is just the og so yeah so i think yeah i agree with vitalik um yeah and just being in all the communities like the values are distinct as well um hard to to say exactly but it's definitely a feeling you get that um yeah every chain even ones that aren't like specifically interoperability chains such as like polka dot cosmos etc like every chain does have its own values because obviously if two chains have the exact same values why would they not just merge and become one chain like there are chains that value like privacy there are chains that value scalability there's chains that value like all sorts of things um and yeah like all yeah um that's a good answer yeah cool all right lee i'm gonna bump it down to you i mean because you know when you think about shared values right it's also about attracting developers to one chain over the other so as you think about this with harmony like what is the value proposition that harmony is looking to build as it relates to these other networks yeah i mean it's it's kind of in our name right harmony harmony for one and all but seriously i think right now the you have these distinct communities of course that happens because we're in the early days of this industry where like it's small communities of people right we we all started as like the founding team where that kind of shapes your early team early community but if five years from now you're telling me we're still in these little tribes and there's tribalism and blockchain like this entire industry would have failed to get the the world onto this technology that we that we think is web3 and can impact and transform the world so it really shouldn't be we shouldn't be sitting here five years from now having the same conversation um we should actually all coordinate as layer ones right that i don't really think of this as competition but once we you know today you don't use like the the green internet and then the blue internet and then the yellow internet like you just have this one tech uniform technology that anybody can access and anybody can use and i really hope that's the future got it and that was harmonious thank you so much uh a harmonious moment everyone all right elena i'm gonna put you on the spot as well what are the things that metas values that maybe would make it distinct from some of the other networks that people have access to build on so first of all we focus in on the web 2 world because we really believe into mass adoption and that's the way we had it it's uh our blockchain space is actually really small we have about like three percent of the population probably so the whole big world is out there and we are creating a value proposition for actually for that world while we are here all working towards that and maybe we're competing on the way but yeah we all do the same thing so i agree what what is for me just the values that we believe and that's what spike the mass adoption of course the usability people need to be able to use whatever we built and maybe at a couple of clicks of a button and without this you know private keys and all that uh difficult stuff uh so second it has to be secure it has to be fast and then it has to be like that's the value that we provide decentralized i mean otherwise why would they even go to us why would they even use us they can use their you know sql servers that they have already amazon google they already have that so our value is in the decentralization and that's what we provide and it means that's what believe we believe in and that's what we provide to the current enterprises to develop you that's why they're excited about it because they can come onto the blockchain and no one can can shut them down so that's the freedom that they will have all right i want to put elizabeth on spot again um i want to talk about sort of evm right i want to talk about evm uh maximalism right it seems like evm is like a highly evm compatible compatibility seems like a key differentiator in the market right now when it comes to the new base layers and i want to put this to you first and then work with our way down the line because we have some interesting perspectives on this one um do you think like evm compatibility is still going to be really important down the road or is that going to wane over time when it comes to people building in new new languages and all sorts of that stuff yeah that's yeah interesting question um yeah i mean i think the evm is still going to continue to be extremely popular um and yeah even a few years from now will probably still be the top kind of um like state transition type logic just because of the fact that there's been so much tooling built on it like literally for the past however many years all of us have been building off of it all the tooling like truffle smart contracts like everything is built off of it um yeah and i just think we're not just gonna suddenly decide to like throw that away and like move to awesome although like sure like going maybe if we went back in time we would love to do that but the yeah reality is that like we can't really do that um so much has been built on the evm already and will continue to be built by the fact that like um yeah all of the new layer ones are trying to put in evm compatibility so yeah gotcha yeah lee i'll just talk to you just very curious for your thoughts on evm compatibility and then i definitely want to get alex on the board for how near is approaching some of those questions yeah so so we you know we obviously are evm compatible as well and um i would say that it's really not about what i want it's it's much more about what the community wants and you know we're here to build a tech build something that users want and our users are developers and so i'm really more just like you know listening to what what the community wants and this is you guys are going to shape what we build right it's not going to be us like coming up with some new fancy programming language that's better than evm cool and so alex i mean so near what's near's view on this whole thing yeah good question so um a blockchain is one more than a couple applications right the blockchain is a ecosystem of applications and there's a massive number of applications already built in the vm so if you try to spin up a new ecosystem uh it's very if you're if your blockchain supports a vm then you can go talk to every single project they have nothing to lose if they come to you right if you can attract liquidity if you can attract them they deploy for them it's just changing one parameter in their configuration and you have a ecosystem bootstrapped if you have a new virtual machine it's significantly more effort so near by design is not an avm chain near runs wasm wasn't however has a nice property that was extremely fast and you can compile low level languages like c plus plus and rust into wasm correspondingly for any other virtual machine you can imagine it is compilable it is usually either written in c plus plus or rust so it is compilable to wasm so that's exactly what neo does mir has an evm machine which is just compiled to wasm but from perspective of a developer or a user it is completely transparent they just connect in metamask and they use it and it works like a charm right and so tomorrow if there's a new fancy vm that everybody likes it is equally easy to compile into wasm with zero changes on the protocol level right so in order for us to have a vm zero changes were made to the protocol itself uh correspondingly uh if we want to have adoption from web two people they actually do not speak solidity we have two people speak javascript right so it's very easy to compile a javascript interpreter into wasm deployment it works very fast and you can now compile contracts in javascript same same goes for python interpreter etc right and today what happens now is that if you heard of this concept of execution environments that exist that was planned of ethereum two the idea was to have different execution environments running on different shirts so that effectively exists today on any chain which uses wasm because you can compile any execution environment deploy it as a contract and create tooling for users not to think about it and use it as if it was a well execution environment so today if you want to have your own vm chain if you want to have your own evm vault nothing can be easier you just clone aurora deploy your own contract get their tooling change the contract name bam you have your own vm chain which people can just change the chain and the metamask and use it but it's entirely yours with your contracts uh with your permissions that you set etc it's significant you don't need to search for your validators you don't need to deploy your own nodes it's all running with the security of mir but you have your own ecosystem yeah i'm glad you mentioned just being able to bootstrap these communities you know you look at the tbl rankings and the only outlier there is terra all the other ones are evm compatible in terms of getting projects over at low cost and getting those users to come with them seems to be working eric i wanted to ask you a similar question from a bd perspective is that a selling point when avalanche goes out and talks to projects that may be looking to deploy on that network yeah let's say definitely uh even compatibility the west is like a low hanging fruit right um when we launched avalanche it was we had two default chains the c and x chains the c chain was even compatible the x chain was a dag um and the c chain saw just way more usage and part of it is because evm is just a little bit more mature right there's a lot more developers has a lot more tooling a lot more auditors right focus on the evm but going forward i do think that you know we are going to see a lot of a wider variety of different virtual machines um an avalanche you can deploy any number of subnets any subnet can have any any virtual machine really attached to it you can choose your validators so you have a lot of flexibility and uh near as well as all other chains are offering this as well right so i think you will see a wider variety it just takes a little bit of time right given that the evm has had like a four or five year head start got it all right we got a few more minutes left we have nine minutes left and we're gonna change up the panel uh let's try let's try to get a little spicy here all right i'm gonna throw this to lee um is there ever gonna be too many chains in a multi-chain world are we gonna see like you know like should we should we stop talking about multi-chain at some point what's your view on that okay so i guess that's a two-part question like is there will there be there will be natural selection right so it's uh it's not up to me how many chains will be it's really up to the again the developers and the users um there will probably be some amount of like critical mass right as some of these chains get bigger and it gets harder to start new chains i think there was this like moment in time in 2017 uh in 2018 where all these like scaling solutions started and now you don't see as many of them right and so like there's a there's like a there's a moment in time in this technology curve uh development where like it makes sense to start a new layer one blockchain and probably not you know we won't see that kind of boom so alex and i actually know each other from back in uh the days of bay area where we're we're hanging out at the same meet up uh and getting to know each other when we were starting uh the projects together so i think the so i think the first answer is uh there will be some natural selection on the number of chains that will end up growing and surviving and then uh i think i forgot your second part of the question yeah this is the first question the first question was better i'll stick on the first question um elizabeth how many chains is too many chains i need a i need a i need just a number 255. okay that's a big number yeah i'm going to say any chains that don't really have that many users are probably not really going to survive yeah like like um i'm sorry i forgot your name but like lee said um yeah i totally agree that there's gonna be lateral selection like basically whatever chain gets some sort of uh mass amount of users or critical mass is just gonna continue to kind of gain more users just from just having users um yeah cool um elena are you seeing chains find specializations or is it all mostly the same thing over and over again yeah i see the very interesting evolution of the chains of course we talked about the evm standard and this is just the developer standard that's for us just to making developer job easier but all the chains they have something unique in mind some you know unique value proposition and that is what's very valuable so i guess it's it's really really good that people you know go and try new things making new offers to developers and see where it goes and yeah as we see some change they just pull through and no going nowhere but other chains like like everybody that on the panel here uh you know all blooming and they have all their own community so i guess the community actually shows how good the chain is how usable it is and the value that it providing to people okay got a few more minutes left alex i'm gonna ask you this question um when will the multi-chain future be over and when will it just be the multi-chain present is there a signal tbl threshold something that you look to to figure out when the future is here no it's going to be like slowly there's no no threshold no threshold all right anyone else have thoughts on that one when will we stop having multi-chain future panels at crypto conferences i'm going to put eric on the spot for that one yeah so i think um for us right uh as part of the avalanche bd team our job is really done when our community is kind of still perpetuating and kind of builds upon itself right without our involvement um and i see ethereum has really reached this point in time where you know youth denver right it's a huge community vitality doesn't need to be involved right um so i i see that you know multichain presence really happening when it happens on multiple chains like that where each chain has a vibrant community of users of people building on it people you know putting out additional content material right and the foundation teams kind of take a step back and kind of have lesser importance i would say gotcha elizabeth i want to ask you about the cambrian explosion of ecosystem funds right we've seen a lot of investment in getting people to build on some of these green fields that these networks kind of represent at this point um do you see any chains that are doing those incentive programs better than the others and at what state do you think we're in are we still in the need to incentivize devs before incentivizing user stage or i guess that would vary by chain but curious for your thoughts on ecosystem funding yeah okay interesting question um yeah i don't personally look into ecosystem funding that much like personally um i don't know i i'm not as a dev like i'm not super motivated by how much money i'm gonna get working on something it's more how much value i think a project is gonna bring um and how much it's actually going to be used and wanted by people so i think like even if a chain doesn't really have that much value and they offer like a huge grant or fund or whatever for people to build on it like it's not gonna really attract that many devs or users in my opinion um i don't know maybe people that just want to get that big fund will work on it but yeah in the long run i don't really think there's a huge i don't know point of that gotcha us as of leave because i mean you guys have a big one i think we have three big sort of ecosystem funds on stage actually what's working for you in terms of attracting developers is it a particular type of incentive system that you are finding success in or what yeah actually for us uh you know capital is everywhere which is good uh we should have more ecosystem funds anyway and uh invest in emerging economies invest in uh people who haven't had the opportunities to be able to build in this space but for us it's really uh what we've seen that works is standardizing all of our grants so that we can give them out as fast as possible so uh every week we're giving out on average 10 grand hopefully we'll give out 50 at denver so if you find anybody in a blue uh hoodie or a t-shirt or a beanie go talk to them but it's really about the skill and making it making the grand standardized so that everyone knows like this is exactly what we're doing the team knows you guys know what you're getting and uh there's no we don't like sit around and negotiate this is not a venture capital firm like we're not here for our irr whatever whatever they have uh so it's really like getting it into your hands as fast as possible and getting it to as many people as possible and incentivizing people who have been on the fringes like in emerging economies women developers we funded actually 300 scholars just to come to east denver 200 of them were women and so that's the idea we're just going to keep keep this going as fast as we can alex i want to ask for your approach on ecosystem funding fit we got 50 grants on the table right here can you top 50 grants well it's not it's not the quantity right so so one thing we do is near has multiple entities which uh which extend grants and those entities uh they they focus on very different areas and have very different values in mind when they when they work with founders and so therefore the significantly more work towards aligning the fund uh and the founders it's usually more than just a fund we usually if we give a grant we also want to support people we want them to be part of the community right and the crypto ecosystem is very large right so if you put all the people all across the board into the same community it is going to be less helpful than concentrated uh communities that help each other around a particular application right so we have a one that is controlled on creators called human guild we have uh foundation gives a lot of grants itself we have proxima we have um aurora which gives uh grants for evm so it's it's all it's not quantity it's quality so it's all it's all around aligning on values providing value to founders all right so it's 4 20. we're gonna switch out the panel part two is about to start but first please give this wonderful panel of biddlers a big round of applause