Bringing the cultural mainstream to Ethereum and scaling it

Transcript

it's [Applause] um hello guys first of all uh thank you for staying until 6 pm here um I'm sure there was a long day but yeah the talk today is about nfts and how we are planning on bringing nfts to millions of people and scaling that on on ethereum um so yeah here we'll talk about the text side of things and I'll talk about the sewer side of things and you know our vision and thesis to uh bring nfts to millions of users um so I just wanted to start with the origin story of silver so basically in

2018 you know like most of us here we discovered cryptokitties um and you know through that we discovered that we could collect digitally and you know the founders as football fans they thought that you know there was a massive opportunity to create um a digital object that you can collect and bring one of the most coveted IPS in the world to it which is the IPO football clubs football leagues and players and so that's what they started doing in 2018 partnering with the Belgium pro league and then you know convincing more and more leagues and clubs and players as it went through and so in 2020 that was kind of our

breakthrough year where we started partnering with pakistanjama Liverpool Real Madrid Etc but the idea of silver is not to just build Collectibles that have the IP of football clubs but it's also about bringing utility to these collectibles in a very compelling game and you know here on the slide I'm showing uh the uh FIFA game built by EA Sports and EA Sports every year they launch what they call icons and these icons they sell 1.6 billion dollars worth of icons per year and they create them at the beginning of the year and they make them disappear at the end of

the year and these icons are items in a video game that you cannot really trade outside of EA that you cannot really use outside of EA's ecosystem and so we think that there's a massive opportunity to do something a lot better with nfts but really the idea is you know how can you create nfts that are valuable on the long term and sustainable not just something that can be a fad of a few months and so regarding that you know there's really four criterias that you'll be looking at when it comes to creating valuable nfts the first one is scarcity obviously we can do that through nfts and to give you an example in 1980s trading cards lost a

lot of value because there was an over issue of trading cards and so with nfts you have this transparency that really makes you build a great Community around a really transparent standard of you know your scarcity and I'll go more in more in detail about that after the second aspect is you know making these Collectibles reputable and you know we can see that people through his reputation or um you know crypto punks through their storytelling are creating also great nfts that have value third point would be liquidity um you know uh crypto punks can be traded on openc writable and any other nft platform all around the world and

the final point which is really our main thesis at Silver is you know baking utility and multiple layers of utility Within These nfts and there's multiple ways of doing that either by creating in-game utility or experiential utility or ticketing utility and that's what we are looking at so I'll give you an example of how at or we try to achieve this the first thing is you know scarcity um having a transparent and easy to understand standard of scarcity at Silver what we have is three levels of Scar of cards one is the Unique Card this is the polo dybala card there's only one per player per season then

there's the super card there'll be 10 per player per season and then there will be the rare card 11 per player per season and this scarcity is known by all both in solar.com but also on the blockchain on ethereum on etherscan the second point is you know having great reputation and IP and you know what we're building here is the football game for nfts um and we've been adding more and more clubs and more leagues as we go our goal is pretty simple and straightforward it's to onboard the top 20 leagues in the world

and you know educate them on the benefits of blockchain technology and entities for them why they signed with silver or with any boxing company is pretty easy the first thing is it creates a new Revenue stream for them it also creates an added new Revenue stream which is monetizing the secondary market right so um if I'm Real Madrid and I sell a panini card whenever that Panini card sells again on eBay I don't make any money on that but I would make money on Silver if silver took a fee in the secondary Market which actually we don't today because we want to create liquidity which is my third point and the way we sell cards and silver is

pretty easy the new cards are sold on auction so basically the highest bidder wins the auction and that's how the price setting mechanism works um and then once you own the card you can do whatever you want with it you can sell it on Silver there's no take rate there's no fee you can also sell in an open C and variable on any other platform that supports uh the ethereum nft standard erc721 um and that liquidity is very important to make sure that you do have a sustainable nft project and finally the third and the fourth point Sorry the most important one would be this one having utility that is long lasting sustainable and it drives retention and that's what we've

seen at Silver is that you know people that place over and collect sorrow cards are actually Gamers they're not Traders they're not speculators they are Gamers and I see the value in the cards because there's this game and so the game Loop is pretty simple you come in you collect cards you compose your team enjoy the live experience of fantasy watching your players you know uh like have an amazing performance online offline and then you watch the score of that player online and you can see the score of your team you can get ranked and depending on your performance you'll earn rewards and that's the game Loop

right the beauty of nfts is that they have these superpowers where you can basically do whatever you want with them you can use them and so work you can also use them elsewhere and so we've been very lucky and it's something that we did not expect two and a half years after having launched the alpha of the game to see so many side projects build uh games on server build third-party applications on top of silver cards so really our vision and where we want to go today is you know to build the best fantasy football game there is and then it's about you know baking into these fantasy into this fancy experience some really cool content experiences that you

can online lock through specific nfts adding even more utility than purely just the gaming utility and then the third point is building an ecosystem of games around server cards you know it we this will be an asset-centric type of experience and not a game-centric type of projects and you know so far we've actually been to step three Without Really providing any incentive other than building on an open blockchain building you know with an open API that anyone can access to and anyone can you know code with and we've been very lucky and fortunate to see gaming Studios such as Ubisoft building on top of server cards

um just yesterday there was a new project that announced a nap on top of server cards before we actually release our own app um so we've been beaten to it but it's been incredible to see how you know building in the open and building you know with uh this kind of community-led growth has made the product evolve but I'll leave the floor to Pierre who's been building or blockchain infrastructure and you know we've had a lot of challenges on that so I'll uh I'll leave him say more Twitter hi everyone

I'm Pierce I'm a senior software developer at soar um so I'm going to speak about scalability from a technical standpoint where we started where we are and where we are going and show you the the challenges we got like along the way um so it started basically we start we we launched our product the first version of our product in March 2019 um and actually we were already on the scaling solution which is called Loom so at the time they had a side chain a

little side chain and that's that's where we started basically and so we had subsequent trades and it was working very well until until December of of 2019 where Loom basically decided to pivot and they were no longer gonna maintain their their side chain so we had to make a decision so where are we going now um so we decided to go on the main chain for like the main reason was exposure so we know that like ethereum has a huge

ecosystem being there was a way for us to to be more visible so around um yeah and I just forgot like we started like Q4 2019 uh we had around 303 000 trades in a quarter um so April 2020 we migrated to ethereum um so at this point we had to Mint all our tokens on ethereum but at that point in time we only had like three thousand or four thousand tokens uh so that that was something we could do and at the time the the gas price was around five

ways so that was okay um in Q2 20 2020 we reached 30k trains in a quarter so it started growing and basically today the last quarter so Q2 2021 we settled 210 000 trades on on ethereum and that's why we are looking for a scaling solution and we've been we've decided to partner with stockware to to bring a better experience to our customers and we are currently working on migrating and we should be migrating

uh tomorrow if everything goes as planned so yeah we had a lot of work and in the recent weeks um so the scalability challenge and just to give you uh a few numbers so so you you see like where we stand so in the Q2 2021 uh we we use the 73 73 billion gas uh that's a lot and if if you assume 15 million gas limit per block four blocks per minute that's about one percent of the totally term block space over the quarter

um so that's that's already a lot uh we are planning to grow so um Brian presented uh the different scarcities we have uh but it's still a small amount of cards like 100 counts for Ronaldo is is a very uh very little since a lot of people want this car so we do plan to have more cards and if we have the same growth over like the next year uh we it could represent up to 10 percent of the total later on blog space which is uh is not something we can we can do and and it um won't be able to handle that at decent prices I want to

be able to sell nfts that are worth five to ten Euros um but like with current gas prices is probably around 20 200 Euros to Mint and nft sorry 10 to 40 euros um and yeah so it's not just about the price it's also about ux impacts so we have many of our users they've never heard of uh ethereum or gas fees or transactions or private keys and like when they buy a car and they they pay by credit card and they only receive the account 24 hours later or 48 hours later they are kind of surprising and we get a

lot of support tickets so yeah ux is not great that's one more reason we we want to uh to move to a skating solution um so at the beginning of 2021 basically we started doing a review of what were our options in terms of scalability so everyone is familiar with the the scalability trilemma which basically says you can have scalability security and decentralization at the same time you have to choose which one you're willing to sacrifice so in our in our review of scaling Solutions

basically we had a look at layer ones so other blockchains um but I mean we are really attached to a term uh it has like the the highest adoption uh the biggest project and we believe it's the most neutral infrastructure with no for-profit organization controlling it so we decided to remain on ethereum it was kind of an evidence for us the second option we looked at was side chains side chains have benefits but we've had like we've had an experience with the sidechain uh that's where we started and

like they basically told us that we we should migrate in two monsters because the chain is going to die at some point so we're kind of we're kind of yeah we didn't want to to to do the same thing although I know uh side chains are different uh it's not the same team but yeah we passed on on that option too um so the the next option was layato protocards so uh it's been trending a lot over the past six months or even year and there's like two main flavors which are optimistic collapse collapse

what we like about layer 2 protocol is that they inherit the security and decentralization from ethereum they don't make new assumptions there's no other chain there is no other validators um so optimusic rollups have a huge advantage today in the sense that they are evm compatible uh um but they have also drawbacks especially fine FTS in terms of withdrawal times could be around like a week to withdraw an nft um but also I believe it scales less than ZK olaps because all the data has

to be on chain which means that yeah at some point it's going to be clocked I guess um and we we are kind of lucky because the way we use the blockchain is pretty uh straightforward we only do means minting of energies and trades of energies so it's really just trading an asset there's like our game is is not decentralized we don't have like complex logic that some D5 project have so uh having a full evm compatible solution was not necessarily something we needed so we looked at ZK roll ups um the main benefit is with roll times

and scalability there's several ways of of using a wrap I don't know if people are familiar with data availability modes but basically you can choose to have data on chain or that out chain when you have data of chain it like opens the door to a to a very um High scalability so there's like multiple people in the space we've decided working on with the stockware the reason we we've decided to go with them is they have a world-class cryptography and engineering team they have they have focused on scalability which is our main concern

today and that's what we want to tackle first and also what was really reassuring for us is that they have systems in production since summer 2020 meaning that there is already a year of run which is quite reassuring foreign so I'm just gonna try to explain very briefly how how like the concept of of ZK Roll-Ups basically so ethereum has constraints in terms of computation and Storage so the goal of this of the ZK roll up is

to reduce storage and computation on main chain and try to take uh most of it off chain so to reduce the the storage uh we use a macro tree basically the leaves the leaves of the macro tree I just forget always too so that's an apple tree for the so basically the leaves of the macro tree represent ownership of an asset and we kind of hash all of this together to get the macro root which is a compressed uh um uh representation of the state that's what we're going to commit on chain

the second part of it is more around themselves so there's two important things so at Stockwell they they work with ZK stocks stock stands for scalable transparent argument of knowledge and basically we are very interested in the first part which is the S which stands for scalable I get back to that just just a little bit later so what we're trying to do uh I've just wrote a formula so we have a function f that takes two arguments

the previous root of the macro tree a list of transactions and that that turns that into a new macro root that represents the new state transactions are like I mean they are similar to it around transaction so you can find nonsense you can find signatures and basically it's just saying okay I want to send x amount of that token to to that person to simplify and so what the ZK proof does is that you can prove that you have a set of transactions uh that with the previous route and the function f gives you the

new root so that means that what you need to commit unchain to prove that your new state is valid is the is only the the sorry the ZK proof and the contractor already knows about the the function um so you send me the CK proof and the next route and that's enough to to guarantee the validity of the new root coming back to the scalability part so how ethereum works is that basically they replay all transactions so all the nodes of the network replay the transaction and verify they are valid um so with the the ZK proofs so there's

a approving system where there is approver and a verifier so the goal is to construct a proof in a time that is linear to the computation time so you can see on the chart basically the light blue line is the the proving time the dark blue line is the computation time so you can see that is roughly the same order of magnitude but the very fine time is much smaller and in fact is exponentially smaller than the computation time so it means that instead of verifying all the transaction which has a cost of T you will only verify the

proof which has a which is exponentially smaller than a than t so I mentioned I mentioned that there are there are several data availability modes so um dydx for instance that that works with stockware as well they have a they are using a ZK roll up in the sense that they post all the data on chain as cool data meaning that anyone can reconstruct the macro tree but it also means you need to post the down chain we're going to run in the validium mode which means that the data is not posted

on chain on chain you'll only have the the macro root for the system to be self-custerial users need to be able to exit the roll-up without having to interact with soar or stockware so for that you need a miracle proof and basically there is a what we call a data availability committee so it's a five or six committee members and to be able to commit a new state on chain you basically need two things you need a proof which is valid uh that

basically says there is a set of transactions that allow me to go from the previous route to the new route but you also need n of M signatures from the members from the members of the data availability committee they basically attest that they have all the data that that they need to be able to recompute the macro root so it means that if someone wants to exit without going through soar or Stockwell they could just turn to a data availability Committee Member which could provide them with the macro proof um so some people might want

um might prefer having additional guarantees around data availability and we know Stockwell is working on a new data availability mode which is called volition which will let the users decide if they want to have the data on chain or off chain which makes a lot of sense I mean we have nfts that runs in value from five euros to a hundred Euro 100 000 Euros and you're not willing to pay the same amount of security for a hundred thousand Euro token or five euro token um so having that that flexibility is uh is very interesting so that's all for for our talk if you

have a questions we are more than happy to answer so the the current TPS we basically do 3000 transaction per day today uh that's about uh 0.03 I think transactions per second um but like today our we basically sell 111 cards of each player and we we are planning on introducing a

new scarcity which has 1 000 editions so we're going to probably do 10-fold uh just on the new issuance so we'll probably reach on 0.3 transaction per second and also what is interesting is that so at soar we have the primary Market where we sell accounts we also have the secondary market and the secondary Market is growing um so if you think that like maybe 10 of the secondary Market trades every month uh that's good that number is going to grow right so that that the amount of Canada has been sold before it's going to grow expunged exponentially so we expect to reach transactions around one transaction per second and that's what

we would like to be able to to have yeah to inform a technical standpoint thank you um today you're using solidity in order to emit your nfts which allows composability and people to develop games on top of your game how do you think using another language and another

system will affect this dynamic uh that's a great question um composability is something that uh we we took into account when when deciding to to have a roll-up which is a a closed roll-up as well so like if we if we look at the things today we have like several apps building on top of us none of them are interacting with solidity just they read through solidity but given the current gas costs actually no one can really afford to to build a game on solidity on top of our nfts so there is composability in theory but in practice what we see today is

that it's too expensive so that's unfortunate now so we are moving on on stock where and we're using uh their product which is called Stock Exchange which is a basically an exchange and and it's built on top of Cairo which is the like uh touring complete language and they have a road map to go to stocknet which will be a an open run-up so where our application should be able to talk to each other so there is a roadmap uh is not there yet uh but I think today we are happy to sacrifice a bit composability for

scalability and have that come a bit later um yeah anyone else wants to make a question thanks everyone there's one question uh I have a non-technical question so what is the end game for solar like what can we yeah I can precise my

question what can I do with the with the solar care card in the future um so right now what you can do with a silver card is play or fancy game um are kind of short-term ambition is to build the best fancy game there is out there if you think about fancy football it's a very fragmented Market you have a fancy game in every country that is different and so we were building a Global one that will cater to all these different audiences at once um and we are supercharging them with these in-game items that are nfts

um and so with a card you can play the game you can earn rewards and these are in-game Awards going forward we are working with the football clubs to make these rewards more special kind of experiences that money can't buy right so you can imagine stuff like um I participate in fancy game I score well I rank in the top five I eligible to go to the train ground at Real Madrid and play ball with the Benzema or I'm in the stadium I play the fancy game and I you know play fan Cristiano Ronaldo

and my team and I'm in the Juventus Stadium and he scores and since you're in the stadium then that then that unlocks an experience in the stadium or nfts as tickets to a game etc etc so there's a lot of on there's a lot of things that we are exploring that we're just scratching the surface and that also depends on the partners that we have and we're very lucky to have enough Partners to really brainstorm at multiple levels and and have great ideas coming and then from the team and from our partners congrats congrats for being a unicorn

today thank you and by the way uh I don't know if there's any other questions but we are recruiting a lot of people so feel free to uh go on a website and look at the open positions um yeah thanks for coming do you plan to go beyond football as well or is that going to be the focus for the next years um we think football is you know what the biggest sport in the world it's not we think it is um so there's a massive opportunity there but we are building a model which is fancy nfts that no one else has built so

far and you know we think there's great opportunities to replicate that model to different sports so it is in our long-term strategy to start thinking about you know how we could replicate that too other sports and we have a few in mind and and we have a few that we could do in the next few years thank you have a great evening