OMG Network, Dark Forest and Mintbase Keynotes (Combined Recording)

Transcript

[Music] hello edcon 2020 thank you for joining me for this talk what's up with omg network i'm victoria dad leading pr for omg network and i'm very excited to be here with you guys today before we jump into things i wanted to give a little more background about me i've spent the past four years in the tech scene growing communities across asia i was previously tokyo's chief marketing officer and head of startup operations which introduced me to the crypto blockchain world as we know it and led me to joining omg network a year ago for those of you who are not familiar

with or not really caught up with what we've been up to at omg network what exactly is omg network the omg network is the quickest and most affordable way to transfer each and erc 20 tokens globally and without restrictions as a value transfer layer that scales ethereum our mission is to enable open financial services to facilitate fast cheap and secure transactions but not only that but we're also green as we cut down electricity consumption per transaction we're open which means you're free to build on our network through our odp or omg developer portal and trustless all thanks to the plasma protocol 2020 has been a pretty big year for us

to say the least the past six months alone have been filled with a lot of announcements a lot of launches a lot of really cool projects that are currently out there right now but to catch you up what exactly has omg network been up to lately in june we were branded from omisigo to omg network and along with it we announced the launch of omg network v1 mainnet beta but what does this mean exactly it basically means that we've successfully scaled ethereum and reduced transaction costs as well we're able to achieve this through the more viable plasma framework which is our very own flavor or type of plasma scales transactions on the child chain

it's fully trustless and non-custodial it relies on decentralized security which means route chain and a community of watchers that validate the system if you're learning about this for the first time here right now it's pretty simple really through this framework we're able to bundle up transactions and blocks and send them in batches to the ethereum network for confirmation this compression allows us to achieve high throughput of thousands of transactions per second at one-third the transaction cost while having ethereum level security as a layer 2 solution we're not only building with a trifecta of security scalability and decentralization in mind but in the process we're providing

solutions on main issues in the community such as fees congestion and the like that would help the ecosystem as a whole it's no secret that eat congestion and fees have been hitting all-time highs lately but through the omg network we can help alleviate this issue in june we announced that bitfinex integrates tether usct to omg network usdt is the longest running most widely used and largest stable coin by market cap tethered transactions make up close to 24 of the total ethereum network usage while stable coin led peer-to-peer transfers as a whole make up 60 this makes them the largest consumer of

gas on the ethereum network with congestion hitting highs of 90 percent a small increase can clog up the network and limit usage which means gas prices increase demand exceeds network capacity user funds get stuck there for a while you guys know the drill but adoption of layer 2 solutions will help solve this issue for example og network is designed to increase efficiency and affordability for 8th and the erc20 tokens this will help alleviate this congestion issue on the network and that basically means better trading experience affordable rates thousands of transactions per second while having ethereum level security and as tether and bitfinex leads this

effort into unburdening the ecosystem as a whole the whole ethereum community benefits from it as well but i know the big question that's probably running through your minds right now and we've seen it you guys have been asking a lot online on our twitter everywhere really when is this happening right so do not fret we're getting there we're currently on the final stages of the integration so please for our community stay rock stay patient it's going to be out there soon so now let's jump into july where our team went heads down to focus on building something

for the great reddit scaling bake off at the end of june reddit announced that they will be hosting a bake off which is an open invitation competition calling all ethereum scaling projects to show the community a scaling solution that can be used to bring community points to mainnet so obviously this was something that really excited us and our team did what what does best which was to go heads down and build at the end of july we did a surprise submission of the community points engine powered by omg network which the team built in less than 30 days the community points engine or cpe as we call it is a chrome extension that works on the

omg network subreddit and allows users to transfer community points for free i'll be showing you guys our pitch video of the product right now introducing the community points engine powered by omg the easiest fastest and most secure way to send and receive community points on reddit reddit user send and receive community points right from your browser check your balance in near real time all while browsing the subreddit moderator immediately mint and distribute points to anybody on the subreddit

burn points and handle all admin actions with the user-friendly dashboard [Music] reddit team member powered by omg network the community points engine is fearless and can withstand the traffic threshold that reddit requires using our more viable plasma technology this is the video demonstration of how community points engine works on reddit first you need to make sure you are on the correct community in our case it is the omg network subreddit then you simply click on the browser extension on this application you can see your current reddit account with the associated point balance for

the current subreddit you can make a transaction view transaction history as well as purchase items from the store let's make a transaction first you input the amount of points that you want to send select the username of the recipient and then click on transfer this will open a metamask popup that prompts you to sign the transaction once you click on sign simply wait a few seconds and then the transaction will be included the content of the transaction is also shown on a blog explorer and that's it no need to worry about

paying gas or deal with crypto addresses a clean simple user experience so yeah that's the cpe in the nutshell um when the team was building it we only had one goal in mind which was to create an easy to use product that allows for fee less community points transfers and although it's a poc we wanted to come out with a production ready software that users can actually use right now and that basically brings us to here and now you're all caught up and now you know what's up with omg network

with our rebrand our mainnet launch our upcoming integration with the fnx our submission to the reddit scaling bake off and so on it's safe to say that we've got a lot of really exciting things coming up for the rest of the year as well we're all geared up and working hard behind the scenes as we focus on real world applications but with big goals comes a kick-ass team behind it so now it's your turn we currently have a number of openings from technical product manager to senior blockchain engineer if you're a fit and interested in building and growing with us don't hesitate to apply it would be great to work together with you in the future just head on to omg-network.breezy.hr to keep updated and find out more about

us you can check out our website at omg network if you're keen on checking out what we're working on you may check our github and feel free to reach us at omgnetworkhq at almost everything and feel free to connect with me on any of my socials and as well as linkedin always happy to connect thank you so much for joining me on this session and hope to see you guys on the next edcon [Music] sorry

hey everyone my name is brian and i work with the ethereum foundation on zero knowledge cryptography research and development besides that i also work on dark forest which is a zero knowledge real-time strategy game built with zk snarks on ethereum in this talk i'm going to talk a little bit about why i think zk snarks might be potentially very interesting for blockchain gaming and gaming on decentralized system and also what i think some of the implications might be of zk snarks for decentralized systems beyond the applications we usually think about in privacy and rollout so first of all to motivate all of this i want to talk a little bit about a concept from game theory known as complete versus incomplete information game for those of you who aren't familiar games can generally be divided up into two type complete information games and incomplete or hidden information games

complete information games are games like checkers or chess in these games all players basically know the full state of the world so like in chess i know where all of your pieces are and you know where all of my pieces are and there aren't really like any secrets on the board whereas in poker an incomplete information game there's the notion of private state so in these kinds of games some information might only be selectively known to certain players and hidden from others like in poker i know my hand but i don't know yours real-time strategy games are an example of very popular hidden information games these are games like starcraft where hidden information is basically encapsulated in this mechanic of a fog of war a fog of war is basically a fancy way of saying that

you know in these games you might not know exactly where your opponent is at all times or what they're doing so before i've scouted out my opponent's base or explored the part of the map that they actually are based at i can't tell what actions are they doing how are they developing how are they approaching this game it turns out that incomplete information adds a whole new layer of complexity to a lot of really interesting multiplayer games so for example a lot of the biggest persistent massively multiplayer online games like eve online or world of warcraft or minecraft these are all incomplete information games and for good reason too incomplete information games allow players an opportunity to explore a much richer strategy space

with fewer constraints for example players can engage in things like deception or like conditional coordination you can see very complex emergent behaviors coming out of the player base or these like very complex social dynamics that evolve by virtue of the fact that i don't necessarily know everything about the game you don't necessarily know anything either and information is a first-class asset for us unfortunately on decentralized systems sort of by just you know the design principles that we bake into them most blockchain games and settings are complete information settings the reason for this is pretty straightforward a blockchain or a decentralized system broadly is often a system whose data layer is designed to be completely open

and transparent in other words i can always inspect the totality of the evm state and look for any data that anybody has ever stored in it this means that while it's possible to make games like cryptokitties where you know everybody knows who owns what kitty and what all the properties of each kitty are etc etc it's much harder to have the notion of private state inside of a blockchain game simply because you can't have private state on a blockchain almost by definition interestingly though new advancements in applied zero knowledge proof technology in the last year or so have allowed us to sort of hack in the concept of hidden information into the blockchain in more generalized settings so let's talk a little bit

about how we can do that so the idea here is that we would like to distinguish between the information that a player knows like a single player and the information that they have maybe local to their client or their machine or their brain and the information that's known and publicly inspectable and verifiable to the entire network of participants so what we're going to do here is let's say that player this player on the left has a private state s1 that they basically want to be keeping private um but that they want to commit up to the chain what they're going to do is they're going to submit a commitment to this private state s1 which means you know like a hash function evaluated on s1 and they're going to submit that commitment c1 up to the

network alongside of it they're also going to submit a zero knowledge proof that that hash that commitment c1 does indeed correspond to a validly formed private state that is you know formed in accordance with the rules of the game so p1 is basically going to say all right s1 is a valid state i didn't cheat or like allocate myself a bunch of extra resources or anything like that now the really interesting thing happens when a player wants to make a state transition uh in zero knowledge so suppose that player one wants to transfer from private state s1 to private state s2 so maybe this is the equivalent of like making a move well what they're going to do is they're going to upload a commitment c2 of their new private state s2 so you

know like the hash of s2 and this time they're going to attach a zero knowledge proof that the state transition from s1 to s2 was valid so this zero knowledge proof is basically saying something like all right i moved my knight from secret location a to secret location b i'm not going to tell you where a or b are but this proof does prove that this isn't an l shape i didn't like move the knight like halfway across the galaxy or something like that so again i'm able to basically commit to the fact and prove to the rest of the network that all of my actions that i've taken are in fact in accordance with the rules without verifying anything about the underlying private state that was actually operated on

so with this fairly straightforward concept we're able to build already a fairly complex game like dark forest and here's just a screenshot from the ui we actually have a white listed sort of first beta version out right now at zkga.me if you want to check it out and today what i want to do is i want to talk a little bit more also about the construction of this game and exactly how we use that zk hidden information technique to make this game work so yeah let's talk a little bit about the game construction so for a little bit of context dark forest is basically this space conquest game where players initialize on some home planet and their goal is to sort of build and develop out this empire

of steadily more valuable valuable and powerful planets so like you can see over here there's this procedurally generated and infinite terrain and players are gradually sort of colonizing more and more regions of space the key dynamic in dark forest is that there is a cryptographically enforced fog of war which means that when you initialize into the game and when you inspect the public blockchain state this doesn't tell you any information about where other players are all they do all this information proves is that all players have acted consistently in accordance with the rules of the game so to start off with everybody lives on this large infinite two-dimensional grid um and the way that we insert we sort of

enforce this cryptographic fog of war is by the following construction for any coordinate pair x comma y in the game we're going to identify the hash of x comma y as that location's public address conversely we're going to say that the coordinates themselves are the location's private address and these are never uploaded to the blockchain um another thing that we do is that in order to give the game a little bit of texture we specify that uh only a certain number of locations actually correspond to say habitable planets so right now it's about you know if the coordinates of a location hash to under some difficulty threshold then we call that a habitable planet everything else is

empty space player controlled units are going to live on locations and planets that players own and you're going to be able to basically move these units between planets that you own in order to attack other planets or colonize other planets and that's really like pretty much all there is to the game so let's talk a little bit about what state is being kept public and what is being kept private and hidden by the snarks the on-chain state that's stored in the dark forced core contract simply is a mapping of essentially player addresses to the hashes of planets that they own so you're basically going to be able to inspect the core contract and you're going to see a list of all of these

hashes alongside which players own them and what units are situated on them the private state that each player keeps on their own machine in their browser's local storage is going to be the private addresses x comma y of all the planets that they own so this is like hash pre-images of their planet ids and any information that they learned from computation so what does this last part mean information learned from computation well let's say that i initia i initialize in the world at some home planet located at say five comma twenty what i do is i hash the coordinates five comma twenty and i upload that hash up to the blockchain you might look at 5 comma 20 you might look at the hash of 5 comma 20 and it basically just looks like some string of bytes to you and because hash functions

are hard to invert there's no way for you to actually uncover my location from that however because i submit a zero knowledge proof along with that hash you do know that it corresponds to some valid coordinate pair now on the other end maybe you initialize at three comma eight uh you hash three comma eight and you upload that up to the blockchain so from my perspective i see the hash of three comma eight and i have no idea where you are because again hashes are hard to invert but i know that you are playing honestly because you've submitted a zero knowledge proof so how do we actually go about finding each other well the best thing that i can do to try to figure out if there's any players or points of interest close to my planet 5 comma 20 is i can basically just start brute force hashing

so i'm going to hash 5 comma 21 5 comma 22 6 comma 20 4 comma 19 etc etc and eventually i might get around cashing 3 comma 8. at this point i'm going to get the hash value of 3 comma 8 and i'm going to be able to look up on the blockchain that hash value to see it to see if anyone lives there and i'm going to find that you indeed own that location so basically what i've done is through computation done privately i have lifted the cryptographic fog of war and found players and points of interest near me note that all of this stuff happens on my local machine none of this is ever uploaded to the blockchain because this is all private state so we talked a little bit about zero

knowledge proofs for state transitions earlier and i want to dive a little bit into how that construction works in dark forest as well the fundamental action that you can take in dark forest is essentially to move units from uh some secret planet a at some secret location to a planet b at some other secret location that's not known to the chain so what this looks like is basically i'm going to say i want to move 100 forces from um you know hash one to hash to how am i going to prove to the blockchain that i'm actually allowed to do that when the blockchain doesn't know anything about what the underlying coordinates are behind those hashes well the input to the move function therefore is going to look something like you know hash one hash to acclaim distance

between them because uh you know you pay some cost um incurred based on the distance between the two planets you're moving from a two and a zero knowledge proof that's basically going to prove the validity of all of this so concretely the zero knowledge proof is going to say i know some secret coordinates x1 y1 and x2 y2 such that the hash of x1 y1 is the first public address the hash of x2 y2 is the second public address and these two coordinates are at most this claimed distance apart and again this is important because the claims distance is basically going to be uh you know some uh there's a rule set that governs how much i have to pay or how much time i

have to wait in order to make a move of that amount of distance so what is a zk snark proof preventing it's preventing people from basically saying all right i'm going to move from location a to location b um these locations are actually one unit away from each other so this move should cost me you know no resources and should execute instantaneously when in reality the actual underlying coordinates are like halfway across the universe or something like that so in this way these zk proofs are basically going to ensure the integrity of the game and making sure that all players are kept honest cool so that's basically the backbone behind dark forest beyond this we use a few other tricks to both introduce a sense of texture and complexity and richness

into the world and also to create a sense of real-timeness to the game within the constraints of course that the ethereum world tick size is going to be that block mining time of about 10 to 15 seconds usually so the first thing that we do is we have taken procedural generation algorithms and we have put them inside of zk snarks so what does this actually mean procedural generation algorithms are the algorithms used by games like minecraft to generate rich and varied and infinite terrains without game developers or artists needing to actually make all of these things by hand it turns out that the algorithm that kind of underlies most of the most commonly used

procedural generation techniques is an algorithm called purlin noise which is entirely arithmetic operation entirely linear operations so think things like you know dot products multiplications scalar multiplications addition subtractions purlin noise is basically used to generate rich and varied textures so in the context of dark forest if we can put purlin noise inside of a snark we can create textured infinite worlds where basically there's features like you know this big region of space is an ocean with very few planets this is a choke point over here and this is like a hub with a lot of very valuable or very powerful planets and all of that is possible because we can take this purlin noise algorithm and put it inside of a zk

snark we also use a trick with lazy updating to simulate continuity so obviously you can't schedule a cron job on the blockchain but we'd like to make it so that if i initiate a move it say arrives after some period of time so we do a little bit of lazy updating trickiness in order to get that to all work consistently but the end result is that you know we're able to see planets grow according to like these s-curves um moves appear to arrive at distant points in the future after they're executed despite the fact that the blockchain can't execute you know this kind of timeout function and and overall there's there's uh some other tricks that are basically going into making this really have a sense of real-timeness so that's pretty much that's pretty much

it for dark forest uh if you want to follow along the progress uh we keep a blog at that blog.zkga.me and again the game itself is playable at zkga.me we'll probably start running some public play tests pretty soon as well we're on twitter at dark forest underscore eath and we're also on telegram at zk underscore forest thanks so much [Music] my name is carolyn wendt and i work at mint base i am super excited to be speaking here at edcon thank you so much for having me

and today i'm gonna speak about evolving economies nfts and the metaverse so i will share my screen with you because i have a presentation so okay let's share this presentation with you so um mint base uh who are you um we are an ft minting platform um i will first give you an overview um then i will dive into use cases of mint base and the metaverse and then i will actually go into our virtual headquarters and decentraland and cryptoboxes so uh we are two people um it's nate and myself building mint base and we have become one of the most used marketplaces on the ethereum network and this is awesome

um so just a little bit of background why we built this um so nate worked a few years for nike and a company called bums um which is in the fintech sector and he was always surprised about how complicated this financial system is how um you don't really own any any shares in web 2.0 in the normal days we live and we don't really have any ownership um my background is a little bit different i worked in politics i was a blockchain researcher and at one of the events um i met nate and um now i've been whitman based for over a year i'm super super excited about what we're building because i think it's really uh

revolutionizing um the way we do things on the internet i think in the future everything will be tokenized and the meta versus will play a massive role in this so um mint base this is how our site looks like we enable anyone to come onto our platform and create their own uh smart contract which is a shop it's like basically a shopify on the blockchain what we do um so the difference with us and other minting tools is that you the shop creator whenever you create a shop you have your own unique verified smart contract

this is important because you have all the functions you have access to your smart contract and you can get listed on sites as dabradar or nonfangible.com so up to date we have over i think now it's over 760 unique stores that have been created on our platform and they are very intentional because um depending on the ethereum gas fee uh shop creation of a shop can be anywhere between two and uh now sixty seventy dollars um yeah so it's super exciting we use um many different technologies um so basically uh we uh enable people to log on to our platform and

make transactions with the wallet of their choice they can use arjun metamask and other other platform other wallets so use cases um mfts a few years ago and i used to be uh just a collectible that sits in your wallet um cryptokitties take cryptokitties as an example but now we see more use cases on our platform every day so we have crypto artists who create nfts on our platform and sell it and we have game items we have more and more music that is being tokenized on our platform and we have people uploading

files such as lease contract or marriage certificates in crypto boxes different things the one of again another interesting use case um is tickets so uh we are actually selling tickets for um san francisco blockchain week korea and paris blockchain week so um nft's uh um super super wide as you can see and uh one nft is holding more than just an image we allow people to upload um files such as mp3 mp4 so um it's really really um diverse um so basically how our tech works is a

user comes onto our platform uh mint base um the contract is being created um like uh yeah just the normal on the ethereum blockchain and then um the nft metadata the sounds the images um are actually stored on the awf blockchain um that is awesome when you want to store your data for over 200 years um and it's immutable you have a timestamp that comes with your data it's a completely new um new technology which is super important in times we live in because fake news will not be an issue with

this type of data storage anymore um as said we use many different technology but technologies but since this talk is about nfts and the metaverses i will just dive into cryptoboxes and decentraland so um interoperability that is basically the main uh main thing that is to note here um so anyone who creates nfts on our platform in form of esc 721 um can be put into a virtual world the token itself is the api carrying all the data um so

you can for example mint a token on mint base behind the scenes it will automatically be put and published onto openc as well you don't need to do anything so that is kind of the interoperability then you can put the token maybe art maybe a ticket maybe music into like metaverse into decentraland or cryptovoxels and this is awesome because um it's kind of mushing the virtual world together with nfts and i think we are more and more moving into that direction um so uh we

have um people who exhibit um the art in our headquarters it's kind of like our shop or our like um to it to promote the artworks of our users so when you mint a token on mint base you actually also get promoted in in different virtual worlds and there's actually a lot of traffic coming through um people um walking through those virtual worlds and looking at art and and tickets and other things so think about um marketing uh in the internet age right now um performance marketing when you uh i

don't know um on i don't know on the search engine google or whatever and you get those little um click ads this is completely uh yeah this is completely the past um nowadays like uh like in the future or even like it's already happening um like the new world of marketing is uh an experience so you have a virtual world where you can go to you can listen to the music you can walk around it's basically like going shopping but um in a more more discreet way so before i jump into the um our headquarters and those two worlds um just uh what um what we did or why

we um got many users back in december um last year is uh like nimbus we did like a advent calendar so an advent calendar something which is um like in europe it's very common um between the 1st and 24th of december kids are super impatient because santa claus is coming soon and they don't want to wait for their presents so um they get like a little calendar and every day um like first of december or the fifth of december and they can open a little door and then there's a chocolate or little toy inside the calendar and this is meant to just like uh shorten the weight until christmas so what we did is actually we

um replicated the same con concept of an advent calendar in crypto boxes so um we needed 24 people um and we asked people or companies who are big in the nft scene so we asked trustworth um knosis meta cartel porters um crypto artists such as max or sirius and also the platform sent um and many other partners um if they want to be on board on board with our um yeah our little advent calendar so uh they agreed to it and every day um we had little avatars coming into our

virtual headquarters in crypto voxels and we had a little riddle like obviously um it's just one present per day so we did uh some riddles like um the and then like underline and uh is on fire so the roof is on fire so um people who figured it out they flew like on top of the roof and there was the nft they could grab so those kind of things um like were this like worked super well um people loved uh the art advent calendar at some point we had over 50 60 people um in crypto voxels it was really great and um yeah it definitely got a lot of traction through that so um as said we have uh so this here is our um our website mint base uh

so it's super easy for people who are also not so familiar with crypto um you just press get started and go through the process um we also are on the rinkbee dotmentbass.io network but coming back to what i actually wanted to show is um cryptoboxes so i just give you a quick tour um so cryptoboxes is this virtual world on uh on the theorem blockchain ben nolan is um the founder and he built this um all by himself it's completely indie and um you need to buy an ft in order to uh buy land so i'm actually the owner of this um i just make this enlarge this a little bit so i'm actually um the owner

of um this little uh parcel and because i'm the owner i can modify um and i can build stuff like i can like put up new artworks like this for example as a song that has been minted on our platform you can put up the open ceiling uh you can [Music] put up other links as long as they are nfts so this is really awesome let me just close this um [Music] yeah and we regularly do parties in here we also have companies um like doses or we recently had um dao records who is a musician who hosted

a little party uh in our headquarters so here you can sit down as you can see we also exhibit uh what we're selling right now so um we sell tickets from san francisco blockchain week and other conferences over here is a little art gallery and again we have some music over here so we can click on that and we can uh listen to to this awesome um mint tape it's actually a song about um so that's really cool um just do this uh

yeah so this is our little virtual headquarter in um cryptoboxes i will share the link with you or come to mind based on you can find us on twitter or just go to the website and we have a link on our website so feel free to just walk around there's so much to do so much to see it's really an endless world um in here so that is crypto voxels i'm super excited as well about the centerland so uh in decemberland um this here is our headquarter this is awesome it's super big it's um it looks like a berlin

uh like building um and you can enter so let's work inside together let me close this um and as you can see we have so many artworks exhibited we changed the exhibition every two weeks so um people can come in here we have launch parties uh we even have like um a little party sometimes where people come and we stream some music tapes and some dji sets so uh we like do many different things in the virtual world and it's super important for us because it gives us um

a lot of traction and actually it's also a lot of fun for them so um i hope you enjoyed this um and let me know if you have any questions uh about this um if you want to see more in the centerline on crypto voxels i'm happy to guide you around and you can reach me on mainbait.io just on the website or you can come to twitter and reach out to us anytime this is totally the future we will see more and more companies selling and doing marketing events in 3d world so get familiar like