Blockchain Operating System by Illia Polosukhin | ETHDenver 2023

[Applause] all right thank you all right well yeah first of all big thanks to the east Denver crew for putting this together it's insane amount of work so please appreciate them yeah let's give them [Applause] all right great thanks for coming here I'll uh introduce blockchain operating system the concept I'm Ilya co-founder of near protocol and CEO of pagoda and I want to start with the vision right we're all here because we believe in the same concept that we want people to own their own identity we want people to own their own assets when people turn their data and we obviously want to own their our own decisions and this is a concept of open web3 kind of crypto blockchain all of those Concepts but are we there we still have web too right most of the applications most of the stuff on my phone is still running by large corporations that where all the data all the identity belongs to this company we still need to use banking account where the money actually sits in the bank and they do whatever they want with it they have their own kind of Silent identities right like the identity you have in one app doesn't really link to it and then to another app the reputation you build in Uber doesn't translate to reputation lift the you know the bank account don't really link together either and like moving between them switching costs is really high and car these companies have control over what features you can use what fees they charge they can always block account you know remove you do something and at the end there's centralized parties they keep getting attacked the data getting leaked they misuse the data you know people make mistakes because they have all of this kind of in one place now we'll hear you know it's been going for a while this is my fifth uh East Denver so we're all building cool stuff right there's a lot of cool blockchain technology and I have like if you have three of this you have a bingo so in the in your pitch deck uh but the point is like we're aiming to bring this to mass adoption it may mean to bring this to users across the world but we don't really have like clear plan right there's like there's lots of Google blockchain tech dot dot dot you know figure it out 1 billion users and the reality is until now we still have a lot of the same problems we have a disjoint experiences we have you know different blockchains where you have your different reputations as well we have kind of networks and and applications that are like not really integrating between each other you have applications themselves running centralized servers right that you to so if you want to access a smart contract they still need to go to some centralized server and that centralized server can get attacked it leaks data there's logs of everything you're doing that don't belong to you you have you know this identities problem like come how many like wallets you have and how many different accounts you have and you still don't have a set of common services that we really get used to in web 2 where you can search across all the things you can uh you know get notifications about this thing that going on in in the platform so like until right now web 3 has been extremely disjointed not very connected experience that actually creates more and more separation as we go and as we launch more and more uh different Technologies so what we want to introduce is the concept of blockchain operating system it's a common layer for browsing and discovering open web experiences and it's compatible with any blockchain it unites the identity the applications across all the blockchains allows the user to have their own data and own identity assets belonging to them being able to access them without really needing to know which blockchain works where it is and how it's all linked together and so one thing you need to remember it's near is the bus and why why is this because we've from the start been building a lot of pieces to not just build the blockchain but actually create a really simple onboarding we've been focusing on creating developer tooling that enables everyone to build versatile applications and on top of it we're adding Now search and Discovery flexible capabilities we're adding social and notifications kind of all of the functionality that we're used to when we're talking about lab2 platforms right you go to Twitter imagine Twitter without notifications and search what are you going to do this is how web3 right now looks like and so the New Concept that we're adding is composable apps it's idea that instead of just kind of having you know websites siled across you want having one place where all of the Unchained experiences can come in how does this work well so blockchain operating system has a tech stack obviously on the you know security data availability blockchain layer is where you know near protocol ethereum layer twos other blockchains sit there's a data platform that unites all this data across all these blockchains in the format that applications can use right right now it's dancer in fewer through indexers through pagodas to various ways so we're creating a protocol for for this to kind of unite the data platform and finally we're launching a new kind of component called discovery which is a composable front end and I'll show you how it looks and so what it allows to do is to have this components themselves the front ends the pieces of the front end that connects blockchain and user on chain and kind of recomposable for you when you're browsing uh the experiences you don't need to have kind of a specific you know website where only there the front end is accessible it's accessible through any Gateway you can you know in the future run a local node event or local application or any other way to access this so why is near protocol doing this well this was always our vision and to achieve this Vision we build the protocol to make sure it's fast because you don't want to you know get users to really wait for like saving front ends interactive is this you know if we're talking about social like 12 seconds it's not very realistic it needs to scale it needs to have you know ability to scale to billions of users which the only way is to do sharding and finally to make this on board impossible you really need to have a flexible account model and so we have various Key Management tools we have meta transactions we have guest accounts we have fast authentication with Biometrics all of this coming together to truly enable blockchain operating system so I mentioned you have a blockchain over your system in the core but you have all of these places you can access it from right so near.org will be kind of the Gateway we're launching a proximity Labs one of the companies in the ecosystem launched a D5 Hub and I'll show you how it looks we have wallets that can integrate this we have even browsers that can actually support near column slash to look this up directly from the blockchain and it is actually multi-chain what this means is you can use Smart contracts from any chain you have a data abstraction layer decentralized front ends and any wallet that can access it and kind of this connects really all of this ecosystems into one place for the users to find discover and interact with it and the idea is that operating system really handles kind of the identity management the connectivity the bridging remote accounts and routing and you as a developer can just use different parts ideally you as a developer are able to build applications that span multiple blockchains and you still don't have any Reliance on centralized infrastructure you can always switch from one data provider to another you can switch from one gateway to another and you can always have you know even a switch between blockchains so how does this look like so we launched yesterday Alpha that near the Dork this is kind of our Alpha experience for near specifically it it is a developer Social Network right now starting kind of bootstrapping this um with developers building first applications it has a social features already it has some games it has kind of news experiences people so you can start navigating it uh the idea is it's mobile friendly it's mobile kind of focused because we believe more and more users will be coming to this on one side and obviously developer on a desktop we already have over 2 000 people joining it and we have over 18 1800 components built right of various levels like everything from an nft rendering component up to a full like laser game you can always look at at any point which component you're looking at which exact uh kind of application you you are at and you can go and look up the information who built it uh watch description so again you don't need to rely that this is like built by someone running centralized you can always look up where it is and more importantly you can look at the code you can actually access the code look what is actually being rendered for you and what dependencies that have so like you know what I don't like this home screen I want something else you can Fork it and you can start you know modifying it or maybe you can switch the feed to something else all of this is like really available for developers and for users more and more no code experiences will be available as well so already you can switch pretty much the right panel without any code just by selecting what you want there it comes in with all kind of there's a lot of GitHub type features because it's on chain everything is stored on chain and so you can actually see the commit history of this component if you don't like what the front end is changing to you can always go back Fork it off modify it or keep it the old version and use it so the idea is like you now have in control what exact experience you have and has developing in control of all of the things that you depend on and can provide the experience you want so it kind of comes together this developer end user experience in one place and that's why we call it operating system because kind of operating systems provide this kind of abstraction over hardware and in this case blockchains are Hardware they provide a common set of services like search notifications you know social Etc and they give developers you know set of apis that they can just use and not think about it and for users they create this platform where you can find these applications and start experiencing them so this is example of like 4K and component and starting to hack on it and you can always you know start searching finding uh various things so one thing to show is somebody have built a game inside this platform it's called laser chess I invite everyone to play it because it's kind of cool I still have not won our computer um and so the idea is you can actually build really complex experiences directly embedded into this all the users who are looking for for example game will find it you'll get initial user base right away and you have other developers who can mod it and modify it and start playing with it so like you know all this vision of composable gaming is coming together here so it is a two-sided market and you know there's developers and users developers building applications and users starting to experience and and uh on board and obviously today right with Alpha we're focusing on developers and super fans crypto crypto community to really start kind of creating forking you know and composing this experiences to build something really interesting right because we have all this like bits and pieces of you know Financial stack of gaming of uh like Dows and governance but it's all all over the place right there's no sync like place where you can come in and see like what are the different dials that exist or between all the chains what are the different Financial kind of product you can do when you experience this so this is what we're doing now and kind of as this matures will have you know all those gateways like near the dorg which provide users their end kind of uh like experiences that they're actually looking for is earnings so micro tasks so Commerce it's you know access to finance wherever you are it's complex apps that that kind of putting all of the species together it's you know Unstoppable chats and games so where is Denver it's ethereum conference and so I mentioned any blockchain so here's example of a Lido app on this on the same platform I'm I'm connected with my metamask and you know you can interact with this app directly from here so this just shows you you can build light application and you can go in same thing look at source code and start hacking on it you can modify the address you can switch it for example from working on ethereum to polygon and you can you know completely change it to for example do something else now there's another one uh somebody from a proximity team has built a Canto example as well for Canter swab so again you connect with your metamask and you can interact with Canter so the idea is like it's that easy to start like building on this and interacting and so we have twenty thousand dollars worth of boundaries to build ethereum experiences in this platform so if you go to boss.gg this is kind of the where you can find more about the hackathon you can click on Lida to see the example and you can go in the menu and see the source code in forkit so twenty thousand dollars versus bounties any ethereum project build the front end start hacking as soon as you do that other developers will see it they can start modifying it so you can kind of entering this open source phase of front ends so here's a link for getting some near to actually hack all those components I invite everyone who is a hacking uh at East Denver to to grab that so I just want to kind of finish on the on this idea right so near has started as a blockchain but it's not just a blockchain right we've have built web3 identity through kind of a extensible account model we have a lot of developer tooling across the Spectrum we just launched JavaScript SDK V1 which means you can use it for any use case we have multi-chain interpretability between auroras that allows to run evm contracts Rainbow Bridge that connects to ethereum in a trustless way we have fast on boarding coming that allows to use face ID fingerprint to create an account without users ever seeing the seed phrases we have now social graph that allows you to build on top of it and create really rich experiences we have now composable front ends that allows you to create extremely kind of you know fast experience from Max from and I'm not a really good front engineer but for me building on this has been actually faster than any other frontal experience because you can kind of pull the pieces that already exist really quickly you can see how it works and you don't need to care about scaffolding and finally it's still a blockchain protocol underneath that powers a lot of this but there's all the other blockchain protocols connecting to this and that's what we call blockchain operating system thank you [Applause]