#199 Peter Czaban: Polkadot – The Internet of Blockchain Networks

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought you by legend and the legend NOS half peace of mind and knowing your private keys are protected by industry standard physical security go to ledger wall comm to learn more and buy shape-shift I owe the easiest fastest and most secure way to swap your digital assets don't run the risk of leaving your funds on a centralized exchange visits shapeshifter IO to get started hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the

technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is Sebastian Cujo and I'm mayor today we are talking to Peter Chava co-founder of the polka-dot project bull karate is an interesting project that is pioneering how an Internet of blockchains would work or how many block chains would work together Peter pleased to welcome you on the show hi guys so before we start talking about Punk Arad tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be interested in this space so I've been interested in this space since the

university time I first I mostly did some agora the algorithmic trading of Bitcoin because I was mostly interested in machine learning but then I notice all the different currencies popping up such as peercoin prime coin and so on and then I got a little bit more into the into the space being interested in the protocols went to a number of hero meetups in London and then after university I decided to go more into the space and joint priority technologies you have to build some protocols and the centralized

stuff and at parity I've been mostly working on that consensus algorithms and and generally contributing to to the priority code base so can you tell us a bit about Lamia I'm sure most listeners will have heard of parity and some may even downloaded the parody the pair of the wallet can you tell us a bit about parity you know what what would you do at parity and you know was the goal of the company yeah so we make one of the most use Hulme clients and which is we try to make it as performant and as

usable as possible but in general we also built other decentralized technologies such as whisper and and now we are getting involved in in other projects such as polka dots and then building also enterprise type theorem applications with proof of authority and in general building technologies that will enable people to build the centralized applications fantastic and so the team it's generally based in London or are you sort of spread out across the world how was the team look like so the team is pretty spread out we

have some people most people in Berlin but I'm based in London and we have a number of people in different places but mostly coalescing around Berlin cool so let's let's jump into polka dot tell us about give us a give us a high-level overview of the polka dot project and what shortcomings you saw in the community that led to it it's being supported now by by the web 3 foundation which hopefully we'll get to talk more about a bit later but basically we we notice and a particular phenomenon in the in the in the blockchain space we

saw that there have been a number of different block chains starting to appear both in the public space and consortium private blockchains so the reason for for most public block chains is that they want to introduce some kind of a new feature so z-cars wanted to introduce a new type of cryptography in order to enable privacy or Tesla's wants to make a new blockchain to make formal verification easier and and let's say wave maker has a blockchain that makes handing tokens very very easy so so in in a public space is mostly driven by

functionality then then in the in the private space it's mostly driven so different consortium banks and so on want to make their own block chains because for instance transaction fees are too high on the on the public network some of the clients that we had the parity couldn't run run stuff on the public network because they were limited by the fees the throughput of the network is not there sometimes and also also some privacy features which potentially could be there on the public chain but are not there yet but they need it right now so but there are two main issues with this sort of approach of adding new

chains first of all all those different chains cannot communicate with each other so at first you know we thought that that the blockchain a blockchain may be or block chains could could connect everyone together and then enable them in to interact in a trust less manner but now when we start building those block chains and we don't have a trust less way to make them interact than the native it's a purpose and second of all the each blockchain has to be secured separately so we with with Bitcoin Bitcoin a six you secure but now if you add another chain that has different features that

we need to gather a new set of miners or a new set of staking parties if it's proof of stake to secure that chain because otherwise it would be when the secured and the existing was so those are the kind of two main motivation the the they in lack of interaction and the sort of disparate security so polka-dot aims to solve this by providing two trustee transactions and pull security so that food security and transferee transactions are provided by the relay chain we can get into and and then we have different power chains or different bridge chains that provide varying functionality and varying kind of

capabilities for the network so I mean blockchain interoperability is a topic that we've covered at length here on the show we've had Definity on we've talked about cosmos we've also talked about about polka dot and a previous episode about mail and port but where we spent a significant amount of time and polka dot and the way you describe it is well what's desirable is or at least what you know from the standpoint of a polka dot is for blockchains to be able to interoperate and so in this sense blockchain should be able to talk to each other in in some form of fashion and that there is a another sort of

undesirable side effect of having multiple block chains and multiple consensus models operating on each of those block chains independently and that is that each of those block chains need to secure the data independently of each other and we can't sort of pool resources or have sort of a global consensus mechanism as a service sort of thing is is that a good way of describing so the high-level thesis of polka dot yeah two main points and of lots of other things fall out of it so of course we could you could argue that multiple chains give you scalability but but now this scalability actually makes

sense because because you know just adding your chains kind of scale you know I just adds new new entities rather than actually scales that that's the network that called a single community so I think I can sort of see the the value in having this sort of a consensus mechanism as a service right if you're gonna have multiple block chains and each of those block chains might have different functionality different features even different types of users and maybe we can get into some of that right like you know this chain over here might be what you would consider a public blockchain while another chain might be restricted to some sort of consortium or something like that but in terms of interoperability you know to

block chains talking to one another or sending data or sending transactions from one another to one another can you sort of talk about some of the applications where this would be desirable yeah absolutely so so of course we can we have a lot of capabilities for us on material but but as we see for instance different chains being made in the energy sector where where there might be I if a blockchain that handles trading of energy and has certain permissioning features and so on where that particular blockchain right now cannot use that

different facilities that are there on the public chain so for instance if there is a there is a certification algorithm certification contract on the on the main chain or there is some token on the main chain this this this energy sector chain cannot make use of it and communication for instance let's say you want to you want to pay for your electric car with with with US dollars and there is already a fully collateralized token on the main net then you could for instance pay with that with that token on the on the on the energy sector chain as well or if there is a Z cash like chain for

instance the cash is great at providing privacy but now we have we have different ICS on the on the etherium chain and people cannot leverage this privacy for for aterial with polka-dot what we could have is a is a Z cars like chain that has those privacy features and a more general chain like an e theorem chain that where there is a contract that has an IC o---- and then if someone wants to contribute in an anonymous way they could they could send a transaction which goes through the zika chain in order to anonymize and then and goes into the into the sale contract on the issue like chain

basically anywhere where there are some very varying capabilities on different power chains or different bridge chains you can you can have one chain leverage the capabilities of the other chain and vice versa so you're using these words like lily chain and para chains of just explained to us like the overall architecture of the polka-dot network yeah absolutely so so the pocket of the network at its core consists of of the relay chain which is the chain that relays their messages and

provides consensus to all the different chains and then there are para tanks and then often what we also distinguish which could be a another type of para chain which are breached chains so chains that are independent but yet are connected to the polka dot polka dot network so para chains are our fully reliant on the relay chain for it to provide the consensus to them so basically they can have all sorts of different characteristics there might be a see cache like para chain or a theorem like power chain or tells us like power chain or some other type of power chain

so those are the things that actually provide the functionality really chained and holds them and enables validators to to know how to validate those different chains and ensures that they can communicate with each other and then they're there as though those British bridged Chase so connected via bridges which which do not really rely on the on the polka dot network to provide that consensus so for instance something like ithi room already has its own minor network or something like Bitcoin and it doesn't need any other consent requirement it just needs this ability to communicate so in this case there are kind of less tightly coupled and they

are also possible so those are the kind of main structural elements and would there be an incentive or would it be possible I mean outside of you know community and governance issues to port an existing chain like Bitcoin or aetherium to use the the the polka dot of consensus as a service model yeah absolutely absolutely so so probably probably one of the first race on the Polka Dot Network will be a probably a a probably a slightly different chain which is also very

general purpose so it will be based on webassembly rather than on EDM but then but then also one of the first power chains could be an easy room like para chain which is basically identical from the functional perspective to a cereal but is kind of directly plugged into a pocket so you could even take a state snapshot of the of the issue of network and put it on on focus so and of course one of the also one of the first bridges that that we are already working on would be connecting would be connecting the actual issue of network to all cut out this episode of epicenter is brought to

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calm and get your ledger nano s today we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter so from the outside it looks this description of day being like this central deleting and then which isn't you can think of it as a hub and then these para chains which are like the spokes of the network like this this sort of design pattern has occurred people like before in this space in the form of the idea of side chains right so even inside chains or a lot of proponents were saying is that there would be Bitcoin which is nice sort of hub and then there are these side chains which would be like spokes each of these

side chains could have like different functionality but then people could move like Bitcoin from the central chain to the side chain and then do some specialized transactions there like anonymizing transactions etc and then go back to the main Bitcoin chain later so so in the in this case that the main like there is a few differences first of all an important part is to make it very general so basically any sort of data can be transferred between the chains it's not only balances of tokens that can be that can be moved across and second of all is this is this validation and pull security which which makes it

possible to to like that the validation of the of all the power chains is part of the of the protocol it's of which is very important ok so let's let's sort of walk through how how this validation would work in order to build to maintain the polka dot network there is a number of different roles that have have to be fulfilled that the relay chain is maintained maintained by the validators primarily which are heavily heavily bonded parties they can they can gather steak from from the community in the form of nominators

in and they perform the active role in the in the in the relation consensus mechanism but in order to be able to have multiple parishes and support multiple power trains or there are a few other roles so there are also Co laters and Co laters also perform a role of a fisherman which have been something that has been mentioned in folk art paper so so collectors are basically responsible there are a little bit as like current miners so they are responsible for sitting on a particular chain gathering

up the transactions and then and then proposing proposing blocks on that on that particular power chain so the end of validators when they are assigned to a particular power chain so on each on each block of the relay chain a different group of validators gets assigned to a different era chain and then they have to receive the candidate blocks from the collectors perform validation then broadcasts and some statements and then then the validators come together in order to to canonicalize

a set of a set of power chain blocks on the on the relay chain so there are validators and collectors are the main roles collectors or so two fishermen Inc which is basically looking at the death hurricane blocks that get included and making sure that they are that they are valid and they are able to submit proofs of invalidity if that's not the case which can lead to to removing bonds and and then validators also somewhat function as fishermen reporting invalid actions in the consensus process and

yeah and that's those are that the main roles and basically because because we can have lots of different power chains and with different different state machines because because decorators don't actually need to make they only need to maintain a node for that particular Karachi and validators don't need to provide the need to run notes for all the different color chains because they are getting light proofs so so basically state transition proofs from Decca laters which do not require them to maintain the database and validate every single block on a particular car chain so we are able to paralyze this process of of generating state transition proofs

across all those different collectors which makes it possible to have lots of different chains in parallel basically but at the same time then then we come to the validators and in the end we end up with with a global consensus that enables us to then relay messages in a trusted way between arbitrary data messages between the different chains so in effect we have the central chain which is really chain that chain has its own token and that token is used for the selection of validators yeah so that's a bonding token use for bonding and for a governance of then of the network of the airport so this is central to central chain and central token is used for the

selection of parties a set of parties that are going to validate not only the central chain but also all of these side chains or bearer chains right and now the I guess the central challenge here is when there's I say that one side will change but there is like say ten different para chains then the problem for these validators is that they would if they want to validate all of the side chains then they would start to be full nodes to all of these chains and like this all of nanoscale that that has I'm scaling and it listen to all of the transactions and compose blocks and stuff so in order to like remove this

burden of being a full node on on all of these side chains if I'm a validator on the main chain I have this other group of parties that are calculators that will basically take away the burden of me needing to have a full node listen to transactions and compost blocks yeah exactly and and what funny Gators have to do so the dances also can go into a little bit how would you add a new power chain so so basically the relay chain as as if you want to add a new power chain you need to write the state transition validation logic

so you basically write a letter write a little program that is able to validate proofs from a particular power chain and then this this program is lit written compared to web web assembly so so it's a little program that every validator can run so and anyone can basically run it and they given that program and they can judge if a if a state-transition proof that has been supplied by a collector is valid or not and you know in case of for is in case of a block chains because the state machine is deterministic we can we can with absolute certainty say you know this

this state transition proof is valid or not valid so it just returns good or not good and then validators from that now to you know how to treat that should they include it in the consensus process moment so it will be a little bit like deploying like a little bit like the playing a contract now a new paradigm so assume like I am the validator of the main chain right session is another validator and like there's like 50 50 of us and we have all like four moves of the main dealer chain and now you now we have like 10 para jeans and you are d co later of supply chain 7 so as you may let's say less the block the block time

is like 2 seconds or something 2 seconds later you send me a block like saying okay according to you this is the next block do I need to trust you in any way that now because so so what I actually get so normally if I just get that block then I wouldn't be able to judge if it's correct or not what what really needs to be supplied is a state-transition proof so basically it's a like a light client proof so it basically tells you every accolade or everything they need to know all the parts of the state and whatever happens in order for the validator to judge it as correct or not so they don't need to trust the collector at all in

order to validate it they just look on the real a chain look at this logic for this particular para train execute this logic and and then they see is it good or not good but suppose let's say the block you sent has like 100 transactions I do need to run all of these 100 transactions on my end so I have the state of the ledger before these 100 transactions and now you send me the block with these 100 transactions and the state after executing this 100 transactions or execution but I do need to run all of these transactions myself as a validator in order to be sure that this block is valid yeah but about what

I don't need to do is I don't need to do it for every single block I can't be just kind of randomly picked oh now now at this book you are task we're checking this proof and I don't need to know anything the only thing I need to know is be provided this this proof in order to check it so so now like once I get once I get one of these blocks from you like and I and I've sort of verified that that block is correct or in the second case may be trusted that that block is going so when I'm choosing blocks randomly for checking I am trusting you for some blocks and in some other blocks I am actually very fine then I as a manager I take that

block and with the other group of validators I sort of finalize that block on behalf yeah exactly so so so there is two types of statements that are broadcasted on the network one type of statement is valid ET statement so basically a validator says yeah I got this blog and I verified it and I say it's valid and of course if someone then says it's invalid and it can be easily proven and then they can be penalized so it's very important for the validators to make sure that the statements they make are actually good valid and then and then another type of statement is

just I've seen this block it's it's floating around it's available to me and this kind of discount kind of tells other validators which blocks which valid blocks they might want to prefer to other valid blocks because because they are kind of more more validators are claiming that it's actually available and it's actually floating around around the network and given those two criteria then then whoever is assigned to be a primary or proposal on this on the relay chain is able to to then assemble this this list of parroting blocks that should be that

should be included and then and then once that's done then a normal kind of consensus process can can continue from there okay okay so in effect what it is though this is allowing you to do is like for the for us the set of validators of the main chain it is allowing us to leverage the effect efforts of all of these Co letters in order to give like scalability to this yeah exactly the neighbors has to paralyze this this state construction it does it does enable certain level of of scalability which is definitely beyond something that that we have right now and who have

for a while but but we we are thinking about about doing things such as second order real a chains so basically para chains which function as real a chains which enable us to paralyze the action even more of the protocol so then you could have even more scalability out of that but that's that's a difficult topic so let's talk about scalability a little bit in the white paper you mentioned and this is sort of one of the the core premises of a polka dot is that in order to achieve scalability one of the one of the ways that we can do that is to separate

consensus and the state change or validity can you explain why a block chain that combines those two functionalities is unable to scale in your opinion there's two things so when when we when we run a block chain that the primary concern is for all the state transition to be to be valid so we don't want any any transaction that came come out of zero balance accounts and things like that to be in our chain but but given given the state transition rules we still can have a large number of different

Cheng's so then once we once we had this large family of different possible histories we need to choose just a single history out of all of those and then this is you can call it canonicalization or or coming to consensus over the state of the network or over the chain and and basically that the thing is that validity of a particular blockchain is is completely objective so to a certain degree or because because given given a particular implementation that that can check if a

blockchain is valid it will always give the same output there can be no disagreement and if there is disagreement then it can be proven that like who is that the misbehaving party basically or who is who is the party that is not not following that protocol so so this validity checking can become like it can be done by as many people as as we want and they can be all providing us with lots of information about this variety and the second thing is picking among all those valid solutions is which which has to be done in some in in by communicating between communication

between different parties so for instance I consensus algorithm such as in tender meat or pbft requires lots of lots of few runs of communication between different nodes in order to figure out what is that the canonical chain or even with with Bitcoin or ATM you could I argue that the confirmation time is basically the time for for for the network to agree on a particular chain because basically with every issued block a particular miner communicates to other people that they trust the chain that is below that block or they think it's canonical China belongs a block so basically by splitting splitting their two and not

not trying to have everyone that is participating in the consensus also validating stuff and the other way around also not everyone validating having to participate in consensus we can we can have this tight group of people that can actually communicate because the communication scales pretty badly but a much larger group of people that validate stuff so in this case all the collectors are looking at all the blocks on all the different era chains and checking their validity Wow you have a smaller group of validators that are only responsible for doing the actual communication and validation which scales pretty badly to two large numbers okay and so talking about some things in

a more practical sense in a polka dot world so let's let's imagine say like you know in five to ten years from now you know polka dot is a massive massively successful network there are you know hundreds if not thousands of pair chains using the polka dot consensus and and validator spouting transactions from those pair of chains you know bitcoin poured it over and now bitcoin is using that consensus and you know we can wishful thinking right now so what would that look like in practice who would so where where would the you know say the Bitcoin blockchain where would the blocks be stored the transactions would they be stored with

the pair chain users or are the validators or perhaps or perhaps the the co-leaders storing the the finality the blocks yeah so most users would actually have clients that synchronized that they rely chain and then if they want to look at any sort of information or want to want to submit transaction on the transactions on the powertrain there will be a light client protocol that will enable them to fetch their relevant bits that kind of kind of the relay chain so they would they would be able to access all the different powertrains at the same time

but but actually who would be providing their full notes on all the different powertrains it would be the decorators so for them it is necessary in order to provide to provide valid state transition proofs it's necessary for them to maintain State and also maintain the potentially history of that of that para chain so they would be you know they could be providing both the proofs and for for for users and for the validators okay so the co leaders that are sort of sitting that are the half full nodes are relaying blocks and storing the blockchain for that pair

chain so that your instance like the Bitcoin blockchain users don't have to store or like the you know the Polka Dot etherium implementation and the validators in the in the the network I don't have to store everything from all of the different pair of chains that are on yeah they don't have to store anything they just listen to to network messages do some computation and reply to those messages okay and what is the incentive for the collator so i can you talk about the incentive mechanisms for validators co-leaders denominators like all the different participants do they all hold staking tokens do they all stake something or yeah so a lot of it is actually pretty flexible in the in

that protocol so for instance when we think about when we think about why would why would the validators decide to add a parrot chain or not one of the reasons might be because simply this parrot chain provides some utility to that to the network as a whole and because they they hold a lot of stake in the in the network and they use it potentially as well you know they won't just want to add that power chain or maybe maybe the power chain proposes a one-of fee to the to the validators for for adding it or any other or maybe some sort of sharing of the transaction fees that are

happening on that particular project so so a mechanism kind of for reward can be can be can be anything for for validators thanks to the fact that they are staking their the dot tokens are not getting diluted on the network so that's the that's a primary thing and and then there might be some additional mechanisms where they are able to actually manage some of the some of the issuance of the of the token on the relay chain as well for the validators and and of course they are penalized for for for invalid actions as it is usual

improve of stake for collectors it can also vary like most of the time they will most likely be rewarded with that with the transaction fees because they are the ones to include or not include transactions so so they are the ones that should be you know at least route through that the rewards will be going through that for the transaction so just like miners but but they could be provided also additional additional rewards especially because they maintain full notes on the on the fara chain they will be provided services to light clients and and other things like that and as for the stake it might be that

that the validators because they do want to have they don't want to have any valid proof in valid proofs being provided they can either make use of a reputation system or they might actually require the collator to to to hold some some stake in them or or in the network as how in order to to to be considered as I as a collector so regarding all of these incentive structures so my impression is like like one of the things that seems to be lacking in the polaroid paper is a very defined incentive model right so what what is the current state for for

these incentives incentive structures are you going to propose like one one particular incentive structure or are you going to leave it open for the market to discover what I mean here is like for example the incentive structure for Co laters this sort of seems quite quite open at this time that would be definitely needs to be there other needs to be at least one one incentive mechanism well I think I think a reasonable one is to have colliders to be to be given the transaction fees the validator simply be be the ones that that that received issuance on the on

the on the relay chain and that's that that's the simplest thing and of course any sort of future men or invalidity proof submission is first of all it requires a small small bond to be submitted so that you can expand the network with invalidity proofs and then there is a large reward for for providing any any proof of invalidity and those are those are that's the kind of simple scheme I'm just saying that it's it's important just as the consensus americanese estate validation it's also important to leave leave the instant disposition open because we want

to keep it fairly fairly minimal what sort of things are specified and imposed by the protocol so that it's flexible and can adapt into the future and only specifies the the very minimum of things but of course we need to win to have at least one set of kind of you know at least one pair change so anyone someone can use it at least one incentivization mechanism yet the one that I mentioned is a good contender this episode is brought to you by shape-shift the world's leading trustless little-ass exchange quickly swap between dozens of leading cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin

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shape-shift is so the get started visits shape-shift I owe and start trading and we'd like to thank shape-shift for their support of epicenter can you talk about the consensus algorithm in polkadot what which consensus algorithm will you be using is it sort of an off-the-shelf algorithm or something that you've developed internally so so really in priority is that consensus is there is a pretty good abstraction or division between between the state machine and that consensus mechanism so so it's pretty easy to swap out what what kind of consensus is being used in a particular situation we are still going

back and forth between something something that requires more messaging and has more of an instant finalities or something like ppfd and something that is a bit more delayed in finality or you could say as asynchronous in some way where we're actually blocks can be released released just as in proof-of-work sequentially and then and then after a while after a while that particular chain becomes final given the blocks that have been issued on top of that particular chain which

makes it possible to have much less communication between the nodes but at the same time delays the finality so so that I think that the consensus that we are converging on now is is a is a is that consensus we're a bit similar again to something like proof of word or maybe you're familiar with our accountants Asst that is implemented in parity where where where they're their blocks are being issued without any negotiation between validators but then but then as the as the blockchain grows the validators can issue can sign off on particular chains ahead of time so so

normally they would only sign off once once the new book they release a block on that particular chain by in kind of confirm that this chain is good that I'm building up but now they will be also in addition to that be able to issue some statements about about the chain to kind of finalize it ahead of time so it will be kind of optimistically releasing blocks and then trying to also as soon as possible finalize them so in some cases the finalization would take a bit longer or a bit shorter but you'll be always sure that once it's finalized it's finalized so no probabilistic finality like in proof of work but at the same time less work to be done than with something like tender means where

you need to have two rounds of messaging in order to agree on a block before it's being released so is this another version of practical Byzantine fault tolerance or is it like a completely different consensus mechanism it's it's differences all of that practical present in the photo Russ stuff always kind of it's always instant finality so basically you know every every block is treated as a separate kind of consensus issue rather than something like nakamoto consensus where you you know really the whole chain is treated as a as a kind of eventual consensus issue so so it kind of draws

from the from both of those things by kind of achieving finality only once once the kind of traditional eft conditions are met but at the same time being a little bit more lenient in a way such as nakamoto consensus by allowing blocks to be built you know without without having to agree on every single block ahead of time can you repeat the name of this consensus algorithm it's not anything so it's a so you can have a look at era which is in parity right now and then you can look at PFT and you know so I'm working on

prototyping it right now and you know we'll be releasing more information hopefully getting a community involved in some of the research work as well okay so for Cordy project is inventing both a new consensus mechanism and a mechanism for so that might not be actually the case we could we could you know it could be start working straight away with something like tender mint or with something you know like our I would just just want to make it you know as good as possible and if we think there is some kind of nice way to improve it and we will that the way it will be built it would be upgradable so again

this is just one example strategy that that we are providing for the for the validators to communicate with each other while actually the the mechanism will be described in in the in the logic that is on the relation that can be changed as the time goes on so it's a little bit maybe yeah akin to what yeah I think that the definite is something like Casper for instance also also the aim is to have that implemented as contracts so what's the polka dot network is launched I guess the assumption is that there

will be developers that will want to build pair of chains for on top of polka dot so for instance one could imagine a Z cash implementation on polka dot Ana theorem implementation on polka dot or even any type of blockchain really now would it be possible and how would this work if Bitcoin or or the existing if the urine blockchain or the existing Z cast blockchain would want to interact and transact with these sort of natively compatible polka dot the relay chains or

a pair change sorry so there's for the existing chains there will be those bridges as which I was talking about before and they each each bridge is will be a bit different for for each for each kind of existing chain there they will have number of similarities but what each anchor which has to be treated separately and basically for forty theorem it will be fairly straightforward so there will be a particular contract on the theorem network that that would be like a breakout contract which enables he theorem contracts to issue messages onto

the polka dot network and then communicate with with other with para chains on the polka dot network with with Bitcoin it will require some protocol alteration so in particular snore signatures which are actually on the roll map of the of the Bitcoin project so so it might be that that would be implemented for other chains it all depends on the particular chain what sort of capabilities it has but but there will be usually some some account or a contract that enables you to to issue messages out of that part chain and then the messages that are being

received will be injected as simply as transactions into that particular purchase so any other part chain will be able to construct a a transaction that then is issued on that part chain and of course you know another way is just to simply you know we'll be speaking with the card company to for instance implement a implemented para chain with with similar capabilities that is more tightly coupled with polka dot something you know you can leverage the same functionality if you are not actually very tied to to some that independent chain so what I was thinking about something earlier now I want to bring it

up as at this point and that is sort of a the economic the economics at play in in block chains and so if you think about the the network effects that are required for blockchain to be successful that is very much dependent on that blockchain sort of living in a silo as opposed to another one so if Bitcoin is very successful it's because a lot of people using it there is a security model that is those robust and that is trusted and people are building applications and businesses and things on top of that and that's very much true for aetherium as well and and they sort of compete in their own in their separate silos but as soon as you create an interoperability layer my feeling is

that some of those assumptions kind of go away so if all of a sudden we have a an ethereal implementation on polka dot and that implementation provides the exact same features as aetherium and all these Bachchan's can enter with each other that there would be some consequences to sort of how we perceive the value of these of these block chains I want to know if you if you if you thought about this if you agree with this and you know how do you think this new ecosystem will play out yeah I think I think it's a good point like a lot of a lot of momentum behind the blockchain

space is due to those effects I think I think of course there will be one effect which is you know there really chain by itself doesn't have any functionalities already you know ability adding the capabilities of the different power chain will will make people want to use polka dot and will make it kind of you know the polka dot itself will be will become something something that is that is interesting to people and and they want to potentially get involved with so so that just a community will be much bigger it will consist of lots of sub

communities that kind of all try to try to work on this kind of common network hopefully the other thing is that I think I think it's true of many different industries and and many different issues kind of many different projects in the world in general where you know of course by by opening yourself up you do give give up some stuff but at the same time you are able to leverage if there is a group of people it's like prisoner's dilemma or in general some game theoretic dilemma where you have a group of people that

open themselves up then then the sum of all those all those different things is hopefully much bigger than than any single one of those things so so in general I think I think hopefully polka dot will kind of unlock this and and and make everyone better off by being part of the of the network both from the functionality perspective you know you was still like an ethereal a lot of a lot of the tokens that are being issued don't create actually a new blockchain that right now they create different platforms that are running on top of the blockchain you know you don't really need all those kind of fundamental

different protocols and it's yet - you know it's yet to be seen how much utility is you know up to a certain case that is this incentives incentive will be there in the early days but once p1 once we we need to have some applications on the particular power chain then then then maybe some of those completely separate chains walk fall flat and when we actually deliver much well while polka-dot will be hopefully very fully featured able to provide everything that is needed for someone to build a good decentralized application so one question I had is on a high level like polka dot seems to be like part of

this this this this next wave of blockchain protocols which can be called like Internet of blockchains in some form but like many different block chains in turn operating in some way and giving like function like a total set of functionality is much bigger than current block chains can ever give so another another project in this space is cosmos right so like tell us how polka dot and cosmos are different yeah for sure so so first of all I think that kind of from a more general perspective polka dot is designed to be pretty low

level very generic so so when one outcome of that is that that the transactions that can be related between different chains can contain any sort of data there are not - just token transfers and it's very important for us not to not to make that not to impose that it's supposed to be on the tokens you will be we already see some certification contracts let's say or or or maybe some identity services popping up and although all of those require general data transfer and we'll see what comes out later so so the kind of general messaging focus something that Paul polka-dot brings in second of

all this this ability to have basically any sort of so there are two things are linked at different state machines and the code security so so something like cosmos that it does connect different chains together but each of the Chase has to run its own consensus mekinese potentially have its own stake set of stickers that are securing that chain so if you want to if you want to run a new chain then then you it can be a bit of a hassle you need to gather a whole community around it and only then it

will be secured with polka dot you they only think it's you can just persuade the rest of the existing poker community that actually this state machine brings some utility to that table and then it's a little bit like deploying a contract so you just you just put this logic up there and then it just becomes magically a new a new chain and then it's secured with the whole force of the of the whole state of the of the polka dot network so so this brings you know the ability to innovate much easier iterate on the different state machines and so on so I think those are the two main differences

kind of pull pull security and those more general transactions so this means like if in the future there's both like cosmos and polka dot working yeah yeah absolutely if if not I mean like if I'm thinking in from the perspective of like investor that's taking a bed right so in in Cosmo sort of the kind of bet you're taking is that there will be like many successful coins and because there are many successful coins there can be like many successful blockchains each very secure and then you can move these coins around

in the cosmos system whereas like with polka dot you're taking a more a bet on the other kind of future in which you're saying there may not be a lot of big successful coins there might be just a few like like the dot coin might be very massive market cap and you don't need other coins to have big market cap so the dot token can have a huge market cap and it itself can secure a lot of different change together so for instance in in the case of in the case of of Cosmos you don't necessarily need to have new tokens for for each chain it you know there can be any sort of tokens

and and existing tokens can be used for securing different chains it's just that it's more about gathering the communities together and the same for on the other hand for polka dot you could have you could also have multiple tokens and potentially multiple protocols as well interacting with each other and were or on different tire chains you you also make a new native token with each pair chain that you deploy and in order to pay for computation on that pair chain you need to have that that's that token which is basically like deploying any serum chain right with with the token ring to pay for smart contracts

right so so you could also have lots of different tokens on on polka-dot so I think I think it's just I would characterize this cosmos focus on maybe more more of a very particular problem and and like it's I think I think it's very it's very good to kind of have a good solution for this particular problem of token exchange or on independent tender mean trains and and you know it can be can work with that pocket network as well but but I think it's important to to for for picado to be generic and provide at

least similar functionality as well but what yeah we'll see I think but but it will be a definitely that the two the two networks can interact with each other and and both can support different tokens so these are not the only projects that are aiming for blockchain and Trop ability there are others and I that there will be more projects trying to achieve this you know the sort of a high level blockchain and probability right so that this this idea of Internet of block changes Mayor was referring to earlier you know what do you think the ecosystem looks like in the in the future do you do you envision a future

where there is one block chain of block chains you know similar to like the internet we have one Internet network that is you know there's predominant and that is that has the monopoly or do you see an ecosystem where there are multiple block chains of block chain of block chains running you know different types of networks with different types of characteristics and we haven't even talked about like consortium chains and you know in this in this context and how they would interact with these types of block chain of block chains right like a polka dot yeah what do you see but I think I think so what is important for for the pocket project is to enable basically enable as much as possible and

then it will be up to up to the community that that uses the text to decide how they want to use it so so it certainly can be it can evolve in such a way that that there is this this this top level really chain and then there are those lower order will a change in the polka dot network and it's kind of all kind of ends up in a one-one huge clump that is very distributed and very paralyzed but at the same time can all kind of is under the same umbrella of polka dot and this is certainly seems to make a lot of sense if we are able to nail down this extensibility is also

varying state machines so that everyone can do their own thing and this parallel validation so that we don't you know there is no kind of bottleneck to this to the scalability but at the same time because because you can you can bridge other chains to polka dot which are kind of independent you could have potentially other chains that also communicate with polka dot but are more independent and this is something this is a case with with something like consortium chains where where consortium might want to might want to rely on the might want to make use of the communication with other chains they might not want to have anything to do

with any tokens or anything like that but they still might want to use some some information from the relay chain like identity and they might want to sometimes outsource their consensus algorithm but they might want to have an option to always step out and use their own kind of set of authorities to maintain the chain and polka dot polka dot should support this sort of stepping in and out and and being connected while separated and potentially you know if the community you know thinks it's right maybe maybe have another really chain that is connected as a bridge to this really chain and lots of other things so I think what polka dot enables is it

enables this sort of more tightly-knit community that is very extensible and very kind of evolvable but at the same time you know I don't think it opposes it opposes this sort of framework I think it will be very interesting to see and I think we haven't seen just that much of this single extensible network type of thing before so and we we see a lot of potential for it in terms of use cases on social medicine yeah I could definitely if we look at the recent history I think it would be difficult to see a future in which there is one you know one Internet of one Internet of

blockchains blockchain that is sort of running the consensus for every single one I mean just look at what's happening in in Bitcoin and what happened earlier with etherium and and the communities that are you know divided about you know sort of I mean not meeting this topics but pretty trivial topic sometimes so like we are think pretty early stages I think a lot of a lot of this disagreement could stay there but it could be at the lower levels in the stack so to say so people might stop being concerned about some kind of or actually smile so being concerned about some low level things in

the stack and actually be pretty happy with the utilities that are being provided and and slowly evolved some of them I don't know like tcp/ip or some kind of low-level protocol but then but then still you know have words about some you know so what's how the state machine should be changed or like where you should migrate your stuff and like all sorts of other things so I think we'll see how would the whole space evolves I think we are earlier with maybe maybe it is the case that that it will kind of coalesce at one layer you're very optimistic because I can see you know the people you know that like people in the communities definitely fighting over things like and you know like low level functionality but you know well I guess well we'll see let's

put let's not put our money on that so let's briefly talk about the web 3 foundation so we mentioned earlier you're a council member there can you talk about the web 3 P nation and what its goal is with regards to a polka dot yeah absolutely so so with polka dot we want to make sure that that the wider community is being built around it and and polka dot is just one part of the of the wider web free vision idea and and by it by itself it won't enable people to build decentralized applications that are very useful I think it will provide some

useful tool but but it won't provide everything so so the web free foundation has been established to to to promote and support the development of different web three technologies so the first project is polka dot and but there is a number of different projects we are looking at the project of matrix or for distributed messaging and then of course whispers warm and potentially other technologies later down the line and and supporting different groups of the foundation self won't be doing any of the work it would be just supporting

external groups that that do the work there will be technical console in the foundation to kind of figure out what would argue the good things to pursue what the research what kind of research should be done so there will be a bit of research done at the Wesley Foundation that supports all the people that implement stuff but also also research will be funded at universities that that contributes to the you know to the to the work that the people that implements that are doing because often as we found first as a parity we don't have that much time to to research stuff and it will be great to kind of point someone in the direction or we are curious about

and then someone do a bit of research that then we can leverage to build some cool technology for people to build on top of so that's a web through foundation and yeah hopefully we'll be we'll be talking more about it and have some more information available about it and I presume that at some point there will also be some sort of funding period do you can you just not to go to details but can you tell us about when that will be yeah so we are planning to we are trying to do it like hopefully in the in the in the next month we'll see how it goes but but basically it will be it

will be created to the Polka Dot project there will be the dots which are the staking token in the polka dot network will be distributed and if you go to a polka dot network you can see a bit more information about it you can subscribe yourself to kind of keep posted and yeah most of the most of the tokens will be distributed and fund the development of polka dot but also of some of the other projects supported by the way through foundation so where can people find you work in the communities we've gather around web 3 in polka dot yeah so so we

are looking at four different different types of community members so definitely people that are working on new blockchains reach out we will be very interested to to kind of think how we could work together to make your chain part of the of the polka dot network you can reach out to me at twitter at web 3.4 nation or go to channel on polkadot Network where were most of the team hangout hangs out or if you if you are just if you are more

interested in the technical side of things and an actual polka dot implementation have a look at polka dot IO it's a separate website which deals more with with the current progress of the project it outlines the roadmap and and and also there is a link to a more technical chat about their paper and protocol economics and so on all right well Peter thank you so much for coming on the show today it was fascinating discussion about polka dot will be looking forward to hearing more about that network in the future and and hopefully you know it'll be very successful and a lot of different pair of chains will come out of that I'm looking forward to when we didn't really get to talk about this very much but I'm

looking forward to seeing how this can be used or leveraged as a as a general consensus as a service for or you know things like enterprise chains and consortium chains and things like that so looking forward to hearing more about polka dot and good luck on the on the funding Thanks and thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in we are part of let's talk Bitcoin network you can find this show and lots of other great shows at let's talk VidCon calm if you want to support us there's lots of ways you can do that you can leave us a typical tipping address will be in the description and you can also leave us a review wherever you get your podcast whether that the iTunes stitcher or anywhere else so thanks so much and we look forward being back