#259 Gavin Wood: Substrate, Polkadot and the Case for On-Chain Governance

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and Enterprise great infrastructure spend less time on block gain scaffolding and more time building your application to learn more visit AKMs slash epicenter and buy top-down experience a new way of hiring as top tile delivers only the top 3% of applicants including highly skilled locked-in engineers if you're looking to

scale your team with the very best talent visit top.com slash epicenter hi and welcome to episode my name is Brian Fallon crane I'm here today with mayor Royce we're gonna have Gavin rude on in a second of course Gavin wood who's done so much important work around here and poor fella parody some we had a really fascinating conversations with him actually May her and I both said this was you know one of our favorite interviews in a long time that we've done now before we get started actually we did want to speak Mahon I didn't want to speak few minutes about a project we work on a company that we started at the end of last year called course one we haven't really mentioned that so far but

this has kind of been our main focus since then and what we've been doing is we've been building validators and kind of staking infrastructure proof of stake networks so also some slight disclaimer I really I mean we haven't yet worked on much work on polka dot but it's definitely one of projects were very interested in also working at it for from doubt and so we have this kind you know kind of relationship also from down end yeah and it's actually been fun working on building a validator I feel it's making me a better interviewer because for many of the projects I I'm starting to know the internals of the projects much better so I think I hope it'll be a

positive sum game with epicenter and the viewers we get more insightful questions from the two of us because we have this experience with chorus one yeah no I totally agree with you I think that was also one of the things with me that really attracted me about it is that you know we've had so many conversations about so many different projects and half there's you know fairly superficial knowledge of a ton of different things going on but then when you actually try to build you know this fundamental infrastructure that will make a blockchain work and you actually make it secure inside blocks that's very interesting to think also you know sort of look under the hood so that's also been one of the things I found really fascinating about it but I'm sure we'll talk more about that at some point in

the future now there's one other announcement that we briefly wanted to make so this week actually you know Def Con is going on in Prague Sebastien is in Prague I am in Prague unfortunately you can't make it this year but you know we have a few other people of sunny I'm not sure if he's here but so we are organising a meet-up and the meetup is going to be on the 31st around 7:30 to 9:30 so hope to see many of you there if you want to learn more about it just go to Epson or TB / DEFCON 4 that's de vie CO and 4 and you know you can learn about the details there

and I hope to see many of you there and now let's let's go to the conversation hi so we're here today with Gavin wood Gavin has you know we've known him for a long time actually I was looking back just earlier and he was already a guest it was episode 31 so that's over four years ago and I remember recording that in Gavin's apartment just briefly after he moved to Berlin so that was before he theorem it a lot much before he theorem at launch I think it was just around the time of the theorem fundraiser during the etherium fundraiser so one of our you know one of her very early episode pre-video and a long time ago of course Gavin has done a lot of you know important work in the blockchain space he joined the human project very early on kind of at the very start he

wrote yellow paper back then so that was kind of a technical specification on material and he will you know he was the guy who originally developed solidity and the C++ client and then of course went on to do a lot of lot of other important things including founding parody and and now a polka dot so this loss to speak about yeah thanks so much for coming on today again thanks for having me right so first of all tell us a little bit like how did you originally learn about helium and blockchain and get involved back then I guess I guess it started in 2013 really I I was aware of Bitcoin a

couple years before when it first hit slash dot but I don't know it kind of didn't seem particularly interesting kind of pointless bottle top currency you know I think I was in there not not in a minority in basically writing it off as any relevant experiment and a couple years passed and it's like early 2013 and I see the stories about the Silk Road and I see and you know stories about how being a bitcoins being used as you know to facilitate this this stuff and it's uh you know it was like wow this is I mean there are people using this that that was a that was the first kind of surprise like wow and I sort of

kept an eye on the stories and I found one guy his name is Amir taki and you know this this guy seems to be kind of a revolutionary fact crypto programmer you know it's type of Punk kind of revolutionary guy so I figured he was an interesting kind of guy to speak to so I I reached out to him I've done a lot of coding in the open source world for the I don't know 10 or 15 years before and I had an email address that sort of demonstrated this I have like a KD dog email address from the time so I was a KDE coder and I might any you Amir would recognize it so I used that and lo you know sure enough he replied and he invited me to his squat the same one

that I'd seen him being being interviewed in which was kind of interesting so I got the train down to London man up with him and I met up with a couple of his friends as well one of them was was Mihai Alesi who I actually randomly have said hello to him me I sort of through this door open to one of the rooms in the squat and Mihai was there in bed with his girlfriend Roxanna and it was like oh this is Mihai he does a Bitcoin magazine I was like I better close that it was kind of an odd an odd kind of scene anyway we he also introduced me to another guy called

Johnny Bitcoin hey Jonathan James Harrison and he was kind of man about town in London he had a bunch of friends and he'd been staying with a bunch of people in place by Barcelona where he met Vitalik and he'd been charging to Vitalik about what he was thinking this was kind of pre etherium but not long after vitalik started sending sort of early versions of the etherium white paper to various people in his email address book and one of them was Johnny Bitcoin and when he found out about if they're here me sort of thought it was kind of a cool idea and he mentioned it to mean one of our sort of times down the pub having a pint together and he

said look if you're I was I was kind of saying oh you know I'm such a good programmer and he was like well if you're such a good program I should just go and program his area I was like fine I will do so I downloaded this white paper and I I think I think even Johnny sends it to me and he made the intro with italic so I I started chatting to metallic and yeah it was I was working at some like really boring horrible Microsoft coding at the time and I just wanted something to clear my mind over Christmas kind of a nice little project and this seems to fit the bill so I I started coding up aetherium and before long I was sort of swept away into this this new world and so what was it about

a theory room that you know kind of captured your imagination when you know Bitcoin hadn't done the same thing I think I mean there's a few kind of points I guess one of them was that you know I kind of knew roughly how blockchain worked but I you know I kind of learned things by implementing them and it seemed that the etherium was a more enjoyable and more point 'fl thing to implement than Bitcoin it's like why would I you know why would I implement something that's already got like two or three implementations that perfectly perfectly good enough if theorem was relatively nicely specified I mean it turned out that there were quite a few holes in the specification but it was it

was good enough to get going and that was that was just nice that was that was a nice clear kind of little coding mission to go on and I was also curious to see how well it would work it's you know it was doing stuff that hadn't been done before and I I was pretty sure that it wasn't gonna work but I figured that with enough tweaking it might eventually it might eventually do something kind of interesting it wasn't until later that I really kind of got to grips with what etherium was and why it was you know so so sort of special so you said later you realized okay if theorem was actually so

special and it took you a while to come to grips with what it was so tell us about this like what is this essence of aetherium that it took you somewhat while to understand I guess it was sort of fast forward a couple of weeks and I'm I mean I've been implementing this you know I don't know four weeks or so and I get I get sort of noticed that you know we should meet up in Miami everyone's getting together as meant to be a hackathon you know meant to sort of all get down start start coding what finished coding theorem they turned out that I was actually the only Khoda that was there everyone else was

busy doing other stuff and it was during that time in Miami that I sort of got thinking about I was exposed a lot more that say to the Bitcoin world I was exposed to many different Bitcoin people as exposed to some very interesting peoples and sort of self-declared philosophers and so on and we got yeah it's a few interesting conversations and some of them got to sort of talking about the state of the crypto world how Bitcoin was crypto currency and things that were sort of crypto finance were coming up mash the coins fairly in vogue at the time and there was an idea that master coin was providing financial contracts on the blockchain that was gonna you know facilitate this whole new wave of crypto finance lending and

contracts for difference and all sorts of things like that and I know I was trying to figure out what what etherion was you know if that's got cryptocurrency equipped for finance is it theorem just another crypto finance that's how it was kind of presented to a large degree in the white paper if you read sort of the original white paper it had a little bit to do with sort of smart contract but a lot of the the general gist was it was really kind of a better more turing-complete better scripted version of Bitcoin that wasn't really this idea of building cohesive decentralized applications at that time

it was it was very much coming from a sort of nuts and bolts purist were making a smart contract plan we're making a mecha and platform foot for deploying and executing smart contracts and it was it was sort of at that time that I was I was thinking well what what is this platform what does it do what's the general generalization of it and yeah it was there that I sort of figured well this is kind of crypto law because what we're doing is we're creating new laws their laws because we can't work around them but their laws like the laws of nature they're they're just they're they're sort of set by game theory but they're different to laws of nature in

that we could kind of program them ourselves and that was very interesting and it was like at that point that I started to realize you know the vastness of what this what this software would change it was good really going to change the way that society was going to basically work it was gonna provide a whole new sort of economic foundation for society so you mention another thing that you learned by implementing is is that a habit you still continue absolutely yeah I mean it's um you've got to balance it

with some forethought especially when you do any things like design like protocol design and particularly it kind of where the stakes are high it's important to think through and prove things but in general I find that I can I can deal with things a lot better I can internalize them if you like in my brain I can understand them a lot better if I work through and I code them and the thing is if you code it it's basically just formally and and strictly expressing what it is it's not it's not really doing much more than that and it forces you to really manage all of these sort of edge cases all of the all of the

the sort of corners that you might not think of when you sort of considering the general vision or the sort of direction that you want to move in and it's very easy to sort of think of and I think you know get a concept get an idea of something and think that you've designed it through think that you've got it all covered and then when it comes to coding it it doesn't compile or you can't code it in the first place and when you realize why it doesn't compile it teaches you about why your idea maybe isn't as good as you thought it was or at least isn't as complete as we thought it was interesting so would it be right to say that you know you're not somebody that leaves a lot of white papers necessarily you get interested in in an idea and you maybe write your own

paper and you build it yeah I don't know I kind of I remember reading you know a quote by someone that was basically like you know it's important to stand on the shoulders of giants but also eventually it's similarly important to kind of keep saying keep saying and sort of arguing new things things that just seem correct to you from first principles and eventually you'll start arguing or discovering things that no one else has as argued or discovered before and that that kind of that second part really

definitely sort of appeals to me I'm not I find that if I read too much it's it's very difficult to it's kind of like you'll get led on down a particular path down to a particular way of thinking or way of considering a problem and it it shuts off kind of psychologically speaking other part and I you know I can't see the balance of like well you know if it's already been determined that that's the correct solution that's the optimal solution then you know you shouldn't try and reinvent the wheel you should you should just follow on and build on it but similarly in these very sort of early stage industries where lots of ideas are floating around believing that something is the optimal

solution and just sort of automatically using it automatically assuming that that's the case I think is is can be hugely problematic and so I don't I kind of I like to chat to people because about new things because in that case it's very easy to kind of delve to the bottom of something and you can better understand whether it really is sort of the best way of doing something you understand the trade-offs perhaps that were made you can challenge but that's not the case with the white paper and white papers are often written again like as I mentioned before the design of something they're not real implementations which means a white paper might on the surface seem as though it's delivering so many things it's the you know it's the best thing

since sliced bread but actually when you get into the missing prettier than all sorts of corner cases that you don't think about because they're not presented to you in the white paper but it means that it's it's actually not the optimal solution it's maybe not even a good solution so I could I could see this approach working when let's say like you were an individual contributor right so you would may be doing the PhD then you'd build a theory oh man has your approach changed as you have so now you're also managing this organization and presumably there's like lots of other people that are building the same have you had to change in your approach on on

how to learn to manage an organization a team of developers not just yourself yes I thankfully thankfully I don't have to do management I kind of managed to sneak out of that one it's definitely not my favorite thing am i my role within parity is I'm a basically a team lead I'm the one that sort of tells people look you really need to review these PRS I'm the one that sets the milestones and I'm the one that sets the white space policy which is I can't tell you how important that is but I'm not the one that has to sort of manage per se like management comes

with quite a lot of other things that are non-technical and that's something that I've stayed well out of that the closest thing I do to management is that I interview people so - want to come work in the team but beyond that it's very much in the same open source mentality that we've had but I've been sort of involved in for 15 20 years now and I don't think I mean you know it's evolved of course we have new tools we have to get hurt we have to pull requests but basically it's it's still just being a programmer and that's that's kind of what suits me the best

and there are people who are better at doing things like management and doing things like organization building and that's good because they can take on those roles if you've listened to previous episodes with Merlin Grey and Matt Turner you know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers well the azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks take the etherium proof of authority template for example it's ideal for permission networks where consensus participants are known and reputable etherium on Azure has on chain network governance that leverages parodies extensible proof Authority client each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator and parodies

webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts in familiar languages like C C++ and rust Azure blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all production services in Azure so you know you're relying on secure redundant infrastructure that can scale and with built-in services like authenticating api's off chain databases and secure key management services you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and how Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability and enterprise check out AKMs slash epicenter and start building today we'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter so speaking about organization building in a management so of course you did work for Hyrum right

so you CTO of a theorem but then you know pretty soon I mean I think a theorem organization went into many different directions and and it kind of spun out a bunch of different organizations but one of them was was yours so first was called Leith core and after its parody so when you started parody what was the vision for parody both in terms of I don't know what kind of organization you wanted to build but also what kind of you know impact you wanted to have if parody I think it would be fair to say that some of the early days with with ether core parity were we're pretty pretty muddled there was one guiding light which was let's build an ethereal client let's let's do

this from the from the ground up and let's kind of see where this takes us that was that was what we did there was beyond that so when we're talking like kind of business plans and marketing and all that sort of stuff we there were lots of ideas floating around but to be honest we didn't really know it was a very I mean you know this is late 2015 early 2016 this is a the industry was kind of crazy lots of things coming in there was the Dow going on there was I don't know team sort of coming in there was a whole IPO thing

happening it was it was a very like generally mad time and there were lots of things sort of pulling at our a sort of attention there was the idea where what about enterprise what changed what about you know building stuff for the companies what you know Microsoft seemed to be coming in at the time with that sponsorship of the DEFCON one I was also the idea of you know sort of building out web 3 and like what if we did swarm and whisper and we put it all into a browser you know what it wasn't clear that mist was was sort of being developed at a substantial rate so there was there were lots of ideas there are lots of potential directions and in the

end we were just basically stayed through to our developer culture which was let's just build stuff let's just start with building what we know how to build we'll start with building a theory and we'll do it right we'll do it in the way that with architect it in the way that we think is is its best from the ground up and and see where it takes us and I think at least for me it was probably not long four to six months into the having company where I started to realize that the company I wanted was very much a technically focused company so kind of until then you know I was kind of half buying into a lot of these Silicon Valley self-help books where they're

like oh you know you need to think about marketing and you need to think about company building and need to think about sort of I don't know you have to have these particular points of culture and yeah it kind of gives you all of these many there are so many of these books and they give you all of these sort of bits of guidance rules to follow and I kind of the idea of building a company whose that was really just about being delivered developing and delivering the best technical solutions without having too much of a consideration for some of the other aspects particularly around

marketing was almost kind of a dirty you know it's kind of like the thought that dare not share itself because I you know I figured that that was just gonna be that was that that wasn't following the rules it wasn't following the advice that wasn't what the company culture was allowed to be but it turns out that that very much is what our company culture has has has become and I think that's you know a lot of that is down to my sort of influence and and we really do have a sort of developer driven mentality within parity and marketing and business development and product

I wouldn't say is necessarily sort of lagging far behind particularly product we do have a fairly we try and do product development as part of software development but but I would say the biggest part of our attention falls on thoughts on making in a really great software and and for that matter really great Platt it's a building cycle and that that's really enjoyable when you're driven from this kind of technical standpoint it makes development so much faster because you know what you have a sort of 1/8

idea about what it is that you want to get done you have a very sort of clear and concrete vision it makes a product that makes product development it makes project management and so much easier then in the early days where you know you're trying to be very much more market led and that's yeah that's substantially more difficult to work with as a developer so I I clearly remember like so I I saw posts around the formation of parity and I think the first target was to build a client for helium and my my said my first question in my head was like who's gonna fund

this team it's like who's gonna fund the building of this company that builds a client for etherium and then like a few months later you did raise your first round 700k or something like that so you threw out like at least parts of the Silicon Valley playbook your first product wasn't something that would generate enough money how did you did you not struggle to raise money and get the company going once I struggle but it was not it wasn't something that we were gonna get tens of millions for me at the time we were seeing r3 start to raise crazy amounts we saw 21 raised a huge

round block stream raised a huge round and I think what is it digital asset all things was it Blythe masters thing they also had a pretty big race so you know there were people who are raising really you know huge amounts of cash for in principle at least blockchain blockchain based products I mean are three sort of steered away from it in the end that was its original suggestion and I think you know we kind of considered ourselves to be more or less over the same sort of class we were we were

developing you know sort of next generation what chain and in my mind we had the better technology so I didn't you know I I wasn't like super worried that we were kind of on the wrong path that said we weren't we weren't industry heavyweights I mean if theorem was still down at like 80 cents or so at that time it you know it was it had gone up what to Act 3x more or less from from the scale but like no one really cared and so yeah it was we didn't really have any huge amount of credibility people could see that there was a platform behind us but wasn't that much doing with a

platform Bitcoin was still very much came and yeah it wasn't thankfully you know we had some people that did kind of believe in a theorem I feel like I believed in the platform and they were they were very quick to to get us started and you know we did we didn't with we didn't really kind of do the whole Silicon Valley thing of going around all of the things I'm having a pitch deck and having a really kind of slick you know product slides and we were like we're gonna make an Aryan client we think the theorems probably gonna be significant we think it may

well end up being the platform of choice for anyone who develops on blockchain this could be a sort of enterprise play this could be an open-source sort of the user base play we don't know yet but you know we think it's probably worth doing and yeah a few of the there were people who sort of said cool we think you're a good team and we'll just sort of be able to take it somewhere which was cool and I think I've grown kind of having seen Silicon Valley up close and personal the show that based itself on it is actually pretty true to life a lot of the time it's really not it's a bit of a club and it's a bit of a there's a certain talk you've got to kind of talk

the talk to be accepted sort of as a potential member of that Club and you know we were never really a talk the talk company we were bill we were get the ship built company and that's yeah I kind of go grow a little bit kind of what's the word not disappointed but I said I think Silicon Valley thinks more of itself but as a higher opinion of itself than it deserves I say yeah no absolutely and I mean it's also interesting note that you had like etherium and nobody in Silicon Valley cared about etherium and then it became this massive success and then it was

this entire thing right that basically the VCS in Silicon Valley sort of like you know missed out on and then of course now there was this huge tendency of PCs rather like okay no we missed a theorem so now we're gonna have to find the next e theorem right and it's not so it's interesting how this you know how this sort of played out but let's speak about poor code also so afterwards right you build parody and then and polka dot has become this major thing or you know major focus of yours so how did the genesis what was the genesis story of polka dot so we won - 2016 we've been working at parity for about six seven months I

think we began we began coding the etherium client late November ish 2015 and it's like June July August remember exactly and you know I'm sort of we're kind of waiting with bated breath on aetherium one and a half or a theorem - we're kind of you know kind of waiting for this sort of new white paper to come so that we can can start implementing it and basically there were a bunch of things that happened there was the Dow that kind of stole some attention from the core development team and there are a few were that kind of bits and bobs and you know it started to get a bit kind of is this ever going to come and

so just when I was sort of an off chance conversation with with Marek one of our one of the sort of kind of founded developers of parity while we were in San Francisco we started America sort of said well what if we sort of built something like that ourselves with it you know how could we could we do it was like well I started to think about a design for a sharded version of aetherium that was as simple as possible that kind of I'd already come up with this I this notion of chain fibers which was back in 2014 and that was also a kind of shard of the theorem but it it tried to keep the original aetherium sort of ease of development of smart contracts and

particularly how smart contracts can talk to each other and as such it's kind of it's substantially more complex so I kind of thought what if we could you know let's let's forget trying to make it as aetherium as transparent as possible over for developers and let's say right well we're going to change some of the some of the assertions and assumptions that developers can make maybe it's not going to be quite as easy to develop upon but let's try and make it as simple as possible and that was basically where the original idea of poker from it it was essentially you know can we parallel can we create a shot in this

area following from that like pretty much in the same conversation I think we were having a beer at some bar and after we met Matt a VC maybe in San Francisco and it was it was there that I realized that you need this kind of you're gonna need a kind of I think a theory of course at the beacon chain but you need this you need a sort of main chain in order to validate all of these shards to make sure that they're not doing anything that they shouldn't be doing and it was always in my mind super important that the shards should all have the same guarantees of security so this is different to some of the early things that metallic was saying he was in the early days he was a favor of different shards having different levels

of security and it's also similar to some of the other multi chain designs like Bitcoin side chains and cosmos where you know you can have different sets of validators for the different and sub chains and in my mind that you know they always needed to be the same the same sort of security guarantees and so it was one way of doing it and the obvious initial thing to do is just to fix it hard code it hardwired it to be that validation algorithm that looked at that thing that's running checking that all of these different shards are doing the right thing

was to be just theorem right so the shards are all basically implement little bits of aetherium and and the main beacon chain or the main relay chain as we call it in polkadot is checking and making sure that they're all doing the right thing but then I figured well what if we let the chains do different things I mean it's there's no real need to fix them all to be doing the same thing and as long as you make the message format that's being passed between them arbitrary is like kind of just general just a bunch of bytes basically then there's actually no no need whatsoever to be for them to all be the same and that's where the idea of a hatch rod multi-chain came from rather than the

homogenous multi-chain that is a theorem - and it was again not much later still I think it was a maybe a couple of weeks later but at that point I was like well hold on we've got this kind of platform called webassembly and Weber suddenly lets you basically describe any program you can compile many languages to it it's just a sort of gin generic abstract machine specification and it's nice and simple why don't we just encode this validation function that could be different for each of these different shards as as a webOS under the program and then it can just be linked they can just be a sort of executed and you can

for what the this is the software to actually validate these things although indeed the specification a definition of a valid pirate Ain shard you can store that on the real a chain itself and so now what you have is this kind of completely generic mechanism for bringing together many different shards many different chains that all have their individual leash or individual well we call it a runtime technically speaking it's a state-transition function but basically I like to think of as like the nature of the blockchain it's like Bitcoin has a particular

nature it's to do with and spend transaction outputs it's a very much currency chain if they're in has a different nature it's a smart contract chain so you can actually define chains of various varying they're kind of different natures and they can all sort of exist within this community where they're all being secured with the same apparatus and they're all able to pass messages between each other and so it kind of evolved basically from a how would we scale aetherium to why don't we why don't we actually implement this because it's doing we didn't really want to kind of jump the gun so to speak but it seemed a lot more reasonable to implement something that in and of itself was going to be a sort of a next generation play very interesting so I

this progression of ideas is really nice cerium okay then we need a shower this idiom oh then we need the central chain to be the arbitrator of final validity of some kind then like the idea of these para chains or these side chains there should be heterogeneous and of course now if if they're going to be heterogeneous then you need some way to distill and express their difference in like one common in one common manner right and so that leads into you picking like webassembly and allowing these

chains to allowing like the state transition functions to be written in in webassembly it makes a lot of sense I'm curious like why you picked webassembly in particular did you have some other choice that you did not some other road that you did not pursue I mean in principle there were a couple of potential candidates the most sort of obvious one I guess is LLVM in our code so LLVM if you don't know is a compiler framework it lets you sort of not have

to write half of the compiler if you want to make a new programming language you only have to write the bit that's basically just passes your your program and then specifies in a machine independent manner what your program means but you don't have to do all of the sort of taxing things of trying to optimize it and actually targeting specific hardware well VM looks after all of that for you and so one of the ideas was just to use this intermediate representation or I are from our VM which in principle at least is not architecture specific the problem with that is that it's not designed to be architecture independent some

architecture there are there are particular IR op codes or sort of IR fragments that are kind of particular to some architectures and it becomes quickly a fairly problematic sort of platform to try and build on so one or two of the other things we could have tried to use EVM but again EVM is really not designed for this kind of general specification of state transition functions of validity I mean it's barely even sort of well well designed for smart contract I mean at the time you know what

so EVM actually it was me who gave it the EVM name before I came along and sort of in the original incarnation of italics white paper it's called ether script and it was really meant to be a scripting language it was you know some of the early ether scripts were written literally as just like Bitcoin script so just like the mnemonic and then any of the arguments to the mnemonic so it looked kind of like assembly macro assembly and you know sort of came along was like well this is this is pretty low level I don't think you know having a calling it script is sensible at all so I came along with this kind of notion of the etherium virtual machine

but it is reasonably low level but it has some fairly high level aspect to it where it sort of deviates significantly from common Hardware one of the obvious ones is the 256 bit word size so the stack and the memory is doing it on the storage at least it's done in terms of 256 bit words and you know that that basically means that almost all low-level code is is massively suboptimal because it's all being formed in these you know huge heap allocated chunks of memory even though only 1 or 2 bytes of them are being used so we we kind of ditched that idea pretty quickly

I mean I don't think it was ever really given an afterthought and was there another one oh yeah there was one of the possibility that that we mooted and that was targeting it to a particular hardware but particular Hardware sort of CPU architecture but one that was sufficiently kind of risk enough so reduced instruction set computers what risk expense one the idea is that it's it's not got very many opcodes it's very simple so a principle you can retarget it you can recompile it into a into a sort of another architecture without losing too much performance and the obvious one was arm the arm targeting

something like arm v5 but again we sort of have any thought about it a bit a bit more we kind of figured yeah probably probably not the way to go especially when we have something like web assembly which is increasingly supported by theme you know outfits like Google and Mozilla it's it's very much likely to end up with really well performing compilers that trance compiled it from webassembly into the native native architecture LLVM targets it natively so it doesn't you know it's it's basically as good as as something hardware like arm except it it's gonna be probably much better

supported and it's sort of simpler it's easier to to work with you've got various tool bits of tooling that let you do programs very easily you've got functions as a sort of initial as a primary thing getting imports and exports it's basically designed to be develop all developable rather than designed to be implemented on on fast hardware and so yeah we we figured it was probably the best choice and certainly in terms of its its future [Music] hiring is stressful let's face it it's a long process of sifting through resumes

and interviewing candidates without any guarantee of quality but it doesn't have to be this way companies all over the place are experiencing a new way of hiring with top-down if you go to their Trustpilot page you'll see that of the hundreds of people that have left reviews over ninety eight percent were four or five star ratings including one guy who wants to give his developer a bear hug that says a lot top dog gets all this great feedback because they focus on their clients and their top priority is quality they only accept the top three percent of applicants including highly skilled blocking engineers one of these engineers is Roddick Ostrovsky Roddick has experience as a lead software engineer and data scientists for Sony and Expedia then he discovered blockchain and he became totally consumed with aetherium he worked as a

consultant for the firm start on chain and his time lock tap when the top quarter consensus you port and identity blockchain hackathon then he expanded his reach through top tile he worked with a bunch of clients on projects such as smart contract development and a POC that leverages blockchain if you want to hire engineers like Roddick for your team go to top tile comm slash epicenter for a Norris trial a top tile director of engineering will deliver your next hire in as fast as 48 hours and you'll get $1,000 credit when you decide to hire we like to thank top towel for their support of epicenter at this point if you've basically covered a big key insight and that key insight is Volker Articuno is going to have all of

these heterogeneous chains now you can think of like each chain has its own individual DNA its specialized to do something unique which others are not and so you want a way to express the individuality the individual DNA of each chain in some like common way and what polka-dot is doing is saying that the individuality of each chain is its state transition function which is here's here's the current state of the ledger in comes a set of transactions or events and there's a function that will take it from the old State of the ledger to the new state of the ledger if you could represent the differing state transition functions of all of these heterogeneous

chains in one common way that would be nice and then polka dot ended up picking up the awesome standard to express all of the state transition functions in one common way cool so like it makes sense right so we have come to this piece of this story and now of course this piece of the story ultimately leaves into substrate doesn't it so just tell us what is substrate and how you are using this insight to build substrate okay so yeah what is it straight so substrates many things substrate began as a desire to abstract out the common bit of

poccadot that could also be used for building other chains like you know we were doing from the from the the ground up we were building this kind of this software stack for polka dot and I really hate seeing code not be able to be read it's kind of like you know food waste it's like come on you know someone can eat this early idea I like throwing it away I prefer to put a Tupperware and I'd say later in this kind of temporary inferred is a little bit like abstracting code you can if you if you turn it into a module ready for reuse then it means someone else can eat it

later and it also kind of it's actually just generally good practice there's a lot there's a lot to be said about this if you put force if you sort of modularize your code then it also makes it it makes it generic which means that you have to be much more clear about what the interfaces are you need to be much more clear about the definitions if you trying to get other people to use it means that they're gonna help maintain it means that they are mistaking in your code base which means that you know that they might end up fixing some bugs or at least being at least catching some bugs it builds community it means that you know your documentation is probably gonna be a lot better because you're now

having to document directs they're not people rather than just internal people and that means that as your internal people change as people people come on it's much easier than - to get to grips with it so you know there's just huge numbers of reasons why it's really sensible to you know abstract and modularize your code and get it to the point where it could be used for multiple projects internal and external and that's that's kind of where substrate came from if you look at substrate heritage it you know it wasn't a thing initially it was just polka dot and and you know over time it's like there was at one point like I did a giant rename and and sort of many of the polka dot modules substrate modules and

then I was sort of continually factorings to take the to take much of the polka dot code and turn it into generic code within substrate and then eventually the repository split out and we have now a separate substrate repository now we always knew that building chains in polka dots so we call these chains pair of chains because they're like kind of either parallel ice chains or they kind of like chains but not exactly like chains and we always knew that it's gonna be some sort of SDK to be able to be we needed that sort of thing to be able to build more of these change in sort of hurry things up and substrate it turns out is not only very good for you know sort of building the polka dot relay

chain the sort of big chain in the middle and building other chains that nothing to do with polka dot but it's also good for building these power chains it has much of the sorts of algorithms and subroutines that you need for building higher chains things like sinking the chain things like peer networking and although that's not finished yet we're still very much working on that aspect of substrate it it fits very nicely into the design of substrate so substrate there's really a block chain framework it's it's it's if you like substrate actual reason is to be the antithesis of block chain

maximalism right so substrate is probably the world's biggest bet against block chain maximalism it's you know the whole point of substrate is to make making new chains really really really really easy like as easy as building smart contracts almost the idea is that you you just pick and choose which you want there's a maybe even a library of modules that you can learn that you can choose from you select the consensus mechanism you want and you end up with you know with a a chain that's as good as as good as if not better than one that you would have hand-built yourself now the idea is that these consensus mechanisms that you can choose from

we've already implemented a few of them so there was our pbft derived sort of consensus thing called rhododendron and that's that's fairly similar to tender meant that the cosmos goes in music we also have now or implemented in derivative derivative or recalled all around which basically just introduces shuffling to the to the authorities and one of the things that's sort of being actively merged at the moment is the grandpa algorithm I call it shaft actually so it's like kind of shaft sometimes called shaft sometimes called grandpa I forget what

grampa stands for but shaft stands for shared ancestry finality tool and this is a new consensus algorithm that we came up with us web three foundations research team came up with sort of in concert with with parity and particularly Robert parity and I guess we could talk about that a bit later but it's one of the sort of things that you can pick one of the consensus items that you can pick and the idea is eventually to have a another consensus algorithm called para chain or polkadot that lets you form consensus based around using the polkadot relay chain as your as your sort of mechanism and what this means is that if you can code your

chain and substrate now then it means your chain will be able to be integrated into polkadot later the other really nice thing about it is that it both the consensus algorithm and the runtime so the runtime is what we call the state transition function although this sort of nature of the network the thing that interprets the transactions executes the blocks all right so what makes a theorem a theorem and Bitcoin Bitcoin and the idea is that these can all be hot swapped they're all pluggable but not just pluggable they can actually be changed in the city as the chain is is ongoing so you can switch between consensus algorithms even you can move it from being a a chain that's sort of

busy going along on its own to one that's integrated into the polka dot you can change it from a a rhododendron pbft scale chain into a grand park Ain entre until even a proof-of-work chain you can just switch between switch between them as you choose and the the same can be said about the runtime so you can actually take your chain and turn it from a Bitcoin into an if they're home chain I mean you have to define exactly how that would work with the accounts and stuff but basically if you can imagine it if you can code it then it can be done and that's massively different to the current generation of block chains and actually even most of the next generation block chains that have what we would call in the graphics

industry a fixed function pipeline they're kind of fixed function change because you have to go back to the sort of I mean basically they're not designed to ever change and we see this in Bitcoin that's sort of terminally not designed to ever change but we also see a lot of it in aetherium where you know it was never designed to be upgraded so in order to upgrade it you basically all of your users everybody that's overusing if they're in has to opt in to the change and if they don't then they're going to just run off into you know on the a on this sort of continue and the older version of the chain they'll come out of consensus yeah so that I was super fascinating what he talked about how substrate works

in this way so let me just sort of rephrase it to see if I understood it correctly right so you have substrate it's like framework for developing a blockchain now somebody who go today or today or maybe in a few months but like you know in the very near future and say or maybe today and built this you know substrate blockchain and now they could use for example the the existing consensus algorithms you have your maybe grandpa or maybe that your attendant like algorithm or you know something that exists today the launches blockchain and now you know a year from now or something like that polka-dot launches and then that chain could actually decide to you know on the live chain say ok we're going to swap

out the consensus and we're going to start using polka dot consensus and rely and you we get rid of our own validators and we rely on the security after real a chain is this this would really be a possible yeah that's right so that's the sort of use case we're designing for so yeah you know the pretty much all of the existing consensus algorithms require you to name validators either you know hard code them or more likely that we have proof of state systems but in all of these instances you do need to incentivize them not to misbehave usually through slashing so if they lose some of their stake if they do anything bad and the idea is that eventually

you'll basically just be able to move it to poke it up with little more than a single sort of change in the in the chain sort of runtime itself so you it's like literally a storage item you basically just say yeah change this particular piece of storage from using grandpa or rhododendron or whatever the contents is algorithm that the chain is using is to use para chain when we want to use para chain slot for t2 right cool and as long as poker table is expecting is expecting you then it will just seamlessly yeah I think that's absolutely

mind-blowing so I'm super excited to see how that's gonna turn out and yeah I mean you guys are certainly developing some very interesting technology there so of course like substrate is is very ambitious and so where where is it currently at as far as I'm aware you were so your plan is to like releasing its helium releases series of pocs each with more complexity or wood or the previous one until you have the final substrate so what's the current PUC and what can it do so we haven't actually made any release of our our schedule is to release our beta 1.0 beta of substrate real soon now

like before the ideally before the web 3 simmer so that's like in a few days time it's certainly it's certainly you know most of the code has been written it's now just the case of merging it and and testing it so pretty pretty happy to sort of claim that this is going to be out within the next week or so the 1.0 beta sort of has enough for doing fairly general chain development so it will have the rhododendron consensus algorithm in the instant finality one that's a bit like tender

mint it will have the Grandpa finality and algorithm in that I don't know if we can talk about it later whatever but it's our sort of new cool consensus sort of algorithm that's a little action or two beyond beyond the rhododendron and it it has some stuff in common with the etherium 2.0 consensus algorithm it's it takes a slightly different Road but but it is a basically a progressive finality thing so we also have the orange block production algorithm in for 1.0 beta and we have a we will likely for 1.0 have a

an iteration on that that's sort of derived probably from a rube arose which is a kind of slightly it's it's actually got quite a lot of similarity with or run but it's a little bit it's it's basically been demonstrated secure as long as a few particular guarantees are given so that's likely to be our sort of final iteration for consensus on substrate and polka dot 1.0 beta will have mostly finalized AP is the beta is most is primarily there because firstly it hasn't yet been audited that's something that we are looking into and

it hasn't the documentation is still a work in progress but over this period of the next two or three months is 1.0 beta becomes 1.0 will be sort of working a lot more on the tutorials there may be some minor API tweaks but yeah by and large what you see with 1.0 you'll be what you develop on 1.0 will be usable for the foreseeable future great so we spoke before right about this power of of this on chain automated upgrades and and it obviously is amazing or you know super interesting but of course power it

has has two sides right so it today when you have an upgrade of you know significant consensus affecting upgrade over blockchain and in general have a hard fork right so there's this big discussion around it and then you know it's hard work happens people actively would have want a full know what they have to download a new client and you know to the extent that people and miners actually use the client also determines whether that change gets accepted so here we have you know basically automatic updates right where I don't have to upgrade the client so so first of all what's what is the big downside with hard Forks and how does that how do you still have this level of accountability or control or this is

lead to a lot of risks as well having you know automated upgrades and so I think it's it's fair to say that automated upgrades are kind of like a sharp knife you know you they're very powerful you've got to be you want to be sure that when you use them as part of your chain definition there are an appropriate amount of safeguards in place to to be sure that they can't be used malevolently and they can't accidentally be sort of misused because they have the power to break your chain basically as I demonstrated on the first on chain upgrade their last April Lynette Khan

but because they're powerful doesn't mean that we shouldn't do them it just means that we should develop appropriate safeguards to make sure that when they use their and used on we can sort of expect them to be used most technology is most disruptive technologies are powerful and there's inevitably sort of a bit of an outcry from the side saying especially the sites that are in some sense faked in the current technology to say oh this is this is very dangerous very powerful you probably don't want to do that you know and it's like no no you know when you're pushing the fault you are developing these things and they are they are to some degree dangerous sharp

knives are dangerous but it's still a chef will prefer to work with a sharp knife than a blunt worth in the case of blockchain upgrades upgrade paths for software are very very important especially in the early days and especially when you have so much economic inertia behind them we can see this with Bitcoin there are many sort of follow ups the Bitcoin that are better in various ways and yet the money is still behind Bitcoin and that you know that's kind of problematic because Bitcoin hasn't got an upgrade path there is no really easy way of grading bit corner why is it problematic specifically well hard Forks

are generally considered mutations of a blockchain and as such their blockchain being something that you know a lot of a lot of people in the blockchain think you know immutability this idea that what chain is well defined that it should never move beyond the confines of that initial definition are forever at odds with those that believe blockchain should should evolve so which means every time hard fork is proposed unless you have someone that basically everyone can rally behind to say fine this is a dictator they dictate that it changes then you're stuck with a big problem of how do you decide when the upgrade is

necessary enough that everybody should switch on to the heart on to the new the new chain and they should all indeed do this procedure that you demonstrate their software and all the rest of it and that decision that that mechanism for sort of globally deciding this and a decentralized manner and particularly one that's full of people that you know actually don't really trust anyone else because that's why they're in this yeah it's very self selecting ecosystem the trust lists or trust free ecosystem basically full of people don't really trust anyone else it becomes very difficult to to agree which is ironic because the technology that we

have here is technology for making agreements right that's what consensus is so it we're stuck in this ecosystem where no the key differentiator from the rest of the world is that we all about consensus technology and we can't form a consensus um one to upgrade our consensus pretty much the whole thing you know smacks of a bit of a Shakespearean comedy so what's the solution well the solution is that we we have we extend our consensus technology to to dictate not just what happens on the chain but what happens with the chain itself and this isn't a crazy idea this isn't something that you know it's like that's that's so DIF what we're

doing it's exactly the same as what we've been doing already the only difference is that we're sort of extending it a level up and we're saying well look you know there's this very important things that happen on the chain you know potentially huge balance transfers but things like the Dow where you know we've got smart contract that's controlling tens of hundreds of millions and it's and it is fraud in some way well we're just sort of saying well yeah we we recognize that sensitive I'm exists on the chain we also recognize that the chain itself is sensitive software so just as much as the things that happen on the chain are controlled by algorithms that have an underlying usually they have some sort of governance structure even if it's like this one guy and he holds the key a

lot of them a you know much more complex than that you multisig wallets and all the rest of it well let's let's apply a similar governance structure perhaps something that's even more sophisticated to make similar decisions but these decisions are about the chain and if you want to spend the sort of technicality that the sort of technical implementation of protocols like substrate that allow these kind of this kind of upgrade happened you realize that substrate is actually just a meta version of etherium all we're doing really is we're saying rather than have a smart contract that dictates a particular state transition function we're saying that there's actually just a single runtime that is the chain and that dictates a state transition

function and just as a smart contract can say instead of running this code I want you to from the next block run this other code that's all we're saying with their with with with with substrate it's like from this point onwards I'd prefer you to run rather than the code that's running at the moment we should run this at the code it's really just the case of extending the software model of a smart contract one stage higher and taking it on to the blockchain level so really the only question that's left I mean I don't - you have great ability is any kind of a controversial thing yes it's powerful but so are smart contracts so is the fact that you can control money without having a resource to an organization

based purely on an algorithm it's really powerful it's fine but we're in this rule here because we recognize the power and we think it's probably a good thing for the world so with with the on chain upgradability the questions simply becomes what are the specifics behind taking the decision to upgrade the chain and how do we you know how do we ensure that it's you know has appropriate fail-safes in now of course if italic and flat and a bunch of the human people have sort of argued that you know smart contracts is great but then the governance process it's better if that takes place off chain and if people can't even have this like social consensus and and I think

there's a variety of reasons for that I think that's probably if you of you know the riskiness of on chain governments and you know the power as you phrase it I think another big concern is that if you do have an on chain process then you know what is that process controlled with and you know generally will be the token holders right because that's kind of the the the basic you know unit of significance right then in a blockchain system since you don't really have you know real world identities there and then there's this fear that they will you know is blue Taco C and controlled by the small group of token holders so what what what is your view of kind of you know both of those concerns if we go

back to basics about what what what blockchain is about it's about a trust free decentralized means of following specific processes it's about taking the risk and uncertainty from how a system will behave for Bitcoin that system was currency in payment it was taking the risk and uncertainty out of having your app seized and about how much it would cost to transfer those assets for a theory M it's much more abstract to estimate contracts but it in essence is taking the risk and uncertainty out of particular business processes that smart contracts can encode it's all about

taking well-defined processes and removing the risk uncertainty that will be executed as you expect governance of a blockchain is a process if it's not a process it's arbitrary and probably random it will only work effectively if it's a process unchain governance is simply the effective execution of that process it's a weld find formally defined strictly defined process and it will be executed as you expect as everybody expects the notion that you can that in some sense it's better to either not have a process or

have a vague process that's vaguely followed by people vaguely commenting on social media and getting together invade groups and vaguely coming to some vague decision the thought that that is better than having a well-defined strict process that's executed correctly is absolutely nonsensical it's the most stupid thing that vitalik has ever said and I can't believe anyone possibly believe it this it is a powerful thing yes there need to be safeguards yes the processes need to be properly designed but none of that means that it should be done off chain yeah no I mean I agree

with you that there is something very ironic and strange to say on the one hand we need to use smart contract and have this you know trustless lism control and then audit ability but not when it comes to managing the system itself so I think that's a completely fair point however then there's the question of you know how is that process managed let's say we accept that each it would be desirable to have it you know properly structured and and as a auditable you know process then there's still this concern around you know maybe a small minority of token holders controlling it and you know in in the case of a polka dot right I mean I don't

know what the distribution of tokens will would look like in the future but at the token during the fundraiser I think it was around fifty percent that were you know either the parity or or the foundation so of course that does raise the question if it is explicit process and if the token holders are the ones that determine it like how do you then also get you know what kind of white support or is that something that matters um so I prefix this and the serve with a couple of points the first is that bitcoin is essentially controlled by Bitcoin core and seven or

eight miners maybe a few exchanges a theorem if it wants to do a hard fork is a dictatorship if vitalik states this is the way if they're insured hard fork eath will hard for it that way theory and foundation has a trademark Vitalik controls the etherion foundation it's as simple as that so the governance processes for the major to the top to crypto currencies are Plutarch plutocracy slash oligarchy and dictatorship so I reckon we're doing pretty well if we have stakeholder voting already but that aside yes the there's there's actually only thirty

percent that that was that will be with the web through foundation on on the launch of poke a lot so although fifty percent was told in the original sale twenty percent will be distributed one way or another probably through a few fails and possibly an airdrop before before launch so that that means that over two-thirds will be in the hands of the many so this week and actually the foundation will be giving away about ten percent of its tokens to various people that have that have helped you know sort of build it and found it and community members hackathons all of that kind of crowd and then

another probably ten percentage will go to the teams behind the implementations at the moment that's primarily parity but the idea is to find some other teams as well so there won't actually be more than ten percent held by any individual actor at the time of launch and that's still a fairly sizable chunk admitted but it's you know far beyond the far below the amount that would be required to to actually push through arbitrary changes to the chain beyond that I absolutely agree with many of the concerns that you know that are brought

up by people like metallic and Vlad over stakeholder voting which is partly why we don't have a strict you know just coin vote model for polka-dot it's even at its current state and this is I'd meant to iterate you know before release and even after release we don't have a straight sort of point all the voting per se it's rather we do have an adage a sort of maxim which is if more than 50% of the of the coin holders of the coins vote to make a change then the change is made that just seems to me to be an economically sensible thing because if if you don't listen to the majority of a

coin holders if actually 51% vote in a particular way you know that's such a sizable majority that they could probably fork it and just go along with a new fork anyway and then you'd be left with like a minority of the chain or if the chains fake staying on the original fork and that just seems crazy so it's like you know having a maxim whereby 51% of the stake so not 51% of the turnout critically 51% of the stake can choose to sort of kind of choose to live off the chain that just seems like a self a case of the self managing continued self-existence self preservation I should say beyond that we have something

that's much more sort of adaptive there's a sort of a council which is this notion of a body that is brought in through approval voting and you know kind of help the idea is that through kind of deferring to to a smaller set of people they can probably bring about sort of sensible changes or at least propose sensible changes to the chain that allows some degree of fast moving this without was still with a democratic safeguard or a safeguard that's sort of coined Democratic now beyond that I still I'm

not you know this is a first effort I don't think this is gonna be a I don't think this is gonna be the final thing but it's it's somewhere on the path to some things tents of all a sensible way of governing a chain beyond that I do think there's all sorts of interesting avenues to go down and these are things that will be prototyping in polka dot on the way to release and that will be continuing to prototype beyond release so some of the sort of ideas have come up so one of the things that vitalik mentioned this quadratic voting which is basically where as you skip votes your votes become worth quadratically more when you do eventually choose to vote so

it's a bit useless without without some form of civil resistance but it it's not in principle if you did have if you didn't have this civil resistance resistance then it would be it will become pretty interesting beyond that there's also the idea that you don't vote with coins instead you vote with coins that have been locked so essentially when you go to vote your vote is how long you you will lock your coins for if your your side of the vote turns out to win so it's like I think

this is a really good upgrade or I think this is a sensible rescue and I'm backing it with my money because if it turns out not to be a sensible rescue and the price drops then I'm locked in for that price drop and everyone else that voted against it gets to sell their dot tokens or whatever their currency and then buy back if the price rises if you do referendum in order to you know and do the damage or whatever it will be so there's a notion of like economic motivation when you get economic motivation it becomes much more like a market mechanism much more where people have to put the money where their mouth is and and you end up with something less like a something that follows less the flaws of a democracy and more the triumphs of the market in addition to

that there's all sorts of potential like future future key sort of mechanisms where people can sort of bet on you know on price going up and down and based upon proposals and we've got a few other ideas that sort of sitting on the back burner about how that might work all in all I think oh yeah one of the other things I should mention is the idea of like having not using coins as the purely a way of deciding who should be voting for what or whose opinion should matter but also using you know positioning community potentially even this notion of like there being a body

that decides who are DAP authors or maybe power chains are able to have votes have a you know a vote as part of their a part of the sort of notion of being a pair of chain so the power chains each have their own individual governance mechanisms that allow their users in order to influence what happens on the relay chain there's also an idea of having voting through transaction fees so whenever you issue a transaction on the relay chain you can put in a vote or you can your account at least gets a little bit more voting power so there's quite a few there's quite a few ideas floating around as to how to make it not

purely a coin vote things some of these are things that we've implemented like the council others are things that we definitely plan on implementing like coin lock-ins for vote and and other those are the things are things that sort of definitely does further research to see if we can if we can come up with a reason as to why they would work and you know push forward with implementation if we think that they're promising yeah I think this is a good point and like very much on this topic so we did have a few weeks ago we didn't interview for Arthur and Kathleen from some tezo's and you know he kind of made a similar point right this question was like okay the goal of governance and tezo's isn't to like you know replicate

a democracy it's to basically build an efficient blockchain and so I think if you look at it that way maybe coin voting is less offensive I think if you look at it coming from the perspective of like you being used to like the system of democracy right that manages this environment that people function in then I think people get very upset right and if you like okay this is not a good good system and I think of course also one of the big benefits of especially proof of sake blockchains is if people don't like it it's really easy to fork right and it's really easy to launch a new network and have you know different distribution of token holders and get rid of the ones you don't like so I think that also provides is like

very powerful kind of balance where okay maybe a majority of coin motors could you know decide and something in some you know way that serves them specifically but if they end up losing the user base because they decide to fork the chain then like that's also very kind of powerful balance of power that you know you don't have an existing political system right you can't just say okay I'm gonna fork this country and go my own way yeah I mean you know there are certainly separatist movements that I kind of would quite like to for countries but yeah it's it's certainly a lot harder and I mean one of the one of the things that were not implementing certainly not for a year or two but

vague ideas that I've had it was was actually to make forking the network part of the government system so basically when I when a vote happens you can say well a remain minority can say we really don't want this to go in like to the point where we will destroy our account balances on this chain and fork the chain into a new chain where you guys don't get your account balances but we get ours so basically you actually you actually do a split and that that that's four balances as well and the idea is if we can make this a if we can make this a sort of sufficiently

trivial operation so that things you know and things like exchanges can automatically kind of lift these extra tokens the you know when it splits so there's automatically a means of deciding who gets what name and who gets you know some derivative name or even like automatically determining the derivative name that would potentially lead to fewer splits because it's like the majority would actually believe the minorities like they couldn't help but believe the minorities threat because the minority would be held to it basically their balances would get wiped if you know if the vote go if the vote went through with the majority and because they can make these credible

threats you can also build into the governance system more credible minority minority sort of support by saying well if you're willing to like put all of your coins up in order to in order to say you know no we don't want to try and veto it then we will listen to the veto we'll say well this vote this vote actually got vetoed it won't go through it can be reverted again maybe in a month or in two months or something but you know it's enough for them to to basically say you need to think about this some more guys because you know this is oh this is a credible threaten that the chain will talk otherwise and I mean this is similar to the bicameral

system in the UK where you've got the House of Commons in the House of Lords the House of Lords can't indefinitely block a vote by the House of Commons but they can send it back to the Commons a handful of times in order to say look we really don't think this is a great idea you guys need to kind of reconsider this and I think these more sophisticated systems particularly ones that play on time that say well you know it's not to say will block it forever it's not to say that you know you know a sufficient majority of turnout will will will always win it's rather to say that sometimes you just need to think a bit more you can come to some sort of some

sort of compromise where both sides are happy great makes a lot of sense I'm really curious to see all the governance experiments that will happen on polka-dot the other thing of course is when you have so many different peril chains experiments and governors can happen on these para jeans so we can I trade our way towards better governing these systems over time yeah so power chains basically have a similar I mean they all run on substrate so they have similar mechanisms to the to the relay chain in order to govern themselves in order to upgrade themselves and that's kind of that's very much I I quite like

one of the things that the u.s. is federal system is is kind of cool is this idea that states can have various different kind of social economics they can have different welfare systems they can experiment with like different medical care systems I think notably was it Michigan that had a version of Obamacare before Obama brought it in and it was who was he it was a bomb one of Obama's challenges that was actually the governor of Michigan that brought in that that that healthcare system and obviously later said oh no I do know there was a meet

Romney that's right yeah yeah Mitt Romney exactly so the idea that you know you can have two states next to each other like Texas in California that have you know vastly different welfare systems taxation systems and all the rest of it basically governance systems is it's really great because the things that work can be rolled out nationwide and the ones that though at least it's only a state that's kind of got a failed experiment on its hands and I see the same thing happening with polka dot where you know each of the different pair of chains and their communities can experiment with their various governance systems and the things that work get roll out to poker oh and the things that don't what they stay on the power train cool so that brings us to the last team which is the

polka dot is a very ambitious project right so you have new consensus mechanisms you have substrate to build para chains you have interchange communication there's a lot you need to get right in order to launch the system and have it be a maybe a fruitful ecosystem so Vera where is the project currently at in its lifecycle what works well and what doesn't and when can we expect to see a release of the main name so polka dot itself is we released PSD to PSC to was actually a non chain upgrade from PSC one that was the first to my knowledge on chain upgrade of a sort of live network a live public test

net and yeah I mean and it was also it wasn't just the you know I said it flaky sort of demo where you've just got like one minor relevant thing that's been upgraded this was like a full runtime upgrade it it like huge amounts of things changed all of the front lines have to change to deal with the new runtime this was actually a legitimate auto you know completely new test net and it's just that it happened to have the historical POC one blocks before it and all the psg1 substrates or polka dot could could continue thinking okay so PST 2 is out PST 3 is right around the corner it's

finished as a side except for this this extra consensus algorithm which will probably be our final polka dot consensus algorithm pretty excited about that and yeah it should be kind of interesting to see POC for was shared for late in the year sort of new year time were probably a couple weeks behind on PS III so I would guess we're looking more like late January 20 2019 I'm PSE for basically takes polka dot to feature completeness it it introduces the interchange communication and it will

have a relatively sophisticated consensus mechanism in order to you know bring in the power chain blocks it will have the validation the fishermen and the Co laters actually we already have colitis we already did the power chain thing in prc2 so there's actually I don't know there's already a power chain deployed certainly there have been power chains deployed on tests on clothes to test net the idea with PRC 5 is to bring in the substrate executable itself as a parrot regulation system so that basically we can start running things like smart contract chains potentially Bitcoin a Bitcoin chain and aut EXO chain on on the test net on the PSE

whatever it'll be four or five test net and and also start playing around with pluggable consensus and hot-swappable consensus and all the rest of it so that's likely to be done around April 2019 at that point basically we'll switch to smaller P SES and the audit will happen will begin so the components that affect things like the consensus algorithm there was an interpreter and a few other bits and we'll start order to probably start being audited probably towards the end of this year and the auditing will be going on sort of in the background and as more and more gets

sorted it'll just sort of flow into the audit I would say we're still roughly on track for our original release date of August 29 ever sorry autumn 20 and 2019 and probably be towards the end of q3 I'm gonna I'm gonna eat these words I know you know software projects but I'm gonna say them there we are end of 20 end of q3 2019 we'll know more once PSE forest and as I said PS before is basically feature completeness and at that point we're fairly will be fairly happy about the protocol and it's really just about getting the audits through [Music] yeah that's that's basically it our SDK is basically substrate and that's going

to be continued to be developed so that's power chain development can basically already be started and hopefully those para chains those sorts of changes that are being developed in substrate now can be deployed to polka dot with relatively few code changes round maybe March time next year for that for that polka polka dot PRC testing it yeah but you know we are slowly getting to the point now where it's starting to feel quite real and that's that's cool well gammy thank you so much for coming on there was super fascinating speak with you and I mean it

was really a lot of very interesting things you're working on a lot of great innovations so yeah thanks so much it's exciting and look forward to seeing how polka dot develops and how it will do in the real world cool thanks for having me on the show and I look forward to coming back in another four years thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of

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