Why Decentralized Frontends Are the Future of Web3?

Transcript

hello everyone no okay okay yeah hi everyone uh thanks for being here uh before lunch I know it's uh you're waiting for to hit that uh hopefully a lot of energy so let's talk about why decentralized front ends are the future of F3 so I'm Ilia co-founder of near and the CEO of pagoda and for those who are not familiar with near kind of we started as a vision of building open web which is giving control to everyone with their assets was there data was their power of governance right and was in that big vision we started by building layer one because in 2018 there was no clear technology which you could use to actually build

something for billions of users we have uh you know invested a lot in usability in scalability on this as we launched that we invested a lot in developer experience because as we saw more and more developers coming they had struggled to actually build something the tooling was very low level it was missing a lot of components and services and so what we call developer platform and services in building that but uh kind of throughout last year the realization came in that although there's a lot of great developers there is missing kind of a unified platform that actually connects users and and applications in one place right as a developer you build your application you you know go to UCC pair is global uh Paris hackathon you build a really cool

app and then it goes nowhere nobody finds it nobody is able to use it and then you know you lose interest and you move on and so how do we get this kind of connectivity and really deliver something that kind of can push us through to the next wave of web3 adoption and so what we introduced is blockchain operating system and this goal of building to 1 billion users so blockchain operating system is really a common layer for browsing and discovering Open Lab applications and it's compatible as any blockchain and I'll show what that means so what are the problems with solving right there's a set of core web3 problems that uh sorry web2 problems that we're solving is up three right

this is everything about data privacy about user ownership about lack of you know being able to affect decisions when you know Instagram decides to remove a like button at the same time there's you know more and more kind of arbitrary decisions are being made by the platforms that right now provide applications like you know application stores uh as and um there's no way to really you know argue against that because of the Monopoly on distribution they have in that three we have new problems right we have obviously you know really uh challenging and boarding problem with uh kind of new users having trouble coming in not knowing where to start this also

leads to discoverability right you install a wallet you even funded it now what which applications are available which have them as secure you have challenge now which chain to use right which roll up which layer one what other things even mean if you're a developer yourself and you build an application you have initial users most of you have you know only inspection of transactions on chain you don't actually know who these users are and if you have launch a new feature the only thing you can do is Scream into the void of Twitter and hoping people will come back so there's no way to re-engage users and really have a relationship with them obviously there's ton of uh questions with compliance and importantly as we're

building this web3 applications right we still have a lot of pieces that are centralized right and importantly the front ends but also a lot of middleware is still living on a centralized server and is kind of very fragile to you know the main going down a hack that happens like something like happens curve front ends and so all of this just creates more and more challenges which we're trying to solve as box generating system now how does this work well it's not a one single thing right it's a whole layer a set of layers that really build one on top of each other so we have layer ones on the bottom with layer twos uh there is already obviously support for those EVMS there's uh kind of

actually people contributing other layer one as well on top of this we have Services right this is everything and I'll talk more but think of it as all the middleware that you need to really build powerful website applications we introduced a new layer called decentralized composable front ends right so this is moving away from the idea that front end needs to live on some server and needs to be accessed by the user and only through that way you can have this front end but because we're saying the you know the smart contracts contains the logic the identities the data of the user right it may be living like some of the data living on ipfs or other decentralized storages the front end now becomes more of a medium of information and it can

also live anywhere and it can be kind of reconstructed for the user at the time when they need to access it so gateways is the way you actually access it right and it can be anything from a Gateway that you know application self-runs to a common gateway to even Gateway that you run your yourself on your Urban device and finally you have onboarding right solving all of those problems is how to get new users how to get them engaged is really important so diving into Services uh there's a set of really important pieces that need to come together to allow anyone to build applications the big part is data platform right right

now if you need to read data you are hitting rpcs you may be using some variant of an indexer and all of them have you know some set of centralization and they don't really uh kind of the only way for them to be compatible is to have a standard right RPC have a standard and so it doesn't matter which rpcu endpoint you use so we introduce query API which is a standard for how to index data the the indexing code itself lives on a blockchain and so anyone any service can pick it up and provide you exactly the same shape of data and exactly the same API better transactions right making sure that your users don't need to pay transaction fees on day one

fast us being able to sign up with kind of Biometrics of your device and leverage Canada to create accounts and use meta transactions to pay for transaction fees so that user doesn't see any of the crypto complexity when they start using it decentralized social and near social is an example there's other like lens and others as well which all can be leveraged to build the social graph and reputation around the account information it actually levers that now in other applications notifications right I mentioned that like how do you engage users you should have a way to send notifications and users should be in control which notifications they receive from each application searching recommendations ability to

actually index all of the data all of the applications and allow to search for the user and finally multi-chain accounts right right now we have you know an account on every chain they're completely disconnected there's no way to access them but actually ironically centralized exchanges have a multi-chain account right you log in into coinbase and you have an account on every chain right that type of functionality but accessible sort of self-custody and with ability to interact with any of the applications any chain that's what we're really aiming for here so I'll just showcase what fastas is this one is already launched so this is

the ability to use a cryptography directly on your device it uses secure Enclave to generate uh kind of cryptography and you use a multi-party computation to do email recovery so all together this combined allows to pretty much onboard users in five seconds in a very similar flow they're used to in web2 it uses passkey for the local cryptography and it's easier than normal web 2 because you don't need to remember password right it uses actually your device for that and now and now as you logged in you have you know meta transactions so you can start interacting with applications and you know let's say there's some limit up to how many you can do and then it pops you up to uh kind of top up your account

so at the core what we're trying to do really is leverage uh like kind of turn around this idea that right now if you build decentralized application right you lose in distribution right you don't have the access to users people don't actually know and this is a secure and where like secure application and where it is and how to find it and instead we want to have like a common set of applications that are accessible through any of the endpoints and at the same time you know have specific endpoints and gateways where people can access it they're censorship assistant resistant they're user owned so it doesn't matter which you know you go to near.org or boss.gg you go to quick quick swap.com you get exactly the same experience and

and uh usage because it's your data and applications are all shared and so that's what we're trying to do with box operating system so I'll show in a second how it all looks but just to kind of finish the idea here for developers now is that you can build once and it's available in all those platforms right uh including you know as their more Mobile support and there can be desktop application to access it I mentioned orbit it's allowing to leverage this decentralization for distribution as well right all these endpoints anywhere you can have this access now is able to use it and kind of to start with you don't need to have any of the

infrastructure overhead right you can just build your application launch it and keep going so let me show you how this looks just um so you understand right so near the door right now everything you see is coming from blockchain the at the core you see the social feed which all of the posts are on blockchain but more importantly is the front end itself the code you look kind of the coded powers the whole page is stored on blockchain and you can actually inspect it right so um so let's say we open something more specific like let's say a profile page you can actually look at the profile page how it's implemented right with all

of the kind of references to other components that it uses it's highly modular and it allows to really quickly kind of compose new experiences from this and you can Forex this uh kind of yourself and start modifying how you want it to look right for example if you want your own profile page to look differently or you want to create a profile page for lens for example profiles as I mentioned it works with um ethereum applications and so to just showcase your search so this indexes all of the applications posts kind of information on chain and allows you to actually navigate to for example this app called evm components that showcases some of the evm applications that are

available here now this week we launched actually partnership with ZK VM and so this is a partner this is powered by the same technology and everything you see is a component that is rendered from the blockchain and it's specifically kind of a selection of applications for uh for the KVM apps right so let's say we go to gamma so this actually pulled the component code from the blockchain and rendered to the user right so there's no kind of web server rendering and you can open the same component on near the door right again because they just all start on blockchain any of them kind of entry points are able to access it

uh and so the idea here right as a developer you build once and you're available everywhere right so kind of the example would be you build your application you know you deploy the smart contract to ethereum and now you can deploy your very similar to kind of react.jsx code to the blockchain and any user can navigate to any of these places right be including tonight we actually have a event reserve it where they're going to be showcasing how to do this on orbit and launching your gateway directly locally uh and have you know full ownership of your data and so uh the user selects an app and kind of interacts with uh with the app and

ethereum so kind of in conclusion the idea is like this is all live this allows you to really build decentralized applications that are anti-fragile it allows you to really power kind of your uh really multi-chain developer experience and unlock kind of this composable future and allow us to have access to all these users which are generally not accessible right now because they're all kind of uh slotted in into a specific you know website and and don't even know how to discover other applications try it out you can try fast dots right now with New York sign up and uh you know for the hackers for the people who are hacking uh this weekend we have some

boundaries as well to build on top of this so thank you and if there's any questions I would love to answer thank you um I didn't understand exactly how the front-end code stored you say it several times that is stored on the blockchain but um I understand blockchain so far that it's not fast storage it's for transactions

yeah so I mentioned we started near with the idea how do we build a scalable blockchain that actually can handle you know billions of users and so part of the value offering of near blockchain itself is that we can store pretty large amounts of data relatively cheaply and so here's an example of the component source code and actually every commit every as you kind of you know update the code is stored at specific block number and you can actually navigate and see the div like what changed within that code and so this actually allows to to have this permanence where as you build your application you can reference other people's components and applications and you can bind specific versions so

similar how you would do this with GitHub or npm and kind of just so has this like pretty powerful connotation that you know you can start building off somebody else's applications and rely that they'll stay the same and if you need to you can update and bump the versions to the new newer release and I'm wondering if you are planning to support more syntax than GSX because I don't really like GSX so yeah so there's an interesting question

around you know uh there was a previous talk about the choice uh leading to more problems so the benefit right now because it's singular format every component looks the same and so it's really easy for people to kind of dive in compose you know uh Fork them and modify if you have like you know five different Frameworks and like now when you go and like open an app and it's building a different framework you're like oh now I need to figure out how to deal with that right so uh we're actually working on an extended version that would allow that um but I like from a developer experience perspective although you know I know some people like or dislike the this Choice itself like the lack of choice here actually leads to a better

composibility and from a developer experience like we see composibility here being kind of extremely valuable because um like literally we see like people building like three times faster with this even for web 2 applications all right I guess folks are interested having oh hello Olga Feld my great to see you here we know that you started actually as a near AI right so there was this component uh well it's kind of like your background right can you share with us a

little bit uh plans for the future in this area uh sure I mean it's probably off topic from this talk but um so yeah for background I I was an AI researcher before I worked on tensorflow I worked on what now is powering all of the chat gbt image journey technology Transformers and we started near AI actually to generate code from natural language and I think within kind of the context of the stock the interesting thing is uh for people who don't like to write GSX is there will be natural language interface it will be able to actually talk to the computer not just as a developer but able to generate interfaces for specific use cases and I think like two talks before there was an

example of that as well so like we are moving in that direction where kind of some of the access to the blockchain will not be as guarded by you know as developers as designing better U access but actually being able to have a more natural conversation and there's some really cool demos around that I mean separately from that I'm working with few folks who are trying to to build more kind of Unchained inference such that you are able to run kind of AI models directly integrated into for example Dows and making decisions around how dials should function with AI and I think that's very interesting so but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this space so probably for another talk

I'll let people go to lunch [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music]